Translation of “Neither colonists nor sympathetic: a response to Eduardo Gudynas”

[This is a quick translation I did from the Spanish article defending critiques leveled by Gudynas against David Harvey and his Ecuadorian research team. Please don’t hesitate to offer suggestions on improving it!]

UPDATE I, 10/15: The authors have published an official translation here.

UPDATE II, 10/15: The folks at the ENTITLE blog have published an English translation of Gudynas’s original article here.

“Neither colonists nor sympathetic: a response to Eduardo Gudynas”

By Estefanía Martínez, Verónica Morales, Carla Simbaña, Japhy Wilson, Nora Fernández, Thomas Purcell y Jeremy Rayner (CENEDET)
Originally published in Spanish, 10/13/15
http://lalineadefuego.info/2015/10/13/ni-colonialistas-ni-simpaticos-una-respuesta-a-eduardo-gudynas/

Eduardo Gudynas accuses David Harvey and his research team in Ecuador of sympathetic colonialism. But his critique is based on a lack of understanding of Harvey’s work and its utility for anti-capitalist fights in Latin America.

In an article recently published on various critical politics websites, Eduardo Gudynas accuses David Harvey of sympathetic colonialism. According to Gudynas, the presence of Harvey in Latin America, and the “style” of his Marxist theoretical framework, ideologically supports some governments in the region. As an example of this, Gudynas references CENEDET, the research team led by Harvey in Ecuador. Here we respond by emphasizing the utility of Harvey’s work for critical thinking and anti-capitalist fights in Latin America, against Gudynas’s superficial analyses of “extractavism.”

One of the most important aspects of Harvey’s thought is the concept of accumulation by dispossession, which has been extremely useful for social movements that denounce the dispossession that has been imposed on towns across Latin America. It is disturbing to us that this concept is the focus of the critique that Gudynas has leveled against Harvey.

Perhaps Gudynas’s posture is responding to the feeling that he is not as “fashionable,” and so he attacks a theory that better serves movements opposed to extractavism. In his article he argues that some Latin American governments critique global capitalism for covering up the reproduction of the capitalist social relations that they produce inside their national territories. But his own critique of Harvey, in which the latter is judged as a “sympathetic colonist,” reproduces the same tendency to fault external forces for avoiding internal changes in the realm of academic thought, thus rejecting a powerful theory because of its origin in the “North” to hide the weaknesses of his own theoretical framework.

Without speculating more on his motives, it is necessary to clarify a few of Gudynas’s basic errors in his presentation of the theory of accumulation by dispossession. Gudynas refers to it as a simple reproduction of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation – of the separation between the peasant and the land as the basis of capitalist social relations. Harvey is certainly inspired by Marx in this respect, but his argument is that these processes of dispossession are much more widespread than Marx indicated, and that they are not simply processes of the past but that they actively continue in contemporary capitalism.

According to Harvey, there is a dialectical relation (a concept that apparently escapes Gudynas’s understanding) between the extended reproduction of capital though the production and accumulation of surplus value in the exploitation of labor power – and accumulation by dispossession based in the outright theft of use values and their transformation into exchange values through the process of marketization.

In the context of the crisis of capital (dynamics that Gudynas also does not understand), when extended reproduction slows and economic growth becomes negative, the processes of accumulation by dispassion assume more importance for capital. According tor Harvey, the intensification of accumulation by dispossession in the era of neoliberalism has been an expression of the crisis of reproduction at a global level, beginning the 1970s.

For Gudynas, this focus on the global level is a great weakness in Harvey’s thought for thinking about concrete realities in Latin America. It seems that he does not understand the importance of examining the relation between the geographical scales – which are fundamental to generate a critique of the dynamic of capitalism, that operate simultaneously in the local and global dimensions. Herein lies precisely the utility of the concept of accumulation by dispossession – it allows us to articulate, for example, the violent dispossession of an indigenous community in the equatorial Amazon with the overaccumulation of capital in China, in place of simply denouncing the act as a consequence of extractavism in the abstract.

It turns out that descriptive and one-dimensional concepts such as extractavism and “neo-extractavism” are less useful that dialectical Marxism for critical thought and political action. Therefore – and not because of an alleged “mental colonialism” – the intellectuals and social movements of Latin America are using Harvey’s concepts in place of Gudynas’s ideas.

In this respect, it is important to note that Gudynas’s concept of extractavism is based in theories of “Dutch disease” and “the resource curse” – theories that are not only “from the North” but are also from Neoclassical economics; that is to say bourgeois thought. This is a problem much more serious than is geographic origin, while we ourselves are referring to a concept that has pretensions to be a useful tool in subaltern battles.

Gudynas presents accumulation by dispossession as if it were the only thing that has passed though Harvey’s mind during his entire life. On the contrary, this concept is built atop an immense theoretical work that offers us a complete and coherent structure for thinking about the relationship between the accumulation of capital and the production and destruction of social space. Other examples of the application of his theoretical framework in Latin America include: rentier capitalism; infrastructural megaprojects; spatial utopias; entrepreneurial urbanism; the capitalist ecosystem; and the claim for forms of property that prioritize use value over exchange value. (Gudynas says that the concept of use value does not apply in Latin America, but indigenous communities dispossessed of their land and the possibility of reproducing their lives would be able to offer another perspective).

We invite readers to review the documents of the work that we have done in our research center that set out from heterodox readings of Marxism and combine the ideas of thinkers from Latin American and other latitudes in the spaces of dialogue not restricted to academia – and outside the recent Summer Convention.

Our work shows that Harvey’s oeuvre is a critical tool much more powerful than Gudynas’s framework to think about actually existing capitalism. In this respect, it necessary to emphasize that Gudynas’s work is complicit in the fantasies of a sympathetic capitalism, based in eco-tourism and in “other knowledges,” whereby he pretends to defend “the rights of nature” without confronting capital socialist relations as such.

In the face of this impoverishment of critical thought, we propose a heterodox Marxism that is hostile to simple visions that propose false alternatives to the reality of capital. Contrary to Eduardo Gudynas’s sympathetic capitalism and bourgeois colonialism, we begin from Marx’s statement supporting a “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”