Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City 0415933498, 9780415933490

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A Marxist Tale of the City

Andy Merrifield

ROUTLEDGE New York aiid London

Published in 2002 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group. Copyright €> 2002 Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or utilized in any form or by any elecronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubucation Data

Merrifield, Andy. Metromarxism / by Andy Merrifield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93348-X (hb) — ISBN 0-415-93349-8 (pb) 1. Sociology, Urban. 2. Socialism. I. Title. HT119.M377 2002 307.76—dc21

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 КАНЬ MARX Commodities and Cities, with Sober Senses

xi 1

13

г FREDERICK ENGELS Backstreet Boy in Manchester

31

ö WALTER BENJAMIN The City of Profane Illumination

49

4 HENRI LEFEBVRE The Urban Revolution

71

5 GUY DEBORD The City of Marx and Coca-Cola

93

6 MANUEL CASTELLS The City of Althusser and Social Movements

113

7 DAVID HARVEY The Geopolitics of Urbanization

133

8 MARSHALL BERMAN A Marxist Urban Romance

157

Afterword

175

Notes

185

Index

207

.h

I

"You cannot say that I hold the present time in too much esteem; and if I do not always despair of it, it's only on account of its own desperate situation which fills me with hope" --Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, May 1843

«But for heaven's sake, let us not talk of quarts or gallons—let us take the story straight before us; it is so nice and intricate a one, it will scarce bear the transposi­ tion of a single tittle; and some how or other, you have got me thrust into the jciddle of itn --Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was easy and a joy to write. Dave McBride of Routledge helped make it easy with his typically prompt and eagle-eyed comments. Ditto my (fiends at Clark and in New York, who are unnamed here but not forgotten. Corinna and the guys came up trumps with the joy.

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INTRODUCTION

Thinking about the city from the standpoint of a Marxist, and

about Marxism from the standpoint of an urbanist, is fraught with a lot of difficulties. For Marxist urbanists, this double movement runs the danger of tugging one in opposite directions or else having one fall between two stools. The present offering tries to reconcile these two political and intellectual imaginations. It’s my hope that what emerges in this book will help sustain (and resuscitate) Marxist theory while enriching our critical understanding of the kind of city most of us inhabit today: the capitalist city. At any rate, the act of reconcil­ ing Marxism with urbanism isn’t easy. Often the diffi­ culties Гѵе encountered haven’t just been my own scholarly failings—evident as they are; for it’s equally clear that, historically, Marxism’s own relationship to urbanism has been pretty stormy. And urbanism, in turn, as a broad-based social scientific discipline and practice, has frequently eyed Marxism with a fair bit of skepticism. In an odd sense, the thinkers I’ve selected here, and whom I base each chapter around and give my own take on, have all suffered somehow from these respective pitfalls: their urbanism has been rejected because of its Marxist overtones, or else their Marxism has been “officially” denounced (or ignored) because of its urban (and spatial) overtones. For me, it’s exactly this heterodoxy that makes each chosen thinker not only a better urbanist but also a more imaginative Marxist. To some extent we can hold the grand old patri­ archs, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, responsible for Marxism’s problematic marriage with the city. Neither man, after all, really got to grips with “the urban”; nei­ ther really spoke about the city as a definitive item

Introduction

within the “laws of motion' of the capitalist mode of production. The city was certainly there in their voluminous writings; and Engels wrote several tracts that could be con­ sidered “urban,” insofar as he emphasized the “Great Town” (and housing) question within the overall development of industrial capitalism. But the urbanism on show was more backdrop than center stage, more scenery than speaking part. To compound matters still, successive campaigns and regimes bearing the stamp “Marxist” have, during the twentieth century, been none too kind toward the city, or toward urban intellectuals. (Maybe with more foresight than irony, then, did Marx once tell a French socialist,wI, at least, am not a Marxist”!) On this note, there are a few antiurban skeletons in the closet of Marxist insurrec­ tions. Here, variously, the city is portrayed as the site of corruption, of hell, of Mammon, and Sodom and Gomorrah, the world in which everything becomes nasty, brutish and short. The city had to be done in, taught a lesson, “debourgeoisified”; it contaminated real Marxism, unduly affected the “halo” of militant Marxist practice. Such thinking, to greater and lesser degrees, has indelibly scarred actually existing (or once existing) socialism. The 1949 Chinese Revolution was peasant based and later concentrated in smaller towns rather than bigger cities; ditto the Cuban revo­ lution: Havana was long viewed as the power base of Fulgencio Batista’s corruption and oppression. Daniel Ortegas Sandinistas looked upon Managua, Nicaragua, in similar light in 1979. And Pol Pot had it in for Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The Bolsheviks’ antiurbanism was more complex. Their revolt was dearly urban based, yet their vision of socialism almost wanted to convert whole cities into giant facto­ ries, into colossal means of production and fodder for Five Year Plans. Old St. Petersburg fared especially badly here. Denounced by Soviet Moscow as “the 2 window on the West” and the seat of obsolete czarist traditions, it fell victim to the party apparatchiki. They loathed its cosmopolitan urban culture, feared what it inspired, and thought it decadent (read: bourgeois). Hence, implidtly and explicitly, they asphyxiated a lot of what made cities great and urbanism vital. Antiurban fervor, voiced in the name of militant Marxism, is evident in Régis Debray’s classic insurgent text Revolution in the Revolution? but in an intriguing way— not least because it inverted the revolutionary logic of Marx and Engels. Portrayed as an authentic field guide to Fidel Castro and Che Guevaras thought, Debray’s book aimed to “revolutionize” revolutionary practice itself by turning up the radical heat, by insisting that Marxism became an offensive, guerilla-like operation, flowing from the countryside to the city—not vice versa. His credentials on passing judgment were impeccable: Debray had studied with Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure, gripped a loaded rifle alongside Fidel and Che in the jungle, and served hard time awaiting a firing squad in a Bolivian jail. (He survived; in the 1980s, Debray joined François Mitterand’s center-left government in France and has steadily continued on a rightward shift since.) In the Latin-American context, the city, for Debray, essentially put the brake on true revolutionary momentum. It was the empty “head,” largely incompetent, deaf to the plight of the rural guerilla and to peasant life. The rural hin­ terlands and mountain jungles were really the “armed fist” of a liberation front. The

Introduction

city corrupted radicalism, made Marxist comrades soft, consumers, unwittingly bour­ geois. “The jungle of the city is not so brutal,” wrote Debray. “Men garrote each other in order to assert their superiority, but they no longer fight to survive”1 Debray dismisses citified New York Marxist intellectual types as “bourgeois,” “naïve,” “sinister,” and “ridiculous” Their vice, like the vice of the urban intellectual generally, is the vice of abstraction and theory, debilitating characteristics of the “con­ templative man.” “As we know,” argued Debray, “the mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, and the city can bourgeoisify the proletarians” (76-77). Once in a while, though, guerilla commanders had “to descend to the city” ; it was, after all, the capital of political and economic life, the center of the industrial proletariat, of factories, trades unions, and universities. Guerilla leaders had to spread the revolutionary word, report on tactics and maneuvers. But they couldn’t linger too long in the city for fear of co-optation, or worse, arrest and assassination. “The city,” Debray quotes Castro as once saying, “is a cemetery of revolutionaries and resources.” The Cuban Revolution, Debray claimed, would have languished if it relied on its urban worker base: “Thus it devolved on the Sierra to save the revolution which had been imperiled by the city” (77-78). Such discrepancies and splits between the forces of the countryside and the city commandeered the attention of one of the most brilliant and abused of all Marxists, Antonio Gramsci. Condemned to slow death in a fascist prison in the 1930s, which sought “to stop his brain functioning for twenty years,” Gramsci instead produced 2,848 handwritten pages, rough notes smuggled out after his death in 1937, and published as Selections from Prison Notebooks. If Debray was the Parisian philosopher who sought redemption in the Latin American bush, Gramsci was the country boy from Sardinia who helped found the Italian Communist Party ô in Tbrin. His Marxist “praxis” was much more sensitive and subtle in working through the city/countryside dilemma and in accommodating the demands of north­ ern urban factory workers and southern rural peasants. For Gramsci, spatial antago­ nisms between urban and rural tended to occlude more basic class questions, and one of the biggest problems here was organizing. In the south, urban forces are subordinate to rural forces, and the city to the countryside. There, in the Mezzogiorno, the coun­ tryside was less progressive than the city, but southern urbanism, unlike its northern counterpart, wasn’t necessarily industrial; the culture and history of Naples was differ­ ent from Turin and Milan. And yet, given the dominance of the industrial north, and the greater leverage of its factory workers and unions there, the latter had to convince the southern rural and urban working classes alike that they really were all “brothers.” The city/countryside schism, in other words, is usually a lot more complicated Лап first meets the eye. In fact, warns Gramsci, “relations between urban population and rural population are not a single, schematic type ” He adds, “It is therefore neces­ sary to establish what is meant by‘urban’ and ‘rural’ in modern civilization, and what combinations may result from the fact that antiquated and retrograde forms continue to exist in the general composition of the population, studied from the viewpoint of its greater or lesser density. Sometimes the paradox occurs that a rural type is more pro-

Introduction

gressive than a self-styled urban type.”2 Figuring out the specifics of this paradox, and fulfilling some educative, directive and organizational function, is the task Gramsci ascribes to “organic intellectuals.” It is they, he thinks, who feel the elemental passions of “the people,” yet who also become “permanent persuaders,” active participants in practical life, critically explaining the movement of history and the working class's own interests within that movement. In Italy, as elsewhere, helping forge a “national-popu­ lar collective will” was something organic intellectuals had to engage in, mobilizing the urban factory proletariat as well as peasant farmers, who somehow “had to burst into political life” (132). Gramsci draws the important distinction between “organic” and “traditional” intel­ lectuals. Those of the latter category, he reckons, tend to be of a conciliatory sort—pro­ fessionals, bureaucrats, technocrats and “experts”; people who, wittingly or unwittingly, uphold the status quo. They might comprise, say, lawyers, notaries, teach­ ers, priests, and doctors. Of course, urban studies has its own traditional intellectuals, assorted disciplinary honchos and members of professional bodies, editors of aca­ demic journals, sociologists, planners, geographers and architects. Arguably, this species of intellectual has been instrumental in dismissing Marxism. Indeed, the bad press that Marxism may have given the city pales compared with the bad press urban studies has given Marxism. If anything, the gatekeepers of urban studies have actually sought to kill two birds with one stone: their repugnance toward Marxism is backed up with an almost similar repugnance toward the city itself. In this regard, the influence of the so-called Chicago school of urban sociology con­ tinues to hold a certain sway. It has long been permeated with antiurbanism; pio­ neered by Robert Park at the turn of century, passed on to Roderick McKenzie and 4 Ernest Burgess two decades later, its “scientific” study of the city, operating within a “human-ecology” perspective, saw human behavior through social Darwinist lenses and afflicted generations of urban students. Chicago school theorists took the city as a cancer, a place of breakdown, where “natural” groups like families are afflicted by tensions tearing them apart; destroying community; fostering alienation; promoting deviance, delinquency, and dysfunctional behavior. Rather than enhance social life, the city is where society itself disintegrated. “If the city is the world which men created,” Park notes in Human Communities, “it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live.”3 Reactions to the Chicago school, later in the twentieth century, managed to retain an antiurban bias. Even the most talented and intelligent of urban commentators, such as Louis Mumford, pined for a city of bygone times, yearned for the face-to-face virtues of Greek polis or the medieval town. When Mumford saw the giant modern metropolis, all he recognized was a “necropolis.” His modern city needed doing in, required radical surgery, had to be broken down to a “normal” size, decentralized and reordered. Meanwhile, if critical urbanism has been antiurban, uncritical urbanism has deigned to acknowledge only that which could be measured or quantified. Its preoccu­ pation was (and is) for the “hard city,” for the city that can be “mapped” or “modeled,” chorologically represented. What are in fact four dimensions now get reduced to a flat-

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tened surface, to a “detexturized” plane, blind to underlying processes and social rela­ tions. Accommodating conflict and contradiction isn’t something these representa­ tions handled (or handle) too well—even as (or, especially as?) computers became ever more sophisticated. Reactions to this “quantitative revolution” within various spatial disciplines like behavioralism merely reverted to a paradigm based on voluntarism. They focused on individual behavior and consciousness, and tweaked social psychol­ ogy and phenomenology in novel ways; but they were invariably blind to structural constraint, to those political and economic institutions and forces that can delimit individual action. When Marxism blasted onto the scene (or returned from exile) in the late 1960s, both in Europe and in the United States, all this changed. Certain areas of geography, sociology, and city planning became radicalized and intellectualized dra­ matically, wafting fresh air into erstwhile positivistic subjects, making them interesting and socially relevant in ways they never were. For a while, a lot of the best urbanism was carried out by Marxists, and the best Marxism by urbanists. Some of those Marxists I consider here bear this claim out; people who came of age during the heady period of revolt partook in anti-imperialist and civil rights struggles, became soixante huitards out on the streets of Paris, lived through the be-ins and happen­ ings, the hippies and Yippies, SDSers and situationists. One of the nice things about these thinkers, too, and the others active in Metromarxism, is that they’re all not only unashamedly pro-Marxist, but also decidedly pro-urban. They denounce the unfair plenty of the capitalist city at the same time as they uphold the virtues and latent potentialities of urban life; they plunge into the paradoxes of modern urban life rather than shy away or withdraw from them; and they try to develop individual and collective ways to inhabit a life in this contradictory meantime where two souls inevitably dwell in the breast of 5 any Marxist. They all know, one way or another, a lot about the metropolitan dialec­ tic about how it shapes the functioning and form of the city itself, and how it shapes the form and functioning of any understanding of that city. It is a dialectic that recog­ nizes urban shadows, knows that life for many poor city dwellers is lived in Plato’s cave; is dark and scary; poverty stricken and dire; spent staring at shadows; chained to the millstone; full of Dantesque “sighs and lamentations and loud cries”; haunted by panic, fear, terror, phantoms, and monsters, the sinister forces evoked in Francisco Goyas “dark paintings,” in which Saturn devours his children. On the other hand, this dialectic also acknowledges the coexistence of light outside the cave, so bright, in fact, that it dazzles your eyes, makes them ache from its brilliance. It’s an urban brilliance that promises enormous freedom and liberty, ensures dazzling stores with enticing goods and services, means movie houses and theaters and restaurants and night clubs that cater for every taste and fantasy. Thus the metromarxists I present here know, as Marx knew, how good things under capitalism are inextricably linked to bad things, and that the good life has a nasty habit of turning into the bad life; they know what Marx meant when he said that “everything is pregnant with its contrary”4 But they equally know, like Marx, that within the bad things are the seeds of the good. So, too, with the capitalist urban process. They’re all, somehow, voicing a trenchant critique,

Introduction

but they’re likewise positing something affirmative about urban life, keeping hold of a contradictory duality within a noncontradictory unity, grasping a dual material drama within a singular consciousness. Metromarxism, accordingly, will burrow deep into both this external and internal dialectic. More than anything else, it is a book about this dialectic, about the dialectical city, and about urban dialectical thought. At this point, it might be asked whether basing each chapter around an individual person reverts to the “great men” thesis of history that Marx (and Marxists) would generally scoff at. What about the famous opening declaration to Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte? “Men make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under cir­ cumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.”5 The cult of person­ ality, a specifically individual agency, especially in historical change, clearly isn’t what Marx advocated. Neither do I here. Marx and Engels, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Marshall Berman may or may not be great men. But their work, I will suggest, developed, and goes on developing, not as solo flights of individual greatness, but rather under circumstances transmitted and inherited from the past. They’ve developed knowledge and their own specific view­ point alongside, and with the help of, others, unfolding as a cumulative process and not as an intellectual epiphany. During the twentieth century, this cumulative process of Marxism and urban­ ism split into intellectual flanks that often weren’t dominated by men at all. In fact, it’s women who’ve been their ablest protagonists. One only has to think of the remarkable Rosa Luxemburg, whose Accumulation of Capital (1913) stands out as one of the greatest second-wave Marxist achievements; and then there’s Jane Jacobs, 6 whose Death and Life of the Great American Cities ( 1961 ) is probably the greatest book written about the modern city, period. Neither woman was shy about advanc­ ing metatheory, about voicing a theory that tried to say big things about a big topic, that tried to grasp society and history, cities and life holistically, even if that holistic theory had a humble origin—like the commodity or the plain old city block. Nevertheless, if one makes the logical leap, if one tries to think about any woman who’s managed to meld both Marxism and urbanism together into a formidable singular force, one has to think very hard indeed. And even then one comes up short. For that reason Metromarxism delves into an ongoing tale of Marxist ideas that have essentially been propounded by men. This seems conditioned more by history than by choice. Thus, the narrative will shift through time and over space, through cul­ ture and society, through dramatic life and tragic death, to show how and why certain positions within Marxism flourished at certain times and places. It will discuss how certain bodies of ideas emerged, how they bore distinctive urban inflections, and explore how they can be put to work to help us understand our own urbanism today and a prospective one tomorrow. It’s a tale voiced by men, but it’s a script that involves us all. It’s a dialogue that purposefully has a textbook feel and function, yet strives to retain some political oomph. Indeed, Metromarxism has progressive pretensions, yearning to be pedagogically instructive as well as politically meaningful—at a time

Introduction

when each is urgently needed. It will expound upon the dialectical nature of urban Marxism, and upon the dialectical nature of the capitalist metropolis, looking at how the city fulfils a functional role not only for capitalism, but for Marxism as well. Big cities, Marx and Engels reminded us long ago, help expand and socialize the produc­ tive forces, yet also have distinctive ingredients advantageous for working-class organ­ ization and collective action. The text will begin with some notes on Marx himself, with a little background on his life and on the growth of his thought. I will look at a few of his early allusions to the city as his historical materialist outlook advanced, and examine his usage of dialectics in understanding capitalism as a ‘concrete totality.” Writ large here, as it is in twenti­ eth-century urban renderings of Marxism, is the “fetishism of commodities,” Marx's celebrated concept, something I will outline alongside his youthful idea about “alien­ ation” (or “estrangement”). The shift from the early humanistic Marx (1844) to the mature, politicoeconomic Marx (1867) is at once a bone of contention within the Marxist inner circle and a point of demarcation within various strands of urban Marxism. The introductory chapter will give potted definitions and summaries of debates and ideas that will feature later in the narrative. Here, and elsewhere in the book, I will stick to primary literature and let each thinker speak in his own words, making short shrift of the plethora of secondary commentaries on their work and on Marxist studies more generally. I hope this makes the narrative intellectually weighty, but without the excess baggage of endless (and sometimes mindless) derivative referencing. Marx rarely wrote very explicitly about the city. He hints at it on a few occa­ sions, whetting our appetite momentarily. But these incidents soon tend to peter out Instead, he really left more extensive (and intensive) urban criticism and 7 enquiry to his friend, Frederick Engels, who penned two classics, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), framed around Manchester, and The Housing Question (1872), a radical pamphlet about how the bourgeoisie “solves” the urban housing crisis. Thus, in chapter 2,1 want to look at Engels's work, and at how he wove capital accumulation and class dynamics into a model of urban development, linking up the laws of motion of industrialization and urbanization for the first time, spawnmg a graphic urban Marxism. And yet, in truth, Engels, like Marx, missed much about the metropolis. Neither man was really interested in its everyday culture and ambigu­ ity, and neither really got this ambiguity in any great depth. It’s precisely this thicker texture that subsequent urban Marxists teased out, often more subtly than our dynamic duo, and often more dialectically—though often with ideas deriving from the dynamic duo themselves. The chapters that follow move chronologically and theoret­ ically, showing how successive Marxist thinkers have sought to give richer urban meaning to Marxism as well as richer Marxist meaning to the urban. Walter Benjamin was perhaps the greatest and most tragic twentieth-century urban Marxist He mixed surrealism, Jewish mysticism, Franz Kafka, and literary critKMm with Marxs Capital and the city. Benjamin’s dialectic was open, not closed; peslimistic, not idealistic; it brought a new depth of experience and melancholy to theory.

