[Where I left off]:
Grace is Grace Lee Boggs. I worried a little about her...
This gets me to thinking about David Harvey again and the geography of revolution... It is relevant to some of the things that Grace Boggs said this morning.
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So I read up on GLB this afternoon. Cool old lady, sorry about my doubts. Anyway, it occured to me that we could combined Boggs with Harvey. Here is GLB discussing the econ crisis in Sept 2009. It includes Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster. Goodman plays a clip of Michael Moore doing his Capitalism Love Story with Leno. This is just background for me and those who haven't heard or read Boggs:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/17/philosopher_grace_lee_boggs_and_sociologist
So I listened and was struck by the parallel tracks Boggs takes to those of David Harvey's talks on the revolution of social change, seen as deeply similar to the processes that Darwin outlined. We can see these evolutionary processes much better today through the study of ecosystems and in plant and animal physiclogy.
In brief these are a set of interactive or dialectical interactions that involve the atomsphere, the oceans, climate, geological processes of the earth, as well as the development of life, plants, animals and of course thse systems now includes people, their cultures, societies and modes of life. In order to really see the connection, you have to get up some background in what biology calls `cycles' like the oxygen cycle, the Krebs cycle, the ATP cycle, or on grand scale the carbon cycle, the water cycle and so forth. The diagrams and models and studies of the cycles tends to be static and therefore you can't quite understand their true dynamic nature, unless you imagine them as interactive and interdependent on their various components. These interactions are usually modelled with the mathematics of thermodynamics, but those are buried in highly technical journals that nobody reads. After going through some of Hegel's Logic, you can reconceive these empirical science mathematical models as dialectical machines. Guttari went off the deep end with this metaphorical connection. Nevermind
Now Harvey ties these more recent studies from the biological sciences to Marx's Capital in the fourth footnote in Chapter XV. It's not very long, but in it Marx makes some of these connections between the evolutionary process that Darwin studied and the evolution of the spinning machines in manufacturing, or the capitalist mode of production. Marx notes that capital brought about the change from feudal society to a capital driven bourgeois society.
Here is the footnote:
``Before his time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.''
I can see why Harvey was so taken by this obscure note. You get to see Marx musings on the relationship between social forces, economic production, creative processes, human nature, biological sciences, philosophy and the history of ideas.
Anyway, Harvey boils these musing down to a set of elements that must function as an interactive dialectical system. This is completely different than the postivist or empiricists concept of cause and effect.
These elements are:
1. Relation to Nature
2. Relation to Technology
3. Social Relations (class, gender, race)
4. Organization of Production
5. Mental Conceptions of the World
6. Relations to Daily Life
7. Institutional Relations
In Harvey's view these are the key elements of radical social change, that have to be involved and interacting in concert to effect change. Or we could use the biological metaphor, and call these organs human society.
So, then, given that we are in an extended crisis of capital accumulation, with the question, where is all that money the top 1-5% of the world's elite going to go? Well it's going to go to places, economies, processes, and institutions where even more money can be returned in self reinforcing cycles. According to Harvey, we the other 95% have to figure out, act and try out, steering these elements of change to benefit us and the world we want to live in.
And North Africa, Egypt and Tunisia provide the whole world with the unthinkable, revolutions where we can see and understand them, be infected by them, and get pointers on how we could do something similar... Well, and then the risks and potentials for nightmare, etc.
CG