The first section of this
chapter concluded with the claim that the central commonality evident in the
various approaches to the city in Marxist and Marxian-inspired theories is that
the contemporary city is conceived as a capitalist city. Numerous accounts advance such a conclusion
quite explicitly. For example, Harvey
argues, in reference to the variety of technological changes reducing the
temporal requirements of movement across space (i.e. space-time compression),
that:
These new
technological and organizational possibilities have all been produced under the
impulsions of a capitalist mode of production with its hegemonic
military-industrial-financial interests.
For this reason, I believe it is not only useful to think of but also
important to recognize that we are all embroiled in a global process of
capitalist urbanization or uneven spatio-temporal development even
in those countries that have nominally at least sought a noncapitalistic path
of development and a noncapitalist urban form (1996: 414, italics in
original).
The implication of this reasoning
is that capital accumulation in diverse production processes and the particular
effects of technological development arising from such processes imprint the
image of a globally expansive capitalist mode of production upon all social
contexts with which they come into contact, notwithstanding the efforts of policymakers
to displace axiomatic dependence on capitalism. In reference to the city, as a spatial form, the impact of
capital accumulation, both in the development of urban built form and the
integration of technologies into the everyday lives of urban residents, ensures
that every city in the age of a specifically capitalist globalization, marked
by the insistent penetration of capital accumulation into new geographies, must
be a capitalist city. Harvey’s
characterization of the relationship of capitalism to urbanization can be
described as capitalocentric, using Gibson-Graham’s (2006A)
terminology.
The
capitalocentric characteristics evident in the larger body of Marxist and
Marxian-inspired theories on the city manifest diverse forms, introducing divergent
consequences for the relationship between theory and urban practice. As suggested in the previous section,
theories focusing on the relationship of class struggle to the development of
urban social movements manifest a particular reduction of class to the binary
struggle of unitary working and capitalist classes, a binary constituted by the
image of a capitalist mode of production that is singular and coextensive with
economic processes such that every form of workplace involved in commodity
production can be labeled capitalist.
The commitment of agency-oriented theorists to ontologically privilege
individual agency relative to structural determination implies that such
discourses do not, however, typically go as far in expanding the sphere of
effects from capitalism as more structurally oriented theorists like Harvey,
the regional economy theorists, or the control and coordination (global
and world city) theorists.
To varying
degrees, structurally oriented approaches to the city expand the social effects
of capitalist processes to suggest, in many cases, a kind of uni-directional
determination of political, cultural, and ecological processes by the economic,
at a minimum arguing that state policies in urban planning or collective
consumption and the development of alternative non-class cultural
self-identifications must be functional to capitalist development and
reproduction. Further, reflecting on
the position of the city relative to other geographic scales, the reduction of
the city to a limited set of political/institutional roles by the regional
economy theorists, alluded to in the first section in reference to Scott et al
(2008), introduces a kind of inter-scalar economic determination of the local
(i.e. the city) by the regional and/or the global, in which the latter, higher
scales articulate restructuring processes by industrial capitalism. In this sense, capitalism, as the economic,
is uniquely capable of transcending the limitations of local space and even
regional and national space to become global.
Thus, the city becomes a captive of regional and/or global economic
processes that are unambiguously capitalist.
Structurally
oriented manifestations of capitalocentrism and the reduction of class to the
working/capitalist class binary ultimately reflect the utilization of
definitions for capitalism that are sufficient broad to subsume not only a
range of effects on non-economic processes, but to subsume the totality of
economic processes and to reduce the possibility or actual presence of alternative
organizations of surplus labor to relatively minor variations on a common
capitalist logic of commodity production and/or market exchange under the
motive of profit. Capitalism, thus,
completely encompasses the horizon of feasible economic structures and this
coextensive identity of the economic with capitalism constitutes the hegemonic
influence of capitalism on political, cultural, and physical/ecological
processes. Consequently, socially
transformative projects, contesting the effects of capitalist economic
processes, confront an expressive totality of social processes, all
arrayed to reproduce the hegemony of capitalism. For this reason, the sorts of capitalocentric discourse
represented in most of the aforementioned Marxian theories of the city impose
on socially transformative urban movements, especially those anchored on the
historically assigned agency of the working class, the impossible task of
overthrowing, in its entirety, a globally integrated system from the standpoint
of the local/the city.
Consistent with its
theoretic bases in the Marxian theory of class, Althusserian overdeterminist
ontology, and performative epistemology, this project rejects this
capitalocentric imagery. Elaborating,
overdeterminist ontology holds that capitalist class processes are mutually
constituted by and mutually constitutive of all other social and physical
processes, implying that no uni-directional determinism is conceivable. As such, the structured totality of
processes containing capitalist class processes manifests complexity,
irreducible to the simple expression of capitalist dominance in all its
processual parts.
Addressing the
geographic/scalar imagery of global capitalist dominance and ontological
captivity of cities relative to the regional or the global scale, this project
will advance a theory of networks in chapter 2 with the intention of reframing
the geography of the city in relation to material processes. This network imagery will insist that
spatial scales are constituted as piecewise constructs of relatively local
processes, local in the sense that every process has a definite positionality
and boundedness relative to other processes for any given moment in time. The global scale of social processes exists
as a piecewise combination of local processes whose effects diffuse explosively
but unevenly along complex but fragile networks. Consistent with overdeterminist ontology, such networks must,
likewise, facilitate multi-directional effects. Thus, the effects of globally dispersed capitalist class
processes on a particular city cannot be understood, on the one hand, as
uni-directional (from transnational capitalist firms to individual cities) or,
on the other hand, as emanating from a unitary global agency (from the global to
the local) rather than as an assemblage of networked but dispersed local
processes. Such an understanding of
connections, not between the local and the global but between diverse locals
across networks that facilitate multidirectional linkages, imposes the sort of
relational logic discussed earlier in which every process is understood to
define its own scale and agents interact simultaneously through multiple local,
regional, and globally-extensive networks defined by processes.
