Join us at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 20 for a special one-hour live broadcast with Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor, authors of the new book, “Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice.”
Herbert Reid is a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky and the editor of “Up the Mainstream: A Critique of Ideology in American Politics and Everyday Life.” Betsy Taylor is a cultural anthropologist and senior research scholar at the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Reid and Taylor begin “Recovering the Commons” in mountaintop removal country with the surreal vision of West Virginia’s Kayford Mountain — or what’s left of it — a 50-acre parcel which owner Larry Gibson refused to sell to the coal companies.
“And so Kayford Mountain rises as a fragile green mesa above the bizarre postbiotic, post-industrial landscape hundreds of feet below and falling. By staying put, Larry has created a landform of stark aesthetic power . . . . a global pilgrimage site [for] activists, scholars, and students from the surrounding region as well as Nigeria, South Africa, India, Peru, and elsewhere,” write Reid and Taylor.
Kayford Mountain, they write, is just one of “a myriad of small-scale push-backs . . . a great diversity of spontaneous, mostly local refusals of neoliberal globalization” that, in the aggregate, comprise a growing resistance movement against the flattening and displacement of local cultures by non-local market forces.
With impatience and disillusionment growing over the Obama administration’s slow slog toward progressive change, Reid and Taylor could have analyzed and assessed this transitional moment from the secure confines of academic tenure and abstract social theory. Instead, they have written a courageous book that challenges academics, activists, and policymakers to open their eyes and minds to the possibility that “something is afoot – a courageous, creative, and elusive rethinking of politics, economics, and culture . . . a positive political project of great significance, and potentially global scale, {that] could be emerging in this heterogenous movement-with-no-name.”
Exactly what this movement is and how it may come together is a still-emerging narrative and not the focus of this book. Instead, the authors’ aim “to clarify the basis for solidarity” among these diverse local uprisings in order to reduce the “anxiety and confusion about what collective structures, goals, and strategies are appropriate,” thereby creating space and opportunity for “collective action” amid diversity.
“Intellectuals,” write Reid and Taylor, “can be helpful in this clarification because they are part of the problem insofar as they are embedded in professional institutions and ideologies that have served to disembody, displace, and privatize public debate” about market-driven destruction of local communities.
So while mountaintop removal – “the largest earthmoving project in human history” – continues apace, “the explosions bringing down the mountains of central Appalachia are heard by few Americans.” It’s been said that academics are akin to the “critic who comes down from the mountaintop after the battle is over and shoots the wounded.”
The genius of “Recovering the Commons” is Reid and Taylor’s recognition that as mountaintops disappear, literally and figuratively, academics must find new ways to connect with communities of action. This book will help blaze a trail.
Wally Bowen
