Economic & Political Weekly EPW october 5, 2013 vol xlviII no 40 29

book reviewS

City as the Revolutionary Space

Paramjit Singh

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution by David Harvey (London and New York: Verso Books), 2012; pp xviii + 187, $19.95.

From antiquity cities have been the most dynamic spaces for cultural, political, social and economic

transformation. Epochs prior to indus-trialisation, there was the oriental city (dominated by Asiatic Mode of Produc-tion), the antique city (Greek and R oman associated with the possession of slaves) and the medieval city (based on feudal relations but struggling against land feudalism). “The oriental and antique city was essentially political, the medieval city, without losing its political character, was related to commerce, craft and bank-ing” (Lefebvre 1996a: 65-66). Modern European cities are characterised as capitalist cities dominated by service sector activities. These cities are crucial as spaces for capitalism to produce end-lessly as well as spaces to dispose the over-accumulated produce. The suprem-acy of the capitalist mode of production in these cities leads to the eruption of mass movements in urban centres. To quote Harvey from his preface to the book under review,

It was also in this very same year, 1967, that Henri Lefebvre wrote his seminal essay on “The Right to the City”. That right, he asserted, was both a cry and a demand. The cry was a response to the existential pain of a wither-ing crisis of everyday life in the city. The demand was really a command to look that crisis clearly in the eye and to create an alter-native urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and playful but, as always with Lefebvre, confl ictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.

Lefebvre’s City

David Harvey’s new book Rebel cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution is a collection of his early e ssays (with some additions) published in different journals. This collection seemed to be a kind of tribute to Henri Lefebvre (French Marxist philosopher and sociologist). Harvey has placed the

city at the forefront in terms of its posi-tion as a generator of capital accumula-tion and absorption of surpluses (of both capital and labour). Harvey has done much to expand on Lefebvre’s urbanisa-tion thesis. But the fundamental differ-ence between the two is that Lefebvre’s work was rooted in Marxian philosophy, whereas Harvey’s work is founded on empirical Marxian political economy.

In the Chapter 1 titled like Lefebvre’s article of 1967, “The Right to the City”, Harvey explains that urbanisation is very crucial for the capitalist system to absorb surplus it perpetually produces. The growth of capitalist output over time is broadly parallel to the urbanisation of the world population. Like Marx, Harvey also claims that the capitalist production process has an inherent t endency towards over-accumulation. A common manifest-ation of this over-accumulation includes a glut of commodities, falling rates of profi t in industrial production, surplus productive capacity, unemployed and idle money capital (Harvey 1985).

History as Urban Struggles

Capitalism uses urbanisation as a way to delay the capitalist crisis of over-accumu-lation by switching investment into the u rban-built environment. To solve the capital-surplus-absorption problem, con -struction and reconstruction of cities, investment in the metropolitan regions, investment in vast infrastructural projects and suburbanisation have been considered most effective. This was done by Louis Bonaparte, who entrusted Haussmann (a civic planner), to come out of the 1848 crisis, and this was also done in the United States (US) by

Robert Moses, an urban planner, after the second world war. The same was done again by the US after the 1970s up until 2008, when the housing market ab-sorbed a great deal of surplus through new construction, acting as an impor-tant stabiliser of the economy.

All this process of construction and reconstruction seeks to solve the problem of capital and delay the capitalist crisis, but invariably has a class dimension. These measures to solve the capitalist crisis, however, are temporary in na-ture, which give birth to other crises that are deeper and more dangerous. Haussmann only deferred the crisis, giving rise to the Paris Commune of 1870 and Robert Moses’ suburbanisa-tion strategy has generated the urban crisis of the 1960s, defi ned politically by “white fl ight” and urban revolt by ethnic minorities. Harvey argues that the burgeoning process of “Creative Destruction” through construction and reconstruction causes the dispossession of the urban common masses from the right to the city.

Real estate speculation worked as a supplementary form of exploitation in times of industrial slowdown. Harvey considers the process of urbanisation as the most important activity in the dynamics of capital accumulation. The process of urbanisation fundamentally requires some combination of fi nance and state engagement for its functioning. Financial institutions lend to developers, landowners and construction companies to build suburbs with an assumption that the value they have produced in the form of houses and building will also be realised in the market. All this kind of debt-fi nanced urban speculation is fi ctitious. The same company can fi nance the buy of what has been built. In such processes a wave of defaulters and pos-sibilities of economic collapse remained very real. Debt-fi nanced urbanisation has played a positive part in the US recovery from recession during the 1950s and 1960s but it had been environmentally and economically unsustainable and geographically un even. This had result-ed in the urban crisis of the 1960s.

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The same is true for the sub-prime crisis of 2008. The housing sector in the US is not reviving and new housing con-struction activities are depressed and stagnant. These are signs of crisis similar to the great depression where more than half of the construction workers remained unemployed. The fi nance-capital-driven urbanisation process becomes global. In India and China fi ctitious-capital-driven urbanisation causes the marginalisation of a majority of the population along with high-modernist urbanisation and consumerism. This speculative-fi nance-driven urbanisation has pushed the majority of the population into an un-secure and uncertain environment.

