The limits to Marx

Introduction

Brotherhood is a two-way street.

I’m flattered that David Harvey has taken the time to write a reply to my article, ‘Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist’ (Springer, 2014d). Clearly, he didn’t have to do so, and although he doesn’t agree with much of my argument, I can’t help but take his response as a huge compliment. At the same time, I have to be honest in saying that I feel quite disappointed with the end result of what he’s actually written. In asking me to ‘listen’, it’s both ironic and disheartening that Harvey is not really offering the same courtesy in return. While I’m happy to concede that he makes some worthwhile critiques, at the same time he problematically pushes the same threadbare Marxist arguments that anarchists have been responding to for a very long time. In some instances, these are criticisms that Mikhail Bakunin (2002 [1873]) and other anarchists demonstrated as fallacious Marxist caricatures over a century ago. Moreover, it is curious that Harvey chose to focus entirely on my essay alone, rather than dealing with the broader currents of contemporary anarchist geographies (Springer, 2013), as though a single article is the beginning and end of what has been, and might be, said among the diverse and expanding group of scholars working within this (re)emerging field (Clough and Blumberg, 2012; Springer et al., 2012). He also entirely neglects any of my other work, and particularly my recent ‘Human Geography Without Hierarchy’ (Springer, 2014b), which is far more critical of his work than the piece he takes aim at. Had he read this other essay, he might have noticed that it preemptively answers most of his criticisms about horizontalism, decentralization, and prefiguration, which makes his response all the more curious. Perhaps most confusing of all though is that he also ignores the rest of the dialogue that my original essay spawned (Clough, 2014; Gibson, 2014; Ince, 2014; Mann, 2014; Waterstone, 2014), including my final response (Springer, 2014a), which, again, already answers some of his critiques. All of this suggests that Harvey hasn’t really taken the anarchist position in geography very seriously at all, thus making it particularly difficult to think about the possibility of ‘fertile collaboration’ between Marxists and anarchists that he speaks to in concluding his essay (2017: 249). To Harvey, I apparently ‘want no part in such a project’ anyway, and he suggests that I’m ‘mainly bent on polarizing the relation between anarchism and Marxism as if they are mutually exclusive if not hostile’ (Harvey, 2017: 234). Well no, not quite. There is an enduring, if not peculiar, sense of kinship between Marxism and anarchism. Certainly, I don’t deny this, not least because they both spring from the same socialist roots. Nonetheless, there is something of a sibling rivalry, where anarchists and Marxists can bring out both the worst and best in each other when each side is prepared to listen and respond to the other’s critiques.

Far from wanting to close down or shut off this conflict, I think we should view it as a symptom of a healthy politics on the left. In this regard, I take an agonistic view of conflict, which implies a politics of mutual admiration characterized by a sense of respect for the other party. Agonism affirms the perpetuity of contestation, a dimension that is fundamental to political struggle and social transformation. So just as children will wrestle and squabble as part of their growth, a circumstance that will often continue in various ways into adulthood, such engagement confirms a fraternal or sororal bond. I want to argue that such conflict is actually critical in maintaining the vibrancy of radical politics. With respect to the relationship between anarchism and Marxism, we might productively consider the present situation to be one of ‘postfraternity’ or ‘postsorority’. Of course, my chosen title plays on the titles of two of Harvey’s (1982, 1989) major works, which carries forward the emerging theme of this ongoing dialogue and the tradition started by Marx (2013 [1847]) when he rearranged the nouns in Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty (2011 [1846]). Beyond the obvious mirth, I think there is something very useful in doing so. First, to acknowledge that there are indeed limits to Marx, just as there are limits to anarchism. There is no fail-safe solution to politics given that its expression is always like shifting sands in the winds of social change. In the second instance, I follow Sidaway (2000) in his musings on colonialism, where he identifies one particular sense of ‘postcolonialism’—in its unhyphenated form—as signifying a continuation meant to suggest that while formal colonialism has ended, it still has innumerable resonant effects on the present. The same can be said of socialism. The era of fraternal relations ended with the First International, but there are many conversations, confrontations, and consternations left to be unfurled in the immediate family of radical geography, and broader still, among the cousins, aunts, and uncles of the academic and activist left. I want to show my respect for Harvey and the profound contributions he’s made by continuing to challenge him on his reading of anarchism as well as the version of Marxism he advocates by pointing to the ways in which he flirts with authoritarianism by perpetuating state-centrism and vanguardist ideals, even as he wishes to deny their presence in his thinking. Welcome to the condition of postfraternity!

