Sacred Headwaters #55: Rebel Cities
What does the "right to the city" mean? What are the boundaries of the urban environment in globalized capitalism? And can cities themselves be sites of anti-capitalist struggle?
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Issue #55: Rebel Cities
Most of the recent issues of this newsletter have focused on ecologically minded, anti-capitalist movements and their implications for our broader struggle for a livable future. I’ve tried to balance explorations of inspiring organizing with an understanding of the broader theory of change connecting each movement with global struggle, but at least half the examples we’ve read about have fit into the “dual power” strategy underlying Murray Bookchin’s radical municipalism. As Bookchin himself said, he arrived at municipalism (and dual power as a strategy) from a Marxist background because he believed it was the only strategy that could work under the conditions we face today.
I should note briefly here (since this newsletter ostensibly began with a focus on climate and ecological crisis) that the reason we are focusing on anti-capitalist struggle is because of one of Bookchin’s most important contributions, a conclusion that many others have reached since: that capitalism’s core contradiction, the one that it truly can’t overcome, is its insatiable need to gobble up the Earth. As such, efforts to halt ecological collapse have to reckon directly with capitalism. This is obviously a strong claim, and the bulk of this newsletter has been spent building a case for it; I’m just reiterating it here to make it clear why we’re suddenly reading about Marxist strategy.
Back to the issue at hand: it turns out that other left-wing thinkers have come to similar conclusions about where and how to organize in the changing modern landscape (particularly in the countries of the capitalist core), even when they disagree with Bookchin’s goal of confederated municipalism. David Harvey, a prominent living Marxist geographer, has written extensively about the city as the most viable organizing venue for anti-capitalists today — and specifically, about the city as a replacement for the traditional Marxist site of struggle: the factory or workplace.
Harvey, building Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city” (coined in 1968), argues that the process of urbanization as we know it is in fact a process of traditional capitalist accumulation that combines surplus value production (what happens in the factory thanks to workers’ labor) with what he calls accumulation by dispossession (the capture or enclosure of value). As such, urban struggles are in fact struggles against the class relation built into capitalism, and urban organizing is a potential vector for anti-capitalist organizing. This idea is promising precisely because traditional labor organizing, especially though not exclusively in the North American context, has become so weak, both because of the decisive political victories of neoliberalism and because of the structural changes in our economies. The transition from manufacturing to service and information economies has fundamentally disempowered the traditional Marxist vanguard by shrinking it; Harvey’s reconceptualization of the city as a site of value production and accumulation on its own reinvigorates the potential for challenging class relations and capitalism in the countries of the global north. It also, as he notes, situates class struggle in a much more global context, because urbanization is a global process driven by transnational capital.
That theoretical framing then yields two more questions. First, the perennial question with ideas at this scale is how do we go from organizing in one city to challenging a global capitalism? And second, as two authors that Harvey cites ask, “How, then, does one organize a city?”
In this issue, we’ll read two chapters from Harvey’s book Rebel Cities. They cover two main areas. First, Harvey explores and builds on Lefebvre’s theoretical conceptualization of urbanization as a fundamentally capitalist process and situates the rapid urbanization of the latter half of the 20th century within the dynamics of an increasingly global capitalism. Then, he explains how city-level organizing fits into a broader (Marxist) anti-capitalist theory of change, and finally, he attempts to hint at answers to the question raised above — exactly how “does one organize a city?” Though he’s quick to note that the question, at least in his context, is remarkably understudied and has only a handful of case studies to draw from.
Harvey’s argument here is an interesting angle precisely because, as he points out, we have seen no shortage of urban social movements blow up and even spread through contagion around the world over the last few decades, including, arguably at least, the climate movement. The question is, can that energy be channeled effectively into the broader social change required to transcend capitalism and mitigate ecological catastrophe?
