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For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: Jim Blauts Contribution to Geographical Knowledge
David Harvey
Program in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA; dharvey@gc.cuny.edu

Whenever I read Karl Marxs famous letter of 1844 to Arnold Ruge, entitled For a ruthless criticism of everything existing (Marx 1978), I immediately think of Jim Blauts enormous contributions to geographical theory and practice. In his open letter, Marx brushed aside the external obstacles to social change and addressed the inner difficulties that so often constrain us. This was perhaps Jims most serious commitment: to confront and cure what he called the serious malady of the mind that so pervades our thinking as to blur our vision and disrupt proper historical materialist interpretations of the world. We cannot dogmatically prefigure the future, Marx went on to advise, but we can approach the construction of a new world through a ruthless criticism of the ideas and realities that constituted the old. Within the tradition of critical geography, Jims (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians is, surely, an exemplary model of how to engage in such a practice. Criticism, Marx argued, must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be. Jim was never one to flinch from conflict with the powers that be and frequently suffered exclusions as a result. Nothing prevents us, Marx concluded, from tying our criticism to the criticism of politics and to a definite party position in politics and hence from identifying our criticism with real struggles. Jim, by tying his work to the fates and fortunes of real political struggles, particularly that of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and its pursuit of independence from the United States, not only placed his work in the service of real struggles but also achieved compelling consistency in his theorizations by forging them in the fires of political practice. From all these standpoints Jim was, surely, the most exemplary Marxist geographer we have ever had.
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The only question mark hanging over such a judgment stems from Jims curious reluctance to come to conclusions. This book, he wrote in The Colonizers Model of the World, has no real conclusion(Blaut 1993:215). It is, he says, merely an introduction. In The National Question he likewise states this book has no conclusion, and in place of one lists several important issues of theory that have not been dealt with . . . or have been dealt with only partially (Blaut 1987:212). Why this reluctance from someone renowned for being such a forceful, persistent, and impassioned critic? Why no firm conclusions after, in each case, setting out devastating and comprehensive critiques of rival positions? Jim was reluctant to state norms or write out prescriptions. Like Marx, he thought it impossible and inadvisable to dogmatically prefigure the future. He eschewed utopian schemes. For all his fierce engagement, Jim also maintained a healthy and in some respects admirable skepticism regarding the limits of his own work. The Colonizers Model of the World, was meant, he observed, as an introduction, an introduction to the study, to the diagnosis and treatment of a serious malady of the mind (Blaut 1993:215). He (1987:54) states in The National Question that the perspective he had built was so closely tied to the struggle for independence for Puerto Rico and other Third World struggles that it could not properly bear the burden of founding a general theory of the national question or of nationalism. But precisely because of his involvements in actual struggles, Jim had far more to say about theory than he was prepared to advance. Unfortunately, his reluctance to draw let alone speculate as to conclusions often left matters in a chronically unfinished state. This was, of course, equally true of Marxs Capital, but in Marxs case the firmness of the interim conclusions contrasts with Jims reluctance to see almost any argument as even half finished. Was there, then, some secret sense in which Jim was afraid of his own conclusions? I ask this difficult, if not unanswerable, question in the cause, pace both Jim and Marx, of ruthless criticism. Jim was never reluctant to engage and was vociferous in projecting his ideas into debate (both personally and in print). But had he been more conclusive and more assertive (a seemingly strange thing to ask of Jim!!) as to the extraordinary implications of the conclusions he might have drawn, his contributions would almost certainly have had a far wider impact. Our task is, then, to project his work on to this broader terrain with greater force. But this requires coming to terms with his failings as well as with his genius. Let me clear out of the way two potential difficulties. The first arises out of the incredible variety of Jims interests that ranged from cartography, place perception, cultural geography and ecology, imperialism, uneven geographical development, peasant studies, the
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study of internal neo-colonies, and geographical methodologies as well as political practices in the field. He made, as readers of this special issue of Antipode will surely see, serious contributions to all of these arenas of work. The voluminous footnotes and lists of references attests to an astonishing range of reading and an immense scholarly curiosity. From this, it may be argued that Jim operated as a polymath and eclectic and that his work cannot be viewed let alone grasped as a totality of concrete determinations (as Marx once put it). I reject that view unreservedly. While it may be difficult to grasp his work as a whole, again and again he uses insights from one or another of these diverse fields to evolve nuanced perspectives on whatever topic he has under immediate consideration. Here he is, for example, in The National Question, in which he is seeking to establish the thesis that struggles for national liberation are inherently class struggles:
