Friday 28th March, David Harvey

We met for the first time south of the river in a rather gorgeous squat in Acre Lane, Brixton. Pretty impressive turn out and a really good discussion, although we felt the need to point out Harvey's poor understanding of popular culture which seemed to make some of his points in 'The Art of Rent' somewhat invalid. We came to the conclusion that the interview with Sasha Lilley was a bit too wide ranging to really enable an understanding of the complexities of neoliberalism but that what was most interesting was his disappointment with the kind of thinking which assumes that local struggles that do not confront state power can produce wide ranging social change. There was broad agreement that what was important in the interview was his description of neoliberalism in terms of 'accumulation by dispossession' and the way in which this concept can help to produce strategies for uniting diverse struggles. Connected to this, we thought that what was important about the argument in 'The Art of Rent' was the way in which it produces an understanding of how space is accumulated under the terms of neoliberalist economics and state policies and we concluded that this has the effect of structuring everyday life in such a way that communities are impoverished in terms of time as they are dispossessed of the space in which time can be politically meaningful. We were not wholly convinced that the argument for reclamation of space through cultural production was anything other than wishful thinking although this led to a discussion of what, exactly, can be understood as cultural production. We found ourselves moving back to the subject of higher education, not only because it has a role in cultural production but because neoliberalist policies and agendas in the university effectively block creative expression. We ended by suggesting that education for creative thinking should begin in the school rather than the university and decided that our next reading should therefore be some radical theoretical approaches to the education of children. Several suggestions were made and we agreed that recommendations should be sent to the discussion list so that we can choose the reading collectively. The final choice(es) will be posted to this blog in the near future.