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Introduction

politics, and the city. He loved Paris, loved its gaiety and expansive flow, and drenched himself in its cosmopolitan exuberance. Yet his Marxist mind condemned its ruthless monetary economy, recoiled in horror from its crass materialism, its oppressions and inequalities. In chapter 3,1 shall plunge into Benjamin’s dialectic, and into his torn brain and curtailed life. More particularly, I want to plunge into his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, in which he brought “commodity fetishism” to bear on the prototypical shopping malls of Paris. En route, I will look at Benjamin’s relationships with Georg Simmel, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno; his discovery of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, his solo hashish trips in Marseilles; his Berlin childhood; and his adoration of Charles Baudelaire, son sem­ blable, son frère. АД told, I want to pinpoint Benjamin’s city of “profane illumination of penetrating the mysteries of the everyday city of things. Walter Benjamin committed suicide at a Spanish border crossing in 1940. With the Nazis closing in and his heart giving out, he was unable to go on. Henri Lefebvre’s heart was healthier. As Benjamin’s one-way street became a little too real, Lefebvre picked up a rifle, took to the road, and fought for the resistance movement. He would also drink wine and coffee with the surrealists, join and leave and join again the French Communist Party, drive a cab in Paris, teach sociology and philosophy at Strasbourg and Nanterre, and become one of the intellectual godfathers of the 1968 generation. Meanwhile, he wrote countless books on philosophy, urbanism, Marxism, everyday life, and space. Lefebvre, who forms the subject matter of chap­ ter 4, urges Marxists to take the dialectical plunge, to turn their dialectical investi­ gations toward the “production of space” and to the “urban revolution.” Powerful class interests colonize and commodify space, use and abuse the built environment В and public spaces, ideologically brandish monuments, conquer whole neighbor­ hoods and urban infrastructure; collectively, space is now a key element in the growth and survival of capitalism. Marxists, he insists, now have to focus as much on urbanism as industrialism, on streets as much as factories. Now, daily life gets increas­ ingly overwhelmed by the commodity and its needs. Yet, at the same time, everyday life alone remains the primal site for meaningful social change. Lefebvre’s Marxist praxis thus champions a different scale of politics; now it’s about a revolt in city streets, within daily hfe; and to help, the early—though long abnegated—humanist Marx must be resuscitated. A lot of Henri Lefebvre’s ideas here inspired and were developed further in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the subversive political group called the situationists, of which the late Guy Debord was its leading light. They were romantic young men and women—avant-garde artists, writers, poets and students—who became the brains and the brawn of the May 1968 insurrection. Then, for a little while, Paris was theirs, and “imagination had seized power.” Debord himself wrote an influential tract, The Society ofthe Spectacle (1967), which warned of the degree to which the commodity now per­ vades daily life. Using a rich amalgam of the early and mature Marx, Lukács, G. W. F. Hegel and Carl von Clausewitz (!), Debord showed how commodities stoop to new depths at the same time as he took Marxist analysis to new heights. The Society of the

Introduction

Spectacle is really a radical critique—emphasizing how the commodity world is now the “world of images” rather than just the “world of things”—the book is likewise a call to arms, a plea “to deliberately do harm to the spectacle.” Like Walter Benjamin two decades earlier, Debord adored Paris, yet lamented its downfall, detested its embour­ geoisement. Paris seemed ingrained into the Marxist mind, and these Marxists have struggled to keep its memory alive. Debord and his situationist friends conjured up all sorts of creative and rambunctious direct action responses to reappropriate their Paris. One was détournement, or hijacking: squatting, street demos, expressionist art, graffiti, and sit-ins. Chapter 5 will outline Debord’s denunciations of spectacular capitalism as well as his love of Paris. The discussion will draw on The Society of the Spectacle, together with his more recent works like Panegyric, a slim autobiography, and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988). Above all, I will explore Debord’s Marxism as one that goes back to the future, expressing what’s been lost from our cities and society as well as what the Left has yet to achieve; the paradox is suggestive and problematic. In the aftermath of the upheavals of the late 1960s, Manuel Castells’s The Urban Question ( 1972) burst onto the scene and set the tone for much Marxist urbanism in continental Europe. Indeed, along with David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (see chapter 7), it became canonical for radical urbanists and urban Marxists. But it signaled a theoretical and a political shift, too. To begin with, it threw down the gauntlet to Castells’s old teacher, Henri Lefebvre. Castells accused Lefebvre of spatial fetishism, of fetishizing urban space, of brandishing “an urbanistic theo­ rization of the Marxist problematic”; no compliment intended. Instead, Castells opted for “a Marxist analysis of the urban phenomenon.” Gone now was the early Marx; in his stead came Louis Althusser’s antihumanism; his For Marx was de 9 rigueur in socialist camps. Furthermore, the city now became conceived of as a site for “collective consumption”—of public goods and services, items provided by the state and so vital for capitalistic reproduction and crisis management. The realm of reproduction, as opposed to strict production itself, suddenly became paramount. In the mid-1970s, the oil crisis kicked in and fiscal problems of the state became conta­ gious at every level. Thus, the state itself now became an arena of class struggle, and the agents within that struggle, Castells said, are Eurocommunist “urban social move­ ments.” In chapter 6,1 will look at the theory and politics of Castells’s ideas, situating them within their historical and geographical context, looking at how they under­ wrote a lot of urban activism during the 1970s. Moreover, I will also examine how and why Castells had abandoned Marxism by the mid-1980s, and how he partly helped precipitate its supposed supercession by “post-Marxist” and radical “postmodernist” strains. If Manuel Castells’s Urban Question brought Althusser into the urban fray, David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973) stuck hard to its classical Marxist mooring. Hugely influential in the Anglo-American world, Social Justice grounded Marx in both urbanism and geography. Harvey, after all, is also a pioneer of radical geography, and Social Justice is a book about the Marxist city and the utility of Marxist geography. I

Introduction

want to get to grips with Harvey’s heavily Engelsian inflection. The pinnacle chapter of Social Justice, “Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Theory,” marks a dramatic shift away from redistributive paradigms of justice (epitomized by John Rawls) toward a revolutionary Marxism. Harvey suggested that we should desist from reformist tin­ kering and instead, much like The Doors urged, “break on through to the other side,” do away with the market system wholesale, since it actively produced injustice though its normal day-to-day functioning. While Social Justice remains a wonderful book, times have changed, and so, perhaps, has Harvey. In fact, his intellectual trajectory over the last twenty-five years somehow parallels Marxism’s own. He’s engaged with the postmodernist assault, dug in through the dark days of the 1980s, lately trying to reen­ ergize Marxism, make it offensive again in the current conjuncture. I will explore these circumstances in depth, looking specifically at Harvey’s uncompromising Marxist real­ ism, à la Frederick Engels, his critical engagement with “the condition of postmoder­ nity,” and his more recent utopian dreams. In Marshall Berman’s urban universe, the theme of chapter 8, Marxism isn’t so much a source of hope as it is an adventure, a romantic voyage that occurred in books and real life. For Berman, Marxism is a special kind of human experience, something “different from ordinary life, joyful, liberating, thrilling, but problem­ atic, scary, dangerous.” Berman brings this kind of sensibility to bear on everyday life, particularly on New York City everyday life, and sometimes on his own New York City everyday life. In Berman’s eyes, Marx glistens as a preeminent modernist thinker, and All That Is Solid Melts into Air conjures up a Marxist thought that pri­ oritizes change, actively seeks it out, yet tries to deal with this “melting vision” at the same time as it affirms freedom. Berman still sees the “modern” working class as 10 instrumental in the development of socialism, and as a crucial agent for puncturing the “fetishism” of freedom; but he also argues that intellectuals—poets, writers, thinkers, scientists, artists—can make a “special contribution” here, too. This can only be done, however, if they (we) learn to read the “signs of CapitaV together with the “signs in the street” The journey isn’t just To the Finland Station; it’s to Grand Central Station as well. More recently, Berman has propelled the Communist Manifesto into the new millennium, and sings three cheers for a post-1989 ironic—not iconic—Marxism. In this chapter, I examine Berman’s adventurous, modernist, urban Marxism, and posit him as a vagabond Dostoevskian Marxist, a lively and generous critic, whose urban Marxism can help us learn to rebuild our city from below, while we try to change the world from above. In the afterword I will tie together various loose ends, and attempt both a synthesis and an opening. I will give some structure and order to what’s gone on hitherto and steer these insights into a possible Marxist urbanism of the future. Much of the opti­ mism here—or, perhaps more accurately, the hope against hope—comes from my own belief in the virtues of Marxism, that it still matters in the world, that it can help us make our cities and culture better and more humane. And even if we never get that far, as an ideal and intellectual tradition, it can make the interim feel more romantic, more meaningful, more alive and worthwhile. As I hope to illustrate, there’s more to

Introduction

Marxism than steel and the economy, more to it than dogma and big statues; in fact, there's more humanity within its pages than we seldom hear about in mainstream caricatures. This belief has been an ongoing, everyday recognition for me, as well as for a lot of others. Living in New York City, experiencing its amazing daily street drama and convulsions, reading the New York Times each morning, convinced me that much daily news, especially in the “Metro” section, could be understood and reinterpreted using Marxist tools. As a body of thought, Marxism has always been a lot more het­ erogeneous and flexible than its assorted critics make out. As a distinctive kind of thought and practice, as a complex “structure of feeling,” Marxism can help unravel the intricacies of contemporary urban politics and development. I tried to examine this empirically in my previous book. Dialectical Urbanism,6 and this volume attempts to intervene at the level of ideas, showing how Marxist ideas live on, or might live on, in unexpected nooks and crannies of the city. Finally, and with a wry grin, I refer the reader to a wonderfully absurd story from the New York Times that chronicled then mayor Rudolf Giulianis “NEW MISSION AT CITY HALL: ‘GET MARXISTS OFF STREETS.’” “Marxism unfortunately is still alive in parts of New York City,” lamented the Republican Giuliani. A sinister Marxist tinge afflicts a variety of enemies, he said, from those protesting police brutality and the New Directions Caucus, a striking dissident faction of the Transport Workers Union, to community gardeners transforming garbage-strewn lots into lovely flowering miniparks. Meanwhile, the unruly demonstrations at the 1999 Seattle meetings of the World Trade Organization likewise highlighted “the remaining damage that Marxism has done to the thinking of people.” “You know,” the mayor warned, “we have it in the city and the influence that it’s had on univer­ sities and thinking and the idea of class warfare.”7 It’s reassuring to know New 11 York’s ex-mayor is worried about the specter of Marxism, even if his worries verge on the usual bourgeois paranoia. But it may be that Giuliani’s concerns are well founded. Perhaps there is a Marxist tinge in the air, something still solid out there. Perhaps, as Jeff Byles put it, in an article appearing in the Village Voice, “a specter of sorts is haunting the American academy.” Byles reckons that the bearded sage might be on the comeback trail, returning to vogue again, after a little time out, speaking vol­ umes for “the post-Seattle generation” who are getting "its Marx druthers.” The moment may be getting ripe, then, “for a new round of Marxist-informed social action.” Indeed, says Byles, “As scholars of revolution are wont to point out, econom­ ics has its cycles, and so does rebellion. Take note, Francis Fukuyama. History lives on.”8

KARL MARX COMMODITIES AND CITIES, WITH SOBER SENSES

Life, Thought, Hitea of Passage The man who famously urged us to change the world, not just interpret it, was bom in the Rhineland town of Trier in 1818. A precocious schoolboy raised in a fairly well-to-do household (father Heinrich, Jewish and a lawyer), young Karl soon fled the nest, and rather than earn capital he embarked upon a long and dedicated career studying and trying to overthrow it—much to the chagrin of his dear Mother Henriette. At seventeen, he read law at the University of Bonn, blithely ignoring his father’s advice about clean living: Karl frequently burned the midnight oil, imbibed cheap ale, puffed away on foul cigars, and once got thrown in the clink for noisy, late-night reveling. Ko wonder Heinrich was relieved when his son transferred to the University of Berlin to study philosophy and eventually breeze through a thesis on the classical Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. Meanwhile, Karl fell in love with a childhood sweetheart and Trier neighbor, an aris­ tocratic beauty called Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his elder and the daughter of a baron, she was a distant relative of the British Earl of Argyll. Karl and the future Mrs. Marx initially kept their affair secret; neither s par­ ents were amused when the two formally announced their engagement in 1836. Karl’s other burning passion then was G. W. E Hegel, the great idealist thinker, who’d held a chair at Berlin years before the apprentice socialist arrived. Young Marx even wrote a charming little ditty in Hegel’s honor: “He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels. Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar.” Marx’s deep debt to Hegel,

Metromarxism

as we’ll see in more depth shortly, was the dialectic, the method and thought system he’d later appropriate for himself in Capital grasping all contradictions and paradoxes, fluxes and flows, theses and antitheses, life and the mind, as some sort of coherent whole. With Hegel, though, everything was in the mind, in the idea, which reached its absolute state in the self-critical, self-conscious individual, free from unhappy con­ sciousness and bad faith. Although Marx would soon turn Hegel right side up, viewing the idea as “nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and trans­ lated into forms of thought,” in Berlin he became the brightest and booziest member of a rowdy crew called the Young Hegelians. Marx spent the early 1840s grappling with, and trying to transform, Hegel’s dialec­ tic and philosophy, seeking to convert it into something more graphic and material, not rejecting it entirely but using immanent critique to tease out the “rational kernel” within Hegel’s “mystical shell.” Twenty-odd years on, Marx still acknowledged his debt to the German idealist, openly avowing himself the pupil of that “mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner.”1 By then, Marx knew that his inquisitive, expansive mind would never be accepted into the stuffy German academy (a similar fate, of course, would await Walter Benjamin nearly a century later), nor would his uncompromisingly polemical style, which often seemed to wallow in confrontation. He took up radical journalism instead, eking out a measly existence writing brilliant articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. He rallied against press censorship under King Friedrich Wilhelm TV, 14 denounced new wood-theft legislation, and flirted with communism. He raised a few friends’ eyebrows en route, who marveled at the young man’s erudition: “Dr. Marx,” one fellow, Moses Hess, remarked, “will give medieval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person—I say fused, not juxtaposed—and you have Dr. Marx.”2 Alas, said doctor was a little too clever for his own good: the Prussian government closed down the sub­ versive newspaper and gave the newly wed Marx his marching orders. Paris beckoned. For the honeymooning Marxes, the French capital set the tone of their future destiny: domestic chaos, personal turmoil, economic destitution. By 1844, the Marxes had little idea of what lay ahead; but Marx himself thrived off insecurity and contingency. Somehow, he wrote a lot, and over the next few years served out an apprenticeship that would establish his credentials as one of the key thinkers of modern times. (Nor did he ever lose his sense of irony: “Never,” he once said, “has any­ body written about money in general amidst a total lack of money in particular.”) It was in such a state of acute penury, and dogged by censorship and round-the-clock police surveillance, that Marx drafted one of his most enigmatic texts: the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The work never made it public in his day, and there’s no definite answer why that was so. Nor do we have any idea what the older

Karl Marx

Marx made of this earlier enterprise. For decades, the “Paris Manuscripts” were buried in a vault somewhere in Moscow; and when they did finally make print in the early 1930s, the long-lost, long-forgotten (long-avoided?) text caused considerable furor within the Marxist fold, especially within the prevailing Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, for they revealed a “subjective” Marx, a romantic existentialist who defined commu­ nism as a revolutionary humanism. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, along with other Marx works of that period, tended to be either deeply loathed or dearly loved by Marxists. Somebody like Louis Althusser, for example, epitomizes the former camp, and Henri Lefebvre the latter. We need to come back to both men at a later stage in our discussion in this volume. For now, we should bear in mind that Althusser has been most prominent in accentuating the rift between Marx’s early humanism (pre-1845) and his mature polit­ ical economy (1857 onward). Prior to his supposed “epistemological break,” Althusser argues, Marx’s ideas were “ideological,” Hegelian, and hence inferior; afterward, Marx became Karl Marx, the great revolutionary whose analysis opened up a new conti­ nent and created a new science: the “science” of history. Althusser’s distinction left its imprint on Marxist urban studies during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Lefebvre, to my mind, offers the most sensible summation of the matter, noting that “in his early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx had not yet fully developed his thought. It is there, however, germinating, growing, becoming. Certainly, the interpretation of these texts is problematic, but the problems need to be properly formulated. My view is that historical and dialectical materialism developed. It did not come into being abruptly, with an absolute discontinuity, after a break, at x moment, in the works of Marx (and in the history of humanity).” A page later, Lefebvre adds, “The mistake, the false 15 option, which must be avoided, is to overestimate or else to underestimate Marx’s early writings.. .. The early writings contain riches, but riches still confused, riches half-mined and scarcely exploited.”3 Young Marx’s romantic dream, for all its problems, was for a socialism that pro­ vided a “new enrichment of human nature.” The “rich human being,” he insisted, is “the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities—the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need” But it isn’t material wealth that Marx thought men and women really need. Human beings actually need a “greater wealth”: the need of other human beings.4 By Marx’s reckoning, people become poorer the more their need for money becomes ever greater, ever more desperate. In short, our “neediness grows as the power of money increases.” And modern capitalist society has one “true need,” a “new potency” and “alien power”—to which everybody is inex­ orably enslaved. Thus, to make it along the bourgeois road, to obtain gratification, Marx already knew we have to sell everything, including ourselves, prostrating our desires and needs and dreams, to the dizzy power of money. He writes, “The extent of the power of money is the extent to my power. Money’s properties are my properties and essential powers—the properties and powers of its possessor.... I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly.... I, in my

