Towards the great transformation: (3) Research, Marx's ‘Old Mole’, and ‘Robinson’/Keiller's Journey

Abstract

Recently, there has in some circles been an influential return to Marxist political economy and historical materialism in and around an updated version of the critical theory elaborated by the Frankfurt School, and in partly overlapping circles of largely post-Marxist (the post-ness is too often taken-for-granted) discussions, there has been talk of assemblage and of ‘new materialisms.’ This series, in seeking to build a bridge between and beyond these two tendencies, Marxist and post-Marxist, returns to the characterisation of the earlier series (‘Is it all coming together?’) of the dominant model of development and urbanization, adding to its particular concerns the realities and notion of ‘nature’. Turning to the relevant knowledges and practices that might illuminate and help to guide us beyond the realities of that model, it continues with its series of experiments in ‘critical epic’, moving across spaces and times from the early civilisations to the present and beyond, making critical use of a wide variety of re-tellings and analyses, seeking to resurrect and redirect the much abused notion – much abused by mainstream urban studies, by positivism and by mechanistic forms of materialism – of an accessible science of society in the making, one that ‘brings people’, and now nature, ‘(back) in’. In moves towards an accessible science, the series as a whole seeks to rescue and enhance ordinary appreciation of nature and of enthusiasm for the commons and related radical change, largely extra-disciplinary knowledge, from a marginalisation and blockages (‘entrapments’) by the market and by academe . It draws at this stage on Patrick Keiller's semi-fictional documentary Robinson in Ruins, and the relevance to it of Marx's notion of the ‘old mole’ of revolution or radical transformation. Though this series does not question the value of current critical, and some mainstream, studies in sociology, geography and the humanities in their coverage of aspects of the crisis, it does question their adequacy for understanding the full extent of the present possibly terminal stage of ‘the urban revolution’ and of the appropriate means for changing it. In so doing it seeks ultimately to direct attention away from an excessive preoccupation with the negative experience of marketisation and neoliberalism toward the positive prefigurative evidence for the possibility of a great transformation based on a re-natured communalism. It is thus particularly attentive to biophiliac, psycho-social, and cultural responses to, as well as economic dimensions of, ‘the crisis’, with an emphasis on the political dimension that is pre- rather than post-political.