Re: [Marxism] David Harvey: it's about a New Deal

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Harvey:
> The danger is that anti-imperialist
> movements may become purely and wholeheartedly anti-modernist movements
> rather than seeking an alternative globalization and an alternative
> modernity that makes full use of the potential that capitalism has spawned.

I wish I knew what this meant. If this means that Islamic radicalism
represents a "danger", I can't agree. Anti-colonial movements have often
had questionable leaderships, going back to the Boxer rebellion--one of the
most explicitly "anti-modernist" movements of all time. That is no excuse
for opposing them.

> In my own view, there is only one way in which capitalism can steady itself
> temporarily and draw back from a series of increasingly violent
> inter-imperialist confrontations, and that is through the orchestration of
> some sort of global "new" New Deal.

I am disappointed that David Harvey believes that a global New Deal would
accomplish anything. It didn't the first time around. WWII lifted the USA
out of the depression, not deficit spending.

> For people on the left,
> the question is whether we would be prepared to support such a move (much as
> happened in leftist support for social democracy and new deal politics in
> earlier times) or to go against it as "mere reformism."

This is not a very dialectical approach coming from perhaps the most
respected Marxist intellectual on the planet today. During the 1930s
revolutionaries supported specific New Deal legislation, such as Section 7a
of NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act) which gave workers the right of
collective bargaining. The other approach was that of the CPUSA which was
to act as the uncritical leftwing of the New Deal.

> I am inclined to
> support it (much as I support, albeit with reservations, what Luis Inacio
> Lula da Silva is doing in Brazil) as a temporary respite and as a breathing
> space within which to try to construct a more radical alternative.

A better approach would be to  support particular initiatives of Lula (such
as they are) and maintain political independence. This business about a
"temporary respite" sounds too much like the pleading for a Dean presidency.

> Otherwise, I fear a catastrophic beginning to the twenty-first century that
> will bring death and mayhem to even more of the world's population than is
> now afflicted. The mass consequences of a capitalist collapse would be far
> more catastrophic now than in the past simply because of the way so much of
> the world's population is now integrated into, and therefore in some sense
> crucially dependent upon, the functioning of the world market. It was for
> this reason that I argued for a new New Deal in The New Imperialism.

This is not a very good understanding of the inner laws of capitalism from
one of its most renowned theorists. Capitalist collapse cannot be prevented
by New Deal legislation. The "second depression" of 1937 could not be
forestalled by any legislation.

> A. This question concerns, in very general terms, the issue of alliances
> that can be pinned together to realize reformist political goals. This is a
> tactical question in which all manner of oppositional forces, including
> dissident voices (like those of George Soros, Paul Krugman or Joseph
> Stieglitz -- if they really mean what they say) within the dominant classes,
> have a potential role to play. My own view is that we should have one foot
> firmly implanted within those conventional political movements that are
> prepared to take up the cause of reform and one foot implanted in the
> radical movements seeking more revolutionary solutions.

In other words, anybody but Bush. I wish that Harvey had the guts to state
this explicitly rather than blather on about "dominant classes".



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org