Dear All,
I'm sorry if my postings have bored people and/or offended them. My
intention was none of this. I wanted real discussions on radical
political economy. This does not seem to be possible. My friends
from the US to Asia had alerted me to the nature of CGF. I should
have listened to them. The shoulders of several CGF (I'm not saying
all) contributers cannot bear the weight of (radical) political
economy, to be a bit blunt. I have not received much criticism of my
specific points at all. Most people who are responding have not
perhaps read the entire stuff I have written. I understand there are
time constraints, etc but then pick-and-choose criticisms are not
useful.
Before I quit the debate, let me briefly repeat my main point:
A really radical discourse must include class analysis but must
not stop there; it must include non-class structures and agencies.
So, it is not exlusionary. Critical geography seems to be concerned
with everything but class. By doing this it tends to rob
itself of its full emancipatory power.
At the same time, who am I to tell you what is radical or what is
not? In the last instance, the issue is a philosophical one -- both
in terms of ethics and epistemology, and perhaps even ontologically
(whether there is anything called a totality or is the world made up
of fragments). As Harvey said long ago (in 1975): there are no
philosophical solutions to philosophical questions. Solutions lie in
the political practice. See also Marx's 'Theses on Feurbach'.
I have a lot of respect for post-marxist works and for
postmodernist/poststructuralist works (e.g. postcolonialism) which
deal with the issues which are directly/indirectly related to
material-social relations. Ditto for feminism. Of course, I
have disagreemwnts over their priorities and much of their
philosophical approach.
My interest is in alliances, not in creating enemies. For alliances
to work, we must respect each other's approach. Let there be
complementarity between different approaches and let that develp more
and more (in Antipode or whatever). One way in which this could be
done is: if people not doing radical political economy take class
seriously and if radical political economists take issues of
representation, culture, etc. seriously and not reduce non-class
issues to class at the empirical level.
If my tone has been angry, that should not be taken as being
disrespectful of works that are not radical political-economic. I
have deliberately tried to bend the stick a bit too much in the other
direction.
I would not say any further.
Raju
Raju J Das
Department of Geography
University of Dundee
Dundee DD1 4HN
United Kingdom
Phone 01382 348073 work
01382 737097 home
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