Metromarxism

character as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor ... money is the real mind of all things and how can its possessor be stupid?” (377; emphasis in the original). In the section “Estranged Labor,” Marx points out the rational irrationale of capi­ talism: workers become poorer the more wealth they produce, the more production increases in power and extent. They cheapen themselves as a commodity the more they produce commodities. “The devaluation of the human world,” he notes, “grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things” (323-24; emphasis in the original). Devaluation is existential as well as material: the object workers pro­ duce—that is, the commodity itself—stands directly opposed to them; so does the activity of labor and the relationship between one laborer to another. The product and activity both relate to every worker as something alien, as a power independent of the producer, as, in short, an objectification of labor. The more workers exert themselves, the more powerful the alienation, and the poorer their inner world becomes. Consequently, young Marx reasoned, and cleverly, that “if the product of labor is alienation, the production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation” (326). In work, people lose a little of themselves; they’re alienated from what they make and do, from the result and activity of their work—whether it’s hard factory graft or seductive office paper pushing. Ultimately, people get cut off from them­ selves, from their “species beings,” from real human developmental potentialities; for employees, active work becomes “passive power,” “power as impotence,” “pro­ creation as emasculation,” a life of dread directed against the self, a loss of the self 16 for awhile. When at work, people feel outside themselves; at home they can begin to reclaim themselves. The worker “is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home Marx here views human beings as practically and theoret­ ically making our species: “[F]or what is life,” he asks, “but activity?” Conscious life activity separates us from other animals. Take away that free conscious practical activ­ ity—deny it, have it mediated in some way via private property—and something will be lost, a vital force enervated, a human power restricted; full development stunted, undermined. Marx sought the “positive supersession” (351) of these circumstances through the ruthless negation of these circumstances. His yearning was to go beyond all estrangement, working through it and not around it, supplanting it, one day, with what he calls a “rea? association” (350) in which free and more wholesome human beings live and act out “soáal Ufé' (emphases in the original). This theme of practical activity was reiterated in another important early Marx tract, once again produced on the hoof, this time in Brussels: the Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845 yet unpublished in Marx’s lifetime. Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841) had been a best-seller in left-wing circles; the Young Hegelians lapped it up. In August 1844, Marx, the renegade Young Hegelian, sent Feuerbach a rather precocious letter, enclosing his critical article on Hegel’s philosophy of law. Marx, apparently, was “pleased to find chance to be able to assure [Feuerbach] of the

Karl Marx

distinguished respect and—excuse the word—love that I have for you” He added,“Your Principies of the Philosophy of the Future and Essence of Christianity; despite their limited scope, are, at my rate, of more weight than all present day German literature put together.”* In effect, Feuerbach had inverted Hegel, had put him right side up, on his feet in real world flesh and blood. So, too, had religion been “pulled down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth—what else is this than a societal concept!”6 Now, the absolute spirit could be understood as none other than the mate­ rial world displaced into the netherworld of human imagination: Feuerbach had exposed Hegel as the apologist for Christianity that he really was. But Marx knew that Feuerbach wasn’t quite there yet, either. So he began to figure out how Feuerbach’s human abstraction might be converted into a more dynamic material force. Alas, while Marx went about this dilemma, he found big trouble over two anti-Prussian articles he’d written for the Parisian newspaper Vorwärts. Prussian powers that be intervened, grumbled to the French government, and Marx received his marching orders from France. In February 1845, he, Jenny, and firstborn daughter Jenny, moved to 4 Rue d’Alliance, Brussels, which became home for the next year or so. They’d move three more times over the forthcoming eighteen months. During that first Brussels spring, Marx had a major breakthrough with Feuerbach. He made headway with a series of eleven idiosyncratic aphorisms that Frederick Engels, Marx’s then new friend (since 1842) and loyal comrade to be only discov­ ered much later, in the late 1880s, after leafing through Marx’s old notebooks. Engels would later publish the Theses on Feuerbach as an appendix to his own 1888 essay, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy. In the foreword he called the text of his late friend “notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elabo­ ration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first docu- 17 ment in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new-world outlook.” This brilliant germ of this outlook bore a curious label: “revolutionary practice.” The Brussels text evinced Marx growing up—a radical coming of age—developing as a special kind of socialist and materialist, as a philosopher with attitude, somebody des­ tined to educate the educators. Everything lay ahead now for Marx. There was no looking back, even as the Belgium secret police patrolled his every move.

Leaving Philosophy Aside “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included,” proclaims Marx in his first thesis, “is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice” Yes, Feuerbach certainly affirms sensuous objects, objects of touch and smell, sight and taste, phenomena really distinct from thought objects, from Hegelian ideal­ ist constructs. But he “does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.” His materialism, in other words, remains curiously idealist. His “genuinely human atti­ tude” remains, according to Marx, a “theoretical attitude ”7 Feuerbach deemed practice as something external to human contemplation: on the one hand, we have a contem­ plative human being, self-aware, naturally rooted on planet earth; on the other hand,

Metromarxism

we have a human being who can practically engage with the sensuous world. Yet Feuerbach had little inkling of how these realms hang together. He couldn't grasp how “practical-critical activity” changes both sensuous objects and the act of contemplation itself. Thus, by acting on the external world, by changing external nature, practice changes internal nature as well. The two worlds become one world for Marx, con­ nected dynamically, not passively. His subject and object are mediated by practice, by revolutionary practice. The question of what objective truth is, accordingly, becomes a “practical ques­ tion.” There’s never any abstract solution: Truth is forever concrete. This is the nub of Marx’s famous second thesis. Now, humans “must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of [Feuerbach’s) thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholas­ tic question” (422; emphasis in the original). Philosophers can argue about truth till they’re blue in the face. But they’ll never find real truth in hallowed university debating rooms. Abstract thinking can be tested out only by being put through its paces, by making it right because it has been made to work. It’s only by working through a problem that humans will create answers: truth comes out the other side. It’s not knowable in advance: its focus becomes clearer meanwhile and afterward. Consequently, no blueprints, no abstract schemas, no prefigurative plans, none of these will ever replace practical steady work. That’s what Marx means about truth, and it’s also how he defines right and wrong. But in the third thesis he distances himself from “vulgar” materialism. He reminds everybody that humans alter themselves; we’re not just responsive to changes in external circumstances but can be the initiators of change—only, 18 though, if we change ourselves first. Thus, revolutionizing practice means changing people, ideas, and ideas about ideas: “[I]t is essential,” Marx notes, “to educate the educator himself” (422). Somehow, revolutionary practice must intervene in the pro­ duction of ideas. Ideas developed in academe, in the workplace, in the street and bars; ideas that circulate publicly in newspapers, pamphlets, and books—all should be fair game for socialist infiltration. Evidently, Marx’s materialism has an idealist moment. It’s a self-reflexive, self-critical kind of materialism. He knows that ideas matter, and it’s important, he insists, that the right ideas are made to matter most. He suggests that practice alters both ideas and circumstances; changing the circumstances usually unleashes changing ideas. But new ideas can equally change circumstances. Revolutionizing practice, meanwhile, provides the gel, makes truth cohere. In reality, this necessitated “leaving philosophy aside,” an outlook most definitively expressed in a 700-page tome, The German Ideology, that Marx penned with Engels, mostly in Brussels, between September 1845 and the summer of 1846. “One has to leap out of it [philosophy],” they note, “and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown, of course, to the philosophers.... Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.”8 Henceforth, the “first premises” of the “materialist method” became “real premises,”

Karl Harx

“real individuals” and their “activity and material conditions under which they live.... These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way” (42). Materiality, in turn, is the “real basis” of ideology, since life isn’t determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. The actual course of history now looms prominently in the imagination of Marx and Engels, beginning with physical organization of real men and women, their relations with the natural world, and the successive modifications made through the action of a transformative human culture. What unfolds then in The Germany Ideology is historical materialism itself, the “prehistory” and “history proper” of the production of material life, a discussion that heralds the “modem” ascendance of the capitalist mode of production. Before long, we hear the first men­ tion in Marx’s oeuvre of the relationship between the development of capitalism and that of urbanization, whose respective dynamics are mediated by something he chris­ tens “the division of labor.” Industry, Marx and Engels reckon, “exists only in and through the division of labor” (68). And yet, for it to do so, “the division between physical and mental labor must already be practically completed.” For both men, the greatest division of physical and mental labor is, in fact, the separation of country and town. This divi­ sion, they note, is actually an “antagonism,” growing deeper by the day, beginning “with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to state, from local­ ity to nation, and [it] runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day” (69). Towns imply the necessity of administration, of municipality, of politics in general. In towns, too, the division of society into “two great classes” becomes most manifest, itself directly based on the division of labor and on the instruments of production. We’re listening here to Marx and Engels unleashing their debut dialectical vision of the destructive tendencies of an emergent industrial capital- 19 ism—a theme, of course, destined to preoccupy them for another forty years or so. Equally apparent are two brilliant minds at play, as well as a characteristic forceful voice finding its cadence: The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the popu­ lation, of instrumenta of production, of capital, of pleasured, of needs, while the country demondtrates Just the opposite fact, idolation end separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property, it is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labor, under a definite activity forced upon him—a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labor is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist. The abolition of the antagonism between the town and country is one of the first conditions of communal life, a condition which again

depends on а шаэз of aaterial premises and which cannot be ful­ filled by the mere will« (69; emphasis in the original)

Metromarxism

Quite a few of these insights may have actually come from Engels, whose earlier solo text, The Condition of the Working Class, as we’ll see shortly, explored in elaborate his­ torical and critical detail the rise of manufacturing and the growth of great factory towns in England. (Engels will soon give us more inkling about what “a mass of mate­ rial premises” means for developing the conditions of “communal life”) The German Ideology whets our appetite for the historical materialism of the years ahead, sketching out, as it does, the disintegration of feudalism, the gradual transition from commerce to manufacture, manufacture to the giant factory system, the giant factory system to the “modern world market ” By the mid-nineteenth century, erstwhile mercantile cap­ ital had been vividly transformed into industrial capital. Marx knew big industry was “universalizing competition” (in spite of protective trade measures). He knew “univer­ sal competition” was “destroying as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc, and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie.” Marx knew that we had the makings of “world history” for the first time, “insofar as it [capitalism] made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labor the last semblance of its natural character.” The upshot, however, was both dramatic and problematic: “In place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight” (78). 20 If there is any nostalgic lament here, it was unintentional; for it’s evident that big industry brings together a lot of workers in highly ambivalent ways. On the one hand, they’re separated as individuals, alienated from each other, sundered from their product and activity, forced apart by competition and the very purpose of their union. And yet, on the other, this same movement helped create giant industrial cities, cheap and quick communication, and thus made new innovative forms of association and progressive action possible. The paradox, of course, is one of the central motifs of The Communist Manifesto. Written in 1848, a year and a half before Marx’s permanent expulsion from continental Europe, the 14,000-word pamphlet hit the German book­ stores in February when an atmosphere of heady revolt pervaded much of Europe. Between February and June in 1848, in a continent gripped by economic crisis and social inequality, angry workers and students took to the streets in France, Germany (Prussia), Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, unleashing the “springtime of the peoples.” “A specter is haunting Europe,” Marx famously warned; “the specter of com­ munism.” “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletari­ ans have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” These upbeat refrains proved premature, and after early hopes there was a tragic denouement, espe­ cially in France. In February, within hours of the barricades going up, King LouisPhilippe abdicated and fled to England; a provisional republican government was

established, amid popular celebration. By April, however, a reactionary, antisocialist majority returned, and soon workers once again manned the barricades. Tens of thou­ sands perished in the “June Days,” and many more progressives were killed later in reprisals; for years afterward, the conservative rot set in, (Twenty-five years later, Marx, in a 1872 preface, defended “the general principles laid down in this Manifesto,” noting that they were, “on the whole, as correct today as ever”)

Urbanizing Capital, Marx Urbanizing

Karl Marx

Marx prepared the singly most influential statement on modern socialism for the Communist League, a largely covert international association of workers and left-wing intellectuals who, at their London Congress in 1847, commissioned comrade Marx to draft a detailed theoretical and practical program.* Its stirring prose likewise con­ firmed Marx as one of the great literary stylists of the nineteenth century, a kindred soul of Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens, mixing fact with denunciation, prog­ nosis with diagnosis, surrealism with realism. On view was an unprecedented amalgam of Marx’s analysis, together with his radiant dreams. On view was the “what is” together with the “what might be,” a projection where the present state represents the internalization of all past states, as well as the germ of a possible future state. Thus, the Manifesto chronicled the rampant growth of modem indus­ try, the corresponding political advance of the bourgeoisie, and the immanent emergence of its own gravediggers, the proletariat. The latter, alone, are the real rev­ olutionary class. It is they who have been progressively produced by the bour­ geoisie, whose own actions, historically, have played “a most revolutionary part.” For one thing, “wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations ” The bourgeoisie has, Marx declaimed, “pitilessly tom 21 asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value” (475). Everybody and everything—and soon, everywhere—felt the prodigious brunt of bourgeois industry expanding, of capital accumulating, of factories growing and market relations spreading; it altered people and places dramatically, transforming all human intercourse into a monetary intercourse, a relationship between things. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx said, with a blend of smiles and tears, “has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.” He was talk­ ing about people like himself, writers and intellectuals; but the list might include physicians and professors, artists and scientists as well, all of whom now flood the ranks of paid wage laborers—assuming, that is, that their labor power does have a market, that it can produce capital for somebody else. Marx smiles at this “denuding” process because he’s glad; he plainly thinks we should be glad, too. This isn’t because he’s evil or has a warped sense of humor; it’s more because what he saw was something progressive, a necessary evil. Such a contradiction about the trajectory of human his-

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tory is at the core of Marx’s thought, although it isn’t a contradiction within Marxist thought itself. Things progress—and disappear—with their worst side forward, Marx knew the march of modern industry and life under capitalism was going to be disrup­ tive and disintegrative, physically and emotionally challenging, and that injustice and brutality would prevail and people would get hurt. But he was equally hopeful that something better would emerge out of this suffering, out of the initial darkness. He honestly believed light could be glimpsed through the tunnel, that, in the end, the heartache would be worth it. The pluses, meanwhile, were obvious, and these needed affirming within a new, future integument “The bourgeoisie has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expedi­ tions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades” (476). Still, all this came at a mortal cost, for the bourgeoisie doesn’t know when to stop. Indeed, it can’t stop exploiting labor, absorbing people into production, making more products, nestling everywhere, entering fratricidal competition everywhere, inno­ vating only to outdo rivals. Stasis spells death; growth is everything. Production for production’s sake, making money for the sake of making money—such is the his­ torical mission of the bourgeois class. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist,” Marx reck­ ons, in an oft-cited passage, “without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole rela­ tions of society.... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted distur­ bance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones 22 become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (476). It’s in the city where things melt into air most of all. It’s there, especially, where all that is holy becomes profane; and it’s in the city, above all, that we are compelled to face, with sober senses, our real conditions of life and our relations with our fellow humans. That’s why Marx welcomes urbanization; that’s why he sees it as the “natural” outcome of the development of the productive forces, as well as a launchpad for sus­ taining that development. It has “subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with rural, and has rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” (477). The last slur/quip, often interpreted as derogatory, wasn’t always typical of Marx. His view showed more complexity in Capital written almost twenty years later, when he accused the advance of modern industrialization as destroying both the phys­ ical health of the urban worker and “the intellectual life of the rural worker,” ruining rural people’s minds and culture, as well as their soil.10 Rural life, Marx seemed to imply, was dumbed-down by the process of capitalist transformation of agriculture, which destroys rural workers’ “vitality, freedom and autonomy.” Any antipathy Marx held toward the countryside may, however, have been as much

Karl Marx

personal as intellectual (and political). He’d spent most of his life, after all, living in cities. He knew, usually from firsthand experience, how cities often proved economi­ cally repressive; but he also knew how they could provide more forgiving environ­ ments for maverick spirits and dissidents. Marx likewise loved the cultural infrastructure of cities, loved their museums, libraries, and used bookstores, and it’s hard to see him functioning without access to rich intellectual (and predominantly urban) resources like the British Museum. Even when his family moved to a more peripheral part of London in 1858, to a house in then semipastoral Kentish Town, Marx grumbled about going out at night in this “barbarous region” full of darkness, emptiness and mud. The breakdown of rural isolation, of what sociologists term gemeinschaft culture, epitomized by a closed, insular community, is taken by Marx as a cosmopolitanizing and “civilizing” process. It would obliterate old localism, self-sufficiency, and narrow­ mindedness, and supplant them with a much more unstable, yet richer, gesselschaft arrangement, with intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations, and cultural commingling. Marx relishes the idea of a “world literature,” a multicultural intellectual world where ideas have no borders and everything is up for grabs. Intellectual property herein becomes “common property” Arguably, one of the authors of this world literature is, of course, urbanization itself; and the forces Marx upheld—rapid improvement of instruments of production, innova­ tions in communication, the annihilation of space by time—are seminal in the production of a metropolitan culture; and vice versa. What Marx condones here is anything that hastens the agglomeration of population, the centralization of indus­ try, capital, and property. He revels in the big fishes eating little fishes, and the sharks champing on those remaining big fishes. The bourgeoisie, Marx explains, Z'à “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all the preceding generations together” At times, Marx himself seems awe struck: “Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, elec­ tric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even the presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” (477). Workers, formerly scattered as incoherent masses, broken by mutual competition, steadily form more compact bodies, not yet a result of their own union, but a union at the behest of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, for Marx, this very coercive union is set­ ting in motion the proletariat’s own “active union.” In cities, the proletariat becomes concentrated in greater masses, “its strength grows, and it feels that strength more” (480). Doggedly, workers begin to form “combinations” (like trade unions) against the bourgeoisie, clubbing together around the wage relation, fighting immediate work­ place squabbles. Although this is important, the real fruit, however, isn’t the immedi­ ate result, but “the ever-expanding union of workers,” which Marx hoped would someday, at a certain quantitative level, coalesce into a new qualitative power. Soon enough, he believed, proletarians would organize into a class, into a self-conscious,

MetrojuarxisjD

independent movement of the majority, radicalizing in the city “in form” while cat­ alyzing, “in substance,” into a more expansive class struggle (482). This depiction, as Marx advanced it, sees the bourgeoisie as the “involuntary promoter” of a “revolution­ ary combination” of workers. Indeed, with the daily advance of modern industry— and, we might add, of modern urbanization—it will cut from under its feet the very foundation of the society it helped forge. What the bourgeoisie produces is, Marx felt, “its own gravediggers.” In place of the old bourgeois society, with its class divisions and antagonisms, its brutalities and absurdities, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all” (491). Crucially, this can’t be effected “except by means of despotic inroads” on bourgeois “rights of property” Marx, for once, actually sticks his neck out and lists a number of characteristics that this new, freer and more equitable society needs to embody—characteristics, incidentally, that will likewise condition the nature of any socialist city: (1) abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes; (2) a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; (3) abolition of all right of inheritance; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the state; (5) centralization of the means of communication and transport in hands of state; (6) extension of factories owned by the state, and improvements of soil in accordance with a common plan; (7) free education for all children in public schools; and (8) gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the coun­ try. The last remark is ambiguous, and ought to be borne in mind. Apart from any­ thing else, it seems at odds with Marx’s affirmation of capitalist urbanization, for now he posits a postcapitalist city based around a small-scale urban ideal, in sym24 biosis with nature and resembling the precapitalist, artisanal town he formerly con­ demned. Engels, in 1872, would oddly follow suit. In an almost throwaway passage, in the supplementary part 3 of The Housing Question (which will be discussed later), Engels offers a version of socialism that both reconnects industrial and agricultural production and provides “as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country” Earlier in the text, in another flippant comment, Engels wrote, “The modern big cities, however, will he abolished only by the abolition of the capital­ ist mode of production” (348; emphasis added).

