City as the Revolutionary Space Paramjit Singh
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rom antiquity cities have been the most dynamic spaces for cultural, political, social and economic transformation. Epochs prior to industrialisation, there was the oriental city (dominated by Asiatic Mode of Production), the antique city (Greek and Roman associated with the possession of slaves) and the medieval city (based on feudal relations but struggling against land feudalism). “The oriental and antique city was essentially political, the medieval city, without losing its political character, was related to commerce, craft and banking” (Lefebvre 1996a: 65-66). Modern European cities are characterised as capitalist cities dominated by service sector activities. These cities are crucial as spaces for capitalism to produce endlessly as well as spaces to dispose the over-accumulated produce. The supremacy of the capitalist mode of production in these cities leads to the eruption of mass movements in urban centres. To quote Harvey from his preface to the book under review, It was also in this very same year, 1967, that Henri Lefebvre wrote his seminal essay on “The Right to the City”. That right, he asserted, was both a cry and a demand. The cry was a response to the existential pain of a withering crisis of everyday life in the city. The demand was really a command to look that crisis clearly in the eye and to create an alternative urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and playful but, as always with Lefebvre, conflictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.
Lefebvre’s City David Harvey’s new book Rebel cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution is a collection of his early essays (with some additions) published in different journals. This collection seemed to be a kind of tribute to Henri Lefebvre (French Marxist philosopher and sociologist). Harvey has placed the Economic & Political Weekly
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book reviewS Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution by David Harvey (London and New York: Verso Books), 2012; pp xviii + 187, $19.95.
city at the forefront in terms of its position as a generator of capital accumulation and absorption of surpluses (of both capital and labour). Harvey has done much to expand on Lefebvre’s urbanisation thesis. But the fundamental difference between the two is that Lefebvre’s work was rooted in Marxian philosophy, whereas Harvey’s work is founded on empirical Marxian political economy. In the Chapter 1 titled like Lefebvre’s article of 1967, “The Right to the City”, Harvey explains that urbanisation is very crucial for the capitalist system to absorb surplus it perpetually produces. The growth of capitalist output over time is broadly parallel to the urbanisation of the world population. Like Marx, Harvey also claims that the capitalist production process has an inherent tendency towards over-accumulation. A common manifestation of this over-accumulation includes a glut of commodities, falling rates of profit in industrial production, surplus productive capacity, unemployed and idle money capital (Harvey 1985). History as Urban Struggles Capitalism uses urbanisation as a way to delay the capitalist crisis of over-accumulation by switching investment into the urban-built environment. To solve the capital-surplus-absorption problem, construction and reconstruction of cities, investment in the metropolitan regions, investment in vast infrastructural projects and suburbanisation have been considered most effective. This was done by Louis Bonaparte, who entrusted Haussmann (a civic planner), to come out of the 1848 crisis, and this was also done in the United States (US) by vol xlviII no 40
Robert Moses, an urban planner, after the second world war. The same was done again by the US after the 1970s up until 2008, when the housing market absorbed a great deal of surplus through new construction, acting as an important stabiliser of the economy. All this process of construction and reconstruction seeks to solve the problem of capital and delay the capitalist crisis, but invariably has a class dimension. These measures to solve the capitalist crisis, however, are temporary in nature, which give birth to other crises that are deeper and more dangerous. Haussmann only deferred the crisis, giving rise to the Paris Commune of 1870 and Robert Moses’ suburbanisation strategy has generated the urban crisis of the 1960s, defined politically by “white flight” and urban revolt by ethnic minorities. Harvey argues that the burgeoning process of “Creative Destruction” through construction and reconstruction causes the dispossession of the urban common masses from the right to the city. Real estate speculation worked as a supplementary form of exploitation in times of industrial slowdown. Harvey considers the process of urbanisation as the most important activity in the dynamics of capital accumulation. The process of urbanisation fundamentally requires some combination of finance and state engagement for its functioning. Financial institutions lend to developers, landowners and construction companies to build suburbs with an assumption that the value they have produced in the form of houses and building will also be realised in the market. All this kind of debt-financed urban speculation is fictitious. The same company can finance the buy of what has been built. In such processes a wave of defaulters and possibilities of economic collapse remained very real. Debt-financed urbanisation has played a positive part in the US recovery from recession during the 1950s and 1960s but it had been environmentally and economically unsustainable and geographically uneven. This had resulted in the urban crisis of the 1960s. 29
