Emily on Militant Particularism in Raymond Williams

In this essay Harvey uses Raymond Williams’ concept and deployment of militant particularism to think through his own experience in editing a book with Teresa Hayter. This book revolved around the story of the struggle of auto workers in Cowley who were attempting to ward off closure of their plant. In writing the conclusions for the book, Harvey discovered that his perspective on the struggle (and his attempt to contextualize this in a broader socialist politics) was very different than that of Hayter (who was loyal to the particular struggle on the floor and over the plant). The central dilemma is posed by Harvey on page 73 “Other levels and kinds of abstraction have to be deployed if socialism is to break out of its local bonds and become a viable alternative t capitalism as a working mode of production and social relations. But there is something equally problematic about imposing a politics guided by abstractions upon people who have given their lives and labour over many years in a particular way in a particular place.”

Harvey turns to Raymond Williams work in order to examine how he dealt with this question. Williams was in one sense intensely interested in the lived experience of place and the local ‘structures of feeling’ that arise out of the immediate and local nature of livelihood. In this sense there is an intimate relationship between the production of livelihood, social relations and ecological change. Yet structures of feeling are not static and are part of the processes of social and environmental transformation. For these reasons working-class political action is necessarily embedded in place. On the other hand, a particular place is produced through the complexity of wider processes and space relations – a place internalises impulses originating from outside.

Harvey summarizes William’s militant particularism as “Ideals forged out of the affirmative experience of solidarities in one place get generalized and universalized as a working model of a new form of society that will benefit all of humanity”. But this generalizing and universalizing is not unproblematic, local movements are often insufficiently aware of the quite systematic obstacles which stand in their way. In order to abstract from local struggles attached to place to a level capable of reaching out across space Williams notes that something was necessarily lost and that the politics of negation, differentiation and abstract analysis were necessarily gained. In going from level to the next the danger is in losing the sense of value and common purpose that underlies militant particularisms attached to particular places. Williams deals with this tension by leaving his novels open and unresolved in this respect, and this is what Harvey advocates with regard to the socialist movement. Relations produced in place under capitalism cannot not be easily/or at all transcended and they must be part of the tension of abstraction. Harvey sees hope in the fact that capitalism has destroyed many of the militant particularisms that have traditionally grounded socialist politics in the last 20 years, and this opens the way for new forms of and bases for alliances.