[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Marxist v Anarchist riffs in geography and politics

[Michel Bauwens]

very interesting article, recommended

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*From:* Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
*Date:* 14 juni 2015 18:58:54 CEST
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*Subject:* *[Debate-List] (Fwd) Marxist v Anarchist riffs in geography and
politics*

The two very interesting Springer articles are in .pdf, here:
https://uvic.academia.edu/SimonSpringer
 “Listen, Anarchist!” by David Harvey
<http://davidharvey.org/2015/06/listen-anarchist-by-david-harvey/>
June 10, 2015
<http://davidharvey.org/2015/06/listen-anarchist-by-david-harvey/> / David
Harvey <http://davidharvey.org/author/davidharvey/> / Comments Off on
“Listen, Anarchist!” by David Harvey

*“Listen, Anarchist!” A personal response to Simon Springer’s “Why a
radical geography must be anarchist”*


*David Harvey *City University of New York, USA

*Download as PDF
<http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/lcts/summer-school-2015/Springer%20Commentary%20-%20David%20Harvey.pdf>*

Simon Springer (2014) has written a lively and polemical piece in which he
argues that a radical geography must be freshly anarchist and not tired-old
Marxist. As with any polemic of this sort, his paper has its quota of
misrepresentations, exaggerations and ad hominem criticisms, but Springer
does raise key issues that are worthy of discussion.

Let me first make clear my own position. I sympathize (but don’t entirely
agree) with Murray Bookchin, who in his late writings (after he had severed
his long- standing connection to anarchism), felt that “the future of the
Left, in the last analysis, depends upon its ability to accept what is
valid in both Marxism and anarchism for the present time and for the future
coming into view” (Bookchin, 2014: 194). We need to define “what approach
can incorporate the best of the revolutionary tradition – Marxism and
anarchism – in ways and forms that speak to the kinds of problems that face
the present” (2014: 164).

Springer, judging from his piece, would want no part in such a project. He
seems mainly bent on polarizing the relation between anarchism and Marxism
as if they are mutually exclusive if not hostile. There is, in my view, no
point in that. From my Marxist perspective, the autonomist and anarchist
tactics and sentiments that have animated a great deal of political
activism over the last few years (in movements like “Occupy”) have to be
appreciated, analyzed and supported when appropriate. If I think that
“Occupy” or what happened in Gezi Park and on the streets of Brazilian
cities were progressive movements, and if they were animated in whole or in
part by anarchist and autonomista thought and action, then why on earth
would I not engage positively with them? To the degree that anarchists of
one sort or another have raised important issues that are all too
frequently ignored or dismissed as irrelevant in mainstream Marxism, so too
I think dialogue – let us call it mutual aid – rather than confrontation
between the two traditions is a far more fruitful way to go. Conversely,
Marxism, for all its past faults, has a great deal that is crucial to offer
to the anti-capitalist struggle in which many anarchists are also engaged.

Geographers have a very special and perhaps privileged niche from which to
explore the possibility of collaborations and mutual aid. As Springer
points out, some of the major figures in the nineteenth century anarchist
tradition – most notably Kropotkin, Metchnikoff and Reclus – were
geographers. Through the work of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and later on
Murray Bookchin, anarchist sentiments have also been influential in urban
planning, while many utopian schemas (such as that of Edward Bellamy) as
well as practical plans (such as those of Ebenezer Howard) reflect
anarchist influences. I would, incidentally, put my own utopian sketch
(“Edilia”) from *Spaces of Hope* (2000) in that tradition.

Social anarchists have typically been much more interested in and sensitive
to questions of space, place and environment (core concepts that I think
most geographers would accept as central to their discipline). The Marxist
tradition, on the whole, has been lamentably short on interest in such
topics. It has also largely ignored urbanization and urban social
movements, the production of space and uneven geographical developments
(with some obvious exceptions such as Lefebvre and the Anglo-French
*International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research* that began in 1977, and in which
Marxist sociologists played a prominent founding role). Only relatively
recently (e.g. since the 1970s) has mainstream Marxism recognized
environmental issues or urbanization and urban social movements as having
fundamental significance within the contradictions of capital. Back in the
1960s, most orthodox Marxists regarded environmental issues as
preoccupations of petite bourgeois romanticists (this was what infuriated
Murray Bookchin who gave vent to his feelings in his widely circulated
essay, “Listen, Marxist!”, from 1971’s *Post- Scarcity Anarchism*).

