Antipode Book Series

Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis

Noel Castree, Paul A. Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner, Melissa W. Wright

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781444397345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Commissioned to celebrate the 40th year of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, this book evaluates the role of the critical social scientist and how the point of their work is not simply to interpret the world but to change it

• Brings together leading critical social scientists to consider the major challenges of our time and what is to be done about them
• Applies diagnostic and normative reasoning to momentous issues including the global economic crisis, transnational environmental problems, record levels of malnourishment, never ending wars, and proliferating natural disasters
• Theoretically diverse - a range of perspectives are put to work ranging from Marxism and feminism to anarchism
• The chapters comprise advanced but accessible analyses of the present and future world order

Chapter 1

Now and Then¹

Michael J. Watts

Class of 63 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley. CA, USA; [email protected]

Abstract: Antipode was launched into the firmament of the 1970s. We might reflect upon how well the journal and its contributors fully appreciated the historical gravity and weight of what was surrounding the project to create “a radical journal of geography”. What sort of radicalism was on offer? The language was “social relevance” from “a radical (Left) political viewpoint”. In writing to celebrate Antipode’s birthday, this time in another, and similar, firmament there is still the need to confront the challenge of radicalism and its meanings. Whether we agree with Perry Anderson that the last vestiges of the 1960s have been finally swept away, that the “fluent vision” of the Right has no equivalent on the Left and that embedded liberalism is now as remote as “Arian bishops”, where do radical alternatives stand in relation to the fractured hegemony of neoliberalism? At the very least the need for alternatives is more pressing than ever. David Harvey has proposed rethinking the idea of “the right to the city”. But what other rights might we rethink? I reflect upon this question by returning to the 1960s and 1970s and Marxist debates over the law, and by thinking about the possibilities offered by this Polanyian moment.

Kew Words: radicalism, commons, law, Magna Carta, markets

One does not easily isolate ideas for study out of that mass of facts, lore, musings, speculations which we call the thought of an age or of a cultural tradition; one literal tears and wrenches them out. There is nothing disembodied about them, and the cut is not clean … Large bodies of thought thus appear, at first, like distant riders stirring up modest dust clouds, who, when they arrive, reproach one for his slowness in recognizing their numbers, strength and vitality (Clarence Glacken 1967:12).

Antipode was launched into the firmament of the 1970s: an imperialist war in southeast Asia, a troubled American Fordism feeling the pressures of global competition, class struggles over the future of embedded liberalism, the Nixon dollar devaluation and the turn to global financialization, massive volatility in commodity markets especially food and oil, a robust Third World nationalism ultimately hobbled by balance of payments deficits, massive public sector debt and Cold War “low-intensity conflict” and proxy wars, the popular energies unleashed by the environmental movement, and not least, the first stirrings of what was to become, to quote Perry Anderson (2000), the global neoliberal “grand slam”. Antipode came on the heels of the 1960s, and of the genuinely revolutionary moment of 1968, and was tempered by a decade in which some theoretical and political flesh was placed onto the bones of the social and cultural libertarianism that passed as the radicalism of the soixtante-huitards. The 1970s, in this sense, launched a ferocious debate within the Left and among Marxisms of various stripes, it gave birth to a number of vital political experiments, not the least of which were various Third World socialisms, and commenced, partly as a result of the failures of ‘68, what Antonio Gramsci called the “long march through the institutions”. From the perch of the present, there have been some remarkable personal trajectories through this period and beyond—one thinks of Joschka Fischer, Bernard Kouchner, Daniel Ortega—and they are not always salutary. A country which loses its hippies is, says Israeli playwright Salman Tamer (cited in Mamet 2009:12), in deep trouble. But I digress.

With the power of hindsight we can now appreciate the watershed nature of the decade into which Antipode was born, and indeed we might reflect upon how well the journal and its contributors fully appreciated the historical gravity and weight of what was surrounding the project to create a “radical journal of geography”. Perhaps it is too easy—or are my expectations too high?—to acknowledge what we did not take full account of in the 1970s, but I have a profound sense that in some respects history was operating behind our backs.

What sort of radicalism was on offer? The language was “social relevance” from “a radical (Left) political viewpoint” (I take this from the journal’s mission statement). But this launches us immediately into the complex historical semantics of the word radical. Here is Raymond Williams:

Radical has been used as an adjective in English from C14, and as a noun from C17 from … radix, Latin—root. Its early uses were most physical … [but] the important extension to political matters … belongs specifically to 1C18, especially in the phrase Radical Reform … [The word then has] a curious subsequent history. Radical … was by the second half of C19 almost as respectable as liberal … there was by 1C19 a clear distinction between Radicals and Socialists … (Williams 1976:251).