Dialectical Marx, Urban Marxism Reading between the lines of Marx and Engels’s initial collaborations of the late 1840s, we can already begin to comprehend the functional role of the city within the growth and hopeful demise of the capitalist mode of production. In general, they affirm the capitalist city historically. They see it as an advance on what came before. They know there’s no turning back, they know that “optimum little republics” won’t do: “the social revolution can’t draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future,” Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). On the other hand, they likewise condemn the capitalist city ethicallyt as something despicable, laden with contradic­ tions, a fuse about to blow. Plainly, these two realities converge into one antagonistic

Karl Marx

unity, a bizarre social form where “everything is pregnant with its contrary,” where possibility is inherent in impossibility, freedom in necessity, emancipation in enslave­ ment. Pushing the point a step further, we can perhaps see how Marx and Engels uphold the peculiar ambivalence of the capitalist city. The same dark forces that con­ jure up the commodity form, that beget the world market, equally gave us the factory town and inevitably define (and undermine) the modern metropolis. Either way, the dialectic reigns—the self-same dialectic. And Marx and Engels certainly recognize the reign of the specifically metropolitan dialectic. All Marx’s thought, as well as his onto­ logical commitment—his commitment to what exists—revolves around the dialectic: It is the most important item in Marx’s (and any Marxist’s) armory. We need, conse­ quently, to spend a little time familiarizing ourselves with Marx’s usage of it. As a methodological device and as a worldview, the dialectic underwrites the urban Marxism we’ll investigate in this book, and numerous Marxists have mobilized it to figure out the dynamics of capitalist urbanization and to expound and enlarge the scope of Marxism itself. By 1859, having “successfully” dodged the Prussian, French, and Belgian secret police, and now essentially homeless and penniless, Marx “eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study”11 Masses of written material emerged from this 1850s period of withdrawal, from his daily stints at the British Museum. Most, Marx admitted, was never intended for publication; it was merely “for self-clarificationOf course, a lot of these private memos and analyti­ cal notations, especially those drafted in the winter of 1857-58, did come to public light, under the guise of the Grundrisse—or “Outlines.” Other chunks of raw mate­ rial were honed and distilled into the first volume of Capital Marx’s preeminent “mode of presentation.” Coarse nuggets now became smooth gems. Now, too, 25 Marx hoped he might “drum dialectics even into the heads of the upstarts in charge of the new Holy Prussian-German Empire.” In fact, Capital is so infused with the dialectic that it often disappears from sight. However, Marx did give us the key ingre­ dients to his materialist dialectic in its accompanying prefaces, written for various edi­ tions, that constitute tasty little appetizers to the main course. One of the most apparent is that of change. “Everything flows, everything is becoming,” said the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus, and Marx concurred. Capital aimed “to track down the natural laws of movement” to reveal “the economic law of motion of modem society” (92; emphasis added). The present society, Marx tirelessly insists, “is no solid crystal, but an organism capable ofchange, and constantly engaged in a process ofchange? The capitalist order—and this certainly meant the capitalist urban order, too—is “a historically transient stage of development,” because the dialectic “includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion” (93,96,103; emphasis added). Marx believes the root of change resided in contradiction. Contradictions, for him, boil down to incompatible elements within an entity that both support and under­ mine that entity. Each facet, however, is internal to this entity, derives from its very

Metromarxism

nature. The obvious example is the commodity, with its use and exchange value, its value form and its money form, mutually destructive and antagonistic relationships, decisive in the endemic instability of capitalism. Marx reckons “the movement of cap­ italist society is full of contradictions.” In trying to comprehend contradictions, he necessarily apprehends the world in terms of process. Indeed, Marx is a prodigious process thinker; process is ubiquitous in his oeuvre. Capital, we're told, is a process; labor, too, is a process; so is value, so is money, so is class, and so are accumulation, industrialization, and urbanization. In Capital the “economic formation of society” is viewed “as a process of natural history”; here, people become the recipients and embod­ iments of processes, or, as Marx deemed it, the “personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests” (92; emphasis added). Marx, the process thinker, regarded social phenomena as internally related at every level. In other words, the way in which different aspects of the world relate to each other is an essential attribute of what they are (or might be). In Marx’s ontological uni­ verse, relationships are themselves contradictions, contradictory relationships, per­ sonifications of processes, contradictory personifications. “What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and forms of intercourse that correspond to it” (90; emphasis added). Thinking about society and cities, from a Marxist viewpoint, thus necessitates thinking holis­ tically. This is a sort of orthodoxy in the entire Marxist tradition; we’ll see it exhib­ ited throughout this volume. Under such circumstances, the macro and the micro, capital and labor, use value and exchange value, cells and body, mutually constitute each other. You can’t have a forest without trees, students without teachers, man without woman—and, of course, vice versa. It’s impossible to figure out different 26 interrelated parts without seeing how these relate to each other as part of the whole—or as part of totality. For Marx, only a concrete totality can grasp the world in an all-around manner; only a concrete totality can transform perceptions and images into concepts—real concepts that are abstracted from the world of people and places and life. Abstraction—thought processes—fleshes out parts in wholes, but equally spots wholes in parts, specificity in generality, universality in particularity, neighborhoods in cities, cities in neighbor­ hoods, cities in global capitalism, global capitalism in cities. Marx’s dialectic is thus inductive and deductive, moving between the theoretical and the experiential, the imperceptible and the perceptible; it is a “method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete ... the way only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as a concrete in the mind.”12 Perhaps Marx’s best and profoundest dialectical construct in Capital is his concep­ tion of “fetishism of commodities,” an insight that—nota bene—is dear to the heart of a lot of the urban Marxists we’ll hear about soon. The discussion cameos in the final section of Capital's opening chapter. Here Marx tries playfully to bring to life (and light) the ostensibly trivial thing we call the commodity. On one level, at the level of sensuous appearance—touch, smell, sight—there’s nothing untoward going on. The same can be said of its use value, as something satisfying a human need: wood contin­

Karl Marx

ues to be wood even when it has been converted into a table. On another, deeper level, though, once this useful item steps forward as a commodity, it somehow “transcends sensuousness ” Then, Marx quips, it “stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”13 These grotesque ideas make a commodity “mystical” and “enigmatic ” A commodity, for instance, is created by the actual labor of living people, whore brought together in “concrete” labor practices, employed by somebody and paid a wage by somebody, a capitalist. This labor is privately owned and controlled, making social things for a market, items for sale and, it is hoped, for profit The concrete “thing appearance” of a commodity is real enough: shoes, shirts, computers, automobiles— all have very real “thing existence” in our world; we can wear them, touch them, drive them. They bear quantitative price tags at the marketplace that adjudicate their quali­ tative identity. In the sensuous, perceptible realm of everyday experience, we think and deal in terms of things—exchanging one thing (Le., money) for another thing (Le., the commodity). This activity is very straightforward and we seldom ponder it at any great length. But Marx does ask us to ponder it, asks us to put the experience of things into a bigger historical and geographical context, asks us to consider aspects beyond our empirical ken. He wants to jog our memory, wants to remind us that commodities are simultaneously sensible and “supra-sensible or social” (165). Unfortunately, we don't see the connection. We don’t see it because, he reckoned, “the finished form of the world of commodities—the money form ... conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects instead of revealing them plainly” (168-69). In response, Marx imagines an association of free men and 2? women, working with the means of production held in common. In this arrange­ ment, there would be transparency' within each segment of the commodity chain; within the different moments of the unity; among production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. The transparency is vital insofar as Marx thinks the dislocation that the commodity undergoes between production—maybe minimum wage, exploitative production, even sweatshop production—and eventual consumption, perhaps conspicuous consumption thousands of miles away, is politically debilitating for the working class. It’s fragmentary and illusory, and conditions us to behave absentmindedly. So, if we recouple this “decoupling,” reconstruct it in its complete social relational entirety, re-create our own transparency, it’s possible to expose capi­ talism and to understand its world better. We'll get a firmer grip on how it functions and what we must do to change it. In a sense, Marx asked us—we of radical bent, that is—to grasp the dual character of the world, to see it singly in its duality, to envision it simultaneously as a process and a thing, as a social relation and an object, an observ­ able outcome with an unobservable “law of motion.” Some of the twentieth century’s most engaging and imaginative Marxists, some of whom are urban Marxists, have drawn sustenance from this idea. Often they’ve extended Marx’s own canvas, opened it up while opening it out, on to the urban scene,

Metromarxism

into the realm of popular culture» illuminating the city*s streets and public spaces while nourishing the Marxist mind. Georg Lukács, for example, admitted that in History and Class Consciousness, our intention “is to base ourselves on Marx’s economic analyses and to proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjective stance cor­ responding to it.” Lukács, the influential Hegelian Marxist, developed the concept of reification as a fascinating amalgam of Marx’s youthful theses on alienation and his mature notion of fetishism. It would later set buzzers off in the brain of Walter Benjamin, while helping Guy Debord theoretically frame his cult book, The Society of the Spectacle. Meanwhile, another great urban Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, put his own spin on fetishism and urged us not to fetishize space, not to view buildings, monu­ ments, public spaces, whole neighborhoods and urban infrastructure as mere “objects in space.” Instead, we had to make the conceptual leap, conceive them radically, get to the root of these things, just like Marx said, and concentrate on the actual “production of space” and the social relationships inherent to it. The concept of fetishism sets the scene for the whole dialectical flow of Capital According to Marx, “the riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish” (187). The movement of money, and the movement of money begetting more money (i.e., money transformed into capital) is really the move­ ment of commodities. That’s the secret of capitalism: the commodity is its “cell form” and hence the edifice upon which Marx’s analysis is predicated. Money in process, money circulating commodities, money as a universal measure of the labor time in those commodities, is for him the “starting point of capital,” money “bring­ ing forth a living offspring, or at least laying golden eggs” (225). And the source of 2Ѳ those golden eggs, the true source of capital, is that very special dispensable com­ modity, a commodity that can produce more than its own value: “labor power,” one’s capacity to labor, the consumption of which takes place in “the hidden abode of production.” Here there’s “no admittance except on business.” It’s here where Marx began his dynamic picture of the capitalist industrial process. He leads us through the labor process, chronicles the working day, mixes rich history with political muckrak­ ing, existentialism with hard economic facts. All along, Marx is stunningly effective at evoking the sound and the fury of capital’s vampiric thirst for surplus value and the class struggle raging around it. He dramati­ cally pictures capital vying with labor, the laborer vying with fellow laborer, capitalist with fellow capitalist. He gets right to the heart of the competitive struggle, explaining to us the urgency of new forms of productive cooperation, division of labor, and tech­ nology. He shows the amazing prowess of human invention, making things that can make and break us, things with “alien qualities,” instruments of man that only betoken man the instrument. Finally, as the denouement to Capital and to capital, we hear Marx delineating the inexorable quest for accumulation, the merciless drive of accu­ mulation for accumulation’s sake and the “general law of capitalist accumulation.” Now, and forever, all barriers with respect to people and places are obliterated, physi­ cally and economically torn down; capital commandeers science in the process, utiliz­

ing it as yet another productive force. Thus, onward and outward, capital centralizes as it concentrates, and accumulates as it centralizes and concentrates: “Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slav­ ery, degradation and exploitation grows” (929).

Karl Marx

Stirring stuff, to be sure. But for all its unprecedented historical vision, colossal scope and intellectual content, which makes mincemeat of traditional disciplinary bound­ aries, Marx never saw the need to reflect on the city itself, never really hooked up the development of industrialization (and production) with the development of urban­ ization (and production of the city). He did for a while in the late 1840s, but it was never integrated into his classic 1860s musings. Despite its evident theoretical, politi­ cal, and historical importance under capitalism, urbanization wasn’t at the forefront of Marx’s critique, nor did it play a central part in his radical hopes. This neglect is sur­ prising: the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1871 in Paris had obvious urban moorings. Only for a moment does the mature Marx of Capital reflect upon the link between capital accumulation and the urban process: “the greater the concen­ tration of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding concentration of workers within a given space; and therefore the more quickly capitalist accumu­ lation takes place, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class. ‘Improvements’ of towns which accompany the increase in wealth, such as the demolition of the badly built districts, the erection of palaces to house banks, ware­ houses, etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, obviously drive the poor away into even worse and more crowded corners” (812). “The evil,” Marx concludes, “makes such progress along- 89 side the development of industry, the accumulation of capital and the growth and ‘improvement’ of towns.... The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the impoverished dwellings of the workers” (815). Marx could have said a lot more in this regard. Yet he didn’t. He left more extensive urban criticism and enquiry to confidant Frederick Engels. In fact, Engels had already visited the “urban question,” had already recognized the connection between industri­ alization/accumulation and urbanization before he’d befriended Marx. He’d actually already written, comprehensively and originally, about Manchester, the industrial town in northern England. In Capital Marx had praised Engels’s Manchester book: “How well Engels understood the spirit of the capitalist mode of production,” he noted (349). It is to this book, and to Engels more generally, that we must now turn in order to locate, for real, the genesis of urban Marxism, and to unravel its complex genealogy and chronology during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

FREDERICK ENGELS BACKSTREET BOY IN MANCHESTER

Karl Marx passed away peacefully ii: his favorite armchair at a quarter to three in the afternoon on March 14, 1883. Three days later, a few miles up the street, the great rev­ olutionary was buried, a citizenless emigré, in London's Highgate Cemetery. At the graveside, eleven mourners paid homage to the “old Moor” and listened to Marx’s longtime comrade Frederick Engels—“The General”— remember his dear departed friend of nearly forty years; Engels’s own personal grief was palpable. But more than this, Engels reminisced about the “immeasurable loss... sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt” "His name,” Engels predicted, “will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!”1 Engels survived Marx by some twelve years. For the bulk of that time he busied himself organizing, collat­ ing, and editing the pile of dusty manuscripts, torn scraps of scribbled notes, and cryptic annotations that Marx bequeathed, all in the latter’s notoriously bad handwriting. (Marx’s handwriting was so bad that it once prevented him getting paid work as a clerk with the British railway board!) Engels was the only man in the world who could decipher his friend’s scrawl. Without his interpretative work here there’d have been no volumes 2 or 3 of Marx’s “vocation,” Capital In fact, without Engels there’d have been no volume 1, either. Indeed, without Engels’s unfailing financial patronage, as well as his unconditional emotional support, Marx would never have made it through his darkest days. Meanwhile, while brilliant himself, Engels never quite

Metromarxism

matched Marx’s intellectual and theoretical genius; and Engels knew it. He embraced his second-fiddle role with typical élan. Unlike Marx, Engels was a self-taught intellectual, a veritable autodidact of the old school. His father pulled young Frederick out of school early in 1837, at the age of sev­ enteen to work (unpaid) as a clerk in his Prussian hometown of Barmen in an office of his father’s textile business. At twenty-one, Engels enlisted in the army, doing a volun­ tary stint in the Household Artillery, which meant moving to Berlin, a city then steeped in Hegelianism; it had an instant effect on Engels’s young adventurous spirit. Whereas Marx discovered Hegel, dialectics, and fledgling communism conventionally as an insider within the University of Berlin’s ramparts, Engels did so exclusively from the outside, in the city’s underground culture, in its cafés, and beer and meeting halls. He lapped it up, as did Marx. Yet the two never actually met in Berlin; their first encounter, in 1842, was brief and surprisingly frosty. Engels had visited the Cologne office of the Rheinische Zeitung, where he’d been leery of the raving young editor who was two years his senior. Marx, in turn, was equally suspicious, taking Engels to be a Young Hegelian pretender, immersed in the kind of philosophy he was increasingly trying to jettison. The second meeting—in Paris, in August 1844—was much more sig­ nificant, of course, not just in the bonding of two kindred souls, who soon realized that they did see eye to eye on all things political, but also in its eventual implication for working-class organization and for world history. Marx and Engels were a perfect dialectical match, a dynamic unity of two con­ tradictory personas: Marx was a dedicated family man; Engels never married. Marx was more conventionally bourgeois about domestic arrangements and relations between the sexes; Engels lived for years in a ménage à trois with two Irish women, Ô2 Mary Burns and her sister Lizzie. Marx, the Jew, was sedentary, squat, sickly and cerebral; Engels, the Calvinist, was an accomplished fencer and horseman, tall and physically robust, something of a bon vivant and flirt, enjoying the high life as well as the revolutionary low life. Marx was poor and impractical; Engels became relatively rich and was wily in his lengthy management of the family firm, Ermen and Engels. And yet, after that Paris summer together, and after their eventual banishment from Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland, Engels and Marx were inseparable in exile. The Marx family landed on English shores in August 1849; Engels followed from Switzerland in November, settling in Manchester the next year. This, their final refuge, was a dismal personal postscript to the promise and disappointment of 1848. Marx and Engels already knew something of the globe’s dominant industrial nation. They’d been together there before, in July 1845, when Engels took Marx to London and Manchester. In Manchester, Engels had shown Marx his favorite alcove near a stainedglass window in Cheetham’s Library. Engels’s father had dispatched him to Manchester in 1842, hoping his wayward son would learn more about the cotton export trade. Needless to say, the prospect hardly enamored Engels, but the sojourn had its compen­ sations for an inquisitive radical mind. Manchester was a thriving industrial giant, home of dark Satanic mills, hugely wealthy bourgeois factory owners, anti-Corn Law agitators, Owenite socialists and Chartists, an ever-amassing urban proletariat, and

pell-mell urban expansion. It made for a motley and exciting brew that quickly lit Engels’s fire, though not quite in the manner his father intended. It catalyzed Frederick’s critical imagination, arousing his admiration as well as indignation, prompting him to put his considerable literary flair to work. The result, a debut book, is a classic piece of urban realism, written between late 1844 and early 1845 in Germany and first published in Leipzig. With The Condition of the Working Class in England the twenty-four-year-old Engels managed, for the first time, to weave capital accumulation and class dynamics into an analysis of urban development, linking up the laws of motion of industrialization with those of urbanization, thus spawning a graphic, nascent urban Marxism.2