Shortly after I got interested in Marx and Marxism in the early 1970s, I
figured that part of my mission might be to help Marxists be better
geographers. I have frequently joked since that it proved much easier to
bring Marxist perspectives into geography than to get Marxists to take
geographical questions seriously. Bringing Marxist perspectives into
geography meant taking up themes on space, place making and environment and
embedding them in a broad understanding of “the laws of motion of capital”
as Marx understood them. Most social anarchists I know (as Springer admits)
find the Marxist critical exposé and theoretical account of how capital
circulates and accumulates in space and time and through environmental
transformations helpful. To the degree that I was able, and continue to
work on, how to make Marx’s critique of capital more relevant and more
easily understood, particularly in relation to topics such as urbanization,
landscape formation, place- making, rental extractions, ecological
transformations and uneven geographical developments, I would hope that
social anarchists might appreciate and not disparage the effort. The
contributions of Marxism in general and Marxist political economy in
particular are foundational to anti-capitalist struggle. They define more
clearly what the struggle has to be about and against and why.

Behind all this, however, there lies a fascinating problem. Elisée Reclus
was one of the most prolific anarchist geographers of the nineteenth
century. Looking at his nineteen volume *Geographie Universelle*, there is
little trace of anarchist sentiments (any more than there were in
Kropotkin’s studies of the physical geography of central Asia). For this
reason the Royal Geographical Society in London could plead for the release
of both Reclus and Kropotkin from imprisonment when they got into political
trouble because they were first rate a-political geographers. The reason
behind this was quite simple. Hachette, Reclus’ publisher, would not
tolerate any foregrounding of his politics (given the reputations of
anarchists for violence at that time) and Reclus needed the money to live
on. Reclus seems to have been either resigned or content with this. He
could be content because he held that objective and deep geographical
knowledge of the world and its peoples was a necessary condition for
building an emancipatory life for the whole of humanity. A deep humanism
encompassing egalitarian respect for cultural diversity and respect for the
relation to nature are characteristic of his work (Fleming, 1988; Dunbar,
1978). In his open letter to his anarchist colleagues (which I cited in the
concluding paragraph of *Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom*,
2009: 283), Reclus wrote: “Great enthusiasm and dedication to the point of
risking one’s life are not the only ways of serving a cause. The conscious
revolutionary is not only a person of feeling, but also one of reason, to
whom every effort to promote justice and solidarity rests on precise
knowledge and on a comprehensive understanding of history, sociology and
biology” as well as, it went without saying, the geography to which he had
dedicated so much of his life’s work (Clark and Martin, 2004). Anarchists
might like to heed that advice.

When, however, Reclus wrote *L’Homme et la Terre* (1982) towards the end of
his life, in which he freely allowed anarchist sentiments to flow into his
geographical work, he could not find a publisher. Historically there has
been a separation between geographical work and politics. This same problem
is there, though for quite different reasons, in Pierre George’s
geographical work. George was a French communist geographer who worked
assiduously to ensure that only party members got appointed to those French
university geography departments over which he had influence. Yet his
geography bears few marks of his communism, any more than the geographers
in the Soviet Union produced politicized geographical texts (see Johnston
and Claval, 1984). Geography, it seemed, was forever destined to fulfill
the role of describing as accurately as possible the physical material base
required for the exercise of political power, of no matter what sort.
Everyone in political power (both state and commercial) needed accurate
physical geographical information (the same way they needed accurate maps),
but no one seems to have wanted it politicized. “Social” geography was
avoided in Reclus’ day because it smacked of socialism. Reclus was
systematically excluded from the history of French geography by the
followers of Vidal de la Blache for political reasons. Only recently has he
been rediscovered and taken seriously in France (Pelletier, 2009).

