"Civil Society"

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Wed May 13 07:59:40 PDT 1998


Mark Jones:
>Just because the question does not connect with the immediate issues you
>face in the townships does not make it a wrong question. Trying
>honestly to answer it, and then letting the answers form part of the
>discourse and practice of your own political work, is surely legitimate is
>it not? Our main complaint about Harvey is not that he is wrong, which he
>probably is, to minimise the issue, but that he simply ignores it even while
>seeming to address it.

Speaking of Harvey, I want to make clear that he has declared in favor of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism on many occasions and favors the dictatorship of the proletariat. His main political contribution to the broad milieu of leftists around the Brecht Forum in NYC has been to defend "classical" Marxist positions on the state. He has critiqued "civil society" concepts and argues that the social movements have to be subsumed under class. He even cited Mao to the effect of primary contradictions. I suspect that his use of terminology like "social justice" in his latest book is not some sort of Bernsteinite ploy, but rather an attempt to satisfy marketing requirements for Verso press. If he wrote for MR, I'm sure the leftish buzzwords would come to the fore, since Harvey is no reformist by any stretch of the imagination.

Actually, it would be more correct to say that he embodies a "left deviation" of the sort Lenin fought in "Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder." Harvey's politics vis-a-vis the greens reminds me very much of the sort of thing that Lenin was polemicising against, including Georg Lukacs of the Hungarian Communist Party. Lukacs et al were anxious to maintain communist purity, so this meant avoiding the corrupt bourgeois trade unions, whose leaders were dedicated to class peace. Isn't the same sort of objection being raised by Harvey? He is obsessed with people like Lester Brown, Herman Daly, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Audobon Society, etc. Because these groups and individuals are worried over global warming, we Marxists have to keep our distance. We have to keep our hands clean, even if this means working only with working-class and poor communities over toxic-waste struggles, etc. As I pointed out, Harvey echoes the worries of a rather broad milieu in the black nationalist and Marxist movement about being co-opted. As far as I'm concerned, the least of Harvey's problems is accomodation to the bourgeoisie.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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