neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city liv... more neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city living … with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and workshops open to the world, cafes galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank, community gardens here and there." 5 To get from here to there entails "a right to change … the city more after our hearts' desire." As such, the "right to the city" must be "a collective rather than an individual right… to claim some kind of shaping power … over the ways in which our cities are made and remade." 6 I am in sympathy with this radical vision of the right to the city. I am grateful to Harvey for at least spelling out these political distinctions. However, for one thing, he doesn't discuss the middle class position.
How are human beings to bring history and society under our rational control, rather than be con... more How are human beings to bring history and society under our rational control, rather than be controlled by the irrational forces still lurking here? The 'horizontalists " in our midst today, like their anarchist forebears, would like to believe that each and every one of us, quite on our own, can come to, if not a perfect, absolute Truth (which neither they nor we should credit), then one not quite so perfect, but at least sufficient to master that social-historical reality. Human beings, however, as Marx writes in the passage above, are easily swayed away from such truth. Thus the working class, like the prospective ruling classes before it, needs a process of self-education, of paideia, to find the truth and propagate it among ourselves. Revolution is a collective, educational process, which does not occur in a vacuum.
neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city liv... more neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city living … with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and workshops open to the world, cafes galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank, community gardens here and there." 5 To get from here to there entails "a right to change … the city more after our hearts' desire." As such, the "right to the city" must be "a collective rather than an individual right… to claim some kind of shaping power … over the ways in which our cities are made and remade." 6 I am in sympathy with this radical vision of the right to the city. I am grateful to Harvey for at least spelling out these political distinctions. However, for one thing, he doesn't discuss the middle class position.
How are human beings to bring history and society under our rational control, rather than be con... more How are human beings to bring history and society under our rational control, rather than be controlled by the irrational forces still lurking here? The 'horizontalists " in our midst today, like their anarchist forebears, would like to believe that each and every one of us, quite on our own, can come to, if not a perfect, absolute Truth (which neither they nor we should credit), then one not quite so perfect, but at least sufficient to master that social-historical reality. Human beings, however, as Marx writes in the passage above, are easily swayed away from such truth. Thus the working class, like the prospective ruling classes before it, needs a process of self-education, of paideia, to find the truth and propagate it among ourselves. Revolution is a collective, educational process, which does not occur in a vacuum.
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