4. The City as Milieu for Urban Social Movements Contesting Capitalist Exploitation and State-Bureaucratic Repression
In contrast to the more structurally-oriented
perspectives of the city as a collective site for labor power reproduction and
as a product of secondary circuit capital accumulation, this view of the city
tends to concentrate on the capacity of the city, as an environmental context,
to facilitate the development of specific manifestations of human agency,
contesting capitalism and repression by the state in support of capitalist
exploitation. To the extent that this
is the case, the approach takes the alternative side in a larger ontological
debate in Marxian theory between structure and agency as motive forces in
social development, asking how collective, class-defined agents (i.e. working
class organizations) can be shaped by the particular environmental context of
the city. This description most
accurately conveys the empirical orientation of Castells’ project after The
Urban Question (1977), including City, Class, and Power (1978) and
culminating in The City and the Grassroots (1983).
Castells’
accounts within this approach can be understood, in part, as efforts to
empirically validate structural hypotheses on the relationship of the
capitalist working class and the city (e.g. to relate collective consumption
practices to the development of urban working class movements focused on
housing, education, and other collective consumption issues). For Castells, these works represent a transition
from the restrictive structuralist understanding of Althusserian-inspired
ontology embodied in The Urban Question to a more complex,
empirically-informed analysis of agency in urban movements.
The transition
ultimately leads to a dead end, evident both in Castells rejection of Marxian
theory as a body of knowledge capable of informing research into urban social
movements and his more fundamental conclusion that the effects of organizing
such movements are almost entirely ideological (i.e. that urban
movements generally lack the capacity to transform their real collective
conditions of existence, especially in response to the effects of capitalist
globalization) (Castells, 1983: 327-331).
In regard to the latter point, Castells concludes that the capacity of
state bureaucratic and capitalist agents to promote the fracturing of local
community organizations along fault lines generated by differential sources of
collective identity ensures that any gains from community struggles are
temporary and untenable in circumstances where durable local alliances between
divergent community groups cannot be assembled. Castells’ transition, thus, traces a movement from a structurally
essentialist Marxist theory of cities to an agency-based essentialism, through
which he rejects class struggle as a unique motive force for development of
urban social organizing and significantly downgrades the possibilities for
community organizations to meaningfully address the lives of urban
residents.
By contrast,
Katznelson (1981; 1992) adopts an agency based approach to the relationship
between working class organization and the city that seeks, at the outset, to
reduce the burden on class as an all-encompassing organizing principle. Rather, he attempts to contextualize class in
relation to other sources of collective identity, especially locality and
ethnicity, in order to explain the limitations of class-based organization in
historical/geographic contexts where other sources of identity are privileged,
and, more fundamentally, to address the perceived absence of an active,
revolutionary working class collective agent in the Western capitalist
economies of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Katznelson (1986: 21; 1992: 214-256) draws a distinction between holistic
conceptions of class, characterized by the unification of group interests
across both working and domestic practices, and partial/divided conceptions
of class, characterized by the existence of cross-cutting interests dividing
social groups otherwise unified by their common interests in working practices
(e.g. division of an industrial working class based on identification with
divergent communities and different property-based interests).[4]
These accounts
by Castells and Katznelson both assume something important about the
relationship between class and the city.
Namely, that urban environments broaden the range of struggles
undertaken by class-based organizations, compelled by the introduction of
consumption-oriented conflicts, of punctuated importance in cities, in addition
to struggle against capitalist exploitation in wage labor relations. On the other hand, they also assert that
more structurally oriented approaches in Marxian theory have failed to account
for differential sources of identity formation, reducing the efficacy of
Marxian theory in addressing the organization of workers for struggles in and
out of the workplace by taking the prioritization of class in all contexts for
granted.
The alternative
structuralist counterargument is most vigorously advanced by Harvey (1985:
36-62; 1996: 341-346), who reduces non-class sources of collective identity in
urban contexts to ideological maladies, impeding the capacity of the urban
working classes from understanding how capitalist accumulation shapes all
aspects of the urban experience. For
example, proceeding in reference to the logic of secondary sector accumulation,
rental rates on residential space reflect fluctuations in capital accumulation,
even if struggles over rent cut across class lines. Harvey’s arguments suggest that any real improvement in urban
housing conditions can only be brought about through a larger struggle against
industrial capital because capital accumulation in housing is inseparably
connected to capital accumulation on a macroeconomic scale (Harvey, 1973:
162-176, 190-194). Thus, by isolating
urban housing struggles from a larger consideration of capital accumulation,
agency-based theorists concerned with differential sources of identity and
organization de-contextualize housing issues relative to class in a way that
undermines any possibility of a resolution.
