Thursday, March 3, 2022

Introducing Marxism and the City in Globalization III

Cities as Objects of Globalization in Marxian Theory (Continued)

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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