Bowdlerism or balderdash? Radical geography then and now

It’s so difficult, isn’t it? To see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something? It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.

There are, of course, points of similarity between Harvey and myself where some form of camaraderie might be built, and in particular I found the autobiographical components of his response fascinating insofar as I could easily see myself reflected within them. Harvey recalls having to publish at an excessive rate to be taken seriously as a Marxist, something I’ve also felt the weight of as an anarchist. If the place of radical geographers in the academy was ‘touch-and-go’ in the 1970s, then the problem seems all the more acute today where the neoliberalization of academia ensures that the stakes are even higher as evermore incredibly talented scholars are relegated to the part-time employment of sessional hell (Purcell, 2007). I too recognized that as a radical geographer my only chance at career stability was more than mere ‘publish or perish’, but I nonetheless willingly carried with me all the baggage of that ‘vile and dangerous’ word ‘anarchism’ (Goldman, 1969 [1917]: 6). I did so precisely because I insist this emancipatory philosophy deserves a seat at the academic table, having much to offer in these times of systemic crises. Despite being extremely productive in the first half decade of my own career, this still wasn’t enough in the eyes of 3 out of 10 members of my department who silently voted to deny my tenure. Yet Harvey is less than happy with my apparently ‘bowdlerized’ reading of the development of radical geography, and in particular his position within it, as though I somehow wouldn’t understand the precarity of being a young radical geographer.

I never suggest that Harvey’s prolific writings ‘imprisoned radical geography in the Marxist fold’ (Harvey, 2017: 236). These are his words, not mine. I wasn’t around in the 1970s to witness the early development of radical geography, but I can certainly appreciate all-too-well how difficult the terrain must have been. What is a little peculiar though is how he expects that I might know all the ins-and-outs of early radical geography in the same way as someone who lived through it. ‘Springer should correct his erroneous view from “hindsight”’, Harvey scolds, ‘as to what actually happened in radical circles in North America after 1969’ (Harvey, 2017: 236). Yet isn’t what ‘actually happened’ a particular claim to a single truth, rather than an admission of the multiple intertwined narratives that inform the history of radical geography? This sort of singular view is basically my problem with Marxist geography all along, as though other views or variants of leftist politics don’t really matter. ‘The idea that I “solidified what Folke had considered obligatory” is way off the mark’, Harvey (2017: 236) complains. But is it? This is where hindsight becomes critically important. Throughout his essay, Harvey wants to imply that his version of Marxism is somehow unorthodox or unusual, a sentiment he repeated several times during his talk at a recent American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in Chicago (Harvey, 2015). I don’t buy it. Harvey’s (2008, 2010) interpretation of the quite heterodox Henri Lefebvre is, for example, far from progressive. He attempts to read Lefebvre’s expression of the ‘right to the city’, and particularly autonomous and radical democratic social movements, ‘through old lenses: namely…statism, centralism, and hierarchy’ (Souza, 2010: 315). Setting aside the question of how orthodox Harvey’s Marxism actually is, we can look to the consistency of his work as having cemented his legacy as one of the most well-known Marxist figures to ever grace the academy. Sure, back in the 1970s, his place in the history of geographical thought was not assured, but today there stands the David Harvey, a legend (Castree and Gregory, 2008).

