8. The City as a Space of Constructed Economic Inequalities
The idea that social inequalities
become pervasively manifest in urban space appears frequently across the
broader span of Marxist theorizations and analyses of the city. Harvey’s early shift toward Marxian theory
was, for example, motivated by analyses of economic inequalities in the
Baltimore, Maryland region (2001B: 128-157).
More recent accounts, like those of Davis (2006), reflect back onto
images conveyed by Engels of the squalor in mid-Nineteenth century Manchester,
further supplemented by reference to the global analysis of constructed
inequalities evident in dependency and World Systems theories. Such references are key because they
emphasize, returning to the issue of geographic scale, that every spatial form
constructs its cores and peripheries through which economic inequalities are
manifest as necessary conditions in capitalist organizations of space. Thus, cities contain concentrations of
capital investments in built forms with advanced residential and commercial
infrastructures for transport and communications for use by high-income
residents (gentrified space) and, simultaneously, contain spaces of
deteriorating infrastructures and built forms within which low-income residents
compete for decent available and affordable living space. The latter spaces are constructed in the
sense that state fiscal and financial sector policies, like redlining of
particular areas in which the profitability of investments is inadequate to
offset apparent risks, promote physical deterioration. In these terms, inequalities in living
conditions arise as a function of secondary sector investment patterns of the
kind addressed by Harvey and Gottdiener.
More
recent accounts on inequalities, particular in reference to the literature on
cities as control points, have introduced the concept of social polarization
arising as a result of differential patterns of demand for particular forms of labor
power in cities exercising substantial power as transnational control points,
an argument most fully developed by Sassen (2001: 251-325). Sassen’s hypothesis suggests that the growth
of urban control points in the global capitalist economy will lead traditional
middle-income occupations in such places, typically engaged in manufacturing
and associated with organized labor, to atrophy while occupations on the upper
and lower income ranges expand substantially.
Advanced producer service firms will demand significant quantities of
workers with skills appropriate to managing financial transactions, real
estate, marketing, legal services, and other fields requiring significant
quantities of education and training and commanding high levels of compensation. These workers, in turn, will demand
consumption goods and services, characteristic of gentrified consumption (Zukin,
1990). The production of such services
and, frequently, some proportion of goods must occur in relative proximity to
the points of consumption, and this requirement introduces the need for an
alternative supply of labor power, possessing far less skill and requiring
lower rates of compensation. The
production of consumer services for high-income groups often involves informal
labor processes (e.g. home maintenance and child care), performed by
low-skilled, generally female, immigrant workers (Cox and Watt, 2002). Consequently, the control points that Sassen
labels global cities become, additionally, poles of attraction for
international migration of labor power from regions of the global economic
periphery.
My
intention in specifying this approach has been, in large part, to identify
characteristics that appear descriptive in many different Marxist and
Marxian-influenced accounts on cities, particular in relation to
globalization. Such descriptions on the
construction of inequalities appear to arise as derivative outcomes of
processes described in other approaches, such as the inversion of state-supported
labor power reproduction represented by Neoliberal policies, or the induced
demand for gentrified consumption produced by the creation of global capitalist
control points. In a larger sense,
especially for authors like Davis, economic inequalities constitute the moral
force sustaining a criticism of the city as a space for global capitalist
economy through which the demand for a new, humanized, post-capitalist city can
be envisioned.
Each of the
aforementioned accounts contributes something, if only a critical focus, to the
conception of cities that I will articulate in chapters 2 and 3. The larger point that I intend to make, in
concluding this section, however, is that each of the accounts shares, to some
degree, a particular, critical commonality.
In general, these accounts theorize and analyze the city as a capitalist
city, defined in reference to its existence in a historical period of
capitalist hegemony and its geographic positionality within networks created by
capitalist economic globalization. The
particular ways in which capitalism, as an all-encompassing economic system, is
defined varies across these accounts, reflecting divergent theoretic influences
internal and external to the Marxian tradition, but, in most cases, they do not
seriously contemplate alternatives to capitalism as either possible or
simultaneously existing with capitalist economic processes in particular urban
economies.
