Harvey (08B) - Ch 5 - Allie

* Harvey introduces his argument with an overview of the Zapatista movement (1996) - as opposition to ‘neoliberal capitalism through globalization’ (73). Neoliberalism as ‘democratizing misery and hopelessness’. Uses the example of Zapatistas to set up discussion of the need to redefine human rights (re: dignity, difference, commonality). Harvey comments on the Zapatistas’ use of modern means of communication – the internet – to advance their project: interrelatedness of the local and the global and the ‘commonality of causes’.
“It appealed fundamentally to notions of the rights and dignity of labour, of indigenous forces of commodification backed by state power” (74).
“…but constructing a universal political response purely in such terms falls precisely into the trap of separating off ‘culture’ from ‘political economy’ and rejecting the globalism and universality of the latter for the essentialism, specificity, and particularity of the former” (74).
“What is missing here is an understanding of the forces constructing historical-geographical legacies, cultural forms, and distinctive ways of life – forces that are omnipresent within but not confined to the long history of capitalist commodity culture and its spatio-temporal dynamics” (74).

* Harvey says he puts in his general theory of uneven geographical developments forces that create and sustain diversities (differences) and proceeds to show us how this informs the way this informs his theory: two fundamental components – production of spatial scale and production of geographical difference.

*Scale: we need to complicate our understanding of scales to include more than simple ideas of local to global and to constantly remind ourselves that scales are always fluid and contested. The more traditional understanding of scale “is inadequate, however, because it makes it appear as if the scales are immutable or even wholly natural, rather than systemic products of changing technologies, modes of human organisation and political struggles.” Scale is therefore a political/economy process and very much a social construct; it is an integral part of a dialectic of historical-geographical analysis and any theory of uneven geographical development. …Because “it is… through a dynamic interaction with what might be called ‘natural process’ scalars that human beings produce and instantiate their own scales for pursuing their own goals and organizing their collective behaviours” (75).

*Geographical difference: “Examination of the world at any one particular scale immediately reveals a whole series of effects and processes producing geographical differences in ways of life, standards of living, resource uses, relations to the environment, and cultural and political forms” (77). … multiple layers of socio-ecological environments and ways of life.

* Harvey argues then that scales and geographies are uneven development, because they are interrelated, necessitate an analysis which pays attention to differentiations, interactions, and relations across and within scales. – this is however conceptually difficult a task: how to relate the local to the global (glocalisation…?). … “This requires us to go beyond the particularities and to emphasize the pattern and systemic qualities of the damage being wrought across geographical scales and differences.” – which leads him, eventually – through a return to Zapatistas –, into a discussion of human rights, and to his ultimate point. He gets there by asking “If, in the broad terms of capitalism’s logic, a certain kind of democratization and capital accumulation go hand in hand, then how can economic rights be kept apart from human and civil rights more generally” (89)?

* Harvey argues that the paradoxes of globalization have opened up opportunities for a progressive politics and for the reworking of human rights - leading to the potential for radical change. Globalization has increased demand for reforms – “it opens up terrains for both conceptual and theoretical debate, and of political struggles. Above all, it makes it necessary and possible to redefine universal human rights that stretch far beyond those acknowledged in 1948” (91). – will inevitably lead to revolutionary changes social/political/economic – so we get globalization (scale/uneven development)-rights (meeting changing needs/identities) –struggle (to redefine rights and apply them) and challenge to neoliberalism.
“The dilemma to which this points becomes even more starkly evident when we attempt to re-embed (or reconcile) the supposed universality of human rights within a theory of uneven geographical developments” (92). – “the idea of rights can be extended to deal with problems of uneven geographical development” (93).
“Perhaps the central contradiction of globalization at this point in our history is the way in which it brings to the fore is own nemesis in terms of a fundamental reconception of the universal right for everyone to be treated with dignity and respect as a fulle endowed member of our species” (94)… which is reminiscent to the project of the Zapatista which is where he began his essay with (<./complete circle>).