Harvey’s influence is undeniably monumental. So when Harvey suggests that ‘it seems mighty odd that Springer has elected to write a rebuttal to [Folke’s] not very influential piece some forty two years after its publication and without, moreover, paying any mind to its historical and geographical context’ (2017: 236), one might rightly ask if this is really a fair criticism? Besides, I actually don’t begrudge him for being a leading light in the discipline; rather, I simply point to that being a contemporary matter of fact. There is no denying that Harvey’s work has set the tone for a significant amount of scholarship that has followed, and consequently I don’t think my historical reading of the contemporary shape of radical geography is actually incorrect. Harvey seems oddly unaware of his current position in the discipline, suggesting he has only really mattered in the last 10 years. This is quite peculiar given that he’s been making waves in geography for several decades. Social Justice and the City (Harvey, 1973), The Limits to Capital (Harvey, 1982), and The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey, 1989) have all made a tremendous impact, where the latter is one of the most influential social science books of all time. What is indeed ‘mighty odd’ is that a tribute to the impact of Harvey’s scholarship would be written only three short years into his ‘really “influential writings”’ being published (Castree and Gregory, 2008), as though anything prior to A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005) hadn’t already assured his legacy.

Even if it is the case that Harvey only came into his own in the past decade, by the time I embarked on my PhD in 2005, Harvey was already established as a household name in geography circles. Perhaps Harvey is simply very humble, I don’t know. Yet modest though he may be, Harvey should still be willing to admit that my original article isn’t any more a direct rebuttal to Folke (1972) than his piece is to Bookchin (1986 [1971]). Harvey knows as well as I do that we both chose these titles as a form of wry amusement to draw readers into a conversation about anarchism and Marxism. While this discussion of the contours of radical geography’s historical trajectory is important to point out in terms of defending my particular reading of the contemporary dominance of Marxian analysis, it doesn’t form the crux of my problem with Harvey’s rebuttal. I’m more concerned with the troubling caricature of anarchism that Harvey seeks to perpetuate, a concern to which I now turn my attention.

Denial of the state and the state of denial: The hidden vanguard

As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists.

Harvey’s use of Barcelona in the 1930s as an example of anarchism gone wrong is a curious choice, not least because it was such a successful realization of anarchist ideas (Breitbart, 1978; Ealham, 2010). Notwithstanding all that could be said about this particular case, let’s take the ‘two broad lines of critique of the conventional anarchist position’ that arise from Harvey’s reading seriously. The first criticism is the ostensible anarchist contempt for power and the ‘failure to shape and mobilize political power into a sufficiently effective configuration to press home a revolutionary transformation in society as a whole’ (Harvey, 2017: 242). We could first begin by unpacking power in a Foucauldian sense (Foucault, 1980), which allows us to recognize that anarchists do not disregard power at all, but actually use this circuitous and fluid concept quite effectively when considered as an ‘entanglement’ of social relations (Sharp et al., 2000). We might also point out that, in order to demonstrate this supposed anarchist disdain for power, Harvey uses Holloway (2002), which is amusing insofar as Holloway is, of course, a Marxist. It also skirts around the arguments I presented against the ‘totalizing spatial logic’ of a Marxian version of revolution (Springer, 2014d: 262), whereby the Promethean impulse of remaking everything and sweeping up everyone in a singular moment of complete transformation disregards the notion that ‘other worlds’ are already happening (Gibson-Graham, 2008). Not everything needs to be remade. There is a colonizing character to such a view of revolution that is undeniable, and one has to wonder where indigenous peoples and other minority groups fit in to such a program? Of course, recognition for such diversity has long been the Achilles’ heel of Marxism and its class-centric outlook. In Harvey’s own words, he admits that he ‘personally do[es]n’t trust continuous insurrections that spring spontaneously from self-activity .…Self-liberation through insurrection is all well and good but what about everyone else?’ (2017: 243). Here is the hidden vanguard, sneaking unseen like a 6′ 3.5″ tall invisible rabbit in a James Stewart film.