All of this changed in the radical movement in Anglo-American geography
after 1969 with the founding of *Antipode* at Clark University (an
initiative I had nothing to do with). That radical movement (which I became
involved with in 1971) initially mixed together all manner of different
political views and opinions – anarchist, Marxist, anti-imperialist,
feminist, ecological, anti-racist, fourth-worldist, culturalist, and so on.
The movement was, like the discipline from which it emanated, predominantly
white and male heterosexual (there were hardly any women or people of color
in academic positions in geography at that time and the women involved were
all graduate students, some of whom ultimately became powerful players in
the discipline). This undoubtedly produced, as was the case in the broad
left of the time, biases in thinking. Various hidden structures of
oppression (on gender and sexuality for example) were certainly manifest in
our practices. But we were, I think it fair to say, broadly united in one
mission. Let the politics flow, whatever they were, into the kinds of
geographical knowledges we produced while criticizing ruthlessly –
deconstructing, as it was later called – the hidden oppressive politics in
the so-called “objective presentations” of geographical knowledge served up
by the servants of capitalist, state, imperialist and patriarchal/racist
power. In that mission we all made common cause, even as we argued fiercely
about the details and alternatives. This movement pushed the door open in
the discipline of Geography for all sorts of radical possibilities,
including that of which Springer now avails himself. The history of all
this has been documented by Linda Peake and Eric Sheppard (2014).

Sadly, Springer’s bowdlerized history eradicates all the complexity and the
openness to new ideas that was involved. He makes it seem as if I wrote an
influential paper in 1972 that inaugurated the radical turn which Steen
Folke (1972) capped by insisting that radical geography had to be only
Marxist. After that, my “prolific writings” imprisoned radical geography in
the Marxist fold as my work “become the touchstone for the vast majority of
radical geographers who have followed” (Springer, 2014: 250). Springer
aspires, apparently, to liberate radical geography from this oppressive
Marxist power so that it can return to its true anarchist roots.

Folke, however, was writing in the context of a highly politicized Danish
student movement and, rightly or wrongly, none of us in the Anglo-Saxon
world took that much notice of his essay at the time. So it seems mighty
odd that Springer has elected to write a rebuttal to this not very
influential piece some forty two years after its publication and without,
moreover, paying any mind to its historical and geographical context. We,
rightly or wrongly, were too wrapped up in providing the mutual aid (spiced
with great parties and fierce arguments) across multiple traditions
(including anarchist) that might allow us both to intervene in the
trajectory of mainstream geography and to survive within the discipline
while producing a more openly political geography.

Survival in the discipline was an issue. Having pushed the door open we had
somehow to keep it open institutionally in the face of a lot of pressure to
close it. Hence the founding of the Socialist Geographers Specialty Group
within the Association of American Geographers. Given my situation, in a
university that was ruthless about publication, the only way to survive was
to publish at a high level. And yes I will here offer a *mea culpa*: I was
from the very beginning determined to publish up a storm and I did
emphasize to my students and all those around me who would listen that this
was one (and perhaps the only) way to keep the door open. It was more than
the usual publish or perish. For all those suspected of Marxist
or anarchist sympathies, it was publish twice as much at a superior level
of sophistication or perish. Even then the outcome was touch-and-go, as the
long- drawn out battle over Richard Walker’s tenure at Berkeley abundantly
illustrated. The Faustian bargain was that we could survive only if we made
our radicalism academically respectable and respectability meant a level of
academicism that over time made our work less accessible. It became hard to
combine a radical pedagogy (of the sort pioneered by Bill Bunge in the
Detroit Geographical Expedition) and social activism with academic
respectability. Many of my colleagues in the radical movement, those with
anarchist leanings in particular, did not care for that choice (for very
good reasons) with the result that many of them, sadly, failed or chose not
to consolidate academic positions and the space that we had collectively
opened was threatened.

Springer should correct his erroneous view from “hindsight” as to what
actually happened in radical circles in North America after 1969. We were a
very diverse group, free to be radical in any way we wanted. The written
record is much more biased initially to Marxism and anti-imperialism
(reflecting understandable preoccupations with the Vietnam War), for
reasons I have already stated, and the voices of women and minority groups
often had difficulty being heard even though there was no specific
hegemonic faction (as opposed to influential individuals). The idea that I
“solidified what Folke had considered obligatory” (Springer, 2014: 250) is
way off the mark. There was a brief period in the late 1970s when many
geographers explored the Marxist alongside other radical options. But by
1982, when I published *Limits to Capital* (a book I had worked on for
nearly ten years), that was pretty much all over. By 1987 I was venting my
frustrations at the widespread rejection of Marxist theoretical
perspectives. “Three myths in search of a reality in urban studies,”
published in *Society and Space*, was greeted with strong criticism from
both friends and foes alike. In retrospect the piece looks all too accurate
in what it foretold.

