Radical Urbanism, The Right to the City, concluding panel

Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer, Susan Fainstein, David Harvey, moderated by Neil Smith, as the concluding panel of all day Radical Urbanism conference December 12, 2008 at the City University of New York Grad Center offering insight about the pending fall of capitalism, the degeneracy of our culture and political institutions, how the people can retake power, particularly in cities.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Peter Marcuse
• Margit Mayer
• Susan Fainstein
• David Harvey
• Capitalism
• CUNY Grad
• Padmini Biswas

[DANxTHExRED]

Shame you never got clued up after all those years then eh?

China, USSR, Cuba, etc. are not communist. Communism is a classless and stateless society, with the workers owning the means of production. These are obviously not stateless states. Furthermore, the state owned the means of production, what is known as state capitalism.

Communism in praxis was the Paris Commune, or collectivised parts of Spain. Both crushed before they had a chance to fail.

Ignorance is fucking irritating.

[kingeric77]

superb analysis from harvey

[chandranale]

thanks you for posting this!

[BHBdrummer]

It's so cool to have all this mind-expanding stuff so available. Gotta love YouTube.

[stochasticmonk]

some people espousing more militant and rigid ideological viewpoints here should lighten up. Lefebvre understood the importance of living spontaneously in the moment and getting some enjoyment out of life beyond hurling the words of dead or dying people at each other from various entrenched camps. What we need here is a festival, eh?

[Antiks72]

@bapyou Ditto for Iraq, and in particular Falluja. Neocon ideology precipitated a blood bath.

[bapyou]

"organized murder based on ideology"

"violence based on 2 demensional (sic) dehumanizing radicalism."

Yeah. That reminds me of Ronald Reagan funding the death squads in El Salvador. Ronnie ascribed to that wide spread American ideology: Good old fashioned commie-hatin'.

Is good old fashioned American commie-hatin' an example of blind idealism? I think I have a case for the affirmative answer to that question. How 'bout you creampuff?

[raphaelnik]

Well said.

[raphaelnik]

He means a city that all of its inhabitants can freely live in. Read the works of Henri Lefebvre who wrote 'Right to the City'.

Harvey and his peers argue that the city is being taken away from many people by the monied-class. Examples being gentrification projects in Manhattan.

[bapyou]

Well, maybe. But that isn't the topic of this thread is it? The poster to whom I was commenting was making a point about the failures of socialism. If you subvert every attempt to do something, then claiming the failure is not your fault, that's a bit disingenuous, ain't it?

It's like tripping someone every time they begin to run, and the tripper blaming the failure to run on the tripee.

Take the Paris Commune. Wouldn't you say the murder of 30,000 people a slight obstacle to "success"?

[kdurston1]

fascism, nazism, hell even christianity could claim their failures on such examples of.... oh yea, reality.

[bapyou]

"every socialist experiment of any significance in the 20th century - without exception - has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement...was permitted to rise or fall on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad & freely & fully relax control at home."

- William Blum