Yet what about everyone else? Are they in need of a grand salvationary gesture? Didn’t European colonialism marshal the exact same rhetoric in asking the colonized to trust its motives, all while perpetuating a deep suspicion of the ‘Other’? For anarchists, as the insurrectionary ethos moves through a community, it mobilizes political power by circulating ideas and making room for voluntary association. Such a view of power isn’t actually individualist; rather, it’s necessarily an assemblage, where the individual and the community are continually negotiated categories. And what of Marxists in a revolutionary conjuncture of totalizing change? The vanguard simply decides what’s best, and those who don’t want to be liberated or assigned roles are dragged along kicking and screaming? In spite of these limits, Harvey remains committed to his state-centric view of radical politics, arguing, ‘the state cannot be neglected as a potential site for radicalization’ (2017: X). But doesn’t this perpetuate a narrow view of how political power might be mobilized? Aside from disregarding the inherent authoritarianism that rests at the heart of any version of the state, I also wonder if Harvey has given any thought to the idea that, in advocating for the radicalization of the state, he is also actually arguing for the radicalization of capital? Certainly he is aware of the interplay between state and capital, noting the contradiction between ‘the supposedly “free” exercise of individual private property rights and the collective exercise of coercive regulatory state power to define, codify and give legal form to those rights’ (Harvey, 2014: 42). Kropotkin (2002 [1903]: 181) recognized the origin of capital and the state as irrevocably intertwined, where ‘these institutions developed side by side, mutually supporting and re-enforcing each other’. Marx (1976 [1867]) knew this too, giving it the name ‘primitive accumulation’. Harvey (2003) has also acknowledged the ongoing character of this bloodthirsty relationship between capital and the state, calling it ‘accumulation by dispossession’. So why lean on a statist crutch?

Just how deeply this relationship between capitalism and the state runs has long been the focus of anarchists, particularly in critiquing nominally socialist states as in fact versions of state capitalism (Goldman, 1996). Bookchin (1986 [1971]: 207) asked Marxists to ‘listen’ when he argued that,

Marxism…. is assimilated by the most advanced forms of state capitalist movement—notably Russia. By an incredible irony of history, Marxian ‘socialism’ turns out to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism. The proletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary class within the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of bourgeois society.

I’m willing to nonetheless accept that anarchists need to be vigilant against neoliberal infection, in the same way that Marxists should be weary of the colonizing potential of the state (Springer, 2012). The Khmer Rouge radicalized the state in Cambodia. We know the result, but here’s the rub: The Communist Party of Kampuchea’s leadership were also in denial about their vanguardism, and in fact they continue to be to this day as the ongoing tribunal has made clear. Obviously, I’m not accusing Harvey of secretly harboring genocidal machinations to ensure his Marxist project is seen through, but genocide was not Pol Pot’s dream either. In my recent book, I recount my Khmer language teacher’s history with Saloth Sar, a man she remembers as gentle and kind (Springer, 2015). Prior to becoming known as Brother Number One, having transformed himself into Pol Pot, Saloth Sar was her childhood teacher. Here, in this most startling example, we find Hannah Arendt’s (1963) ‘banality of evil’, wherein history’s profoundest moments of malice are seen as being fulfilled not by sociopaths or fanatics but by the blinkered recklessness of ordinary people. Yet we might correct Arendt’s formulation because the banality of evil is not actually banal at all. Instead, it represents an acceptance of the premises of the state, its function as the institutionalization of power, and the erasure this brings in our ability to see the violence it unleashes.

Evil is not of the everyday. Pol Pot was not born a monster. He was once a sweet and innocent baby. Arendt could only view evil as banal because she failed to notice the banality of the state itself, with its ugly, twisted trawls of codified rules, vested not in specialization or common good, but in the interests of an elite, a vanguard. The moment we attempt to crystallize our relations in concrete form and invest them with authority is the exact same moment that we fail in our radical, revolutionary trajectory. So we see mass killings as a common feature of Marxism put into practice, not because there is something wrong with socialist ideas, but rather because the state represents the apotheosis of the human capacity for violence. People are not good or bad. Neither are co-ops, and surely they are only as good as their members’ desire to make them such. It follows, then, that organization is not good or bad, yet states are of an altogether different stripe. They do something to us. They arrange the circuits of power in such a way that attempts to make it flow in one direction. They render us cogs in a fixed machine with a self-replicating logic, rather than voluntary associates within a continually unfolding process. The state can never be radical. It is an abomination that always serves the few, while demanding blind obedience from the many. Such a demand is achieved in the best incidents through flags waved and anthems sung and in the worst through shots fired and bloodshed.