For my purposes,
these opposing positions on the agency of class-based organizations are
relevant, in large part, because they demonstrate the importance of how class
is defined as a concept in Marxian theory and how different definitions of
class, embodying irreconcilably opposed positions with respect to structure and
agency, might contribute to different conceptions of the relationship between
class and urban social organizing. They
further raise questions in regard to how local urban struggles, prompting
community organization, may or should engage with non-local processes (e.g.
multinational capital accumulation).
5. The City as Space Bearing Contested Meanings
This perspective constitutes a
particular effort to ford the divide between structure and agency in Marxian
ontology by arguing that structural conditions are internalized through the
experience and learning of agents, who subsequently reproduce or contest those
conditions through their actions. In particular,
cultural processes involving the appropriation, reproduction, and contestation
of symbolic systems by agents determine, in part, the way agents understand
their lived environments and the other social (economic and political)
processes in which they participate.
Thus, agents read the city as a text or “pseudo-text” (Gottdiener and
Lagopoulos, 1986: 17) conveying a set of meanings, generated by material
processes, which determine the way that agents see and act upon the city.
Numerous Marxian
theorists influenced by semiotic theorists like Greimas and Barthes approach
the city in this way, often by way of Lefebvre’s writings on urban space. In fact, Lefebvre’s (1991: 130-168)
interpretation of spatial semiotics presents a partial basis for subsequent
Marxian readings by theorists like Gottdiener and Lagopoulos (1986: 12-19), who
advance a methodology of “socio-semiotics,” intended to structurally articulate
connections between the production of signification (signifiers and signifieds)
and non-semiotic material (economic, political, cultural) processes. In this manner, the production of Lefebvre’s
differential space of urban society, through the re-appropriation of the
abstract space of industrial society, is preceded by the symbolic re-appropriation
of space in relation to the real human needs of urban society, effecting a
liberatory re-reading of the city.[5]
Jameson (1984)
advances a similar conception of urban space as a field inscribed with meanings
by reference to the cognitive geography of Lynch (1960). Jameson’s critique, further supported by
some Los Angeles School geographers (e.g. Soja, 1994: 62-64) and, to
some degree, by Harvey (1989A) as well, labels the contemporary city of late
capitalism as postmodern space, manifesting a depthless
nature/immediacy/transparency connected to everyday experience. This immediacy constitutes an ideological
force, multiplying and confusing understandings of urban lived experience in
relation to multinational capital and, therefore, impeding collective organization
against capital (Soja, 1994: 120-131).
The theoretic
source for a connection between these approaches lies in Marxian theories of
ideology, especially that of Althusser.
Notwithstanding certain technical differences of approach, Gottdiener
and Lagopoulos, on the one hand, and Jameson, on the other, both imply that the
symbolic structures articulated by individual urban agents/subjects through the
exercise of everyday urban existence “represent the imaginary relationship
of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, 1971:
162). That is to say, the real conditions
of existence for the reproduction of labor power in urban contexts,
constituting the everyday existence of urban working classes, are structured by
the dominance of multinational capital, which becomes obscured, in Jameson’s
formulation, by a culture that stresses the complexity and multiplicity of
immediate urban experience over concrete, theoretically-informed knowledge of
the real as capitalist hegemony. Taken
in these terms, these positions reformulate Harvey’s counterargument against
non-class identifications by way of a detour through a structuralist semiotics
and the Althusserian theory of ideology, clinging to the same conclusion that
non-class identities and the lived experiences of non-class urban processes
obfuscate the reality of class, impeding its prioritization for purposes of
organization and collective struggle.
The larger problem
evident in this reading on the semiotics of urban space, as with Harvey’s
critique of postmodern identity formation/politics, is that it adopts an
explicit prioritization of class as the critical source of identity for a
liberatory politics, notwithstanding the existence of alternative sources of
oppression (e.g. ethnic, racial, gendered) and alternative liberatory
re-readings of space in reference to such sources of oppression. Thus, for every source of oppression, an
alternative cognitive mapping may exist to articulate the spatiality of processes
reproducing existing, oppressive forms of everyday life. The multiplicity of such re-readings escapes
from these Marxist semiotic accounts.
[4] Tajbakhsh
(2001: 120-124) provides a good overview of Katznelson’s conception of class
analysis.
[5]
Acknowledging this connection of Lefebvre’s conception of spatial production to
semiotic theory, it merits further acknowledgement of the threat Lefebvre
perceived in the disconnection of theorization, especially by
post-structuralist philosophers like Foucault, from spatial practice, a
position noted by Gibson-Graham (2006: 74-75, 77). For Lefebvre, material spatial practices produce meaning/symbolism,
while disconnection of spatial metaphors from spatial practice reinforces
ideological understandings of space.
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