David Harvey isn’t good about anything pertaining to China, sadly.
For ‘East to West’ read ‘South to North’; i.e. low-wage countries and what some, including this author, insist on calling imperialist countries. To repeat Harvey’s astonishing claim: during the neoliberal era, i.e. the last 30 years, not only have North America, Europe and Japan ceased their centuries-long plunder of wealth from Africa, Asia and Latin America, the flow has been reversed: “developing countries” are now draining wealth from the imperialist centres.
https://roape.net/2018/03/19/imperialist-realities-vs-the-myths-of-david-harvey/
That’s an insane take, especially for a self describe Marxist.
This is the best Marxist (in academia) we have in the West?
Not at all. Vijay Prashad for one.
Actually looking him up it seems he recently relocated to Beijing, good for him!
He directs the Tricontinental Institute which puts out really high quality dossiers and other articles from an anti-imperialist, Marxist pov.
Then his substack Lucid Dialectics he posts more mundane daily stuff, poems, photos (including recently from China)
He also has an obscure YouTube channel by the same name, “Vijay Prashad’s Lucid Dialectics”
I don’t mean this in any denigrating fashion: Vijay is great, but I’d say it’s incorrect to say that he’s ‘in the West’
What would your criteria be for “in the west”?
having been raised in an imperialist country
Okey, but that is an insane definition when we discuss someone being in western academia.
Didnt he use ai on a book and it hallucinated some citations?
It was a Monthly Review article and he claims it was in one of the sources he used, not himself. Also, most of those accusations were from Xianjiang-holocaust Libs mad as fuck at the article so I’m guessing it’s overblown.
Gabriel Rockhill
And his frequent collaborator, Jennifer Ponce de León.
Born in India, but Radhika Desai at the University of Manitoba, Canada has been pretty good as far as I know.
John Bellamy Foster is good. Focuses mostly on ecology, not really a generalist, but he has an excellent understanding of the history of materialism and of Marx’s academic context.
john smith is western
Also Domenico Losurdo
Holy shit lmao that’s comically evil
it’s one thing to have differing opinions on china, it’s quite another to go full microsoft broadcasting network in your conspiracies.
Having read his book on Capital, it felt really forced when he kept mentioning how capitalist China is.
is he good at other things?
I thought his lectures on Marx’s Capital on YouTube were pretty good. I haven’t read his anti-postmodernism book, but I was hoping that one was good too.
I think his stuff on geography is good. His Capital lectures got me into Marxism
I find it very funny how these guys can only ever imagine things happening because a bunch of “bad guys” got together in a smoky room somewhere and organised some master plan. It has been a very strange experience seeing conspiracy theory thinking go from completely fringe to the default for most people in the west in the last 10-15 years or so.
well, the imperialists do get together in rooms to organize terrible plunder and mass murder. at davos and in the white house and wherever. so, y’know, as usual, it’s
because a bunch of “bad guys” got together in a smoky room somewhere and organised some master pla
tammany hall tho
David Harvey has always been a contratian weirdo and yet simultaneously he has one of the most comprehensive bodies of work on Marx’s Capital (in English at least). Harvey is one of the last professors who rejects being called a Marxist too, instead preferring the nonsense label of Marxian. I believe Marxian was developed as a term because if you talk about economics and politics enough, eventually you’ll see Marxist analysis is simply correct in an unavoidable way. So professors would use the word Marxian to talk about reality in factual terms, yet claim they didn’t have Marxist or revolutionary leftist political leanings.
Marxian and Marxist are semantically different terms.
- Marxian = in the manner of, or following from Marx’s work
- Marxist = an identity of a person, or an idea attributable to someone with that identity
“Marxian” makes sense as a term, we don’t go around calling ourselves Newtonists if we accept his theories on physics and calculus. I think you’re right about why Harvey specifically might reject the label “Marxist” but I don’t think Marxian is a bad term as such.
Anyway I think Harvey’s course on Capital is much overrated. He basically ignores volume 3 and cherry picks from volume 2 in order to maintain his interpretation of volume 1. There’s a great video on YouTube of Vijay Prashad roasting David Harvey, in person, where he points out the total neglect of imperialism in Harvey’s work
If MAGA chuds’ way of reconciling the contradictions of US politics was to turn it into a conspiracy theory board, like you’d see about aliens or chemtrails or whatever. Everyone adding their own anacdotes and weaving an inconsistent yet shared fiction together.
Then Democrat libs’ approach is similar yet distinct. Instead of r/consperacy, its more like a fandom page for Dick Wolf’s new CBS show, FBI: CSI: Palm Beach
On the one hand true, US election process is hella open to meddling. On the other hand why China and Russia, I’m sure local interests play a bigger role. On the third hand, when you look at the proposals to improve the election integrity it’s all just voter suppression.
We have seen some small test runs on hospitals, etc.
like this zionist “test run” on a hospital in south lebanon mr harvey?
I’m genuinely gonna lose it
I mean yeah I never recommend him. Rather point people at less common Marx explainers and end up with a decent synthesis between them than point them to the “big guy” that regularly adopts glaringly wrong positions.
so, at the end of the day, he’s just another western chauvinist and racist.
