I sent Harvey’s speech to the World Social Forum last year to Kim, hope he sees fit to publish it.

I also read Harvey’s intro lecture to his one-semester course on how to read Das Kapital. It was very enlightening even to one who first read it some time in the seventies and reread it many times. Harvey notes a lot of stuff that went past me, but is obviously true.

If Max Shields could manage to put his preconceptions aside for a few minutes, I think he’d get a lot out of reading Harvey’s speech. Harvey is alert to Max’s concerns and way of approaching doing something about them.

Many thanks for turning me onto Harvey, who covers all the ground Petras covered in his recent article but in more detail. In particular Harvey has thought more deeply, I believe, about “what is to be done”, how we might possibly get from here to there.

Alas, that remains an open question, and to me the prognosis is not very rosy. But Harvey’s brilliance is to me a very hopeful sign. I hope finding him is an omen of better things to come. ??

Hayek was a reactionary. If you are weary now, keep posting your reactionary jive on DV, and see how weary you get with your own namecalling.

Sincerely,

Iago Faulk-Yusef
69 Uranus,
San Francisco 10011
(between top of Arguello and State Street, it’s on the map:)

So how do YOU define a “free and open society”? You mean one resembling the current militarist police state presided over by Uncle Barack? Where the capitalist legal mythology says there is nothing wrong with the public news media being controlled by this pack of Zionazis?

I’ve read Popper, in fact I have “Objective Knowledge” right over here on the shelf. If anybody is an “obscurantist” it’s Karl P, not Karl M. “In my opinion”:)

Max, could you give an example of what you’re referring to when you say “an edict or a manifesto for action”?

The only substantive solution to the Capitalism that Max offered was Henry George and the Georgist philosophy. The shortcomings of Georgism has been debated here. Max’s other offering is the “small is beautiful” mantra but withdrawing from the general society and failing to vie for political power will be easily crushed.

I also think, giving Max the benefit of the doubt, even after 20 years since fall of the USSR there is is a general disdain or fear of saying the word “Socialism”.

Unfortunately what we are getting from “environmentalist” are easy bromides and nice sounding cliches which IMO are designed to distract people from analyzing and discussing how a Socialist society can be configured and established– a tremendous undertaking.

Clearly there no Marxist would disagree with sustainability. David Harvey is a leader in promoting the “no-growth/redistribution” solutions. He even raises the question of home “ownership”. This gets to the heart of the personal debt crisis because housing is treated as a commodity in Capitalism and as a commodity people have to take on debt in order to bid for shelter.

But these attacks on Marxism will end up being counterproductive. Max has argued from the assumption that ALL of the answers came from one man — Karl Marx — and fails to take into account that Marxism is a LIVING body of work and the legacy of Marxist thinkers and philosophers that have added to Marxist ideas and thought.

IMO the greatest aspect of Marxism is that it provided us with an understanding of how Capitalism function and why it must be scraped. Marxism IMO provides an excellent starting point and is especially needed in the United States where Capitalist propaganda is so widespread.

Just getting to the starting line is a tremendous task and as TF2 points it is in the interest of the ziocapitalists class to circumvent just getting to that starting point. Which is why I think they work awfully hard to maintain a confused and disrupted Left.

Max, could you give an example of what you’re referring to when you say
“an edict or a manifesto for action”? I have to say I find your statement a little mysterious, since an “edict” and a “manifesto” are manifestly vary different types of documents drafted for very different purposes.

I have a hard time figuring out just what you’re so vigorously opposed to. I’m even more puzzled trying to understand what course of action you are recommending, when you say things like “A simple principle of maximizing the distribution of human welfare with the use of minimal resources is a sustainable means of creating a viable living condition not only for humans but for the entire life support system on this planet.”\

A simple principle which I think you’d be hardpressed to find any published Marxist would disagree with, in principle. But how are people going to put the principle into effect? Especially with all these ziocapitalists controlling everything, people like you telling us capitalism is a figment of our imaginations, and expletive deleteds like this Spaghettiman 1962 interrupting what started as a serious discussion with his ignorant garbage?

Good to see you’re acknowledging the limits of Marx/socialism particularly in terms of “selling”. But the hard sell if you will comes about because Marxism (like Capitalism) is riddled with major problems when presented as an edict or manifesto for action. Like it or not there is a legacy of what has been described vulger Marxism. Shades of Marxism or more accurately socialism have had success but hardly living examples of pure Marxism.

A simple principle of maximizing the distribution of human welfare with the use of minimal resources is a sustainable means of creating a viable living condition not only for humans but for the entire life support system on this planet.

I have to agree with M Kenny that “socialism” is a hard sell in the US of A. How could it be otherwise, given the decades of coldwar antiworkingclass/antipoor brainwashing the US public has been subjected to.

I don’t know that I find the term “hybrid” very promising. To me it’s the sort of nomenclature that would be employed by those hoping to reintroduce capitalism via the back door.

If somebody can come up with an idea for a way to organize society in a better way than at present, I don’t care about the label. But it seems that the first requirement of a real change is to abolish private property in the means of production. The second would be to find a way to stop those who enjoy topdog status in the present status quo from subverting the new scheme of things and reinstalling the system we have now.

It may be rational from a propaganda perspective to avoid use of the term Socialism, or reference to the work of Marx, Engels et al. But can people who are trying to lead a movement to topple the present setup and launch something entirely different afford to ignore what has been learned in past attempts to understand the problem?