The radicalism that remained in the discipline (after many of my erstwhile
colleagues had run for the neoliberal hills or, in the British case, to
seek their knighthood) was thereafter dominated by the postmodern turn,
Foucault, post- structuralism (Deleuze and Guattari along with Spinoza
clearly displacing Marx), postcolonial theory, various shades of
environmentalism and sophisticated forms of identity politics around race,
gender, sexual orientation, queer theory, to say nothing of theories of
non-representation and affect. During the 1990s, before the rise of the
alter-globalization movement, there was little interest in Marxian
political economy or Marxism more generally within the discipline or
without. As always there were some islands of resistance in various
departments. With the exception of *The Condition of Postmodernity* (1989)
– which stood out as a pillar of resistance within Marxist thinking to
postmodern trends and which elicited fierce criticism from radical,
particularly feminist, quarters within and without geography (as at the AAG
in 1990) – most of my really “influential writings” have come out over the
last ten years. Springer’s bowdlerized history of Marxism in radical
geographical thought suggests he is simply concerned to build a fantasy
narrative of anarchism in geography as victimized by Marxism to support his
central objective, which is to polarize matters at this particular
historical moment (for reasons I do not understand). Sadly, this comes not
only at a time when the conjuncture is right for a revival of interest in
Marxist political economy, but it also coincides with a political moment
when others are beginning to explore new ways of doing politics that
involve putting the best of different radical and critical traditions
(including but not confined to Marxism and anarchism) together in a new
configuration for anti- capitalist struggle.

So what are the main differences and difficulties that separate my supposed
(but often suspect) Marxism from Springer’s anarchism? On this I find
Springer’s discussion less than helpful. He caricatures all Marxists as
functionalist historians peddling a stages theory of history, besotted with
a crude concept of a global proletarian class who believe in the teleology
of a vanguard party that will inevitably establish a dictatorship of the
proletariat in the form of a communist state that will supposedly wither
away as communism approaches its steady state to end history. Now it is
undeniable that some communists and in some instances communist parties at
certain historical periods have asserted something along those lines as
party dogma (though rarely in so crude a form). But I have not personally
encountered any geographer with Marxist leanings who thinks that way and
there are a mass of authors in the Marxist tradition who come nowhere near
representing anything of this sort (start with Lukacs, Gramsci and then go
to E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton). And much of
contemporary Marxist political economy is so busy trying to figure out what
is going on with the crisis tendencies of contemporary capital to bother
with such nonsense. But all we Marxists do, Springer asserts, is re-hash
tired old themes which he (rather than any geographer with Marxist
inclinations) has selectively identified and which have been so obviously
disproven by historical events. Furthermore, when we Marxists look at
anarchists the only thing we apparently see are people who are against the
state as the unique and only enemy, thus denying that anarchists are
anti-capitalist too. All of this is pure caricature if not paranoid
nonsense. It crams all the actual and intricate complexity of the relation
between the two traditions into an ideological framework defined at best by
the fight between Marx and Bakunin in 1872, which occurred at a time when
the bitter defeat of the Paris Commune poisoned the political atmosphere.
Strange that Springer, the open-minded freedom-loving anarchist, should
seek to foreclose on the intellectual and political possibilities open to
us at this time in this way.

There are, of course, many anarchisms and many Marxisms. The identity of
anarchism in particular is very hard to pin down. There is frequently as
much bad blood between factions within these traditions (if such they are)
as there is between them. By the same token, there are as many
commonalities between factions across traditions as there are differences.
These commonalities prefigure the potentiality for a new left force, maybe
of the sort that Bookchin envisages and which I, too, find interesting to
explore. For example, I share with Bookchin as I do with Erich Fromm and
Terry Eagleton a deep commitment to the humanist perspective as opposed
to the scientism that dominates the Althusserian and scientific communism
traditions. I also share with Bookchin a dialectical approach (which I
think he learned during his early years in the Marxist corner and which he
does not always stick to) rather than positivist, empiricist or analytical
methods and interpretations. Our attitude is, for lack of a better term,
historical and geographical (which is why I often refer to
historical-geographical materialism as my foundational frame of reference).