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The same is true for the sub-prime crisis of 2008. The housing sector in the US is not reviving and new housing construction activities are depressed and stagnant. These are signs of crisis similar to the great depression where more than half of the construction workers remained unemployed. The finance-capital-driven urbanisation process becomes global. In India and China fictitious-capital-driven urbanisation causes the marginalisation of a majority of the population along with high-modernist urbanisation and consumerism. This speculative-financedriven urbanisation has pushed the majority of the population into an unsecure and uncertain environment. Appropriated Urban Commons In the next chapter Harvey, while arguing about Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons”, states that the tendency of private property and individual-utilitymaximisation behaviour causes the loss of common property. The capitalist tool of neo-liberal policies causes the retreat of the state from social spheres and has enhanced the commodification of public goods (education, health and the like). Capitalist urbanisation has destroyed the city as a social, political and liveable commons. Capital accumulation driven by the individual-utility-maximisation behaviour causes the destruction of the urban commons (public space and public goods) and its appropriation for private interests. The state-led appropriation of space for private developers is a classic case. It has unleashed the logic of unbridled accumulation and financial speculation that has now turned into a veritable flood of creative destruction, including that wrought through capitalist urbanisation. Harvey says that the only alternative for the population is to selforganise to produce, protect, distribute and use the commons for societal benefit. This requires, as Ostrom suggested, “rich mix of instrumentalities”. The construction of this rich mix requires a double political attack, through which the state is forced to supply more and more public goods along with self-organisation of whole populations to appropriate, use and supplement those goods in ways that extend and enhance the qualities of 30
the non-commodified reproductive and environmental commons. Capitalism as a system has an inherent tendency of concentration and centralisation of capital. Monopoly rents play a crucial role in all these processes. In “Art of Rent”, Harvey argues that monopoly rent arises through scarcity of land resources and uniqueness of location, which results in a particular kind of commodity and service. Capitalist greed reached up to a point where the commodification of cultural practices to obtain a monopoly price/rent becomes a common feature. Harvey points out that monopoly rent is always an object of capitalist desire, than the means of gaining it through intervention in the field of culture, history, heritage, aesthetics and meanings. Monopoly rent as a tool of capital accumulation is a way to appropriate and extract surplus from local differences, local cultural variations and aesthetic meaning, with no regard to the origin. As Harvey states (p 110). The problem for oppositional movements is to speak to this widespread appropriation of their cultural commons and to use the validation of particularity, uniqueness, authenticity, culture, and aesthetic meanings in ways that open up new possibilities and alternatives.
Revolution Has Long Been Urban In the next chapter, Harvey states that in order to recreate the city and eliminate poverty and environmental degradation, the destructive forms of capitalist urbanisation have to be stopped. The tragedy of traditional left political thinkers is that they had either ignored or dismissed the revolutionary potential of urban struggles. They are still focusing on workshops and factories for anti-capitalist struggles. There were many revolutionary movements during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries which had strong urban roots. As Harvey (128) points out, “But it was not factory workers who produced the Paris Commune”. He further states, There is, for this reason, a dissident and influential view of the Commune that says it was not a proletarian uprising or a classbased movement at all, but an urban social movement that was reclaiming citizenship rights and the right to the city.
Marx himself depicted that struggle for the length of working day as a first october 5, 2013
step down a revolutionary path. Harvey says that in present times claiming the right to the city can be seen as a first step towards a comprehensive revolutionary movement. Lefebvre wrote, “the right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (1996a). On the other hand, Harvey says that the right to the city is a collective right which belongs to not only construction workers but all those unorganised (formal and informal) workers who facilitate the reproduction of daily urban life. So the task of the time is to coalesce the various urban struggle and movements onto one platform for the right to the city as a collective right. Urban movements and struggles are the most important in our time to change this system of exploitation. Harvey then returns to Lefebvre at the end of the Chapter 1, “Perhaps, after all, Lefebvre was right, more than forty years ago, to insist that the revolution in our times has to be urban-or nothing.” In the last two chapters Harvey discusses the London Riots and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He emphasised on a broad coalition between people who are marginalised and exploited by greedy capitalism. All this must reflect the future of an alternative city, an alternative political system and, ultimately an alternative way of organising production and consumption for the benefit of all. In this book, contrary to traditional Marxists who considered workshop spaces and factory workers as the major revolutionary force, Harvey justifies the city space and the precariat class as the
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major force of revolution. Harvey has emphasised that capitalism uses urbanisation as a tool to solve or delay capitalist crisis. This book is valuable for those who take both reformist struggle and radical praxis as a part of a single movement for a socialist alternative. This book suggests a large number of
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alternative strategies for urban inhabitants who could, without relying on the state, make their life more meaningful, playful and cooperative. Paramjit Singh (
[email protected]) teaches at the Department of Economics, Punjabi University College, Ghanaur (Patiala).
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References Harvey, D (1985): The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). Lefebvre, H (1996a): “The Right to City” in E Kofman and E Lebas (ed.), Writings on the Cities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). – (1996b): “Industrialization and Urbanization” in E Kofman and E Lebas (ed.), Writings on the Cities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).
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