This process of class struggle makes use of all traits and institutions of culture as instruments and arenas of exploitation and resistance. Therefore religious conflicts, educational struggles, work place struggles, and all the other, including national struggles, do not function parallel to class struggle but are themselves mechanisms of class struggle. It is for this reason that Marxists can assert that class struggle is the motor of history without falling into some narrow determinism, economic or otherwise. (Blaut 1987:54)

This passage is revealing in a double sense. Not only does it invoke a multiplicity of complex determinations at work in a given situation, but it also records Jims abhorrence of narrow determinism, economic or otherwise. This then raises the methodological question of how to interrelate multiple forces at work in any particular situation. This was the same question that led Althusser to formulate the concept of overdetermination as an answer. While it might be interesting to interpret Jims work in such a light (in which case the inconclusiveness would be seen as a manifestation of overdetermination), Jim early on laid out quite a different methodological framework in two papers published in The Professional Geographer in the early 1960s (1961, 1962). The papers on Object and relationship and Space and process are stunning methodological statements that, sadly, the apparatus of decision-making in the geographical establishment of the time failed (and still fails) to recognize. On this point I need to enter an autocritique. While I (1969:7095) took Object and relationship (though not, strangely, Space and process) very seriously in Explanation in Geography, I failed to refer to it thereafter (perhaps because of my somewhat ambiguous feelings about that book). But I had plainly internalized much of what Jim had to say. When, in Justice, Nature
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and the Geography of Difference (1996), I elaborated at length on the sorts of arguments that Jim had pioneered, I failed even to acknowledge his influence or to reference those early piecesI had simply forgotten how and by whom the seeds of my ideas had been planted 30 years before. Jim wrote me a very appreciative note about the bookand enclosed offprints of the two papers from the Professional Geographer perhaps as a gentle reminder!! Needless to say, I felt badly as well as embarrassed. But what was it that Jim was proposing, albeit in schematic form? Jim advocated a process-based philosophical stance towards the construction of geographical knowledge (he invoked Whitehead positively). This was quite different from the casual empiricism that then prevailed or the positivism that was then beginning to become fashionable. It is broadly consistent with the dialectical method that Ollman (1976, 1993) later spelled out at some length. My own attempts to come to terms (largely via Ollman) with a process-based and dialectical manner of argumentation also led me back to Whitehead and Leibniz and to embracing a general theory of internal relations. I find it fascinating and revealing to read Jims work in this light. It is also legitimate to do so since these were the terms in which Jim defined his own approach to the construction of geographical knowledge. If Jim failed to move towards valid conclusions, that failure must be judged against the methodological presuppositions he had himself prescribed.The theory of internal relations focuses on the whole world of influences that enter into any particular determination or event. Conversely, it allows us to use any particular concrete determination or event as a window upon a whole world of intersecting and intermingling flows of influences (the microcosm is, as it were, an internalized representation of the macrocosm). Much of Jims work focuses on the manner in which Western thought has internalized a particular perspective of the world based on the colonial and neo-colonial experience of domination, repression and exploitation of others. The resultant perspective is described as both Eurocentric and diffusionist. When turned around and projected upon the world, this perspective denies historical agency, ideas, innovative activities, capacity for rational action and even a basic humanity to the inhabitants of the non-Western world. This is the overwhelming serious malady of the mind that Jim identifies. He construes it as his mission to deconstruct, demystify and open up pathways to resist it. His method is, however, singular rather than multiple. Rather than setting out to reconstruct the concrete as the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverseas Marx (1973:101) put ithe selects a single vector of relations. There are virtues of such an approach. Excavating the traces of diffusionism and Eurocentrism wherever they can be found reveals how deeply they have infected,
