Tyrone's Day 7 Posting: "Population, Resources and the Ideology of Science"

Positing that science is necessarily ideological and that social factors inform its methods and conclusions, at first glance the case argued by Harvey in "Population, Resources and the Ideology of Science" reads as being very much a consideration of the social constructions inherent to varied approaches to the study of population and nature.

Through the progression of the essay however, the staunchness of Harvey's position fades somewhat as his analyses move away from the Malthusian and Ricardian arguments which he disdains towards the Marxist approaches to which he subscribes. Unreflexively on Harvey's part, Marxist approaches do not seem to have been subjected to the same level of scrutiny as their predecessors regarding the constructions they inhere and were informed by.

Where Marx is concerned, Harvey begins by noting that Marx too noted the ideological aspects of Ricardo's and Malthus' work, before proceeding to consider his dialectical approaches to nature and population. By seeing the human relationship to nature as an interlinked system with variable social and biotic factors which determine how and by which humans it will be used, dialectical approaches do not set the strict theoretical upper limit upon population which Malthus theorized and Ricardo internalized in his work.

According to Harvey, through his distinctive method Marx "could envisage a transformation of society that would eliminate poverty and misery rather than accept its inevitability." This method however, is never really approached critically. The ideology of Marx's approach to nature is considered as a transcendent insight into the problems rather than as another approach to it which too carries the ideologies that Harvey is so quick to point out that its predecessors do.

In Harvey's consideration of the political implications of Population-Resources Theory he again returns to social constructionist aspects.

The definitions of subsistence, resources and scarcity which he works with consider these to be social constructions. His point about what constitutes subsistence is a good one, which was likely important to make in this era. Subsistence is very much a relative concept with differential inputs required by different perceived needs.

Resources he sees as defined by particular historical, technical and cultural changes, while scarcity is defined by human activities. While these are in many ways reasonable conclusions to draw, Harvey here is adhering to Marxist theory and using it to reveal the constructions in other theories rather than considering it as something worth considering for its own constructions of the world.
The consideration of constructionism is again selective as Harvey proceeds to make his conclusions. Though he recognizes the constructions of the other approaches, a profusion of if/then statements and therefores linguistically reveal that at an ontological level Harvey continues to consider events to be positively logical in their unfolding, having causal relationships with their outcomes.

Some questions regarding Harvey's uncritical use of the example of China:

In asserting that China has since 1949 eliminated famine through its dialectical approach to resource management, does Harvey omit the massive starvation of the Great Leap Forward (1959) undertaken in the aim of Maoist industrialization? Do the Rosalind Deutsche and Meaghan Morris critiques of "The Condition of Postmodernity" examined in class Monday highlight a credibility issue that such information in Harvey works may have been purposefully ignored rather than accidentally overlooked?

Should Harvey be commenting so authoritatively on Chinese affairs at all given that Chinese culture and epistemology seems to be quite far removed from his expertise and that the country was veiled in the secretive cloak of the Cultural Revolution at the time of this publication, making any authoritative claim about food supply (or almost anything else) questionable?