The Bourgeois Proletaria!;

Frederick Engels

Engels spent a little less than two years in the town that would become a twenty-year home away from home. By day, he tended office business. At night, and in his spare time, he prowled the back streets and alleys of Manchester’s squalid working-class districts, glimpsing firsthand scenes few men of his class ever did. Accompanying him was his new partner, Ermen and Engels factory girl Mary Burns, who doubt­ less acted as a trusty guide, helping Frederick familiarize himself with the plight and the geography of the city’s impoverished. The perpetual oscillation between respectable bourgeois gent and undercover proletarian agent never appeared to cause Engels any inner torment. If anything, he reveled in the novelty of orbiting in both worlds and of uniting knowledge of each experience. His dedicatory message, “To the Working Classes of Great Britain,” claimed, “I have lived long enough amidst you to know something about your circum­ stances___I have studied the various official and non-official documents as far as ó'ó I was able to get hold of them—I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your conditions and griev­ ances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppres­ sors.” He had done so, Engels added, forsaking “the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men. I am glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life—many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men.”3 Engels was well versed in the abstract finagling of the propertied and moneyed classes; in a weird sense he partook in much finagling himself. Still, the perceptible product and concrete horror begotten by such imperceptible forces he knew not: he partly learned them from direct observation and from Mary’s instruction. (He would later pass the information on to Marx.) Engels was smart enough to realize that the actual firsthand observation was politically and intellectually indispensable: “A knowl­ edge of proletarian conditions,” he reasoned, “is absolutely necessary to provide solid

Metromarxism

ground for socialist theories, on the one hand, and for judgements about their right to exist, on the other; and to put an end to all sentimental dreams and fancies pro and con” (29). Moreover, Engels considered his text a rearguard attack on the English bour­ geoisie, while reminding its German counterparts that they were “just as bad as the English, only not so courageousГ It was in England, above all, where proletarian con­ ditions existed in their “classical form!u And only in England were these classical con­ ditions put on record, documented by official inquiries, written up by government inspectors, as data “essential for any in the least exhaustive presentation of the subject.” One of the immediate things that strikes any reader of The Condition of the Working Class is Engels’s overflowing exuberance and confidence in the coming social revolu­ tion. Engels hails working class revolt, hails its progress in every direction, wishing it a speedy victory. He plainly feels it is imminent in 1845. “Be firm,” he urges working men and women; “be undaunted—your success is certain, and no step you will have to take in your onward march will be lost to our common cause, the cause of humanity!” (28). (In 1892, in a reflective preface to the first English edition, Engels conceded that his earlier prophesies bore the stamp of “youthful ardor” and, small wonder, “a good many of them proved wrong,” even though a good many equally proved right.) Curiously, this youthful optimism and highfalutin tone resembled one of Engels’s distant contemporaries, another avid city stroller and walker among men: Walt Whitman. At the same time as Engels surveyed the depths of Manchester, Whitman, a twenty-two-year-old rookie reporter, sauntered Gotham’s sidewalks harking democracy. He, too, witnessed the city of extremes, the extravagance and dire poverty, the opulence and overcrowding. He, too, was disturbed by it. But his instinct drew him toward it, stimulated him, calling it “a horrible yet magnificent sight.” 34 Both Whitman and Engels recognized latent possibility here—the possibility of light emerging out of urban darkness. Not a few people saw the metropolis as a dog-eat-dog world where everyone pursued their own interests, and where different races, classes, and nationalities clashed inexorably. Whitman, though, saw this as the scene for a new kind of democratic vista, a daily sharing, a “native expression-spirit” in which disparate citizens manage to join hands. Engels’s hopes were less populist and poetic. He presented an almost artless, hard-nosed urban canvas, a class-driven milieu where the “cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought, not in minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself (36; emphasis in the original). The nasty war of all against all wasn’t so much naturally given as socially induced, a product of history not biology; neither was it eternal: Engels envisioned his own “native expres­ sion-spirit ” but it would be experienced only after the capitalist mode of production was done away with. For him, great cities possessed a peculiar dialectical quality. They bore the brunt of capitalism’s penchant for uneven development; however, they were also “the birthplace of labor movements,” piling like people together, forging a mutual­ ity of the exploited, sparking a class-consciousness whereby the working class could pit its will and resources against a rich and powerful bourgeoisie. In truth, Engels could never really be a genuine flâneur, could never be an aimless stroller and loafer, botanizing on the asphalt à la Whitman. He usually had too much in

mind to be entirely carefree. His explorations around Manchesters streets had a ten­ dentious objective, and an in-built residue of Protestantism caused him to disdain idleness. His is a Promethean spirit through and through. Where Whitmans Orphean wanderings casually label the swarming metropolis “a glorious jam” Engels's discern­ ing eye finds only “colossal centralization” Where Whitman marvels at street disso­ nance, Engels, “after roaming the streets a day or two,” witnesses “something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels” (68). Where Whitman's eyes see majesty, beauty, and pageant, Engels recognizes “brutal indifference,” the “dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate essence, and a separate purpose,” and “the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest,” which becomes “more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together” (69). Whitman feels “a New World atmosphere,” while Engels wonders how “the whole crazy fabric still hangs together”

Manchester’s Whole Crazy Fabric Frederick. lir;gela

Engels was adamant in his belief that the history of the proletariat in Manchester, like its history in England more generally, began in the second half of the nine­ teenth-century. Crucial here is the invention of the steam engine, and of machinery for working cotton, which transformed work and spurred the development of giant factories, overhauling the city in its wake. Handicraft fast gave way to modern man­ ufacture, towns to heaving industrial metropolises. The industrial revolution now kindled the urban revolution; two terrible beauties were born. Of course, the urban revolution fanned the flames of industry as well, since the former handily provided human raw material for the latter. Engels viewed the Industrial Revolution as equally significant for England as the political revolution was for France, or the 35 philosophical revolution for Germany The prodigious growth of the factory system now demanded hired hands, which drove wages up and in turn attracted troops of laborers—those either migrating or displaced from agriculture—to boom­ ing towns and cities. Urban populations exploded exponentially, and most of this growth was proletar­ ian. Engels gives a broad spin on the notion of proletarian, having the category encom­ pass artisans as well as factory workers, handweavers as well as farm laborers, shoemakers as well as carpenters. Several years later, alongside Marx in The Communist Manifesto, he’d define the “modern working class” even more inclusively, as those “who live so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.” By that reckoning, around three-fourths of Britain's popula­ tion then belonged to the working class: “The condition of the working class,” con­ firmed Engels, “is the condition of the vast majority of the English people” (63). And their ranks were swelling, rapidly absorbing small shopkeepers and the skilled selfemployed, converting tools into machines, workrooms into factories, and craftsmen into deskilled mechanical appendages, thus reducing the whole population into two opposing elements—workers and capitalists. Among those proletarians flocking to Manchester were also the Irish, whose population, Engels noted, “more than decimated

Metromarxism

by English cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of Irishmen towards England” (62). In such situations, population becomes centralized, as does capital; and heavily centralized populations are what cities are all about. Increasingly, manufacturing estab­ lishments require workers, cooperatively employed in one place and unified as a single workforce; they are divided by detailed divisions of labor, people working next to each other but fragmented by alienation, living alongside each other yet brutalized by poverty. Big factories spell big money, and big towns foster big productive capacity, offering great incentives and advantages: large-scale road systems, railroads and canals, abundant and specific stocks of labor, direct communication with buyers and suppli­ ers. In big towns, Engels notes, “centralization of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliter­ ated” (67). On his jaunts around Britain, Engels noticed a striking similarity of layout of every “great town.” All, somehow, conformed to a typical pattern; none were really planned, yet all exhibited a perverse innate ordering, a predictable logic and trajec­ tory. “Every great city,” he posits, “has one or more slums, where the working class is crowded together. ... In general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns ... the streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building the whole quarter” (70-71). Manchester, Engels quickly discovered from his foot patrols, was no different. In 36 fact, it was a classic modern manufacturing town, situated on the bank of the River Irwell, containing, at its core, “a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole district [was] abandoned by dwellers, and ... lonely and deserted at night” (86). And yet, “all Manchester proper” really comprised unmixed working people’s quarters, each about a mile and a half in breadth, girdling the commercial core, a vast and gruesome palimpsest of concentric circles. Outside, beyond this girdle, lived the middle and upper bourgeoisie whose wealth appears to increase as distance from worker’s housing increases. The haute bourgeoisie resided in remoter villas with gardens—“breezy heights ... in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes” (86). Handiest of all, the wealthy could take the shortest route, through the middle of the working-class neighborhoods, coming and going to the exchange, jour­ neying on thoroughfares lined on both sides by an unbroken series of shops, conceal­ ing the grimy misery that lurks behind.5 “I have never seen,” admits Engels, “so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a con­ cealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester” (87). For page upon page, Engels reveals this “hypocritical plan "venturing deeper down the abyss, vividly evoking the horror, wandering into filthy nooks and alleys and dark

Frederick Engels

courts, glimpsing crippled and deformed bodies, stray and tired children, panhan­ dlers and begging families; he descends into the ruined basements of the damned, “natural” complements to the suburbs of the rich. It's a story straight out of Dante, whose Inferno was well known to Engels. Dante, Engels once claimed, was “the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first of modern time.”6 Plunging into a Dantesque underworld, an internal capitalist abyss, with Mary Bums as his surrogate Virgil (or maybe his Beatrice?), Engels wrote, “Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storeyed, one-roomed hovels, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two beds—and such bedsteads and beds!—which, with a staircase and chimney-place, entirely filled the room. In several others I found absolutely nothing. . . . This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a fac­ tory. ... And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world” (90-92). Interestingly, Engels-like descriptions were soon visible for everybody. They were vividly brought to life in the late 1880s by lacob Riis’s New York photographs, which confirmed everything Engels said and more. By then, magnesium powder could be ignited while a camera shutter opened, and once-darkened scenes, hith­ erto impossible to capture pictorially, suddenly became illuminated by brilliant white flash light. Now, Riis and his colleagues were able to show New Yorkers “how the other half lives,” spending eleven years documenting and photographing the most wretched tenements of Manhattans Lower East Side, those far worst and more widespread than even Manchesters. “The sights [of the poor],” Riis said in How the Other Half Lives, “gripped my heart until I felt I must tell of them or Ô7 burst.” Like Engels, he insisted that slums weren't inevitable, nor were they the result of “moral degeneration”; squalid housing could be improved, it could be eradi­ cated. In the years to come, Riis’s compassionate writings and shocking pictures, admired by Theodore Roosevelt, helped pioneer New York’s public health reformers and the progressive movement while rousing certain guilt-ridden middle-class people to act on behalf of the huddled masses. Engels would likely have praised Riis’s photojournalism, but might be less smitten by his reformist leanings. Everything that arouses horror and indignation is, for Engels, of recent origin, belonging solely to the industrial epoch. This epoch alone, he notes, “enables the owners of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they only, the owners, may grow rich.” Hard-earned wage, in short, “buys the right to go utterly to ruin. This is what manufacture has achieved, and, without these workers and their poverty, this slavery would have been impossible” (92). Engels’s analysis of the causes of these conditions presents a pretty strong and com­ pelling case for the prosecution, which rather than straighten a thoroughly warped system bids good riddance to the very mechanism that produced the warping: compe­ tition and exploitation.

The Dialectics of Industrialization and Urbanization

Met-гошагхізт

Competition created the proletariat. It initially increased the wages of weavers, because of increased demand for woven products, luring peasant weavers to abandon their farms, devoting themselves full-time to their looms. Competition, meanwhile, crowded out small farmers, overwhelmed them by the large farm system, by what today we'd call agribusiness, reducing them to the rank of proletarians, driving many into towns. So, too, has competition ruined the smaller bourgeoisie, likewise reducing its members to mere wage earners, initiating greater centralization of capital, with ever fewer and larger bourgeois enterprises at the helm of the economy. Every day, workers must com­ pete among themselves just as owners compete among themselves; this battle of all against all wafts through the whole of modern civil society. But its workers who really have to face the music. They can compete among themselves, progressively undercut­ ting each other at the behest of their employers, scrambling for work, any job, subject to the demand and supply for their skills and their kind; or, as Engels hoped, they can “nullify this competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its triumph in every defeat which befalls them” (111). By themselves, proletarians are helpless; what they need is obtained from the bourgeoisie. The latter offer the means of Eving, pay wages to any employee as an "‘equivalent5’ for work. In the contract, there’s every appearance of freedom—free­ dom to pick and choice to whom one sells one’s labor power, with nobody directly dictating the actual decision. But a fine freedom this, thought Engels, since “the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked 38 among the beasts of the forest” (112). Even if one proletarian decides to starve, opposing the equivalence proposition of the bourgeoisie, another is quickly found to step into the fray. In general, no worker will work for less than they need to subsist—although this platform is relative rather than absolute. Engels believed, for instance, that Irishmen are accustomed to living off less, are happier enduring conditions most Englishmen wouldn’t accept, doing all the things minority workers do nowadays, like the lousiest jobs for the lousiest pay, depre­ ciating overall wage levels in the process. In one sense, we know Engels is right here; in another, his treatment of Irish immigrant proletarians leaves a lot to be desired. He rests his case on flimsy cultural stereotyping (all the more surprising given his Irish cohabitees): Irishmen, he claims, eat nothing but potatoes, sleep in pigsties, spend everything on drink, can’t pay the rent, and so on. Frequently, his sympathy for the working class—foibles and all—doesn’t stretch to the Irish working class. He sees Irish immigration as active in the abasement of the English proletariat. He knows that vari­ ous bourgeois prey off and foster immigrant vulnerability and insecurity, and prosper from it. (They did it in his day and they do it in ours.) He knows, too, that immigrant workers usher in a problem for working-class organization. And yet, at the same time, he castigates Irish workers for driving down the conditions of the whole class, for dis­ rupting the Eves of the “deserving poor.” “Drink,” he notes, “is the only thing which

Frederick Engels

makes the Irishman’s life worth having, drink and his cheery carefree temperament” (125). He scorns such impropriety; it’s unforgivable because it stymies class con­ sciousness and weakens adversarial character, forcing apart the “more facile, excitable, fiery Irish temperament” and the “stable, reasoning, persevering English” (150). Irish and English workers alike represent human labor power, wage laborers, “the slave,” according to Engels, “of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he is sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity. If the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls” (114). Thus are wages determined. When demand is high and business is booming, wages go up, mar­ riages multiply, workers get more prosperous and have more children thereby expand­ ing future reservoirs of labor power. On the other hand, when a slump kicks in, and if there are too many laborers about, with supply exceeding demand, wages correspond­ ingly fall, and “want of work, poverty, and starvation, and consequent disease arise, and the ‘surplus population is put out of the way” (115). Workers are periodically sucked into production and get utilized as raw material in mines, mills, factories, and workhouses. But when depressions hit, as indeed they must, workers are sud­ denly tossed out, “set free” onto the streets, exterminated by starvation and disease; poor and desperate women turn to prostitution, men to crime and drink; fathers find themselves permanently unemployed; demand for their children as workers increases. The existence of a dispensable and disposable surplus population, made more dispensable and disposable with the influx of poor Irish people, thus becomes a handy lever of capital accumulation.7 Technological innovation, like the newfangled “iron man,” merely exacerbates this state of affairs, diminishing rela­ tively the numbers of laborers at the same time as it expands industry, intensifying the labor process and cheapening goods that are unaffordable to those without 59 work. What we have here is an early episode of Engels taking on Thomas Malthus’s infa­ mous theory of “overpopulation,” as developed in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).8 Both Engels and Marx would say a lot more in the years to come about the bourgeois cleric whose quackery held such sway on English political econ­ omy. Malthus, Engels insists, is dead wrong asserting that there are more people on hand than can be sustained by the available means of subsistence. A surplus popula­ tion, or an “industrial reserve army,” comes about through the forced competition of workers among themselves, when they’re compelled to live off too little because too much gets produced. “Whence comes this incongruity?” asks Engels. “It lies,” he answers, “in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from it. In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying needs, but for profit, in the system under which every one works for himself to enrich himself, dislo­ cations inevitably arise at every moment” (116). Malthus maintained that public welfare was the problem, not the cure: it stimu­ lated unemployed masses to breed even more, further outrunning the available means of subsistence; better they starve in order to bring population back to its “normal” rate.