The Right to the City (30 minutes)
David Harvey, New Left Review, 2008. Also included as Chapter 1 of Rebel Cities
This essay introduces the concept of the “right to the city” not as it is often used, misused, or coopted today, but as it was originally presented by Henri Lefebvre in 1968: as a right to participate in the shaping of the urban environment, and in so doing, to participate in the shaping of one’s own life. It is a right of autonomy, the "right to change ourselves by changing the city." The other key point here that Harvey attributes to Lefebvre is that the “city” no longer refers just to the metropolitan boundary; urbanization is an all-encompassing process that increasingly includes the rural in its mode of production. It’s not that rural areas are becoming “urbanized” in a physical sense, it’s that rural areas shape and are shaped by the global process of urbanization in the same way that urban areas are. What this means is that the “right to the city” is not a right specifically for those living in inner cities: it’s a right “to command the whole urban process,” including everything that is part of the production and reproduction of urban life.
I included Harvey’s article explaining this concept instead of Lefebvre’s original because it situates its importance in our modern context (and because it’s easier to read). Harvey uses this piece to explain how this process of capitalist urbanization — from its origins in the transformation of 19th century Paris under Georges-Eugène Haussmann to its bizarre manifestations in places like Dubai — has evolved as one of capitalism’s tools for dealing with one of its inevitable (at least according to Marxists) crises: overproduction (or under-demand). The bulk of the essay explains how urbanization is at its core a process of surplus value production, concluding that the urban environment is at least as appropriate a place for class struggle as the workplace.
I want to highlight one thing I got a kick out of: Engels foresaw one of the core problems of capitalist urbanization that today has led climate activists to come up with the slogan “housing policy is climate policy.” He pointed out that as cities grew, the land at their core would grow in value sometimes exponentially, but that value would have nothing to do with the buildings that were there. The buildings in most cases would actually detract from that value because "they no longer belonged to the changed circumstances," and in the vast majority of cases, these buildings housed workers. Tearing down workers's housing and replacing it with luxury apartments that better fit the "changed circumstances" is something we're all too familiar with, and it’s simultaneously comforting and depressing to read someone warning about this no less than 150 years ago.
Reclaiming the City for Anti-Capitalist Struggle (1 hour)
David Harvey, Chapter 5 from Rebel Cities, 2012
In this essay, Harvey reframes a variety of urban social movements as class struggles and asks what role these movements — many of which have been much more successful than traditional left organizing in the neoliberal era — might play in a broader anti-capitalist project. He also presents a picture of what he considers the state of the modern left, largely in disarray as a result of the success of the neoliberal political project. Much of what he says seems to specifically address the kinds of movements and projects we’ve read about over the course of the TINA series, including both things like the Transition Movement and workers’ cooperatives (he is reminiscent of Bookchin here, though less harsh) and more openly militant autonomous movements. What Bookchin calls “dual power” Harvey calls “termite theory” and, while he seems to admire it in some ways, he questions whether or not it can actually overcome capitalism because — taking the analogy further — he worries that as soon as the capitalists realize they have a termite infestation, they will hire exterminators to crush it. He also expresses a lot of doubts about “non-hierarchical” organizing here and argues that many “non-hierarchical” examples that anarchist-inclined people (this newsletter may be a case and point) tend to cite actually do have hierarchical organization.
But in spite of all that skepticism, Harvey seems to think that many of these movements are on to something, and that something is their use of cities as organizing spaces instead of traditional workplaces. The bulk of the essay is spent raising questions about the role urban movements can play and suggesting hopeful answers to those questions. Most interesting, I think, is the case study he presents on El Alto, Bolivia, and how the cultural and physical circumstances of the city — particularly, the rich traditions of active citizenship stemming from both Indigenous cultures and the organizing history of Bolivia’s tin miners — allowed it to play such a critical role in national (and arguably regional) politics over the last two decades.
This essay offers both a healthy dose of skepticism about anticapitalist utopian movements and a potential path forward that doesn’t abandon those movements, but situates them within a broader project of class struggle within the global process of capitalist urbanization.
Book Recommendation: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, David Harvey
If Harvey’s perspective seems interesting to you, I’d recommend reading the whole book. He is a dense writer but much more approachable than many others in his field. The book provides a different perspective on the type of municipalism we’ve been reading about and situates many modern social movements within a broader context of anti-capitalist struggle.
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