>No, more precisely, the tendency is to discover militant
>particularisms, as Raymond Williams and David Harvey put it
Yes, but... Harvey, following Williams, is very clear about the complexities of relating m.p.'s to the wider world. He quotes Williams saying that movements based on "local and community experience" are "insufficiently aware of the quite systematic obstacles" that stand in their way - obstacles, Harvey comments, that can "only be understood through abstractions capable of contronting proceses not accessible to direct local experience." Both concede that the process of contextualization results in a loss of experiential and emotional intensity, but these days, when the local and the authenticity of the grass roots is so romanticized among leftish forces, it seems more important than ever to emphasize the gains from contextualizing m.p.'s. Which isn't to say that politics should proceed on the level of high abstraction, in blithe disregard of m.p.'s - but rather that there's lots of intellectual and organization work to be done in putting all the layers together.
Doug
A bit from Harvey (Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Distance, pp. 41-42):
<quote> The worry at the end of that road of negotiation, is that socialist parties and governments will only succeed in undermining the social and political identities and loyalties that provide the seed-bed of their own support (again, quite a bit of evidence can be marshalled for that proposition in western Europe since World War II). Socialism, it could be argued, is always about the negation of the material conditions of its own political identity. But it so happens that capitalism has fortuitously taken a path these last 20 years towards the elimination of many of the militant particularisms that have traditionally grounded socialist politics - the mines have closed, the assembly lines cut back or shut down, the ship-yards turned silent. We then either take the position that Hayter voiced to me - that the future of socialism in Oxford depended on the outcome of a struggle to get mass employment in car production back into Cowley (a view I could not accept) or else we have to search for new combinations of both old and new forms of militant particularism to ground a rather different version of socialist politics. I see no option except to take the latter path, however difficult and problematic it may be. This does not entail the abandonment of class politics for those of the "new social movements," but the exploration of different forms of alliances that can reconstitute and renew class politics. Put pragmatically, class politics in Oxford could survive the total closure of the Cowley plant, but only if it secures a new basis.
There is still another dimension to all this, which has to do with the question of spatial scale and temporal horizon. With respect to the former, Neil Smith (1992: 72-3) has recently remarked how we have done a very bad job of learning to negotiate between and link across different spatial scales of social theorizing and political action. He emphasizes what I see as a central confusion in contemporary constructions of socialism arising out of "an extensive silence on the question of scale":
<block quote> The theory of geographical scale - more correctly the theory of the production of geographical scale - is grossly underdeveloped. In effect, there is no social theory of geographical scale, not to mention an historical materialist one. And yet it plays a crucial part in our whole geographical construction of material life. Was the brutal repression of Tianamen Square a local event, a regional or national event, or was it an international event? We might reasonably assume that it was all four, which immediately reinforces the conclusion that social life operates in and constructs some sort of nested hierarchical space rather than a mosaic. How do we critically conceive of these various nested scales, how do we arbitrate and translate between them? </block quote>
Capitalism as a social system has managed not only to negotiate but often to actively manipulate such dilemmas of scale in its forms of class struggle. This has been particularly true of its penchant for achieving uneven sectoral and geographical development so as to force a divisive competitiveness between places defined at different scales. But where does "place" begin and end? And is there a scale beyond which "militant particularism" becomes impossible to ground let alone sustain? The problem for socialist politics is to find ways to answer such questions, not in any final sense, but precisely through defining modes of communication and translation between different kinds and levels of abstraction. </quote>