8 theses on the inadequacy of Harvey's conception of justice (JP)

Is Harvey’s notion of justice adequate to a more-than-capitalist world?

My short answer:
No, it is not even close to being adequate. Here are several reasons (I list them as numbered items because numbered lists seem like a common writing form for the Marxist writers we've read in class).

(1) His obfuscated opposition between universalist and particularist politics is annoyingly simplistic. Despite his claims to their dialectical relation, he still obviously creates the binary opposition that elevates universalism over particularism. Why is it necessary to choose one or the other? What about temporal and spatial context? Don’t these necessarily factor into decisions to invoke generality of conditions or specificities of place? Why is there no room to oscillate strategically between the two? Moreover, the claim that post-modern and post-structuralist theorists are trapped in the local is naïve, especially given the rise of post-modern conceptions of networked spatiality that obviously focus on relationality.

(2) He constructs the ‘fragmented left’ as one enemy of his notion of justice, though certainly not in the same level as capitalism (but still). I think it is fair to say that some of the new social movements that he castigates also employ similar universalist claims, but not (just) on the grounds of class. Is/was it not second wave feminism’s goal to make universal claims about ‘woman’ and to gain economic equality with men (to simplify things)? Why is this strand of feminist politics not given room in Harvey’s critique?

(3) His claim that ‘postmodernism and poststructuralism has left us with little basis to accept any particular norm of social justice’ (361) sounds too much like he says that these theoretical orientations are apolitical. Perhaps it would be much more honest to say that their multiple conceptions of politics are different from his, and because of this, he does not see them as political at all. In fact, I think that these -isms have given us more bases to articulate the multiple spaces for claiming social justice. Also, when he claims that postmodern and poststructuralist academics have not looked at society-economy relations, he is incredibly erroneous: see Nikolas Rose’s work on the production of neoliberal subjects. Does Foucault also not look at the production of docile bodies in service of work (in prisons, for instance) (in Discipline and Punish)?

(4) In part 4 ("Situating situated knowledges"), Harvey confuses the notion of situatedness with that of relationality. He caricatures the articulation of situated knowledges by saying that it follows the script ‘I am of this class, of this colour, of this ethnic origin, etc.’, when situatedness as a concept has its genesis in reactions against scientific methodology, particularly claims to objectivity and to what Donna Haraway calls ‘the (scientific) gaze from nowhere’. Either way, to suggest that such biographical claims to, say, my being Filipino-born or my being queer is essentialist is to be blind to the relationality of these claims: that I am Filipino and immigrant in relation to a white settler nation and that I am queer in a hetero-normative and homo-normative city. This is a relational claim, not a purely essentialist one as Harvey claims. (Also, what of Spivak?s strategic essentialism as a form of politics?)

(5) The notion of significant difference comes up again in this piece (358). Who on earth decides this significance? When third wave feminists criticized the second wavers for not recognizing the importance of women of colour, they are making the claim that this difference is significant. Why does this not get air time in Harvey?

(6) I don’t buy his claim that ‘effective working-class politics would have better protected the rights of men and women, whites and African-Americans in a situation where those particular identities, rather than those of class, were not of primary significance? (358). This sentence only works when one accepts the claim that those ‘particular’ identities are not significant. This leads to he question, yet again, about who decides ‘significance’. I’m rather uncomfortable with Harvey’s prima facie assumption of insignificance embedded in this sentence. The same argument can be said about similarity. Who decides similarity? There is a prima facie assumption that class and class alone determines similarity. Is this necessarily true?

(7) I am also struggling with the notion that of the “internalization of ‘multiple othernesses’” (363). Just because the purchaser of a diamond ring is related to a miner in Sierra Leone via the commodity chain, this to me does not constitute good ground for political action. To suggest that one has, within oneself, internalizations of others is a pretty violent way of obfuscating violent social relations between the purchaser and the miner. While I am tempted to say that this at least recognizes relations across spaces, I’m not entirely sure that such a line of argument necessarily allows for the placement of violence within the equation. It also assumes that otherness can be internalized – such a phrase sounds rather too close to the ‘I know how you feel’ syndrome. But does the owner of a diamond ring really know? Is it possible (or ethical) to actually place oneself in others’ shoes? Is this even what the phrase is saying? Also, is it possible to know every single internalization that one has within oneself?

(8) In many parts of the chapter, Harvey uses the term 'speaking for', a discursive tactic that Spivak (in the famous 'Can the subaltern speak?') and Alcoff (in 'The problem of speaking for others') have cautioned us against. On p.355, Harvey notes that this is just not profound or dialectical enough. He accuses this view of assuming "separate and unrelated difference" (ibid), which, following one of my points above, is just not true. To say that 2nd wave feminists should not speak for women of colour is to claim a particular violent power relation, one that is premised on the notion that the former is able to speak for the latter. This is a rather racialized process, one that, according to many third wave feminists, elevates white women as the voice of universal woman. Harvey seems to want to reproduce this.