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often without our knowing it, our consciousness and ways of thought and representation. This was, after all, what Said (1979) did so brilliantly in Orientalisma work whose seminal qualities Jim (1993) happily acknowledged. The difficulty comes when we seek to take this trace and situate it within the totality. This Jim seemed reluctant to do. He acts like the sleuth who is so obsessed with pursuing his quarries that he loses contact with the context. It is almost as if, tormented by diffusionist demons all night long, Jim awoke in the morning with a compulsion to devour at least one for breakfast. And devour them he did, one by one (Blaut 2000). The works of Landes and Jared Diamond are brilliantly disposed of and the list goes on to include a whole host of progressive and Marxist thinkers like Brenner, Nairn, Hobsbawm, as well as Weber and the Weberians. Even Marx is not spared. But, on this point the contrast with Saids Orientalism is instructive. Said weaves his narrative into a seamless web in which it is the totality that really counts while the individuals are elements or moments within a vast tapestry of intersecting influences. Jim picks off the individuals one by one. At a certain point that becomes repetitive. And of course there can be no conclusion except that everyone is susceptible to some overwhelming malady of the mind, be it Eurocentrism, diffusionism, orientalism, or whatever. Jim failed, in short, to appreciate and realize the incipient power of his own methodology for reconstructing the totality, albeit as a concrete concentration of many determinations. While Said was far better positioned, given his academic status and provenance, to re-shape the world of thought and launch the whole postcolonial movement, I nevertheless hold that Jims methodological failure underlay both his inability to draw conclusions and his failure to exercise a grander progressive influence within the academy and beyond. The fact that even most progressive geographers hold Said in such esteem while rarely referencing Jims work has a deeper explanation than the mere course of academic fashion and the perverse habit of geographers of not valuing their home-grown products relative to those imported from outside. I think we are all the poorer as a result. Let me take up this question in relation to what I believe to be Jims greatest book, his much-neglected The National Question. The book has a familiar feel. He takes on a variety of traditionsconservative, liberal and Marxistand offers ruthless criticism of the work of several individuals including Marxists such as Nairn, Hobsbawm and Wallerstein. He provides historical depth through thoughtful reconsideration of the contributions of Lenin, Luxemburg, Stalin and Bauer. In this case, however, these thinkers function as a foil against which he can better work out his urgent commitments to the national liberation struggle of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. This imparts an element of special pleading that some will see as conferring an
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inherent bias to his account. In effect, Jim partially concedes the point. He accepts that the focus of his inquiry on Puerto Rico and Third World national liberation struggles precludes drawing general conclusions as to the nature of nationalism. I think he was quite simply wrong in this. To begin with, no one can avoid political positionality in the production of knowledge. But, even more importantly, given Jims philosophical stance, it would have been perfectly legitimate to argue that the detailed study of the microcosm is precisely the way to get at the macro character of nationalism. Jims positioning lends greater strength rather than partiality to his argument. I say this not because I necessarily agree with his findings, but because the material grounding in actual struggles gives Jims wide-ranging theoretical reflections far greater cogency than most of the abstract formulations of the national question he is confronting. Reading the analysis in this light shows how far Jim actually did get in constructing a sound historical-materialist theory of what nationalism is all about. Let me elaborate. Towards the end of the work Jim ventures the following observation: until we insert this socio-spatial element into our theories of historical materialism, we shall not fully understand the past evolution of class society and its present condition. And for the modern times, we shall not understand the mechanisms and functions of national struggle . . . (1987:184). This is, surely, a conclusion of major significance. It presages a shift in thinking towards what I call historicalgeographical materialism.1 From that perspective almost all prior conceptions of nationalism and the national question are found wanting simply because they abstract from geographical specificity in an illegitimate way. Jim could well have concluded either that no universal theory of nationalism and national identity is possible or, as I think he would have preferred, that any universal theory of nationalism is empty of meaning if it cannot find a way to account for the construction of socio-spatial difference as an active moment in social change. The problem is not that Jims own study is partial but that most conventional theories of nationalism are so one-sided or abstract that they appear irrelevant when it comes to particular cases or the interpretation of the geographical dynamics of uneven development. And this is what Jims own study abundantly demonstrates. The central argument Jim proposes is that nationalism only takes on real meaning in the political struggle to acquire state power. State formation and nationalism are inherently connected. This is a general conclusion worthy of deeper consideration. It would imply, for example, that the imposition of state forms on the Middle East at the Versailles settlement set the stage for the rise of nationalism (as opposed to other forms of social solidarity based in religion, kinship, ethnicity, and the like). Furthermore, struggles for national liberation