Without
venturing into the particular ways in which capitalism is represented as
co-terminus with economics, writ large, in particular accounts and approaches
referenced above, the challenge presented by Marxist and Marxian-inspired
approaches to the city in the present period of globalization raises certain
fundamental questions. First, without necessarily
assuming its all-encompassing nature, the suggestion that contemporary cities
are capitalist cities demands that any Marxian theoretic account on cities must
rigorously define capitalism in reference to Marxian theory. Such a requirement, moreover, is basic in
articulating why Marxian theory has something interesting and relevant to say
about material existence beyond descriptive statements on the ubiquity and the
consequences of capitalist hegemony in contemporary economies.
Further, as
implied above, certain accounts above engage in an ontological debate within
Marxism concerning the roles of structural causation and the agency of
collective, class-defined agents (determination of economic processes by
changes in the forces of production versus determination by relations between class-defined
agents of production). In pursuing such
debates, theorists like Castells, Harvey, and Katznelson have, invariably,
interjected divergent Marxian definitions of class in order to specify the
relevance of agency by class-defined agents relative to structural
processes. In addition to defining
capitalism as a particular structure within which agents engage in particular
social relationships, a Marxian theory of cities and urban economies must,
therefore, come to terms with this ontological debate, at a minimum, in order
to advance an argument on what class is and how it relates to economic
structures, like capitalism, and, further, to situate the possibilities for
agency in contesting capitalism and capitalist globalization. These tasks will occupy the concluding
sections of this introduction.
Class as the Organization of Surplus Labor
The concepts of class and class
structure utilized in this project rely very heavily on a particular reading of
Marx’s economic writings, particular Capital, but they are also shaped
by an interpretation of Althusser’s ontological concepts, which situate class
within a structured totality of material processes. The explanation advanced in this section will, thus, be
multifold. First, I advance a specific
definition of class, as the centerpiece of Marxian economic theory. Second, I define an Althusserian
overdeterminist conception of structured totality in order to situate class as
a process and to delineate the place of structure and agency in material
existence. Beyond these points, the
tasks set forth in the previous section compel me to undertake a comparison of
the definition of class advanced here relative to those advanced by other
Marxist theories of the city, inquiring into the formative significance of these
definitions of class. Again, the point
here, as in the previous section, is not to present an all encompassing account
on competing accounts on class, but to lay out definitively how the account
represented in this project presents something different and theoretically
significant.
Class and Class Structure
The approach to class advanced by
this project specifically attempts to pursue a definition in relation to Marx’s
concept of surplus labor, defined as the material product of human labor
in excess of that received by its producers as compensation for the expenditure
of labor time. For Marx, surplus labor
is produced, in some degree, in every type of social formation,
available to be used to secure conditions of existence for the social
formation that do not involve the necessary compensation of producers.[6] Such conditions of existence include
political, cultural, economic, and physical practices and institutions. They arise under circumstances particular
and contingent to all social formations, and their creation is, itself, shaped
by the relative availability of surplus labor and its particular
organization. Consequently, in addition
to the question of scale, the organization of surplus labor is critical to the
larger structure of processes, practices, and institutions evident in a given
social formation.
The
organization of surplus labor refers, in this regard, to the processes of
production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor. Individual agents become “classed” in reference
to their position relative to surplus labor.
Certain individuals produce surplus labor. They may or may not also appropriate and distribute the surplus
labor that they produce. Other
individuals appropriate and distribute surplus labor that they have not
produced in order to secure conditions of existence they define as requisite in
order to continue to appropriate and distribute the surplus labor produced by
others. Still other individuals neither
produce nor appropriate and distribute surplus labor but, on the contrary,
receive shares of surplus labor to compensate for supplying the conditions of
existence defined as necessary by the appropriators/distributors of surplus
labor. The understanding of class
represented by this definition, thus, involves four distinct class processes
relative to surplus labor (production, appropriation, distribution, receiving)
and three distinct positions relative to these processes through which
individuals are classed (producer, appropriator/distributor, and recipient).