Stretching the horizontal vision: Federation beyond hierarchy and authority

Life already shows in which direction the change will be made. Not in increasing the powers of the State, but in resorting to free organization and free federation in all those branches which are now considered as attributes of the State.

The second major claim that Harvey draws from Barcelona is that anarchism lacks the ability ‘to stretch the vision of political activism from local to far broader geographical scales’ (2017: 242). Harvey means to warn us of what he elsewhere refers to as the ‘fetishism of organizational preference’ (2012a: 7), which he assumes to be a mistaken prioritization of the method of organizing over its desired outcome. To Harvey, such a prefigurative politics, which is the here and now of anarchism (Ince, 2012; Springer, 2012), supposedly prevents anarchists from being able to plan major infrastructures, manage environmental concerns, or service transport and communication networks. Of course, I already provide a partial answer to this in my original essay (Springer, 2014d), where I point to Colin Ward’s (2004) example of postal services functioning not through a central world authority, but via voluntary agreements. Kropotkin (2002 [1887]) makes the same point with respect to the independent federation of European railways in his time. Harvey attempts to preempt being called out on the inaccuracy of his claim by stating that ‘anarchist town planners (including Bookchin) understood this problem but their work is largely ignored within the anarchist movement’ (2017: 242–3). To say this work is overlooked only reveals Harvey’s limited knowledge of the literature and the scant attention he pays to anarchist writings, and particularly to anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism’s oldest answer to industrial relations wherein worker-managed production systems are networked into a stateless socialist society (Rocker, 2004 [1938]; Solidarity Federation, 2012). Harvey knows of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, but he doesn’t take it seriously. Demonstrating the depths of his state-centric imagination, he lampoons it by saying ‘if it looks like a state, and feels like a state, and quacks like a state, then it’s a state’ (Harvey, 2012c: n.p.). Elsewhere, he suggests Bookchin’s idea about assemblies is ‘well worth elaborating as part of a radical anti-capitalist agenda’ (Harvey, 2012a: 85), yet instead of actually doing so, Harvey falls back on a centralization argument, where the state takes center stage.

Perhaps the most confounding statement in Harvey’s entire essay is that the

dialectic between decentralization and centralization is one of the most important contradictions within capital…and I wish all those, like Springer, who advocate decentralization as if it is an unalloyed good would look more closely at its consequences and contradictions.

Harvey dismisses anarchism’s coupling of decentralization with anti-capitalism precisely because Marxism cannot accommodate prefigurative politics, treating horizontality as a charming, but ultimately limited if not futile, distraction from realizing the bigger revolutionary picture. Horizontalism is consequently positioned as something that might happen after the promised great withering of the state, and so we can see plainly that the ‘stages of history’ is not a caricature, but an unacknowledged specter that continues to haunt the Marxist project. Failing to understand this particular limit to Marxism, Harvey invokes the idea that ‘it is difficult if not impossible…to take consensual horizontality to much larger scales’ and that it is

impossible to proceed without setting up ‘confederal’ or ‘nested’ (which means inevitably hierarchical in my view but then this too may just be semantics) structures of decision-making that entail[s] serious adjustments in organized thinking as well as forms of institutionalized governance. (2017: 248)

Instead of a serious discussion of authority, we get nuggets like

I certainly would not welcome a pilot landing at JFK proclaiming that as a good anarchist she does not accept the legitimacy of the air traffic controllers’ authority and that she proposes to disregard all aviation rules in the landing process. (Harvey, 2017: 239)