Metromarxism

Amazingly, this kind of idiocy—or this kind of bourgeois apologetics—underwrote new Poor Law legislation (1835), which put Malthus’s ideas into practice and sounded a little like right-wing poverty programs in twenty-first-century America, where the poor are kicked off welfare for their own good and prisons are built instead of bolster­ ing social security. At least the old Poor Law insisted it was the duty of the parish to provide maintenance for the needy. Now, though, “wise Malthusians” were so con­ vinced of their theory’s infallibility “that they did not for one moment hesitate to cast the poor into the Procrustean bed of their economic notions and treat them with the most revolting cruelty” (283). They’d much prefer to abolish the poor laws altogether. Alas, since Malthusian authority didn’t quite stretch that far, they proposed a law as harmonious with Malthus as possible. Relief in money and provisions was no more; the only relief permitted was entry into the new workhouses, “Poor Law bastilles” that “frighten [ed] away every one who [had] the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity. To make sure that relief be applied for only in the most extreme cases and after every other effort [had] foiled, the workhouse [had] been made the most repulsive residence which the refined ingenuity of a Malthusian can invent” (284). Over a million people were relegated to the ranks of this surplus population. In every great town a multitude abounded. Most of the surplus were said to “betake themselves to huckstering,” to wheeling and dealing and peddling on the streets, pitting their wits in the “informal” sector, vending “every kind of small articles.” (Engels’s descriptions from mid-nineteenth-century England sound pretty famil­ iar to chroniclers of present-day “Third World” urbanization, as they would to any New Yorker, who sees thousands of poor scruffy characters loading carts with any recyclable and resalable item they can scavenge from assorted dumps and garbage 40 cans.) Many more, meanwhile, reverted, as they still do today, to panhandling: “When these people find no work and will not rebel against society, what remains for them but to beg?” ( 120). Often whole families would take up its position on a busy street, “and without uttering a word, [let] the mere sight of its helplessness plead for it.”9 Engels insists that when a society pushes thousands of its citizens over the edge, systematically enervates their vital powers, lets them contract avoidable disease or chronic disability, has them die prematurely through overwork or starvation, it’s per­ fectly correct to characterize the crime as “social murder.” Indeed, “it is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet” ( 127). To be sure, it is murder because the perpetrator “knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not merely manslaughter, but murder” (128; emphasis in the original). And yet, Engels knows workers aren’t entirely passive to circumstance. One of their first reactions to the injustices of the industrial epoch is to rebel with petty crime, the “crudest, and least fruitful” form of rebellion. “The criminal,” he maintains, “could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority” (224). Of course, some workers, resenting their replacement by new technology, followed

Frederick Engels

the lead of the mythical Ned Ludd and began wrecking enemy machines. Then, very gradually, workingmen s movements against the new Poor Law and fighting for a reduced working day took hold, foremost being chartism. With chartism, Engels felt, the working class attacked the political power of the bourgeoisie, its “legislative ram­ part ” Growing out of the Democratic Party of the 1790s, gaining strength during the French Revolution and featuring as the Radical Party afterward, chartism later consol­ idated itself first in Birmingham and Manchester, and later in London. In 1835, headed by William Lovett, the movement established the People’s Charter, invoking universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform, marking the beginnings, Engels believed, of work­ ing people feeling themselves a class, as a whole. Still, chartism for Engels remained more backward than genuine socialism. Hence a union of socialism with chartism— “the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner, will be the next step,” and, in the great cities, “it has already begun” (244). Amid the isolation, indifference and brutality, then, collective fervor became pal­ pable. Great cities were becoming breeding (and testing) grounds for labor move­ ments, rapidly emerging collectivities that paradoxically broke down alienated individuality. “The great cities ” Engels suggests, “have transformed the disease of the social body, which appears in chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of curing it” (148). Thus arises the urban dialectic. “Without great cities and their forcing influence upon the pop­ ular intelligence,” claims Engels, “the working class would be far less advanced than it is” (148). Bitterness will intensify, classes will divide more and more sharply, guerrilla skirmishes will erupt, congealing into soberly organized battles; an ava­ lanche is in motion, and it won't let up. There’s a city to gain, a world to win.

41 Forty-seven years on, old man Engels retained this spirited foreboding. Despite a period of torpid despair, when those radical hopes themselves melted into air, social­ ism was again alive in England. There was plenty of it, he said, of all shades and per­ suasions, the conscious and unconscious, the prosaic and poetic. In feet, there was perhaps a little too much socialism around for its own good. For, alongside workingclass socialism was its middle-class counterpart, a “respectable” type that “actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses.” This kind showed “the incredible fickleness of that terrible despot ‘society,’ middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which Socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion.”10 Far more significantly, though, was the revival of socialism in London’s East End, no longer the “immense haunt of misery” it was. Now it brimmed with a progressive socialism, glimpsed in something Engels called the “new unionism” evident in the organization of the great mass of unskilled workers. This helped illuminate the way ahead. Old unions, reckoned Engels—in a tale chillingly familiar for postwar American organized labor—tried to preserve the traditions of the time, maybe even old bluecollar traditions, and little else, looking upon the wage system as a “once-for-all estab­ lished, final fact.” But “new unions” tried instead to organize disparate, unskilled

láetromarxiain

laborers, perhaps even service sector “domestic” workers, those who ve gotten together when faith in that job security crumbled. Old unions, thought Engels, inherited bour­ geois respectability, catered only for the needs of a “labor aristocracy "being more con­ tent, entrenched and businesslike. New, more defiantly militant unions, however, were now “taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud ‘old' unions"11 Mind you, a sad fact remained: The condition of the working class in England had, if anything, worsened between 1845 and 1892; and the housing shortage was still a burning question for most working-class people. Many socialists, such as followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), the French syndicalist-anarchist thinker and activist, and champion of the artisanal under­ dog, had their own opinions on solving the “housing question." Engels himself had taken it to heart in 1872, revisiting his youthful views of 1845. Now retired, having cashed in his lot with the family business in 1870, he resided in London. It was there where he wrote another important work in the genesis of urban Marxism, a pamphlet called “The Housing Question.”

Secondary Evils: Socialism and the Housing Question

Engels now launched a two-pronged attack, first, on what he called petit bourgeois socialists (enemies, in other words, within the left-wing fold), and second, on the bigwig bourgeoisie. With his polemical powers fully mature, Engels's “Housing Question” lays into both flanks. His critique of the petit bourgeois camp is the most interesting, not least because of its defense of “modern” industrialization and urbanization. “The English proletarian of 1872,” Engels remarks, “is on an infi42 nitely higher level than the rural weaver of 1772.”12 Could the troglodyte—asks Engels, rhetorically—with his cave, the Australian with his clay hut, the Indian with his own hearth ever accomplish a Paris Commune? Engels now looks upon the housing shortage very much on the same plane as he does “overpopulation”: both a superfluity of people and a dearth of decent housing aren’t absolute categories; there aren’t too many people vis-à-vis the means of subsis­ tence and numbers of housing units. Rather, abundance and scarcity are each relative outcomes of the capitalist mode of production, are each socially produced phenomena. Now, though, the mature Engels has refined slightly his critical analysis; now, the hous­ ing question is really one of capitalism's “innumerable, smaller, secondary evils” (318), not the central contradiction, the central evil, not the direct result of the exploitation of the worker as worker by the capitalist. Instead, it’s the worker confronting the power of landed property and the dynamics of the housing market; the cheating workers endure at the point of production plainly extends to the sphere of reproduction as well. Granted, this evil affects a lot of people, even those who are better off. But it hits the poorer classes hardest; after all, they're less able to “bid” competitively, less resourceful at maneuvering in the free market Thus, says Engels, the expansion of big modern cities “gives land in certain sections of them, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often enor­

Frederick Engels

mously increasing value” (319). If poorer people inhabit properties on centrally located land, the/re usually compelled to pay relatively high rents—usually for squalid housing in overcrowded conditions, since multioccupancy is a must, as landlords can then really make land pay. Nevertheless, even then, buildings standing in these loca­ tions frequently depress land value rather than increase it. As such, they're pulled down and replaced by more upscale premises like shops, luxury apartments, and com­ mercial and public buildings. It happened in Paris, Engels notes, and it’s happened in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Berlin, and Vienna. Everywhere is the same result: tremendous swindling and private enrichment. Everywhere “workers are forced out of the center of the towns towards the outskirts; that workers’ dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable, for under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive dwelling houses, builds workers' dwellings only by way of exception” (319). One idea about how to solve this housing question, a petit bourgeois solution, was conceived by A. Mülberger, a German writing in Der Volksstaat, and a dedi­ cated follower of Proudhon. Mülberger’s approach, presaging British prime minis­ ter Margaret Thatcher’s program of the 1980s, boiled down to wanting to abolish rented dwellings altogether, turning every proletarian, every tenant, into a homeowner, and so forging a property-owning democracy, one in which eternal justice reigned. The legal title to rent, Mülberger insisted, was an infringement on this eternal justice, an infringement on the eternal right of the workers, who should own their dwellings just as they should own their instruments of labor. From this standpoint, workers needed to reconnect to hearth and home and overcome modem large-scale industry, the development of which rendered them property- 46 less proletarians. Inevitably, it meant a reversion to an artisanal past, to a bygone age when small-scale enterprise prevailed, a condition in which old stable handicraft of the individual was the rule and where there was direct exchange between producers and consumers. Needless to say, this flies in the face of Engels's (and Marx's) concep­ tion of socialism. “The whole conception that the worker should buy his dwelling,” Engels suggests, “rests on the reactionary outlook of Proudhonism, according to which the conditions created by modern large-scale industry are morbid excrescenes. . . . Once the workers are flung back into these stable conditions and the ‘social whirlpool’ has been happily removed, the worker can naturally again make use of property in ‘hearth’ and ‘home’” (329). The jeremiad, of course, emphasizes the unbridgeable schism between Proudhonism and Marxism, between an antimodemist and a modernist vision of the future, between a passionate yearning for the good old days and a steadfast embrace of the bad new days ahead. These bad new days, for Engels—as for Marx—symbolized the days of the proletarian as a “free outlaw”—a vagabond, to be sure, but a person “liberated from all traditional fetters” hence “the very first condition of their intellec­ tual emancipation,” hence something progressive, something better than before (323). On the other hand, the handweaver, says Engels, “who had his little house, garden and

líetromarxism

field along with his loom was a quiet, contented man, ‘godly and honorable’ despite all misery and despite all political pressure; he doffed his cap to the rich, to the priest and to the officials of the state and inwardly was altogether a slave” (323). Under Proudhonism there was equally no role for modern technology, no role for steam power, for mechanical looms. Only respectable hand labor counted as authentic labor. But Engels realizes the potentially liberating power of mechanization: freed of its cap­ italistic control and ownership, new technology really could lighten the load, really could shorten the working day, could free up time for intellectual stimulation and development, could enable a modern urban culture to flourish. Proudhon, a selftaught plebian and printer by training, was himself suspicious of intellectuals, citified types obsessed with theoretical abstraction. Instead, he wanted his quasi-anarchistic revolutionaries to be tough, hardened by “honest” manual labor: “No white hands, only hands with callouses,” ran his maxim. These doctrinal battles and disagreements—Engels and Marx versus Proudhon— marked an important cleavage in the trajectory of the nineteenth-century socialist movement. As early as 1842, Marx had praised the older Proudhon’s What is Property? wherein the latter remarked, unequivocally, that “property is theft!” Soon, though, the men fell out. In 1846, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy as an “Answer to the ‘Philosophy of Poverty5 by M. Proudhon ” It was a stinging indict­ ment of Proudhons reversion to Hegelian dialectics and his petit bourgeois politicoeconomic pretensions, which sought to preserve a certain amount of private property for workers in a system of equitable exchange between self-governed pro­ ducers. There was likewise a significant organizational-political rift between the two men, between a socialist who advocated an interim centralized “dictatorship of 44 the proletariat” and one who pushed for an antistatist, decentralized, mutualism. For years, acrimony raged between followers of each camp, between the Marxist First International Working Men’s Association’s (IWMA) tight collectivist stance and its looser libertarian impulses, with each flank viewing the other as either authoritarian or petit bourgeois.13 The successes and failures of the 1871 Paris Commune seemed only to accentuate this conflict. In his “Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question,” Engels thinks the “only social measure which the Proudhonists put through was the decision not to confiscate the Bank of France, and this was partly responsible for the downfall of the Commune” (370; emphasis in the original). In 1876, the fac­ tional breech finally blew apart entirely, and the First International collapsed at its Philadelphia convention. For Engels, the Proudhonist solution to the housing question, insofar as it con­ tained “any rational and practically applicable content,” actually found itself being enacted; it was already getting realized not as a revolutionary working-class idea, but as a program of big bourgeois reform. Across Europe, for instance, tenants were increas­ ingly becoming buyers: speculating financial institutions were advancing loans to workers, encouraging them to purchase their humble homes, which they’d repay on the installment plan with hefty interest. The practice, Engels felt, meant rich pickings for the usual bourgeois suspects who now profited by artificially raising the value of

Frederick Engels

housing as a commodity and restricting the supply of ever more costly (and fewer) rental units. At the same time, it drove an ideological wedge through the working class as whole, between those with and those without property. As Engels writes in a footnote added in 1887 (though it might just as well have been written in 1997), “this solution of the housing question by means of chaining the worker to his own 'home' is arising spontaneously in the neighborhood of big or rapidly rising American towns.... In this way the workers must shoulder heavy mortgage debts in order to obtain these dwellings, and now indeed become the slaves of their employers. They are tied to their houses, they cannot go away, and must put up with whatever work conditions are offered them” (330). Now, apparently, with a stake in “the system” and mortgaged up to the hilt, some workers become paragons of consenting citizens, stifling revolution­ ary spirit. In short, the Proudhonist plan, far from bringing the working class any relief, was used directly against it. Engels’s last word against Proudhonism becomes the first word of urban Marxism, as he writes, “As it is not our task to create utopian sys­ tems for the organization of the future society, it would be more than idle to go into the question here. But one thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real ‘housing shortage,’ provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally only occur through the expropriation of the present owners by quartering in their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by the present-day state” (330; emphasis added).

Shifting the Problem Elsewhere The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, has its own ax to grind here. For a start, it plainly has more than just a financial stake in the housing question: remedying “bad districts” is literally a life and death concern for the rich as well as the poor. Squalid neighbor­ hoods, after all, are breeding places for deadly epidemics like cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, and other germs spread by foul air and poisoned water, and the crossclass diffusion of these diseases had recently become an established scientific fact. Terminal epidemics, while incubated in proletarian districts and more deadly for mal­ nourished, overworked people, nonetheless threaten affluent bourgeois districts, too, haunting even its most robust and upright denizens. “The angel of death,” Engels warns his readers, “rages in the ranks of the capitalists as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers” (337). All of this spurred those bourgeois of a philanthropic bent to act fast, and sometimes nobly, if not always altruistically. Soon societies were founded, books were written, proposals were drafted, and laws were debated and enacted to address the causes of recurring epidemics. Workers’ housing conditions were identified as a chief culprit and addressing public health drew closer scrutiny, figuring more and more on the agendas of justifiably terrified bour­ geois. In this regard, Engels singled out the work of a certain Dr. Emil Sax, who was a typical proponent of the well-meaning bourgeois mind. Engels pilloried Sax’s ideas

lletrofflarxism

about remedying worker’s ills, about reforming pestilent neighborhoods and lousy housing, by finding ways and means by which all wage workers could be turned into capitalists without ceasing to be wage workers. Sax, in a nutshell, believed pigsties could be converted into beautiful, healthy accommodations if only their occupants would aspire to the “pure heights of material and spiritual well-being,” if only workers could somehow elevate themselves to the rank of homeowners. The problem, as Sax defines it, is one of moral failing, not economic injustice. Thus, notes Engels, “just as Proudhon takes us from the sphere of economics into the sphere of legal phrases, so our bourgeois socialist takes us here from the economic sphere into the moral sphere” (341). The rich, it would seem, are able to wash and cleanse themselves, so why can’t the poor? Sax is that familiar conservative species: the worshipper of self-help for the poor. Of course, with self-help, structural economic deficiencies are obfuscated or denied, shoved off into the never-never land of personal freedom, solvable by the individual taking responsibility for her destiny. A nice idea in principle, admits Engels, but hardly feasible for workers with no resources, with no means of even reaching the bottom rung of the social ladder. So Sax urges sympa­ thetic factory owners to assist workers in obtaining suitable dwellings, to provide them with cheap land and advance “building capital,” to offer reduced credit rates and somehow subsidize workers’ own subsistence. Understandably, Engels wants to know how these reforms can become general without a corresponding reduction of wages. At best, he thinks, these schemes would remain isolated experiments, and “their very existence as isolated exceptions proves that their realization on an exten­ sive scale is incompatible with the existing capitalist mode of production” (345). They’ll never really be the solution to the housing question, for, in truth, the bour46 geoisie doesn’t want to solve the housing question. But neither can they let the problem get too much out of hand, out of their control. In reality, insists Engels, the bourgeoisie—and the bourgeois state—has but one method of settling the housing question “after its own fashion—that is to say, of settling it in such a way that the solu­ tion continually poses the question anew” (365). No matter what the reasons may be, whether for public health considerations or strategic beautification or both, the impact and outcome is the same everywhere, every time: “breaches in working class quarters, renews the central city, re-conquers it, turns it into a space of luxury and profit, uproots the most scandalous alleys and lanes, dis­ places their most grisly manifestations, removing them away from the purview of the bourgeoisie, beyond the range of transmittable disease and infection. Yet those breed­ ing places of disease, those insufferable cellars and infamous hovels, aren’t abolished: “they are merely shifted elsewhere!” (368). Indeed, the same necessity that produced them in the first place reproduces them in the next place as well. So it goes, on and on. To this end, there is no end, for, admits Engels, “as long as the capitalist mode of pro­ duction continues to exist it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the lot of the workers” (368). The real solution to the housing question can come about “only when society has been suffi­ ciently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the antithesis between

town and country” The means toward the real end, then, meant: “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labor by the working class itself” (368).

Frederick Ertgela

Engels was convinced that the proletariat—“the modern working class”—was a new emerging force, an agent both actively created by the industrial epoch and the sole agent who could actually overthrow that epoch. He and Marx bonded over that con­ viction. The industrial epoch, involuntarily orchestrated and coordinated by the bour­ geoisie, produces, in blunt terms, its own gravediggers. Thus, the development of modern industry cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bour­ geoisie produces and appropriates our means of life. This new revolutionary subject was becoming radicalized in a new social environment: initially the factory town, increasingly the modern metropolis—progenies of the Industrial Revolution as well as key elements in dramatizing and fueling the expansion of this revolution. Despite its class divisions and horrors, Engels affirmed the capitalist metropolis: it is an advance on its feudal and premodern forebear. Now, stripped of all fetters of the “idyllic past” and “philistine sentimentalism,” the metropolis marked a step for­ ward in the march of liberation, providing a fertile context for the free association of the proletariat. As industry developed, the proletariat developed, expanding in numbers, becoming more concentrated in greater masses, forming new combina­ tions (like trade unions). Denuded by industrialization, stripped of anything but their capacity to labor and think, in the giant city people came to share a mutual vulnerability. The callous cash nexus ushered in a rude awakening, and Engels yearned tor what lies on the other side once these new proletarian associations conjoined and figured out, with sober senses, their real conditions of life and their 47 relations with their fellow human beings. As for specific contradictions of this metropolis, Engels saw but a single cure: nothing short of abolition of the mode of production itself. Nothing less would do, nothing else would be permissible or negotiable: there was simply no alternative. It was deracination or perpetual purgatory, a Hobsons choice for radicals. Thus, no urban reform could rescue the poor, no housing or social policy could address the nub of the poverty or string up the real culprits. Rather, it just moved the problem some place else, to another part of town, to somewhere more politically, economically, and hygienically expedient for assorted ruling classes. Engels refused to accept any urban renewal program, however well meant. It was revolution or death on credit. As such, beyond relentless criticism, beyond the utter exorcism of the market mechanism, beyond competitive bidding for land and labor power, Engelsian Marxism says little about cities in the meanwhile. Engels’s hypermyopia blurs much myopic detail. In fact, it leaves a political and existential vacuum in the interim; it denies, if you will, any herey now. The problems of the city are displaced by the prob­ lems of revolution. The former will have to wait until after the latter are solved. Engels himself remarked that once the proletariat has won political power, “measures prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are

Metromarxiam

other expropriations by the present-day state” (330; emphasis added). Engelsian urban Marxism downplays the dialectics of the city, dilutes its atmos­ phere, fails to spot certain cultural characteristics, latent political possibilities, and human potentialities located within everyday city life. Engels and Marx, as modern thinkers and modern urban dwellers, each saw and felt these urban cultural character­ istics, yet existed on a theoretical, temporal, and political plane far removed from the city street and its convulsions, acknowledging the forest but missing the trees. Neither man was really interested in culture or in the everyday ambiguity of the modern metropolis. Sure, Engels grasped a part of it, realized the creative destructive capacity of capitalist urbanization, saw it as something to embrace rather then balk from. The city, he knew, was (and still is) a primal scene of class struggle. But a distinctive urban cul­ ture and politics never struck Engels; he never quite got it, never quite understood the city’s thicker texture and richer density. It is precisely this texture and density that sub­ sequent urban Marxists have reveled in, have tried to flesh out more subtly, even more dialectically, though often—paradoxically—with ideas derived from Marx and Engels themselves. None of this detracts from Frederick Engels’s brilliance. His faults were more birth pangs than errors of wisdom. He was the first urban Marxist. He put in place the foundations, pointed to the significance of urbanization in the history and transformation of the capitalist mode of production. He never did quite make it into the twentieth century, never saw a Marxist urbanism flourish. He died in August 1895, and his body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. At the time, Walter Benjamin would have been three years old, a little boy living out his “Berlin Chronicle.”