The concept of class
structure, in this context, constitutes the integration of class processes
into an ordered relationship through which surplus labor circulates and effects
the performance of other non-class processes. Thus, class processes articulate connections with non-class
processes through the distribution and receiving of surplus labor. In turn, the performance of non-class
processes shape and determine the performance of class processes. The mutually constitutive combination of
class and non-class processes constitutes the nature, development, boundaries,
and interconnections of social formations containing such processes. For example, a firm, as an organization,
contains class processes that define it, in part. The firm also contains other economic, political, and cultural
processes and articulates connections to such processes external to its
organizational boundaries through various manifestations of surplus labor
distribution and receiving. All of
these processes constitute the spatio-temporal form of a class structure not
wholly contained by the firm from which produced surplus labor emanates. Consequent to this understanding of the
spatio-temporality of class structures, a larger social formation (i.e.
society, writ large) may be constituted by the existence of multifarious
interconnected class structures and non-class structures (i.e. integrated
series of non-class processes defined by the particular relationships of the
processes contained by the series).
Returning to the
question of agency, individual agents, classed by their positionality relative
to surplus labor, may occupy multiple class positions within a single class
structure (e.g. an individual who both produces and appropriates/distributes
their own surplus labor) and may occupy different class positions in other
class structures simultaneously (e.g. a producer of surplus labor in one class
structure and a recipient of surplus labor in a separate class structure). This definition of class and class
structure, thus, problematizes the conception of classes as social
groupings based on objective characteristics unifying individuals (class-in-itself)
by insisting that individuals may occupy multiple, simultaneous class
positionalities, making it impossible for such individuals to be uniquely
classed in accordance with one, single set of objective characteristics.
By implication,
this definition of class further eschews the idea that any single class
positionality must determine, without contradiction, an individual’s
self-identity in reference to class or any other culturally constructed
source of self-identification. The
particular interests of individuals, determined by one or multiple distinct
class positionalities and shaped further by non-class processes, generate
contingent individual self-identifications, which in turn shape the engagement
of individuals with material reality.
This understanding of individual agency, in relation to class processes,
explicitly rejects the notion that class processes should axiomatically
determine the self-identification of individuals. Proceeding from this conclusion, I reject the notion that any
axiomatic ontological linkage could exist from the identification of objective
class characteristics, to individual self-identification (individual
apprehension of class consciousness), to collective self-identification,
to organization on behalf of collective interests (class-for-itself). Formalizing the understanding of agency
advanced in relation to this Marxian definition of class, the capacity of
individuals to act as agents relies on the overdetermination of
individual processes of self-identification by a range of cross cutting class
and non-class structural positionalities.[7]
Having
expressed, in abstract terms, a definition of class and class structure in
relation to surplus labor, the need remains to delineate a range of structural
forms identified by Marxian theory.
Borrowing substantially from Resnick and Wolff’s (1987: 115-119) reinterpretation
of Marxian class concepts, different organizations of surplus labor constitute
five generalized forms of fundamental class process: capitalist,
slave, feudal, ancient, and communist. The first three forms of class structure describe exploitative
class relations, characterized by the non-identity of the producers of
surplus labor and its appropriator/distributors. The last two describe self- or non-exploitative class
relations. A complete explanation of
each of these class structures is beyond the aims of this section, but it
suffices to say that each particular form of class structure involves the
potentiality for conflicts concerning the scale and distribution of surplus
labor, some of which may concern exploitation, some of which may not (Resnick
and Wolff, 1987: 158-163).
To conclude, Marxian theory, as embodied in this project, understands that each form of class structure may and often does exist simultaneously with multiple other forms of class structure within a single social formation (e.g. capitalist firms exist side-by-side with communist cooperative class structured organizations and with feudal household class structures[8] in particular social contexts). Moreover, the existence of multiple class types and their potential to exist simultaneously within a given social formation multiplies the range of class-based self-identifications and introduces the potential for class positionalities of individuals to generate contradictory class sources of self-identification. No potential source of class or non-class self-identification uniquely determines the self-identification of individual agents or the capacity of individual agents to organization to advance their collectively defined objective interests. Class, thus, constitutes one argument or set of arguments shaping the way in which individuals and contingent groups of individuals engage with material existence.
[6] This use of social
formation in place of society corresponds to its utilization by
Resnick and Wolff (1987: 118), following Marx.
[7] This
position, in some degree, parallels that of Tajbakhsh (2001: 70-71, 169). On the other hand, his usage of the concept
of overdetermination attempts to distance the term from the Marxist tradition,
associating more strongly with Derridean deconstructionist philosophy.
[8] Fraad,
Resnick, and Wolff (1994), on the interaction of capitalist workplaces and
feudal household class structures.
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