The Marxist cartoonist and the anarchist other: Of caricature and insurrection

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Some of Harvey’s response is so willfully misguided that I can’t help but find significant humor in it. He entirely misses the political implications of reciprocity, active critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism for authority that rest at the center of both my essay and anarchist praxis (Springer, 2014d). Rather than appreciating that what I am speaking to with my examples of the mundanity of anarchism are principles of mutual aid, voluntary association, self-management, and direct action, Harvey reduces his argument to silliness. ‘Perpetually questioning authority, rules and codes of behavior, and disobeying stupid or irrelevant rules is one thing’, Harvey writes, ‘disobeying all such mandates on anarchist principle as Springer proposes is quite another’ (2017: 239). Of course I don’t propose any such thing, and the idea of an anarchist ‘mandate’ is preposterous. The only hard and fast proposition present here is Harvey’s political imagination, which appears to be cast in ideological stone. Although Harvey says he is tempted by parody, he doesn’t actually resist the urge to dive headfirst into mockery where his distaste for anarchism becomes palpable.

What of polarization and hostility? While disregarding a posted sign that says ‘poisonous snakes are in this area’ is an amusing analogy, ask Rosa Parks in 1955 about a sign that said ‘Negroes at the back of the bus’ and it isn’t so funny anymore. Suddenly, we become well aware of the emancipatory potential of a single act of disobedience or personal insurrection. This sentiment isn’t meant as senseless violence, but in Stirner’s (1993 [1845]) etymological sense of insurrection as an act of rebellion, a ‘rising up’ above oppressive socio-economic and politico-ideological conditions. The point is that anarchism is a form of politics that compels us to think critically about rules and whose interest they actually serve. The caricature Harvey perpetuates is that anarchists have no rules at all. Maybe there is a sensible reason to follow a sign, such as a warning about venomous animals, but if a ‘Whites only’ sign is posted outside a bathroom, there exists a very good reason to challenge it. While Rosa Parks was just one of many who took such a risk, when refusing to sit at the back of the bus she liberated herself as an act of insurrection. Her defiance was part of a broader movement, but she didn’t wait for a vanguard to show her how everyone else could be liberated. She took direct action herself because she was tired of giving in, a moment of remarkable courage that allowed the rhizomes of emancipation to grow stronger.

Harvey finds the assertion that all authority is illegitimate ‘ridiculous if not dangerous’ (2017: 239), which of course he should, but his ridicule is misdirected and should be aimed at the cartoon he’s drawn. His caricature of anarchists’ thinking on authority doesn’t ‘give anarchism a bad name’, it gives Harvey one, and if he placed more value on hindsight he might be slightly embarrassed in having attempted to pin such nonsense on anarchism. There is not a willy-nilly disregard of anything and everything. We are talking about anarchy, not anomie, which means that there is critical thought about what rules are silly and what rules work. Anarchism doesn’t mean ‘no rules’. It means ‘no rulers’. Shouldn’t we be willing to question any set parameters, particularly when they have been nailed down and codified as sovereign law? When anarchists call the legitimacy of authority into question, this is meant to imply that authority is fundamentally contestable and any decision to follow must be entered into via one’s own volition, not through force or fraud. As Bakunin (2010 [1882]: 24) affirmed,

[i]f I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God.