Appropriated Urban Commons

In the next chapter Harvey, while argu-ing about Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons”, states that the tendency of private property and individual-utility-maximisation behaviour causes the loss of common property. The capitalist tool of neo-liberal policies causes the retreat of the state from social spheres and has enhanced the commodifi cation of public goods (education, health and the like). Capitalist urbanisation has destroyed the city as a social, political and liveable commons. Capital accumulation driven by the individual-utility-maximisation behaviour causes the destruction of the urban commons (public space and public goods) and its appropriation for private interests. The state-led appropriation of space for private developers is a classic case. It has unleashed the logic of unbri-dled accumulation and fi nancial specu-lation that has now turned into a verit-able fl ood of creative destruction, in-cluding that wrought through capitalist urbanisation. Harvey says that the only alternative for the population is to self-organise to produce, protect, distribute and use the commons for societal benefi t. This requires, as Ostrom suggested, “rich mix of instrumentalities”. The construc-tion of this rich mix requires a double political attack, through which the state is forced to supply more and more public goods along with self-organisation of whole populations to appropriate, use and supplement those goods in ways that extend and enhance the qualities of

the non-commodifi ed reproductive and environmental commons.

Capitalism as a system has an inherent tendency of concentration and centrali-sation of capital. Monopoly rents play a crucial role in all these processes. In “Art of Rent”, Harvey argues that monopoly rent arises through scarcity of land resources and uniqueness of loca-tion, which results in a particular kind of commodity and service. Capitalist greed reached up to a point where the com-modifi cation of cultural practices to obtain a monopoly price/rent becomes a common feature. Harvey points out that monopoly rent is always an object of capitalist desire, than the means of gain-ing it through intervention in the fi eld of culture, history, heritage, aesthetics and meanings. Monopoly rent as a tool of capital accumulation is a way to appro-priate and extract surplus from local dif-ferences, local cultural variations and aesthetic meaning, with no regard to the origin. As Harvey states (p 110).

The problem for oppositional movements is to speak to this widespread appropriation of their cultural commons and to use the validation of particularity, uniqueness, authenticity, culture, and aesthetic meanings in ways that open up new possibilities and alternatives.

Revolution Has Long Been Urban

In the next chapter, Harvey states that in order to recreate the city and eliminate poverty and environmental degradation, the destructive forms of capitalist urbani-sation have to be stopped. The tragedy of traditional left political thinkers is that they had either ignored or dismissed the revolutionary potential of urban struggles. They are still focusing on work-shops and factories for anti-capitalist struggles. There were many revolutionary movements during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries which had strong urban roots. As Harvey (128) points out, “But it was not factory workers who produced the Paris Commune”. He further states,

There is, for this reason, a dissident and in-fl uential view of the Commune that says it was not a proletarian uprising or a class-based movement at all, but an urban social movement that was reclaiming citizenship rights and the right to the city.

Marx himself depicted that struggle for the length of working day as a fi rst

step down a revolutionary path. Harvey says that in present times claiming the right to the city can be seen as a fi rst step towards a comprehensive revolutionary movement. Lefebvre wrote, “the right to the city cannot be conceived of as a sim-ple visiting right or as a return to tradi-tional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (1996a). On the other hand, Harvey says that the right to the city is a collective right which belongs to not only construction workers but all those unorganised (formal and informal) workers who facilitate the reproduction of daily urban life. So the task of the time is to coalesce the various urban struggle and movements onto one plat-form for the right to the city as a collec-tive right. Urban movements and strug-gles are the most important in our time to change this system of exploitation. Harvey then returns to Lefebvre at the end of the Chapter 1, “Perhaps, after all, Lefebvre was right, more than forty years ago, to insist that the revolution in our times has to be urban-or nothing.”

In the last two chapters Harvey dis-cusses the London Riots and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He emphasised on a broad coalition between people who are marginalised and exploited by greedy capitalism. All this must refl ect the future of an alternative city, an alternative politi-cal system and, ultimately an alternative way of organising production and con-sumption for the benefi t of all.

In this book, contrary to traditional Marxists who considered workshop spaces and factory workers as the major revolutionary force, Harvey justifi es the city space and the precariat class as the

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major force of revolution. Harvey has emphasised that capitalism uses urbani-sation as a tool to solve or delay capitalist crisis. This book is valuable for those who take both reformist struggle and radical praxis as a part of a single movement for a socialist alternative. This book suggests a large number of

alternative strategies for urban inhabit-ants who could, without relying on the state, m ake their life more meaningful, playful and cooperative.

Paramjit Singh (paramjiteco@yahoo.com) teaches at the Department of Economics, Punjabi University College, Ghanaur (Patiala).

References

Harvey, D (1985): The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).

Lefebvre, H (1996a): “The Right to City” in E Kof-man and E Lebas (ed.), Writings on the Cities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).

– (1996b): “Industrialization and Urbanization” in E Kofman and E Lebas (ed.), Writings on the Cities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).