Militant particularism - Claire - Wed.

Harvey, D (2001). Militant particularism and global ambition: the conceptual politics of place, space, and environment in the work of Raymond Williams. Pp 158-187 in Spaces of Capital. New York: Routledge.

The context is the struggle in Oxford of the protection of “shit jobs” (monotonous work, ecological deterioration, and displacement of labour from the core of global capital to the periphery implicit in all such restructurings). Even in this, a struggle over jobs, Harvey suggests that working class solitary on the wane. Further, is what is good for the shop floor automatically good for the city, for society at large (163)? Thus, brings in Raymond Williams, with the caveat that “cultural holism” creates a potentially and exclusionary “organicist view of the social order” (163) to explore the dialectic method of Williams as a potential way to understand place and struggles not as things but rather as processes. Here, Harvey’s choice of a dialectic – unlike perhaps his insistence of it as an alternative remedy to the pitfalls of feminisms – wholly befits the problem at hand, that of economic restructuring, and is a suitable method to understand how that struggle becomes articulated in place and might possibly transcend immediacy in time and place (that is, how some general propositions about the nature of such struggles might be conceived).

While embeddedness is “empowering and problematic”, we cannot rely on it alone because of the particularities infused in it (165). Thus, Harvey, although perhaps not explicitly hitting us over the head with it, wants to follow a familiar path of finding what can be a global premise of unevenness, from which we might extrapolate the conditions necessary for beginning to conceptualize a transnational (or transcalar) struggle. The embeddedness in Williams from which Harvey draws inspiration is the idea that humans are social beings with lived, cultural, actual lives but who also carry with them “the possibility of that sense of value that seeks a commonality to social life even in the midst of a striking heterogeneity of beliefs.” (169). Despite the muddle (which became very personally actualized given his conflict with Hayter over the articulation of the problem of job loss) there is a possibly of some kind of harmony. The caveat is that whatever internal contradictions exist are placed in opposition to the “outside” (which could be any number of scales), both codetermining the nature and place of possibility, but also a result of “shifting patterns of spatial relations” (170) [implying the restless nature of capitalism].

[Claire goes off on a quasi-religious tangent: especially with yesterday’s Socialist Register piece, the almost metaphysical potential in Harvey came to the fore e.g. when he asks “if values reside in nature, then how can we know what they are?” p10 or in reference to “Marx’s language, a ‘species being’ whose qualities have yet to be fully realized” p16... the values that are inherent in nature and humans is the Buddha nature, the capacity for being, which is in and of itself valuable. We can replace species being with Buddha Nature and the capacity that is dormant/unrealized as citta, the kernel of being that is not yet realized but when is allows that being to be without being in discordance with other sentient beings. Such metaphysics even helps us negotiate the problematic of seemingly irreconcilable and mutual disgust between Harvey and his feminist critics: "Within sameness there is difference. But that difference should be different from sameness is in no wise the intention of all the Buddhas.” (Huxley, Doors of perception). This is all looking pretty glue-like from here, with the Buddha acting as a deviant-figure that disrupts social norms that establish difference and then perpetuate them, in his time, for a religio-class difference that was to the advantage of the hegemonic... [End quasi-religious tangent here. P.s. no drugs were consumed in the preparation of this section; it’s just my undergrad degree talking].

Why does Harvey not embrace the metaphysical? Maybe because Marx told him not to? But what else are the Zapatista demands for but dignity, the demand to be valued as humans (that is, not to have their Buddha nature stomped all over). The difference with Harvey is that instead of looking for nirvana, he looks to historio-geographic materialism to understand how not only capitalism is restless etc but how fixity of identity becomes an obstacle to potential for broader based collective action. Ways of knowing become socialized not only for hegemonic ends, but such power imbalances become rearticulated at different scales. This is why connectivites between scales are so important (e.g. articulations by feminist political economics about labour in the home commodified into touchy feely post-Fordist service work e.g. McDowell on women in finance or Herod [I think?] on solidarities between striking shipping workers in USA and the UK). However – Harvey, through Williams’ literature, warns us that the abstraction from one site to another (from a level to across space p173) can threaten the value through which people see themselves; complicating this is how loyalty becomes attached to materiality of place and of social conditions (including the means of production) p175, thus socialist politics can overcome such abstractions (177) yet at the same time cannot totally do away with the means through which the working class can achieve the ability to socially reproduce (181). Thus, working class parties take on new identities, adhereing to a “spirit of revolution” but in line with the letter of capitalism, possibly alienating their own popular base (182). Harvey seems to point to the employment of scale as a method by which to keep the contradictory strands in simultaneous dialogue and context, along with, via Smith, a “temporal horizon” (183) to maintain “creative reflexivity” (186). Embeddedness of politics is, in part, codetermined by the place and this in turn begets social relations. We could do worse than to put scale into the foreground and geographers are suited to do so.

The local is dialectically engaged in the crisis and contradictions of capitalism whether it likes it or not. Thus, perhaps the only barrier to transcending the limitations of place-based experience of global processes that clouds the ability to see the whole (something of a Gramscian notion of having to work and work and work just to keep one’s head above water). Identities exist are at multiple scales /sites although they are formatively associated with particularisms... implicit in the idea of a militant particularism is that “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.” (172)....