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On The Potential of Local Political Projects: A Response To Lake, Martin, and Wilson

Let me begin by thanking David Wilson for organizing this discussion, Urban Geography for providing the space for it, and the three thoughtful commentators for taking the time and effort needed to write such provocative essays about my work. The three essays focus, in various ways—and with various opinions—on the political implications and potential for the kinds of “local” political economic efforts discussed in my book Unmaking Goliath. This makes me very happy, because it is precisely these kinds of questions which I hoped to inspire by writing the book, and so I am glad to continue this conversation and ponder, a bit more, the political and intellectual meaning of localized forms of collective ownership in capitalist society. I find myself, however, being pulled in different directions by these critiques, as the different reviewers seemed to suggest that the political limitations were either a function of the collectives themselves, or, rather, a function of my own vision and interpretive frameworks. Bobby Wilson seems to argue that the political potential of localized collectives is inherently limited by their place within the global political economy and, borrowing from Hardt and Negri, he argues that such efforts cannot yield much in the way of community control because of the placelessness of capitalism and capital. In the end, he determines that the outcomes of community control range from a ghettoized militant particularism to, at best, a shelter from the storms of global capital. While I am sympathetic to this critique and at times echo it in the book and elsewhere, I also think that the potential of localized collectives is greater than is suggested by Wilson. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, on some very basic level, capital is not placeless and even the most mobile forms of capital need to be rooted to places in order to reproduce themselves. Wilson, Hardt and Negri, and many others have accepted too much of the rhetoric of capital itself, and have therefore ceded too much political terrain to capital. The world is not divided into “placeless power” and “powerless place”—and thinking so closes off many potential avenues for action. Second, the global system is at least partially constituted by actions taken within localities. While the global economy cannot simply be reduced to the sum total of localized actions (collective or individual), the global does not exist in isolation from local actions and different kinds of local decisions would yield a different global political economy. Wilson is presenting a view of scale that is “nested” and in which the global exists prior to the national or local, and therefore largely determines the scope of potential local actions. I would argue for a contrasting view of scale in which actions taken at different scales play vital roles in enabling or constraining the potential actions taken at other scales. The scales are inter-connected, but the relations flow in various directions and are not deterministic. The political questions that are most important for my project therefore