Chapter 1: Introducing Marxism and the City in Globalization
The purpose of this chapter
is to evaluate theoretic issues raised by the Marxian tradition. The issues discussed here relate
specifically to the ways in which Marxian theorists have approached the city,
but they touch on more general considerations of how Marxian theorists have
defined class and the importance assigned by Marxian theory to capitalism as a
class structure in multifarious, diverse fields of Marxian theory and analysis.
Specifically, I
intend to situate this project, as a contribution in Marxian theory, relative
to other contributions to a Marxian theory of the city. In this regard, I mean to argue,
definitively, that a substantial body of theory already exists in Marxism with
regard to the city, and I intend to take these contributions into account in
formulating the specific theoretic contribution that forms the core purpose of
this project. Specification of these
approaches serves relevant purposes for the work to follow. In particular, I seek to emphasize the
formative significance of works by Lefebvre, Castells, Harvey, and various
other theorists concerned with understanding the city as an object of theory in
the development of my own approach. Of
equal importance, I want to argue, definitively, how and why the account that
will follow in subsequent chapters is different from earlier Marxian theories
of the city by specifying, in this context, how the general understanding of
Marxian theory advanced in this project differs in significant ways from other
theories. Most succinctly, the survey
advanced in this chapter on Marxian theories of the city, as an object of
globally expansive capitalism, will emphasize that these approaches have axiomatically
labeled the contemporary city as capitalist. It is this labeling that I mean to contest, not in the spirit of
arguing that capitalism, as a class structure associated with a set of
definitive processes, does not produce its own particular forms of space, but
in order to argue that real cities contain a more profound heterogeneity of
class structures and that all of these class structures produce their own,
heterogeneous, interspersed, and overlapping geographies.[1]
Consequent
to these particular goals, I will, first, provide a brief survey of Marxian
approaches to the city and, further, argue how these approaches have defined
and situated the city within theorizations of capitalist globalization. I will, then, articulate the foundations for
an alternative approach by, first, defining the particular Marxian conception
of class to be advanced, and, subsequently, by stating definitively how such a
conception of class enables the articulation of a more heterogeneous class
landscape in cities and in interregional networks, articulated through cities,
through which the multiple, diverse, and not exclusively capitalist
processes of globalization operate.
Cities as Objects of Capitalist Globalization in Marxian Theory
The account in this section is
intended as a brief summary of approaches introduced within the Marxian
tradition since the 1960s that have attempted to define the city or the urban. It, further, inquires into the ways in which
Marxian accounts on the city have been affected by larger scale economic
transitions in the geographies of capitalism, alluding to the perceived,
theorized, and/or real intensification of international trade and capital
mobility. The summary is by no means
exhaustive. Rather, my intention is to
raise some important themes in Marxist urban theory and analysis and recognize
how this body of theory has been shaped by the transformation of economic,
political, and cultural processes associated with globalization in the period
since the 1960s. Most importantly, I
mean to define an overriding commonality in this body of theory concerning the
ubiquitous, determinate role assigned to capitalist economic processes. In this regard, the conclusions developed
here provide the groundwork for a critique of Marxist urban theories against
which the larger approach of this project seeks to develop an alternative.
Generalizing
about the larger body of Marxist urban theory, the formative historical period
for much urban theorizing was the late 1960s.
Marxian theories of the city prior to this period exist as a patchwork collection,
devised in the absence of any general project of theorizing space, like Marx
and Engel’s (1975A: 32; 1975B: 488) comments on the separation of town and
country, Engels’ (1975: 324-374) account on the spatiality of workers’
communities in Manchester, or, later, Benjamin’s (1986: 165-167) reflections on
the “porosity” of Neapolitan economic space, riddled with the remnants of
pre-capitalist class structures.[2] This is not to say, however, that Marxian
theory, or Western Marxism in particular, developed an inherent antagonism
toward spatial analysis until the 1960s, as implied by Soja (1994: 39-42,
84-88). The point is, rather, that
certain themes, like Marx’s (1991) conceptualization of land rent or theorizations
on geographically uneven development (Trotsky, 2002; Mandel, 1987), remained
dormant in the repertoire of Marxian theoretic concepts, waiting for an
appropriate conjuncture to be revived and raised to a more adequate state of
development, especially with respect to urban, metropolitan, and regional/sub-national
geographic scales.
