David Harvey again

From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out. It's a good way to get through that book, which is one of those no one ever reads all the way through unless it's assigned (not unlike anything by Hegel). That's not always a bad thing, of course (certainly in Hegel, though only reading the master-slave passage in the Phenomenology or the beginnings of the greater Logic and thinking the dialectic is "therefore" necessary to "overcome" is pushing this way too far). I'm planning on going all the way through Capital 2 and 3 shortly (I've only really gotten through the beginning of 2 and the end of 3), so it's a great refresher and a good way to pick up those parts of the first book (especially part 7) I never made it through. I never touched anything really after the chapter on the working day (except some pieces of the machinery chapter and the amazing part on primitive accumulation), even when I reread it for exams last summer: in literary studies, due to Derrida and his specters, the focus is still on the first three chapters on use and exchange value (though not confusing the labor theory of value with the value theory of labor has enough attendant complications), often to the detriment of the theory of surplus value as a whole.

One more thing. Harvey above (and in a recent paper) talks about a transition from capitalism to socialism--revolution--taking just about as long (or at least involving as much complexity and work) as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This is a welcome comment (obviously drawn from Marx's sense of things itself) when revolution has always had the connotation of radical, instantaneous breaks on the one hand, and on the other has been conceptually discredited by the theoretical left itself in the US for about forty years in favor of micropolitical models of change (or a a dour sort of pragmatism, which turns quickly into a fatalism, rightly thrust to the fore for critical inspection at Planomenology--though one should also point out Zizek too often trades in this pessimism). To this, I would also just add a pragmatic remark about the relation of revolution to violence by by Fredric Jameson:

What is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term [revolution--MJ] is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to rase the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways...
 -"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 388

Then I would follow that up with how he shows, pointing rightly at Allande's Chile, just how plausible the beginnings of such a long revolution (Raymond Williams' term) actually are:

Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out--an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands [which right now we find in Venezuela--MJ]; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism).
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 391

So new laws, new freedoms, new regulations, alongside the building of new economic infrastructures under the emerging new state:

The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics [...] They directed co-ops [...] to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives , and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year's wages into the firm's equity fund, wages earned in the apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to yearly review by the councils.
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 296-7

And one more thing: this sort of conception of revolution concretely situates any cultural or discursive struggle--struggle on that level is only of finite use, and takes place at that level. Cultural politics is only politics (often just politicization, often just micropolitics) unless it also hits at or ties into economic levels--as Jameson (who some might call a mere cultural Marxist) never gets tired of saying.

But then again it is also necessary to register (with Harvey--see this lecture of his for an elaboration of his point about Ch. 15, footnote 4 in the short piece above--and Jameson) that there are many levels of struggle, and that no one who seriously is engaged in cultural Marxism believes they can turn the world around just at that level. No, it's often a micropolitical model that believes that--along with people who dismiss cultural Marxism as a safe or partial form of commitment. The dismissive sense of that last word shows that its positive sense--that indeed, as applied, it is a piece in a larger situation--isn't available from this perspective, one that also believes with the micropolitics of Foucault especially (and tendencies in critical theory in general) that institutions (the "academy") are what is big and bad, and moreover are what determine and compromise the situation of cultural anti-capitalist critique (rather than capitalism, which is precisely much larger--and smaller--than any institution).

My point is that "the production of new needs" is what cultural criticism is about (finite, because representational, demands and Utopian possibilities), but is about this alongside other--indeed partial--sorts of activities and commitments that are by no means incapable of this sort of production (Jameson's phrasing here is precisely calculated to emphasize the fact that these needs can be and are produced at these other levels--even especially at economic ones). Significantly, it is precisely the cultural level (or the level of everyday life) that is most engaged by the recent statements of Zizek, Jameson, Harvey, Badiou and others to think hard about what communism might be, to imagine Utopias, to speak up out of subalternity and present alternative experiences of the world, and, indeed, to think about revolution: "carving out autonomous spaces," as Paul Ennis recently calls it, in various ways (he talks about what Badiou thinks is necessary, against Zizek, but I think Zizek too thinks this Utopian--and I use this word in an approving, Harveyian, Jamesonian sense that too few share--enclave-production occurs or is at least pragmatically necessary). And it is this cultural level that is most misunderstood by people unfamiliar with that level and what it involves (including the sacrifices that I don't think we can just say are nonexistent--unless we keep thinking all cultural Marxists are just "humanists" in a disturbing new sense). That, however, means education is necessary (both of yourself and the misinformed, as Harvey insists upon above: part of the problem is that this stuff isn't taught, or only gotten through someone like Zizek), and repeated reconnection of this level to others (an act that cultural criticism and recent ideology critique has learned to do in perhaps the most adept and tactical way).

And indeed, cultural Marxism is great at this too: what is culture but a way to reconnect while recognizing that separation of levels, rather than try and construct a one-off sort of immanent metaphysical level at which every microelement just is or is not political? I don't even think you can say cultural Marxism has gone too far--which is what the reactionary consensus in the US (indeed increasingly in literary studies) seems to be. We need more cultural studies, not less. As these studies make their way into departments dealing with urbanism, architecture, media theory and design--where some of the most radical Marxist work is now being done--I think they become more concrete and produce more connections and reconnections, perhaps, than they did when this study was done primarily in literature and film (or philosophy). But that's a development and transformation, which is also probably a shift made in accordance with changes in the system studied and the new forms reconnection to other levels is imagined to take.