When the world’s pre-eminent Marxist economic geographer, David Harvey, chimes in on an important current topic, many listen. (Some estimate Harvey to be the world’s pre-eminent living geographer, period.) His work from the 1970s to the 1990s was deeply insightful and is still considered required reading, even as it elicited rounds of critique (from feminists, postcolonialists, humanistic geographers, and others) that are still read alongside it.
To his critics, Harvey has always overemphasized the “relations of production” at the expense of cultural questions, and his “Remarks on Recent Events in the [sic] Ukraine” from a few days ago should surprise no one. Its assessment of post cold war geopolitics is partially accurate but one-sided, and a little oblivious to the multipolar disorder of the twenty-first century world. For any scholar familiar with Ukraine or (actual) Ukrainians, Harvey’s “view from space” (the kind of “god’s-eye view” that Donna Haraway had critiqued many years ago) appears somewhat clueless on the ground.
Political economist Derek Hall has written an astute rebuttal titled “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey.” I recommend it to anyone struggling to reconcile an analysis of capitalist geopolitics with the current situation.
Among the pieces Hall cites is Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous’s “A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv,” which trenchantly critiques the “campism” of many western leftists, whose hyperfocus on “NATO expansion” not only blinds them to the reasons why so many post-Soviet and East European countries clamored for NATO accession after the fall of the USSR, but is generally inadequate to understanding the entangled complexities of today’s world.
The invasion of Ukraine and Ukrainians’ resistance to it presents about as clear a struggle between evil — in the form of a neo-imperialist and in many ways fascist Russian state — and the kind of spirited humanity that political activists of any stripe should recognize as worthy and admirable, or in other words, good. And its human costs are tragic.