Why isn’t it fair game to identify ongoing blind spots within Marxian analysis? Why can’t we have a dialogue about the lack of attention that has been afforded to anarchism, owing in no small part to the strength of Marxism in contemporary geographical thought? Why am I blamed for perpetuating ‘paranoid nonsense’ simply because I’ve raised a series of questions about the limits of Marx and suggest it is time for a reexamination of the anarchist roots of radical geography and an exploration of the promise that anarchist geographies might hold today? The dismissive and derisive responses I’ve received from Marxists aren’t exactly indicative of brotherly love (Mann, 2014; Waterstone, 2014), and the idea that there shouldn’t be an ongoing conversation about how the left is organized seems highly apolitical. Harvey speaks to openness but then closes the door in my face through his liberal use of satire. Obviously, an insurrectionary swell has to be more than me borrowing my mother-in-law’s car, but this is an expression of reciprocity located in the everyday where we actually exercise our agency. The point here is to signal a politics of possibility, which finds its impetus in mundane acts of ordinary insurrection (Scott, 2012). In the same way, surely Harvey sees his writing as pointing to a politics and doesn’t imagine that an entire revolution will be born from, and live its life through, the tip of his pen. His contribution consists of the radical geographical imaginations that he conjures by the words that flow across his page.

The point of horizontalism and the negation of vanguardism is that we all play a role, we all contribute, we all matter. But I’m not here to speak to victimhood. I’m happy to take a kick in the teeth, but my lament all along has been that geographers have scarcely paid attention to anarchism. It is undeniable that the bulk of radical critique over the past 40 years has been in a Marxian vein. And, yes, the profound influence of Harvey has something to do with this whether he’s willing to admit it or not. This statement shouldn’t be misread as blame, but rather as a testament to the quality and strength of his analyses. Make no mistake: David Harvey has done a hell of a lot of good for geography! But he’s not beyond critique. I’d like to think that Harvey would necessarily agree. I’m not the first challenger to arrive on the scene in contesting the Marxist orthodoxy in radical geography. Both Rosalyn Deutsche (1991) and Gibson-Graham (1996) got Harvey’s goat many years ago by dismantling the totalizing impulses of Marxism. In Chicago, he admitted to being ‘pissed off’ with the latter, saying ‘these were supposed to be colleagues’ and so he ‘took a little cut at them, but…frankly, I think they actually deserved it’ (Harvey, 2015). Fair enough, I suppose, as such back and forth is the nature of healthy debate, representing the continual unfolding of, and need for, politics. I certainly hope that late in my career I have young guns giving me a tough time because it will mean that my work has mattered, that I’ve given the geographical community something to chew on, and that the essence of radical intellectual critique lives on.

It’s only castles burning: Disagreement and the politics of listening

Blind man running through the light of the night with an answer in his hand.

Anarchism is a serious contemporary imperative that can no longer be ignored. The fact that Harvey is taking some notice suggests to me that somewhere, perhaps very deep down, he is cognizant that there is a changing of the guard on the political left. There is no doubt that Harvey has made a tremendous impact on the shape of geographical thought, but if ‘Listen, Anarchist!’ is the standard by which the relevance of contemporary Marxian theory is to be measured, then I think it is in even worse shape than I had considered in my original essay (Springer, 2014d). One of the key problems is Harvey’s inability to also listen without simply falling back on his own caricatural assumptions. At times he does take heed, suggesting that ‘[i]f, as Springer says, anarchism is primarily “about actively reinventing the everyday through a desire to create new forms of organization” then I am all for it’ (Harvey, 2017: X). Such an admission is welcome because at a fundamental level this is what anarchism is all about. It is the embrace of the everyday, where the here and now of anarchism form the geography of insurrectionary change. No rhetoric, no hyperbole, with anarchism the revolution is literally at our feet! Yet elsewhere Harvey frustrates with his obvious lack of attention. For someone concerned about the apparent ‘quota of misrepresentations, exaggerations and ad hominem criticisms’ within my article, Harvey certainly could have spent more time considering how he replicates these attributes, wherein ‘the critique incorporates and mirrors far too much of that which it criticizes’ (2017: 244). A case in point is when he refers to my positioning of horizontalism as the optimal organizational form as ‘exclusive and exclusionary dogma’ (Harvey, 2017: 249). Of course, I answer the question of horizontalism at length elsewhere (Springer, 2014b), but clearly he paid it no mind. In my response to those involved in the original dialogue, I also made my position on radical geography very clear by stating that,