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are class struggles for state power. This is simply so because colonialism and neo-colonialism are predicated on systems of class exploitation and these always entail class formation and class struggle. Liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism necessarily entails confronting and trying to eliminate class exploitation through the acquisition of state power. Jim has no time for those who even at his time of writing (1987) were arguing that state power had become irrelevant because of internationalization and the globalization of capital. The geographical aspects cannot be ignored. In his final chapter on Class struggles across a boundary Jim considers how a significant portion of this struggle has crossed cultural and political boundaries, involving the struggle of workers in, or from, one society against two class groups of exploiters, some from their own society, some from an external society. Also, at times there has been class struggle between the two ruling-class sectors, internal and external (1987:184). A number of implications then follow. The invocation of workers from as well as in a society allows him to elaborate more freely upon his idea of Puerto Ricans living and working in the United States as forming an internal neo-colony in which the struggle for national liberation made just as much sense as it did in Puerto Rico. It also leads him to a more nuanced integration of the cultural dimensions to class struggle, praising in particular Amilcar Cabrals eloquent and profound writings on the role of culture, defense of culture, and cultural unification, in the national liberation of colonies as one of the most important new contributions to the Marxist theory of nationalism (Blaut 1987:201). The failure of most Marxists to deal adequately with the relations between internal and external struggles and between class and culture is, in Jims view, one of the most serious problems to be confronted in the historical-materialist analysis of global capitalism. But Jim also nuances the argument concerning who is doing the struggling and where. The class alliance seeking national liberation is not automatically proletarian. The long history of nationalism illustrates only too well how a rising bourgeoisie used it to acquire state power but he vehemently disputes Luxemburgs and Hobsbawms view that this was true only for the rise of capitalism and that it later became irrelevant. He plainly exposes how the class-based nationalism of the colonizer, with its presumptions of moral and politico-technical superiority (or rationality as Weber preferred it) is just as significant to contemporary capitalism (eg the US invasion of Iraq) as the class struggles of resisting populations in colonial settings. And those class struggles can on occasion encompass a disaffected colonial bourgeoisie as well as proletarian-based movements. While fascism and nationalism can connect there is no inherent connection
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between them. There are, he observes, many kinds of class struggle but nationalism is invariably involved precisely because it is a primary vehicle for the acquisition of state power. What Jim does is to disabuse us of simple formulations of the sort that say all nationalism is necessarily either bourgeois, fascist, primordial, irrational, ethnic, or whatever. The task of historical materialist analysis (in which the socio-spatial dimension is properly integrated) is to work through actual situations in ways that allow us to decide which forms of national struggle might be progressive or not, in relation to resisting the patterns of exploitation that capitalism always imposes. This inevitably means projecting the power of class analysis onto a world of immense geographical difference while paying careful attention to uneven geographical developments. Jim constructs an exemplary way to go about this task. Consider, then, the immense contemporary value of studies of this sort. The revival of nationalism worldwide in the midst of the swirling insecurities of globalization, geopolitical confrontations, regional reterritorializations (such as the formation of the European Union or NAFTA) and the naked resurgence of imperialist aggression is one of the most signal features of our times. In what senses are such movements progressive or regressive, proto-fascist or liberatory, is one of the most important political issues we face. Migratory currents are thrusting the question of class struggles across boundaries more and more into the center of our world. The political struggle for state power, from Italy to India to Iraq and Brazil, is profoundly intertwining with nationalisms of varied qualities depending crucially upon the different forms of class struggle currently unfolding around the world. Jim may not have got it all right. He certainly never claimed so. But his study on The National Question ought to be mandatory reading for anyone seriously interested in the construction of some progressive front against global injustice and imperial aggression. It is simply the best piece of geographical writing that exists to date on this topic. It deserves our deepest consideration.

Endnote
My own attempts to formulate the principles of this are set out in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996).
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References
Blaut J Blaut J Blaut J Blaut J Blaut J Harvey M (1961) Object and relationship. The Professional Geographer 14:17 M (1962) Space and process. The Professional Geographer 13:17 M (1987) The Nation al Question. London: Zed Books M (1993) The Colonizers Model of the World. New York: Guilford Press M (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford Press D (1969) Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold

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Harvey D (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Marx K (1973) Grundrisse. New York: Viking Press Marx K (1978) For a ruthless criticism of everything existing. In R Tucker The MarxEngels Reader (pp 1215). New York: Norton Ollman B (1976) Alienation: Marxs Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ollman B (1993) Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge Said E (1979) Orientalism. New York: Random House

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