46

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WALTER BENJAMIN THE CITY OF PROFANE ILLUMINATION

"Things have a life of their own,« the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.« —Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Introduction: The Mysterious Work of Remembrance If Frederick Engels discovered the city through discov­ ering Marxism, Walter Benjamin discovered Marxism through discovering the city. His acquaintance with the latter, he said, was “primal,” made early, in childhood. Benjamin wrote about it in 1932 in one of his best-loved essays, “A Berlin Chronicle,” a Proustian encounter with the lost times and spaces of his native city. The piece, like a lot of what Benjamin wrote, was beyond catego­ rization, and went unpublished in his lifetime. It was written while in his late thirties, when Benjamin had less than a decade to live. It wasn’t really literary criticism, nor was it autobiography. It presented fragmented images and hauntings of puberty, and beautiful pas­ sages on Berlin’s minutiae, endlessly interpolated, advancing from the small to the smallest of detail. Benjamin tells us it wasn’t autobiography he sought; his mind operated differently: It always would. Autobiography concerned itself with time, he said, with actual sequence of events, with what makes up “the con­ tinuous flow of life.”1 Instead, he concerned himself with space, with discontinuities, with moments—fleet­ ing or eternal. His was a topographical imagination, passionately embracing thingness, seeing, hearing and

feeling only buildings, fences, doorknobs, vistas, monuments, signboards, street names, all of which he allotted “a brief, shadowy existence”

Metroxnarxism

Walter Benjamin was born into a rich, Jewish (but nonobservant) family His formative years were solitary, isolated, full of nannies and French governesses, with few friends and little exposure to the outside world. After unhappy days at Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Schule, Benjamins parents sent him away to Haubinda, a country boarding school, thinking rural life might improve his health, make him more independent. It was a progressive institution and Benjamin found an early influence there: Gustav Wyneken, a school reformer with a markedly different approach to pedagogy. Wyneken expressed solidarity with youth, believing education should be conducted in an open dialogue where ideas freely exchange between teacher and pupil. It was a refreshing antidote to the traditional bourgeois model of distance and authority. Benjamin seemed to flour­ ish and, despite his shyness and awkwardness (which he’d never outgrow), began thinking independently. At the age of twenty he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, intending to study philosophy. Freiburg’s provincialism didn’t offer an emerging cosmopolitan Berliner too much cultural stimulation. Neither, apparently, did his philosophy classes. Both town and studies felt narrow and stuffy. Walter attended Heinrich Rickert’s lectures on logic, ethics and aesthetics, as did a certain Martin Heidegger. If they inspired the latter, for the former “if that’s philosophy ...” Benjamin was not impressed. “It is a fact,” he told childhood friend Herbert Blumenthal in a letter dated May 14, 1912, “that in Freiburg I am able to think independently about scholarly matters only about one-tenth as often as in Berlin.”2 He breathed a sight of relief when his 50 first summer semester ended. Returning to Berlin in 1912, back at home, he enrolled at the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University for the winter session. His main interests by then were philosophy, German literature, and art history. The year 1913 was significant for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Benjamin attended the packed lectures given by a scholar who made a lasting impression on him, not least in his thinking about the modern metropolitan experience: Georg Simmel, the great fin de siècle philosopher and sociologist whose students also included Ernst Bloch, Gershom Scholem (two friends to be), and Georg Lukács. (Simmel, a Jew, later left Berlin for Strasbourg to gain the professorship he was always denied in Berlin.3) For another, in May of that year Benjamin visited for the first time, as “a stroke of good fortune,” Paris, his vie en rose, a city he’d conjure up soon enough, more in thought than in fact.

The Metropolis and Mental Life Benjamin took plenty from Simmel and reworked it into his own take on the capitalist j metropolis, and on its ties to the money economy and individuality. In a way, Simmel’s j ideas about urbanism dialectically framed Benjamin’s, providing space and form for r¿ him to apply some specifically Marxist motifs in the years to come. Simmels big book The Philosophy of Money, attempted, its preface said, to put “another story beneath historical materialism.” He never voiced any explicit Marxist allegiances, but it’s clear

fc

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that Simmel thought his sociology and impressionistic social theory was complemen­ tary to Marxism, not a negation of it, putting more of a psychological gloss on money and human interactions, bringing Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche into the dialogue. One of his most famous short essays, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), barely ten pages long, summarized these findings. In characteristically clipped and succinct prose, beautifully crafted yet overflowing with intense detail, Simmel bedded his analyses down on the psychological basis of money in the metropolis itself. It was likely first performed orally, given that it embodies the precision of diction and amazing expanse of thinking that so fascinated Benjamin in class. The essay really has two distinctive strands flowing through it, a duality that some­ how hangs together as a paradoxical unity. Robert Park and Chicago-school sociolo­ gists admired Simmel’s work, and were certainly influenced by the first half of “Metropolis and Mental Life”; Benjamin, on the other hand, was forever torn between both parts, though he tried his best to live out the second half. Simmel's problematic centered on how individuality could be upheld in the face of the overwhelming social forces that dramatize modern life. This, he said, was one of deepest anxieties confronting the “metropolitan type,” the inhabitants of the modern city whose everyday existence is bombarded with nervous stimulation, with “rapid crowding of changing images,” and an “intensified emotional life.”4 “With each crossing of the street,” wrote Simmel, “with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupa­ tional and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life” (410). The metropolis’s brusque shifts, its innumerable interactions and encounters, its dissonance and unexpected upheavals, sheer noise and bustle, contrasted markedly with the smoother and slower flowing rhythms of the small town. Thus, 51 in order to accommodate the fast and discordant metropolitan rhythms, metro­ politan man and woman react with their heads rather than their hearts: they develop an “intellectualistic mentality” (412), become detached, more calculating, aloof, avoid eye-contact with passers-by or with fellow subway travelers. Simmel labels this “objec­ tive disposition,” this defensive precaution, “blasé attitude” (414). The source of such attitude, Simmel claims, flows from the money economy. In modern life, money ¿¡ becomes the true mediator, a “new precision,” adjudicating all qualitative relationships J; Y and exchanges qualitatively. Marx knew this well, of course, but was fascinated more in W moneys impact as a social power and in its metamorphoses within the process of pro'iiduring capital. Simmel embeds money within the realm of experience—specifically ¿urban experience—in both macro social relationships and in micro psychological ; impulses; Benjamin’s Marxism later bore the stamp of each respective viewpoint. For Simmel, “relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so |J«ried and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the giÿfhole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos” (412). “If all the clocks I watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways,” notes Simmel, ously, “even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city 1 be disrupted” (413). Money, then, is a shady Faustian bargain, necessary some-

Metromarxism

how to facilitate exchange, to make the world go around, yet inherently destructive because it “hollows out the core of things,” including peoples’ own individuality, level­ ing any specific value and incomparability. In the first half of “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel evokes money as a source of alienation and the metropolis its devilish incarnation, someplace where people are atomized, bundled together in lonely crowds, where they’re naked and vulnerable, and where everybody is weighing and calculating things, including each other This is one reason why those most passionate and romantic advocates of individuality like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Ruskin, and Nietzsche loathed the modern city, hated “the hypertrophy of objective culture” as opposed to the preponderance of the “subjective spirit.” It was precisely such a breaking down of subjective bonds—the old gemeinschaft world—that stirred the sociological nostalgia of Chicago-school theorists. Benjamin’s critical imagination likewise recognized this facet. But it was the shifts in tempo and culture, and the changes in the built environment of his native city especially, that vividly revealed a few twists. Here, for instance, Benjamin followed Simmel, his teacher. Indeed, one of the ironies that ensued, and one Simmél points out in part 2 of his great essay, is that these same disruptive and unnerving economic and social forces are equally the root of immense developmental tendencies, offering tremendous scope for new individual and collective freedoms. This is where the concept of modernity enters the scene, for modern metropolitan life, Simmel insists, actually opens up human potentiality, enlarges ones frame of reference, lets people breathe and lose their fixed identities, liberates them from small-town prej­ udice and binds (see 416-19). As such, the metropolis becomes “the locale of free­ dom,” and inner life brims with waves from far-flung areas, functions and 52 internalizes ingredients beyond its immediate boundaries. Now, the metropolis comes into its own as “the seat of cosmopolitanism.” Simmel reminds us that while Nietzsche hated the metropolis—its “herd tendencies” fostered mediocrity and under­ mined individualism—it’s no coincidence that these “preachers of individuality” are “so passionately loved in the metropolis and why they appear to the metropolitan man as prophets and saviors of his most unsatisfied yearnings” (419). Benjamin knew at university that he wanted to make this cosmopolitan freedom his own, wanted to work within the metropolitan contradiction, work within its alien­ ation/liberty ambivalence. He spent the rest of his life trying to straddle it, trying to pin down its dialectical basis. He’d had his appetite whetted during the opening decades of the twentieth century by Berlin. Its “kinetic fantasy” was the backdrop for Alfred Döblin’s 1929 masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz, the story of fictional lowlife Franz Biberkopf, whose sordid Berlin milieu was a world removed from college boy Benjamins own. (Werner Fassbinder transformed Berlin Alexanderplatz into an epic fifteen-hour movie in 1980.) But one of the stars of Döblin’s book—the Alexanderplatz neighborhood itself—gulped in, and was nourished by, the same j modern Berlin air that Benjamin imbibed. A ubiquitous, dizzy, and noisy presence f here was movement shifting and jarring contrapuntal scenes of traffic—trams, | omnibuses, trains, cars, and people, en masse. It was a world in which Franz Biberkopf |

W alter Benjamin

coula only stay aecent ror а weeK! ino. о» runs across Kosenmaler Fiatz, Wittenau, Nordbahnhof, Heilanstalt, Weddingplatz, Stettiner Station, Rosenthaler Platz, Alexanderplatz ” wrote Döblin. “In the middle of Rosenthaler Platz, a man with two yellow packages jumps off from the 41, an empty taxi glides just past him___ On the Elsässer Strasse they have fenced in the whole street leaving only a narrow gangway. A power engine puffs behind the billboards. Becker-Fiebig Building Contractor Inc., Berlin W 38. There is a constant din, dump carts are lined up as far as the comer, on which stands the Commercial and Savings Bank, Deposit Branch L, Custody of Securities, Payment of Savings Bank Deposits. Five men, workmen, kneel in front of the bank driving small stones into the ground/'5 Benjamin, our would-be Marxist critic, condemned the capitalist metropolis with its ruthless economy, and recoiled in horror from its crass material trappings and its oppressions, excesses, and inequities—the stuff that inevitably corrupted poor old Franz Biberkopf. And yet, Benjamin reveled in the metropolis's exuberance as a seat of cosmopolitanism, drenched himself with its heady air, danced to its luminous flow.6 Soon enough he’d tap this atmosphere and stake out the heights (and depths) Frederick Engels never reached. In Berlin, Simmel gave Benjamin the soci­ ological vocabulary; in Paris, this vocabulary became an intimate discourse. That initial two-week trip to the French capital was “the most beautiful experience,” he said. He had no inkling then, of course, how much Honoré de Balzac’s and Charles Baudelaire’s native city would feature in his future destiny Benjamin wallowed in the Louvre, and promenaded on the grand boulevards, whose vistas and street dynamics vividly brought SimmeTs analysis alive. Two pleasurable weeks, Benjamin told a friend in a postcard, seemed like three months; almost immedi­ ately he felt more at home here than in Berlin. Paris seemed “the capital of the 5o world,” or at least a “mirror of the world,” steeped in history and tradition, romance and politics, compared to which Berlin was dull and narrow. (Seventeen years later, Benjamin retained this wide-eyed, childlike embrace of the city. In “Paris Diary,” for instance, he writes, “No sooner do you arrive in the city than you feel rewarded. The resolve not to write about it is futile. You reconstruct the preceding day just like chil­ dren who reconstruct the table full of presents on Christmas Day” For the young and mature Benjamin alike, Berlin paled alongside Paris. The latter symbolized intrigue, novelty, and adventure. Conversely, “there are perhaps few cities in which so little is— or can be—overlooked as in Berlin. This may be the effect of the organizational and : technical spirit that prevails there, for good or ill. Contrast this with Paris. Just think Thow the streets here seem to be inhabited interiors, how much you fail to see day after ; day, even in the most familiar parts, and how critically important it is, more so than if.¡anywhere else, to keep crossing from one side of the street to the other.”7)

||be New Angel Шлет that brief and important Parisian sojourn, Benjamin resumed his university life gjp Frieburg. There he got involved in the Free Students’ Association, invited Martin to talk to students, and read a great deal—especially Guy de Maupassant,

MetromarxisiD

Heinrich Mann, and Hermann Hesse; he walked in the nearby Black Forest, spent time hiking in the Swiss Jura and visited Italy (he’d always love travel). Later in 1913, he fin­ ished his stint at Freiburg, returned to Berlin for two more semesters, and discovered its cafés and literary bohemia just as war broke out. World War I was a turning point for Benjamin, as he painfully broke with former dear friends and associates (like Wyneken, his old mentor). Other acquaintances joined the long list of war dead. Twice Benjamin avoided military conscription because of severe nearsightedness. Another time he pre­ sented himself as a palsy victim, staying up all night drinking black coffee, appearing an unfit wreck the next day. While his attitude toward war wasn’t exactly pacifist—he declined to associate himself with the opposition—neither was he pro-“offensive” war either. As ever, Benjamin went elsewhere, emotionally and physically. In the autumn of 1915, eager to get distance on the past and on hometown cronies and haunts, he decided to continue philosophical studies, in Munich. Benjamin kept up his regular routine of drinking copious amounts of black coffee, staying up all night talking about heavy things and deepening his friendship with Gershom Scholem, who loomed for Benjamin much as Engels loomed for Marx. If Benjamin was wandering steadily toward Marxism, Scholem, who’d later settle in Israel, dragged him over to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. Benjamin now wrote some marvelous, precocious essays, like the one on Friedrich Hölderlins modernity, and fell in love with an elegant dark beauty, Dora Poliak (née Kellner), a recent divorcée, whom he'd marry in 1917, and who’d give birth to their son Stephan in 1918. (The marriage collapsed in 1921; they’d divorce in 1930.) They fled war-torn Germany for Berne, in neutral Switzerland, where Benjamin under­ took and completed, in 1920, his doctoral dissertation, “The Concept of Criticism 54 in German Romanticism.” But the work of esoteric genius later proved too hot to handle for the conservative German academy. To get a tenured university position, Benjamin needed to submit a second dissertation, a so-called Habilitation. What he eventually gave the examination committee in 1926, on the German Baroque Trauerspiel or “play of mourning,” couldn't have been less appropriate. Nobody could figure the work out; those who read it couldn’t understand a single word. The manu­ script did the rounds, but was rejected everywhere; Max Horkheimer, head of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, and an associate and patron to be, rejected it as well. Benjamin agreed to give it up, withdrew his application, and began a peripatetic career living off his wits, as a Privatgelehrter, an independent scholar, surviving, but just barely, off bits and pieces of journalism and assorted literary ventures. “All in all I am glad,” he wrote. “The Old Franconian stage route following the stations of the local university is not my way.” So began the ill fate, the catalogue of misfortunes, the tragic bungling, that would plague Benjamin till the very end of his life.8 In the spring of 1921, Benjamin bought a small watercolor drawing by Paul Klee of a spindly abstract figure with a pair of wings and eyes glancing slightly over its own shoulder. The image, Angelus Noms, would later inspire the ninth thesis of one of Benjamin’s last works, his complex essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940).

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Спея лѳтт&Лі

Angelus Novus would also become the name of the journal Benjamin began to edit. The enterprise, alas, barely went beyond the initial “Announcement,” noteworthy in itself because we can glimpse Benjamin’s state of mind as well as his vision of a nonaligned, nonacademic critical thought. “Ajournai that sets out to articulate the experi­ ence of a particular way of thinking,” he wrote, “is always far more unpredictable and unconscious than any expression of will, but by the same token holds greater promise for the future and is capable of much greater development ” It should, he noted, “con­ cern itself less with ideas and credos than with foundations and governing principles, just as human beings should not be expected to have full knowledge of their inner­ most tendencies but should be conscious of their vocation.” Benjamin’s vocation, clearly, was criticism. And criticism, he maintained, was the “guardian of the house.” Both “critical discourse” and the “habit of judgment” were in need of renewal, something requiring “hard, sober effort,” coming without guarantees: “Golden fruits in silver bowls are not to be expected. Instead we shall aspire to ration­ ality throughout ” The program, meanwhile, might be fleeting: keeping up with fast changing times meant uncertainty, meant ephemerality, constantly pulling the rug from under its own feet. According to a legend in the Talmud, Benjamin warned (maybe even himself) that “the angels—who are born anew every instant in count­ less numbers—are created in order to perish and to vanish into the void, once they have sang their hymn in the presence of God.”9 Benjamin demonstrated this sort of “immanent critique” in a long analysis of J. W. von Goethe’s novella Elective Affinities; it is Benjamin’s masterful piece of liter­ ary criticism—before literary criticism had been invented. The book’s title, which Goethe borrowed from Torbem Bergman’s (1775) dissertation on the aversion and attraction of different chemical substances, framed the shilly-shallying of four pro- 55 tagonists, two men and two women. But the tragic plot was a little too close to home, painfully mimicking Benjamin’s own marital breakdown and disastrous love affair with sculptress Jula Cohn (to whom the essay was dedicated), to say nothing of Dora’s infatuation with Walter’s old school chum Ernst Schoen. “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones,” reads Benjamin’s last line (again, maybe with himself in mind), “have we been given hope.” At the time, literary criticism was hardly a big earner (it still isn’t), and to supple­ ment his paltry income Benjamin wrote children’s stories and took to translating Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, penning an innovative essay, “The Task of the Translator,” in the process. What money he’d amass in the 1920s was threatened by rampant inflation anyway. Confidence in the German mark was at an all-time low, and industrial slump and economic crisis afflicted Germany. The atmosphere became oppressive for Benjamin and he chose to escape it, alone, in 1924, on the island of Capri, where he’d live cheaply for six months. Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship had just started, and Benjamin hung out at the Café Zum Kater [Tom Cat] Hiddigeigei, reading and pondering, having little real notion of what would happen next. It was there he’d again encounter Ernst Bloch, the vagabond Marxist philoso­ pher, who’d help Benjamin’s Marxism ripen under the bright Italian sun. There, too,

Benjamin encountered a Latvian woman, a Bolshevik from Riga named Asja Lads, kindling a brief holiday fling and a lifelong Marxist romance.