My mission is only to call for the necessary space wherein we can collectively decide for ourselves what is possible within geography, rather than being bound to particular methodologies and parochial ideas…You can call this ‘anarchism’, ‘critical anti-hegemonic iconoclasm’, ‘paradigm destabilizing recalcitrant analysis’, ‘non-conformist insurgent praxis’, or ‘don’t tell me what to do theory’ for all I care. The point is, we are talking about a mindset of breaking archetypes, tearing up blueprints, and scribbling over leitmotifs. (Springer, 2014a: 306)

The shape of contemporary social movements looks very different from the politics Harvey imagines. As the winds of change blow through the social sciences, his response reads like a reactionary effort to stay relevant when instead Harvey should be putting up his sail and enjoying the ride! He no longer needs to ensure his legacy. It is cemented. Harvey is one of the greatest minds to ever grace our field, and he is rightfully an inspiration to us all. One thing is certain: I would not be an anarchist if Harvey wasn’t first a Marxist. For this, I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. I have a deep sense of respect for the contribution he’s made, which will remain a tremendous gift to the (re)radicalization of geography. But this doesn’t change where we are at today in the current conjuncture of heightened authoritarianism and a wolven state that hides in neoliberal sheep’s clothing. The state can no longer represent the limit of our geographical imaginations, and it is for this reason that the Marxist sun is setting in our field. More and more young scholars are awakening to the vibrant potential of an anarchist dawn. This isn’t mere ideology. Instead, as the Occupy movement made crystal clear, the political climate of the world actually demands it. As academics, we need to listen to the politics of the people, and not simply feign that we are. Fortunately, not all Marxists are as stalwart to the ‘spirit and letter of Marx’ as Harvey (Walker, 2004: 434), and there is an increasingly autonomist character among those who seem to recognize anarchism as ‘the ultimate horizon of all forms of radical politics’ (Newman, 2010: 18). If the Black and Red are to resolve their differences, then we would all do well to recognize and appreciate this outer edge of radical possibility, not as a limit, but as an aspiration to live into. The limits to Marxism are to be found in the stunted idea that there should be parameters to radical possibility, a character that defines the ongoing politics of waiting, the hidden vanguardism, and the continuing state-centric appeal to authority that Harvey demonstrates so clearly. We must instead become the horizon, living and breathing its possibilities without considering it as a static endpoint or fixed boundary, but as a beautiful enabler (Springer, 2016). After all, a stateless society characterized by free association was also Marx’s future vision. The difference is that anarchists are not content to reside in the fragile dreams of tomorrow, gathering strength today by turning castles in the air into earthly dwellings here and now.

There is no foreclosure within my version of radical geography, only a notion that there is much to be gained by returning to anarchism and exploring once more the emancipatory terrain traversed by Kropotkin and Reclus. In this light, Harvey’s seemingly apolitical lament that

[s]adly, this comes not only at a time when the conjuncture is right for a revival of interest in Marxist political economy, but it also coincides with a political moment when others are beginning to explore new ways of doing politics (2017: X)

As an anarchist, I don’t think we need a consensual politics where conflict is avoided or eradicated. Instead, I embrace the possibility of difference and dissent against the apolitical end-state utopianism that assumes we’ll all ever agree (Springer, 2011, 2014c). So I propose that perhaps we might embrace a postfraternal or postsororal politics on the left, where we move beyond the idea that everything will be resolved between anarchists, Marxists, feminists, poststructuralists, situationists, autonomists, and so forth. I want to argue that with any healthy family comes some degree of adversity and an acceptance of disagreement. The condition of postfraternity keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized space in the sense that Massey (2005) avows but also acknowledges our enduring kinship on the left. Postfraternal politics are more than a two-way street; they are a busy intersection without traffic lights! But like those European planners who are experimenting with the removal of traffic signs, we can begin to recognize that the approach actually works. The number of accidents can be dramatically reduced so long as we are willing to listen to each other, interacting ‘as brethren—by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs’ (Schulz, 2006: n.p.). In the spirit of postfraternity, I take my hat off to David Harvey.