[lbo-talk] What government spending?

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Wed Oct 13 15:12:57 PDT 2010


It is the dialectical motion across the moments that really counts, even as there is uneven development in that motion... Dennis Claxton

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Yes. Thanks for posting the paper. This was the primary concept of change, an organic system, within which the moments or domains are conceptually partitioned off, and we loose conceptual grasp of the whole, totality or gestalt---the dynamic of change.

Patrick Bond put up the public lecture the other day. Here is the link again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSDGDerFst4&feature=related

Click in sequence 1/5, 2/5, etc.

This lecture is an application to understand the current crisis that we all know about. What it lacks, is how to apply the constructs of the dynamic of change, hence the methods seminar. Here is the list again:

a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption b) relations to nature c) social relations between people d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects f) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements g) the conduct of daily life and the activities of social reproduction.

It is really not as analytic as Harvey makes it sound. That analytic is necessary for communication and understanding.

This interdependent system of thought and action is directly related to the academic discpline of urban planning, economic development, social sciences, obviously geography of urban living, and has finally been turned into an interdisciplinary study at UCB. Ananta Roy (who did the introduction) got caught up in advertizing for the department and failed to explain (maybe she didn't see it) what its interdisciplinary approach had to do with Harvey's talk. Each of the disciplines Roy listed roughly corresponded to Harvey's moments lised above.

If I wanted to spend the next fifteen years doing research and writing on it, I could come up with a track on the rise of the Disability Movements and their impact on US society using Harvey's list.

A quick summary. While there was a long history of oppression, misery, high mortality, early death, and battles over dealing with disabled, several key developments came together in the late-60s. From my perspective, as a art-techie and politicized grad student, I picked one domain I could expand, build, support---mobility. We took the existing equipment and modified it to make UCB physically accessible. Another component, Architectural Barriers Committee dealt with the building and grounds modifications. ABC was composed of disabled students from architecture and city planning departments. There was some federal legislation on architectural barriers that had already quietly passed and was dutifully ignored to cite, if the bureaucracy resisted.

(Marta Russell's Beyond Ramps, was a great insight into what we failed to confront, the structure of the economy, where Production is central, and where the disabled are consider non-productive, or under-productive and therefore disposible.)

There was yet another program component that dealt with academic customs and practices (item f) that effectively barred access. This is a nebulous concept, but its facts are quite concrete. The implications for re-configuring the education system are pretty stunning.

Just one example. Universities are not what elementary education called the Child Centered Classroom. Now, if several disabled students end up in a university course, that starts to breakdown the customary student teacher relationship. That social relation has to change if education is to occur. A very similar dynamic developed when minority students started showing up at UCB, especially in the social sciences professional tracks like engineering, law, and city planning.

This project organically put itself together as it faced most of the things on the list and figured out ways to change the institution. In other words I am verifying the material truth content of what Harvey is describing. This is why I had one of those, Wow, moments.

What Harvey has done is develop a theory of this change process, which me and many others learned about, without grasping what we knew or what we were doing. Like I said, its a way of thinking.

The problem of communication is always present, since you have to have seen it, lived it in action before you understand what it is--means. It is very much like sex for a child who has no understanding quite that they possess such a potential. They grow-socialize into understanding as more and more dimensions open. I like the analogy with sex because it is a near universal experience, but I want to change the base analogy.

I think about how the intellectual world opened up to me. It was through art practice, reading, and writing (at school) and that start got a tremendous boost once I started working in this student services project. The marxist concept for these experiences is the obvious, praxis. At some point, I thought, in a grudging way, well, hell why are disabled students so special? We should be doing most of the same kind of work for all the students that might need and want assistance.

CB writes:

``Not to say that Harvey's theory is wrong, but I don't think he can quite attribute his whole scheme to Marx. Marx himself seems to be class struggle determinist and "conflict- between- relations- and -forces -of -production" determinist; not the whole range spelled out by Harvey.''

Harvey covered this potential objection in the methods seminar, which I tried to crudely sketch. If the Geography Dept puts up the lecture, you can follow Harvey's answer. (See Ted Winslow's post for an excellant answer.) What Harvey did, is convert the level you are talking about into an abstract interdependent system, Production, Distribution, Exchange. This domain is equivalent to Marxist philosophy of economics, where you can conceptualize what an economic system is. Then there is the domain of how that system works in the world, which corresponded to the thermodynamic systems, where I almost fell asleep. At a theoretic level thermodynamics is a non-deterministic system.

The next locus was the dynamic of change, that corresponds to the points listed above.

What it comes down to, is Harvey `reads' Marx, looks at the world today, and comes up with an application, i.e. praxis. This is not the same as theorizing from an axiomatic Marx. How to describe it? Harvey manages to `embody' Marx, in some current incarnation, to open our world, much in the same way that Marx opened his world.

Anyway, I don't want to debate Marx or Marxism. I am incapable of it for one thing. What I want to see, is Harvey's dynamic of change list applied to Detroit, or some section, also LA or some section thereof, then an urban mobilization plan.

Joanna said to me sometime earlier this year, everybody should concentrate on a single issue. She said, mine is education, yours is citizenship. (This was a very perceptive remark, because I instantly went off on Strauss, Zionism, Arizona, theories of state, later thinking on the conversaton.) Once you concentrate on what, on the surface seems limited, a whole world unfolds under Harvey's list. What J may have meant, comes from literature and the arts which often depend on a central organizing idea or construct (a story, for example) about which to build a poem, a novel, a painting, etc.

Berkeley has been undergoing Harvey's dialectic of change for decades.

The central capitalist institutions of evil in Berkeley are, the chamber of commerce and the real estate association. (There is a third, UCB, but nevermind for now.) They are linked up systemically as political influence on a popular base through neighborhood community group associations. (This was originally a reform, that was quickly co-opted by capitalist forces....)

These associations are formally recognized by the city government and work through both the council and the manager's office. My ex-wife worked in the planning dept and was the formal liason official for these groups mostly from the hills and campus. (Other groups were organized in different council districts and had other liason officers, where the Lorin plan was fought, for example.) I listened to these arguments after their meetings. R had to write summary reports. Thinking about it now, I apologize in absentia. I didn't realize at the time, just how difficult that is do.

The three issues back then were traffic through the rich neighborhood just southeast (and northeast) of campus, the re-development plan for downtown, and how to limit UCB from eating up land. It boiled down to developing the traffic barrier-parking system and a limitation on national franchise retail and food chains in Berkeley to keep it from turning into a Fresno styled strip mall.

The city hates the UC system because it is a gigantic gobbling machine of municipal services and pays zero tax. It also pays no property tax. So the city invented a parking metered and permit system to bring in revenue by surrounding the campus with the most obnoxious parking ticket trap imaginable. Since I live inside this trap, I have to pay the city to park in front of my apartment. They used to pass this trap off as ecology motivated, anti-car crap. I saw it as eco-nazism. I'ved changed my mind, since this plan had an unintended consequence of making Berkeley a locus of green and ecology minded technology development.

Anyway, hopefully CB and DC can see the potential applications of Harvey's concepts to Detroit and LA. At the abstract level, this amounts to law and the prison industrial complex in urban USA, where CB and DC can actually meet. Joanna can see the applications in local education.

Already too long... posting as is.

CG



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