Kanishka Goonewardena

The Desire Called Civil Society: A Contribution to the Critique of a Bourgeois Category

How does ‘civil society’ serve the Washington Consensus while also attracting the aspirations of left political activists and progressive planners? We address this troubling question by interrogating the concept of civil society, with due respect to the actual role played by civil society in the development of capitalism. Based on close readings of Hegel, Marx and planning theory dealing with it, we also argue that the discourse of civil society now serves neoliberalism quite well, but provides dubious support for ‘radical’ or ‘insurgent’ planning. As an ideal for the latter, we propose instead the radical democratization of both the economy and the state.

The Future of Planning at the ‘ End of History ’

The hegemony of neoliberalism now poses a fundamental challenge to planners worldwide. Most influential in this regard has been Francis Fukuyama’s End of History ideology and its progenies – or mutations – such as the Third Way. A close reading of their proponents (especially Anthony Giddens) and critics (Perry Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, Alex Callinicos, John Gray and others) with reference to the contrasting political-economic theories of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, however, reveals the fundamental contradictions of neoliberalism – especially between capitalism and democracy – and identifies for progressive planning the role of extending radical democracy to the realms of the state and the economy.

Urban Marxism and the Post-colonial Question: Henri Lefebvre and 'Colonisation'

AbstractThe post-colonial has often functioned as a code word for a form of French post-theory. In more recent efforts to reconstruct linkages between metropolitan Marxism and counter-colonialism, the post-colonial refers to an open-ended research field for investigating the present weight of colonial histories. But even in these reformulations, post-colonial research presents formidable challenges to Euro-American urban Marxism. In this context, this paper redirects Henri Lefebvre’s work to analyse post-colonial situations. It traces in particular the notion of ‘colonisation’ as it develops from his critique of everyday life (which signalled an extension of his critique of alienation) to his work on the state (where the notion reappears in discussions of theories of imperialism). We argue that Lefebvre’s notion of ‘colonisation’ (which refers to multi-scalar strategies for organising territorial relations of domination) presents a promising opening to understanding the ‘colonial’ aspects of urbanisation today. Still, for this promise to be realised, Lefebvre’s notion must be refracted through dialectical-humanist counter-colonial traditions.

Urban Space and Political Consciousness: A Report on Theory

How is space political? This article first highlights Marx and Engels’s contributions to this question, then examines how a later generation of Marxists exemplified by Manuel Castells and his theory of “ collective consumption” returned to it with decidedly structuralist and reductive readings of Marxism. In conclusion, the article outlines how Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism and “cognitive mapping” provides a more holistic Marxist approach to urban experience by linking political economy to cultural theory.

Aborted Identity: The Commission and Omission of a Monument to the Nation, Sri Lanka, circa 1989

The doomed competition organized in 1989 to design a monument to the nation in Sri Lanka coincided—hardly accidentally—with a grave crisis of this postcolonial state, a former colony (called Ceylon) of the Portuguese (1505–1658), the Dutch (1658–1796), and, most recently and influentially, the British (1796–1948). A terse account of this uniquely overdetermined crisis comes, oddly and appropriately enough, from a hagiography of a politician who helped precipitate it: Dayan Jayatilleke’s tribute to the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa in book form. There he argues forcefully that “the [Sri] Lankan state [then] faced all three major categories of threats that any state could [ever] face.”1 First and foremost—indeed still the most intractable—was the threat to its “territorial integrity,” presented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE, or the Tigers), who had been fighting militarily for an independent Tamil state in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka for almost two decades. Second, as a direct consequence of the first, was the “threat to national independence and sovereignty” posed by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), whose presence in the northern and eastern provinces of the country was meant to enforce the terms of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord signed in July 1987. The latter, though presented and even possibly intended by the two sig-

Planetary urbanization and totality

This paper begins with the accusation of “totalization” that has been directed at Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s concept of “planetary urbanization.” In so doing, it first critiques the meanings typically attributed to “totality” and “totalization” by Brenner and Schmid as well as their critics, and then explicates the concepts of totality and totalization developed in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism, especially in the works of Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Fredric Jameson. Following a review of some influential invocations of Hegelian or Marxist conceptions of totality in anti-colonial and socialist–feminist politics, the paper concludes by arguing that participants in the contentious planetary urbanization debate can best address their substantive concerns by working through instead of disavowing the concept of totality—especially the version of it proposed by Lefebvre, involving state and capital, “the urban” and the everyday.

X marks the spot: Marxist intercourse and Kantian anarchism in Kojin Karatani

In this commentary Kanishka Goonewardena and Reecia Orzeck analyze the theoretical, political, and practical implications of Kojin Karatani’s valorization of the mode of exchange relative to the mode of production.