Holiday Reading

The above included David Harvey's "A Companion to Marx's Capital" as a counterpoint to O'Hara's book on "After Blair". Two particular passages intrigued me. Harvey says that one of the major failures of actually existing communisms is the lack of realisation that an alternative political system would require new and appropriate technologies, plus alternative relations to nature, social structures and reproduction through daily life and mental conceptions of the world (P219).In other words, a whole new world view. One of my problems with all forms of Marxism is that they might reproduce the systems they deride in another, often totalitarian form. They are not radical enough. The other passage refers fleetingly to Deleuze (one of my favoured dead French philosophers) in relation to Marx's description of how various elements of human evolution interact (P196). Again, the suggestion is that a more radical (philosophical) theory or underpinning is required if our self-understandings are to change significantly. In my search for what political structures might best produce a moral perspective and therefore concerns for liberal conservatism, I question how utopian our thinking needs to be and how this might relate to a faith position. Giddens coined the phrase "utopian realism" which sort of closes it off for future reference, but something along these lines seems right to me. We need both. A utopian element that offers an ideal ground from which we can criticize existing practice, and a realism that enables us to move from where we are now - a classic "blurred encounter" then!