The tensions between liberalism, social democracy and socialism inevitably surface from the very onset of Antipode in 1969 and of course in the founding text—David Harvey’s ‘Social justice in the city’. Reflecting upon radicalism and radical geography led me to return to something I had published in Antipode as a graduate student (Drysdale and Watts 1977, but drafted in 1975 and 1976), a piece written with Sandy Drysdale (a political geographer now at the University of New Hampshire), which reflected (inevitably) the sorts of Antipodean debates as they were configured locally in Ann Arbor in the early and mid 1970s. We were part of a special issue (edited by Dick Peet and Milton Santos) devoted to underdevelopment (a term that has now become obsolete!) and the notion of a “socio-economic formation”. It was admirably international—contributions by Venezuelans, Mexicans, Argentines, Tanzanians, Brazilians, Egyptians and so on—in a way that arguably has been diluted in the journal over time. Sandy and I opined on geography and modernization theory. We provided a madly inclusive tour d’horizon of social protest movements of various sorts—something missing as we saw it in the clinical and frictionless world of modernization surfaces—including banditry, millenarian movements, cargo cults, peasants rebellions and so on, all of which represented an “indigenous” critique” of an “alien ideology and total system”. In my recollection Sandy and I were not exactly on the same page as regards what was reclaimable about this alien system and what the alternatives to underdevelopment were. At the very least, there is a staggering lack of attentiveness in our piece to the political projects rolled together—New Guinean cargo cultists, Vietnamese peasant communists, and Italian renegade bandits—in the name of resistance and “indigenous communication”. The essay is held together in theoretical terms by the work of Karl Polanyi and by the teaching of Mick Taussig (in the days prior to the emergence of his book of commodity fetishism). It was, at the end of the day, a sort of weak-wristed anti-market radicalism.

I am writing once more, but now to celebrate Antipode’s birthday, this time in another firmament and still confronting the challenge of radicalism and its meanings. On its face the parallels between now and then are striking: another imperialist war-making adventure (prosecuted not in the name of anti-communism but of global democracy and anti-terrorism), another round of oil and food volatility, another space-ship earth moment (this time detonated by the spectre of global climate change), seething nationalisms (or proto-nationalisms and communalisms of multifarious stripe) in the global South in reaction to decades of structural adjustment and “economic realism”, an anti-imperialism issuing not from the secular or revolutionary Third Worldist left but in the name of political Islam, and, of course, a deep crisis of capitalism of a deeply Polanyian sort triggered by the wreckless commodification of money and monetized assets. This time around one might say that the firmament is defined by the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist project launched in the 1970s. First time tragedy, second time farce.

One needs to say immediately that the contrasts between the 1970s and the current conjuncture are as striking as are the resemblances or repetitions. Nobody would question the observation that US hegemony, from the vantage point of 2009, looks much more fragile. China now appears as a profound counterweight to the American sense of a Pacific Century. The EU is now rather more than a figment of the imaginations of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. The US militarization of its program of global financialization (military neoliberalism) exceeds virtually anything encompassed by the term military Keynesianism or permanent war. Whether we agree with Perry Anderson (2002) that the last vestiges of the 1960s have been finally swept away, that the “fluent vision” of the Right has no equivalent on the Left and that embedded liberalism is now as remote as “Arian bishops”, neoliberalism does rule undivided across the globe. In this sense, Polanyi’s belief that free-market liberalism was finally dead and gone (he wrote at the end of the Second World War) was horribly wrong. It is back with a vengeance, but transmuted into a plethora of national (even sub-national) forms (Prasad 2006). The particular confluence of territorial and capitalist logics of power have produced a setting for Antipode’s next decade for which we cannot simply fall back on the 1970s and what we did or not get right.

Nevertheless, reading Antipode’s birthday against the current moment of danger does have the advantage of framing the question of what a radical project might mean at this moment, and the contours of what Edward Said memorably called the “endless search for alternatives”. Inevitably a huge amount of ink over the last seven or eight years has been spilled on the question of militarism and American empire. In a world in which fictitious commodities have run amok, much energy now is (and will be) devoted to whether, as The Wall Street Journal (2008) put it, “we’re all Keynesians now” or whether, as some on the Left have suggested, this is “the end of neoliberalism”—surely the answer to both must be no (I am ignoring the call of the American Enterprise Institute that Obama’s project endorses the idea “we are all socialists now” and the Governor of Texas’s latest attempt to rally the Republican faithful around a tax revolt predicated ultimately on secession from the Union). In virtue of the composition of the Obama administration, these questions from this side of the Atlantic would only lead one to believe that, at best, the jury is still out.

What is striking to me personally is that it is not at all clear, in view of the events since late 2001, what is the standing of that old staple of the Left “the crisis of legitimacy”? In the wake of the Enron collapse, the run of travesties surrounding the American adventurism in Mesopotamia, the massive assault on civil and political liberties, and now a collapse of credit that disqualifies any sense of credibility within the sector of US capitalist power … one wants to ask where is a politics of counter-hegemony congruent with the gravity of these massive and serial legitimation crises, any one of which (yet alone collectively) represents a fundamental challenge to the edifice of capitalist legitimacy.

