Looking on the Bright Side

Responding is always an invidious business: unless you are in total empathy and sympathy with the viewpoint of the author, you run the risk of appearing simply churlish and grumpy. Of course, unless you believe, like the postmodernists, that there is no such thing as an objective statement, it is always possible to have arguments about the empirical truth, or otherwise, of what someone has written. But many pieces of writing are not like that: they represent what could be called a moral ordering of the world, with which you can agree or disagree according to your own such notions. And that is certainly true of the six lectures in this volume. How, writing for a volume in support of Amnesty International, could it be otherwise? Take two of the lectures, which conceptually belong together almost like peas in a pod, those by Stuart Hall and David Harvey. They are perhaps the best-known British Marxist intellectuals, even though David Harvey now teaches in the United States. And they would deserve that appellation even if they were not occupying a lonely niche, since they are among the very few unapologetic Marxists left. Stuart Hall emphasizes three key features driving change in our urban world: the uneven transition to a post-industrial economy and society, globalization, and migration. He asks: What are the chances that we can construct in our cities shared, diverse, just, more inclusive, and egalitarian forms of common life, guaranteeing the full rights of democratic citizenship and participation to all on the basis of equality, whilst respecting the differences that inevitably come about when peoples of different religions, cultures, histories, languages, and traditions are obliged to live together in the same shared space? This is a good question. But, if you know anything about writings in this tradition, you will know the answer in advance: ‘The promises designed to make the poor complicit with their global fate—rising living standards, a more equal distribution of goods and life chances, an opportunity to compete on equal terms with the developed world, a fairer share of the world’s wealth—have comprehensively failed to be delivered.’