Finally, and most importantly
for the hypothesis that I mean to initially advance here and subsequently to
elaborate in chapter 3, this project contests the ambiguity with which
capitalism has been defined and ascribed a substantive influence on a wide
range of social processes in the theoretic approaches heretofore
described. Capitalism, as it is
variously defined implicitly or explicitly, describes market exchange
processes, the integration, expansion, and transformation of social divisions
of labor with respect to production processes and geographic regions, the
supremacy of the profit motive in driving entrepreneurship, or the evolving
technical, bureaucratic, and geographic organization of enterprises. If, in some sense, all of these potential
definitions of capitalism describe economic processes, they are all too broad
and diffuse to convey the unique insights that Marxian theory has to offer on
class in general or on capitalism in particular. They truncate the theoretic spaces for identification of economic
non-capitalisms.
The first step in moving
beyond this capitalocentric logic involves providing a definition of capitalism
consistent with Althusserian overdeterminism.
Applying, again, the definitions of class structure types conveyed by
Resnick and Wolff (1987), capitalism constitutes a particular exploitative
class structure in which the producers of surplus labor supply their capacity
to do work to a capitalist appropriator/distributor as commodity labor power in
market exchange. In exchange for
wage-based compensation, producers produce a value in excess of the value of
the labor compensation/wages (a surplus value), contained in a mass of
commodities and realizable through exchange.
Upon realization of the value contained in the commodities, the
capitalist appropriator/distributor determines the necessary distributions that
must be undertaken in order to secure conditions of existence of the surplus
production process so that it can be successfully reproduced over time.
This modest definition
describes and delimits capitalism as a class structure in such a way that
certain class structures, existing simultaneously to capitalism cannot be
described as capitalist. Specifically,
surplus production processes in which the producer and appropriator/distributor
are identical and singular describe non-capitalist ancient class
structures. Surplus production
processes in which the producers and appropriator/distributors are identical
and plural describe non-capitalist communist class structures. In both of these cases, means for the
compensation of labor power, the realization of values, and the technical
organization of production processes are incidental to the organization of
surplus labor that defines the class structure. Thus, ancient and communist class structures may produce
commodities for market exchange and operate as firms, in a legal and
proprietary sense, but market and legal/proprietary processes do not render
them capitalist.
By utilizing a definition
of capitalism that relates it, as a class structure, to a very specific form in
the organization of surplus labor, I am able to advance the outlines of a
hypothesis. Cities, as spatial forms,
contain diverse ranges of social processes, organized ontologically into structures
of related processes and spatially and temporally linked as networks. Some of these networks are contained within
the city and others extend longer distances beyond the variously defined
boundaries of the city. Some of these
social processes are class processes.
Among the class processes, some are capitalist class processes. On the other hand, the class processes and
the structures and networks that they define are not exclusively
capitalist. There are slave, feudal,
ancient, and communist processes as well.
All of these processes operate simultaneously. Their structures are also typically interlinked and their spatial
networks overlap. In addition,
capitalist class structures are not exclusive in producing networks that extend
beyond the boundaries of a city. Other
types of class structures produce their own interregional class networks
and non-class processes produce interregional non-class process networks (e.g.
ethnic-cultural processes, political processes, etc.). These preliminary assertions mean to posit
the city as a spatial form existing as a piece-wise ensemble of processes,
structures, and, spatio-temporally, networks and to argue suggestively that the
existence of heterogeneous class structures in cities is important in shaping
the city as something other than a purely capitalist city. That is to say, the existence of
non-capitalist class structures, especially non-exploitative communist class
structures, shapes the economic, political, cultural, and ecological processes
of the city.
Further, in conformity
with a performative epistemological framework, by positing the existence of
non-capitalist class structures in cities, I mean to reinforce the potentiality
for cities to nurture such structures.
In this sense, the theorization of non-capitalist structures as actually
existing entities in cities and theorization of conditions of existence for
such structures does not simply generate an empirically testable hypothesis for
examination of cities, in the sense that Castells’ theorization of the
relationship between collective consumption and urban social movements had
motivated his empirical scholarship of the late 1970s. Rather, this project seeks to contribute to
a continuously evolving Marxian strategy to develop communist class structures
in cities as practical alternatives to capitalism.
In, thus, departing from the
capitalocentric logic of other Marxian approaches to the city, this account
means to take Katznelson’s advice that Marxism indeed needs to exhibit a
greater degree of modesty in approaching its revolutionary aims. In contrast to Katznelson’s approach,
however, the sort of modesty that this project seeks to cultivate concerns the
scale of communist society envisioned by theory. The sort of communisms envisioned by this project possess no
pretension of overthrowing en masse capitalist class structures and all of the
non-class structures supporting the reproduction of such structures. On the contrary, this project understands
communist revolution as a continuous and tenuous piece-wise endeavor of
collective entrepreneurship and class and non-class network building in which
cities play an important role. For that
reason, this project seeks to situate the city, as an interregionally
connective space, in relation to class and to advance a more modest appraisal of
the possibilities for a more modest communism than that advanced, implicitly or
explicitly, in alternative Marxist approaches.
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