Geographically,
the most important national context for the initial efforts of Marxian theory
to come to terms with urban spatiality is France. Urban theorization develops in this particular conjuncture for
numerous reasons. Like many other
Western European economies, France displayed a significant pattern of
geographically uneven economic development, favoring the metropolitan economy
of Paris at the expense of the remaining national economy. Existing geographic disproportionalities had
prompted the development of state-centric policies, favoring the development of
peripheral areas and, especially, development of the services capacity of
peripheral metropolitan areas (métropoles d’équilibres) (Cohen,
2002). Such efforts in France and in
other Western European economies were, however, waning by the end of the 1960s,
as forced economic decentralization began to represent an excessive fiscal
burden to central states. Nonetheless,
the question of state-centric regional developmental policies contributed, in
part, to an intensification of interest on the part of French geographic and
sociological theorists. In particular,
it nurtured an interest on the part of sociologists, particularly those
connected with the French Communist Party (PCF) (e.g. Lojkine, 1972; 1976), in
the geographic concentration and regional peripheralization of capital
accumulation, linking these processes to already existing Marxist theorizations
on uneven development.
Other theorists,
on the margins of official, PCF Marxism, approached the problem of space and,
especially, urban space for different reasons.
Lefebvre’s work in theorizing urban space, in particular, emanated as a
point of transition from a project of theorizing everyday life (quotidienité)
under bureaucratic, state-regulated capitalism, advanced with the intention of
understanding how everyday life is shaped by the production of space (1968,
1991). In turn, Lefebvre’s (2003)
initial arguments on the urban, advanced in the immediate aftermath of the
events of May 1968, provoked diffuse reactions in a still vibrant environment
of intellectual conflict characterizing postwar French Marxism. The most important such reaction, Castells’
Althusserian-inspired The Urban Question (1977), saw as its task the
formalization of a rigorous Marxian theory of the city that would not displace
class struggle in favor of a new spatial problematic (i.e. Lefebvre’s concept
of urban revolution). Subsequent
empirical investigations on the relationship between urban structures and the
development of urban social movements by Castells (1978, 1983) pushed his line
of inquiry away from Althusserian-influenced structuralism and, at least to
some degree, closer to Lefebvre.
Summarily, the development and contestation of diverse theoretic
accounts in the late 1960s and 1970s from Lefebvre, Castells, and the range of
PCF-associated theorists had carved out a place in French Marxism for urban and
more broadly spatial/geographic inquiry.
Outside of the
aforementioned vein of French Marxist theories on the city, the other major
vein of Marxian theorization on cities emanates in the 1970s from Anglophone
geographic theory, a development for which the work of Harvey, from Social
Justice and the City (1973) to The Urbanization of Capital (1985),
bears a strong influence. Harvey’s
contribution to this body of theory is particularly important because it
represents an effort to transform and spatialize Marxian political economy and
to articulate an understanding of urban development anchored against Marx’s
theory of rent (1973: 176-194; 1989: 90-108) and circuits of capital
accumulation (1989B: 61-83; 2006A: 388-398).
On the other hand, Marxian-influenced geographers also appropriated
insights from the more globally focused dependency (e.g. Frank, 1966)
and World Systems (e.g. Wallerstein, 2004) theories and from French Régulation
school accounts on the transformation of capitalist accumulation regimes
and modes of regulation (e.g. Aglietta, 2000; Boyer, 2000).
Under these influences, the larger body of
Marxian-influenced geographic theories that develops over the course of the
1980s and early 1990s transcends the urban scale to assemble a multi-scalar
approach, recognizing the importance of larger regions (Scott et al, 2008) and
interregional networks in commodity production and circulation of capital
(Gereffi et al, 1994; Coe et al, 2004).
At stake in these analyses is the rescaling of capitalist geography,
conditioned by political processes associated with Neoliberalism, devolving
economic dynamism from the national to regional levels. For my purposes in this project, these
geographic theorizations are relevant because they begin to situate the city in
relation to higher geographic scales, facilitating theoretic inquiry into the
relationship between cities and interregionally-scaled economic processes,
characterizing one dimension of globalization.
[1] This
approach, to some extent, follows along lines already charted by Arvidson
(1995; 1996; 2000), identifying the city as a space of heterogeneous class
structures. To this extent, the
introductory stages of my project, advanced in this chapter, invariable repeat
certain criticisms developed by this earlier work, especially on the
“capitalocentric” (Gibson-Graham, 2006A: 6) nature of Marxist urban theory and
analyses.
[2] Merrifield
(2002) provides some context for the development of “porosity” as a concept in
Benjamin’s understanding of the relationship between capitalism and urban
space.
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