I fully appreciate I am reading out of this narrative the 20 million who protested in the streets in March 2003 in advance of the US invasion of Iraq, the growing powers of the World Social Forum and so on, but one might surely ask: what did this get us? Was not the voice of the multitude ignored by the leaders of the world? Why should we not expect that from the ruins of Lehman Brothers will be a new financial architecture good for the bankers and bad for those foreclosed? At the very least the need for alternatives is more pressing than ever. David Harvey (2009) has proposed rethinking the idea of the right to the city? But what other rights might we rethink?

I want to spend a little time reflecting upon this question by returning to the 1960s and 1970s and to something Drysdale and I refer to in our Antipode essay, namely the May Day Manifesto written by Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson in 1967 and which spawned an ultimately failed National Convention of the Left in 1969, and to their notion of the masking and unmasking of the “real costs” of the making of a modern society.

The 1970s Again

After a decade, an interminably protracted piece of litigation was finally heard in October and November 2008 in the northern California District Court in San Francisco. Chevron v. Bowoto et al pitted the unimaginably poor and disenfranchised against the unthinkably rich and powerful; the wretched of the earth against the Olympian powers of corporate behemoths, the biggest of Big Oil. Fourteen villagers from some of the most isolated and desperate communities on the Nigerian oilfields brought a class action lawsuit charging Chevron/Texaco Corporation with gross violations of human rights including extrajudicial killings, crimes against humanity, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. In May 1998, roughly 150 Ilaje villagers occupied Chevron’s Parabe Platform 8 miles offshore, demanding to meet with senior executives of the corporation to discuss resources for community development and compensation for environmental destruction associated with oil and gas exploration and production along the Atlantic coastal littoral and especially across the deltaic creeks from which most Ilaje eke a miserable existence. The occupation of a barge and platform—populated by a rainbow coalition of expatriate and Nigerian oil workers—came on the heels of what the Ilaje saw as a history of serial neglect and abuse. A deep well of local resentment and frustration seeded, inevitably, an unstoppable surge of political energy. Direct action against oil installations was a way of drawing the attention of senior oil executives, a class holed up in their corporate compounds in Port Harcourt and Lagos for whom the only Nigerian constituency to appear on their Blackberries was a venal and corrupt political class presided over by a military psychopath, President Sani Abacha. Even though negotiations between the protestor’s leaders and representations of Chevron Nigeria Ltd (the subsidiary of Chevron Corporation) appeared to be making headway and a tentative agreement reached, on the morning of 28 May, a group of the protestors were shot (some in the back) and killed by Nigerian government security forces and Chevron security personnel transported to the platform on Chevron-leased helicopters. The plaintiffs sought a compensation injunctive and other relief under the federal Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA, 28 U.S.C. 1350)—a statute two centuries old, framed as part of the original Judiciary Act—which provides a sort of testing ground within the federal court system on which victims against individuals or corporations that commit human rights violations outside of US territorial jurisdiction can have their day in court.²

Much could be said about the details of the trial and its own particular mix of drama, soap opera and tragedy. In the 6-week battle between the Davids and Goliaths of the oil world, Chevron only put on three live witnesses, not one of them connected with the San Francisco Bay area defendants; they also chose to reveal expatriate oil workers’ testimonies (most of whom are outside the jurisdiction of the Court so plaintiffs could not subpoena them to appear from Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere) through videotaped depositions taken years earlier, resulting in an inability to effectively cross-examine key witnesses live; Chevron did not introduce one single fact to rebut either the “agency claim” that the Nigerian subsidiary is the US defendants’ agent, or the “ratification claim” that press statements by Chevron of the sort “we categorically deny we paid the military a dime” flew in the face of thousands of documented payments by the company to the military. Chevron won, fully exonerated on all claims in a unanimous jury verdict rendered on 1 December 2008 after barely 1 day of deliberation.

I shoul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction: The Point Is To Change It
• Chapter 1: Now and Then
• Chapter 2: The Idea of Socialism: From 1968 to the Present-day Crisis
• Chapter 3: The Revolutionary Imperative
• Chapter 4: To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations
• Chapter 5: Postneoliberalism and its Malcontents
• Chapter 6: D/developments after the Meltdown
• Chapter 7: Is the Globalization Consensus Dead?
• Chapter 8: The Uses of Neoliberalism
• Chapter 9: Crisis, Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism, the Left and the Future of Capitalism
• Chapter 10: Money Games: Currencies and Power in the Contemporary World Economy
• Chapter 11: Pre-Black Futures
• Chapter 12: The Shape of Capitalism to Come
• Chapter 13: Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World
• Chapter 14: The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the Twenty-first Century
• Chapter 15: An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene
• Index