The Marxist Nomad

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Benjamin’s friendship with Bloch always blew hot and cold. But he trusted Blochs mind and valued the criticisms and comments Bloch made of his work. (Along with Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt philosopher, whom Benjamin met in 1923, Bloch became Benjamin’s tireless advocate and interlocutor.) Benjamin himself had favorably reviewed Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia back in 1920. (The actual review has never been located.) Bloch’s mixture of religious mysticism and hard-line communism affected Benjamin, and Bloch wrote in that similarly elliptical and metaphorical prose, using the same dreamy language; most likely they impacted upon one another. Bloch, how­ ever, survived the approaching Nazi onslaught in a way Benjamin never did: he got out. In the early 1940s, as flames engulfed continental Europe, Bloch never lost hope. In fact, he undertook a mammoth three-volume study of it, The Principle of Hope, exploring the history and possible reality of the utopian spirit in Harvard University’s Widener Library. Hope isn’t confidence, noted Bloch, nor is it naive optimism; it’s the opposite of security and it can be disappointed. And yet, hope “still nails a flag on the mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not accepted.” Meanwhile, Bloch leaned closer and closer to a militant communism during his acquaintance with Benjamin. But Bloch’s line was treated with suspicion by the party apparatchik A more “orthodox” Marxism was espoused by one of Bloch’s friends, the Hungarian intel­ lectual Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness tore on to the radical 56 scene in the 1920s.10 Bloch didn’t introduce Benjamin to the work of Lukács; rather, it was Asja Lacis, Walter’s latest beloved; indeed, he and Asja read Lukács aloud to each other, sometimes at a café, other times naked in Asja’s hotel room. Benjamin’s Capri letters mention Lacis’s “penetrating insight into the pressing need for radical communism”; his attraction to her was political as well as erotic. In One-Way Street, Benjamin’s innovative montage sequence of musings, which did to the essay what Eisenstein did to cinema, he wrote that the street was named “Asja Lacis Street, after the engineer who laid it through the author.”" Lukács gave Benjamin the conceptual vocabulary to fulfill his political obligations to Lacis and to develop his revolutionary fervor and commitment to Marxism. Crucial here was the idea of “reification”—of how, under capitalism, relations between people take on a “phantom objectivity,” assume the state of relations between “things.” Lukács located this “objectification” or “thingification” in the “commodity-structure,” and sug­ gested it was no accident that Marx began with an analysis of commodities. But he also suggested that the riddle of the commodity mustn’t be considered in isolation; instead, it must be viewed, he said, as “the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects.”12 Lukács admitted that his intention here was to base his reasoning on Marx’s eco­ nomic analysis, “and proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out

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of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjec­ tive stance corresponding to it” (84). He reckoned that this was how a clear insight into the ideological problems of capitalism could be attained, and how we might plot the system’s downfall. In actuality, of course, with the concept of reification Lukács man­ aged to galvanize young Marx with old Marx, amalgamate alienation with fetishism, unhappy consciousness with exploitation, and create a transformative HegelianMarxist praxis as an end result. He believed that critical knowledge could expose the reified consciousness of the worker, and that once they’re cognizant of their objective exploitative and alienated condition they can subjectively rise above it, and put theory into action, into praxis. For Lukács, the commodity became “crucial for the subjuga­ tion of men’s consciousness... and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude of the ‘second nature’ so created” (86). In order to produce commodities, working people themselves become commodi­ ties. Both become abstractions somehow, both become things, one containing value, the other producing it. As commodities, both take on a nonhuman objectiv­ ity, are determined by “natural” laws, normalized in everyday consciousness. People, as labor power, as peculiar commodities, become separated from their activity, from the product of that activity, from their fellow workers, and from themselves. Isolation, fragmentation and atomization ensue. Needless to say, the ruling class prospers from this reification, yet the proletariat becomes submissive, unable to grasp fully themselves and their real conditions of life. The world of things takes on a hallowed status. The split within the workers’ labor power and their own personalities marks their metamorphosis into a thing, into an object for sale that produces another object for sale. Reification permeates all social life—it 5? isn’t just a workplace deal. It flourishes in politics and culture, is reinforced through media and ideology, through subtle messages and repressive force. If that isn’t enough, Lukács also suggests that modern philosophy “springs from the reified structure of consciousness” (10-11). The Kantian tradition, which posits the “thing in itself,” is a classic case in point. It represents a barrier, notes Lukács, to the human faculty of cognition, severing the noumenon from the phenomenon, thinking from experience, form from content. In doing so, these become two seemingly uncon­ nected realities, even opposed dilemmas: the problem of “matter” and the problem of “substance of knowledge.” As Lukács notes, “the thing-in-itself character of the formcontent relation necessarily opens up the problem of totality” (151; emphasis in the original). Commodities are indeed things in form, but their content is knowable to the mind. Lukács’s Marxism thus represents the knowing mind acting on full knowledge, acting in a “unified manner,” understanding the “totality of history.” When the prole­ tariat becomes conscious of its own class position, becomes a class for itself, mobiliz­ ing with class consciousness, it assumes the role of this totality, the subject as well as the object of the dialectics of history. In a stirring climax to “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” the central pillar of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács concludes, “Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every

Metromarxium

person living in capitalist society. It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development.... Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectic of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a consciousness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality" (197). Praxis changes both objective and subjective reality, inner and outer worlds, launching each to a higher plane. Praxis stakes out the “process of becoming,” which “mediated” between past and future, recognized the immediacy of things, yet knew this reality could be surpassed by a better reality, wrought through proletarian consciousness. “Only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat,” insists Lukács, “possesses this ability to transform things,” to transform the world of commodities. It’s hard to know exactly what Benjamin made of all this. After all, he was the least practical Marxist that ever lived! Still, it’s apparent that he did get something seminal from Lukács, for Benjamin was now able to comprehend the modern expe­ rience—the modern metropolitan experience—in terms of commodification> in terms of a definite social experience and relationship that assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between thingsNow, Benjamins childlike curiosity with the world of things, of minutiae, extended to a similar curiosity with the world of com­ modities—they’d become one and the same. But bringing everyday culture and experience into the orbit of political-economy also required a few caveats about 58 Lukács’s brand of Marxism. To begin with, Benjamin could never comprehend capitalism as a seamless entity; his mind was nourished by openness not closure. There were always holes, always inconspicuous cracks: commodification was real enough, but it hadn’t over­ whelmed everything; there is, in fact, a porosity in culture, in urbanism and architec­ ture, in everyday life, that makes the economy leaky, subject to subversion, full of “unseen constellations.” Benjamin developed such recognition on the Italian main­ land, in Naples. He and Laris made leisurely trips there, and wrote a lovely short essay together about a city whose grip was firmly in the hands of the Catholic Church, a cor­ rupt Mafia (the Camorra), and an even more corrupt fascist police force. Laris and Benjamin both knew that in Naples “the stamp of the definitive is avoided.”13 In Naples, Benjamin noted the “porosity” of the buildings and social interaction: the two spill over into each other in courtyards, back alleys, squares and stairways. Everything here became a “theater” of the contingent, a “popular stage,” and nowhere is it “thus and not otherwise” (166). In Benjamin’s eyes, porosity results from the Neapolitan’s “passion for improvisation.” It is a southern, Mediterranean thing, appar­ ently, radically opposed to its Nordic counterpart. Public and private lives get com­ mingled: every private attitude or act “is permeated by streams of communal life” (171). The home is less a refuge; neither is the private self restricted by four walls. In

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fact, homes aren't so much places people retreat to as somewhere to flood out from. Life gushes out on to the street, while the street migrates into the living room, as open doors let the outside cascade into the inside. Porosity of the private and public realms is a wonderful subversion of Benjamin’s own bourgeois upbringing, with its obsession with the interior private sphere, dignified and quiet, enclosed and proper. Some of the greatest laboratories of this porosity are, notes Benjamin, Naples’s many cheap cafés, "the opposite of everything Viennese, of the confined, bourgeois, literary world,” the world that Benjamin scorns and is scorned by. Cafés are for "the people,” literally get­ ting enveloped by the street; “even the most wretched pauper is sovereign in the dim, dual awareness of participating in all his destitution, in one of the pictures of Neapolitan street life” (167). Thus, in Naples, poverty brings a weird "stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought” (171). In loving detail, Benjamin evokes intimate Naples, its street pageant, its “festal motifs nestling in the most inconspicuous places”; “everything joyful,” he writes, “is mobile: music, toys, ice cream circulate through the streets,” and “faint sun shines from glass vats of ice drinks” (168). Then there’s the spectacle of the festival at night, with the tumult of childish joy. Men play gigantic paper comets and “their trumpeting is part of urban manufacture” (169), all part of the “blissful confu­ sion.” Meanwhile, Benjamin is fascinated by glass-roofed structures that house toyshops and perfume and liqueur-glass stores, and which “hold their own beside fairy-tale galleries.” Day and night, these mighty pavilions “glow with the pale, aro­ matic juices that teach even the tongue what porosity can be” (168). This is our first mention, of course, of arcades, of those prototypical shopping malls soon to mes­ merize Benjamin in Paris. In 1927, he’d begin to assemble material for this massive, fated magnum opus, the apotheosis of Benjamin’s Marxist urbanism. These “fairy- 5 9 tale galleries” were, to be sure, key arenas of the commodity fetish, new forms of urban life dedicated to servicing the commodity, prostrating itself to its needs. At the same time, they were equally new forms of public space, ambiguous and dialectical, like modern life itself, blending together the outside public street with the interior, quasi-private store. Now, outside became inside, and inside outside, in dizzy, pleasur­ able ways; they were indeed places of pilgrimage to the fetish commodity. Benjamin was almost ready for Paris now; almost, because there was still one strand of his thought yet to break through, still to become conscious while he was awake: surreal­ ism, the dialectics of intoxication, his profane illumination.

Each Minute Ringing for Sixty Seconds Benjamin was an innovative and experimental thinker, a genius at spotting connec­ tions and continuities between patterns of thought and ideas, brilliant at synthesizing other people’s work and converting it into something entirely new and original. Other times he could detonate and disrupt literature and paradigms that had previously been considered solid, complete: he would loosen the thread of tightly woven fabric and open out the fit. Yet in 1928 he began to conduct experiments on himself. He wanted to sharpen his already acute perception, his sensibility for penetrating the essence of

Ifetromarxism

the city and modern life. In itself this wasn’t unprecedented. One of the surrealist king­ pins, André Breton, had searched for such heightened surrealist experience, for such intoxication and ecstasy, via magic and the occult; Benjamin, however, tried something else: he tried tripping with hashish instead. He’d been medically prescribed the drug for years by Dr. Ernst Joel, an old school friend from the Youth Movement, to help cope with periodic depressions. Now, Benjamin upped the dosage, and “Hashish in Marseilles” recounted the sensations, feelings, and highs. He’d been sitting on his bed, in a little Marseilles hotel, smoking and reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Soon a brass band began to play in his head, and he wandered out to a little harbor bar, where the drug exerted “its canonical magic with primitive sharpness that I had scarcely felt until then”14 Before long, he noted, he’d turned into ua physiognomist, or at least a contemplator of physiognomies, and 1 underwent something unique.” It offset, we hear, his feeling of loneliness, his fear of future misfortune; he would eat a dozen oysters and either rabbit or chicken meat— he’s not sure which—then idle around the harbor, staring at moored boats: “As I did so an incomprehensible gaiety came over me” (141). Meanwhile, “events took place in such a way that the appearance of things touched me with a magic wand, and I sank into a dream of them” (144). But the trance had its dark side. In fact, Benjamin knew, upon reflection afterward, that nothing truly beautiful nor illumi­ nating was awakened by the hashish. During the trance, he did become “an enrap­ tured prose-being in the highest power.” But the problem was that, if anything, he’d become a little too enraptured. In this state, the act of creation came a little bit too easy. What one wrote the following day was “more than an enumeration of impres­ sions.” It re-created the ecstasy in such a way that it became the real ecstasy. This 60 became a greater joy, the joy of enjoying the pleasure of discovery while wide awake, actually “discovering the twists and turns of the cave,” the “rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread” (142). The hashish trance, admitted Benjamin, “cuts itself off from everyday reality with fine, prismatic edges.” The conclusion tells us a lot about why Benjamin so adored surrealism. “It is a car­ dinal error,” Benjamin wrote in “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia“to believe that, of ‘Surrealist experiences,’ we know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs.”15 On the contrary, “true, creative overcoming of religious illumination” doesn’t reside in narcotics. It lies rather closer to home, in something Benjamin called profane illumination, a “materialistic, anthropological inspiration” to which hashish, opium, or whatever else give merely an “introductory lesson”—and a “dangerous one” at that. Thus, “histrionic” or “fanatical stress” on the “mysterious side of the mysterious” takes one only so far, Benjamin thought; he was adamant that “we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday” (190; emphasis added). Hashish trances are one thing, but they don’t teach us half as much as thinking about a hashish trance. Thinking, for Benjamin, is “eminently narcotic”; the real illumination comes about through “pro­ fane” illumination, through sober telepathy. “The most passionate investigation of tele­

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pathic phenomena... will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an emi­ nently telepathic process)» as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phe­ nomena*'(190). Benjamin's heroes, accordingly, aren't opium eaters, religious mystics, or dabblers in black magic; they’re readers, thinkers, loiterers, flâneurs. His concept of freedom, accordingly, reiterates the surrealists’ own concept of freedom: a freedom that on this planet can only be achieved through struggle, through acts of will, through hardest sacrifice. What’s more, this concept of freedom reiterates the concept of freedom voiced by Benjamin’s alter ego, the most celebrated loiterer and flâneur of all, Charles Baudelaire, whose “poem of hashish” vividly championed the extrasensual experience of hashish, yet condemned the drug as an “artificial paradise ” Indeed, Artificial Paradises, written in 1860, expressed Baudelaire’s own “longing for infinity.” “Your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute,” he wrote. “Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises. The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is color; in colors there is a music.... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting on your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. ... Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the Gods.”16 That was, however, until the next day—“alas, the terrible morrow!” (71). The previous day, Baudelaire had given an incandescent endorsement of artificial intox­ ication, of hippie magic. Now, while awake, looking at himself in the mirror, hung over, he groans his denunciation: “Let us admit for the moment that hashish gives, or at least increases genius; they forget that it is in the nature of hashish to dimin­ ish the will, and that thus it gives with one hand what it withdraws with the other; 61 that is to say, imagination without the faculty of profiting from it.” Baudelaire reck­ ons that their “magic dupes them,” it “kindles for them a false happiness, a false light; while as for us poets and philosophers, we have begotten again our soul upon our­ selves by continuous toil and contemplation; by the unwearied exercise of will and the unfaltering nobility of aspiration we have created for ourselves a garden of Truth, which is Beauty; of Beauty which is Truth” (51). Thus, Baudelaire concludes that “wine exalts the will, hashish destroys it” (24). So, for both Baudelaire and Benjamin, profane illumination is literally that the illumination of everyday struggle and toil, little acts of will within ordinary quotidian experience, quotidian street experience—expletives included; and mixed with a little wine. Benjamin thought the best modem surrealist writing, like André Breton’s Nadja and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, proclaim this impulse most powerfully. In both, quotidian street experiences and encounters become sublime, intoxicating, ecstatic, revolutionary. Rain-blurred windows, quiet squares, shabby hotels, ruined arcades, take on a dreamlike texture, become things “exploded,” “souls” awoken, brought to life. : In Nadja, Breton portrays his raving obsession with a woman and with the streets of ;; wis. Often we’re not sure if Nadja is a person, or an event, or a metaphor of the city ^Itself, or just a figment of Breton’s fertile imagination, representative of his own

Metromarxisin

romance with the Paris of dream. “Who is the real Nadja,” Breton wrote. “The one who told me she had wandered all night long in the forest of Fontainebleau with an arche­ ologist who was looking for some remains which, certainly, there was plenty of time to find by daylight—but suppose it was this man’s passion!—I mean, is the real Nadja this always inspired and inspiring creature who enjoyed being nowhere but in the streets, the only region of valid experience for her, in the streets?”17 Aragons “modern mythol­ ogy/’ Paris Peasant, written in 1924, four years before Nadja, immortalized the Passage de ГОрега, an arcade condemned by the bulldozer, about to be razed to make way for the Boulevard Haussmann. There “exists a black kingdom,” Aragon writes, “which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them.”18 Aragon lovingly devotes over one hundred pages to this “big glass coffinwhich “presides over the double game of love and death” Benjamin was elated by Aragon’s book and translated parts of it into German in 1928; he told Theodor Adorno that he could never read more than two or three pages of Paris Peasant without laying it aside—his heart started to beat too strongly. These two surrealist classics mastered the world of things because, Benjamin said, they substituted “a political for a historical view of the past”20 To that degree, they came ever closer to the communist answer, to the revolutionary intent of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Lukács taught Benjamin that things are commodities, and commodities are really social relations; the surrealists taught Benjamin that within these things are latent revolutionary acts; such minutiae have a revolutionary unconscious. They are clocks that in each minute an alarm rings for sixty seconds. Each minute really contains sixty precious illuminations, profane illuminations, sixty little doors left ajar. Through them are shafts of light, fairy tales of the future.

62

The Arcades Projectz A Dialectical Fairy Tale If the father of surrealism was Dada, Beniamin noted,^its mothei^was an arcade.”21 Paris’s nineteenth-century arcades fascinated Benjamin. He obsessed over them for the best part of thirteen years, piling up huge mounds of material: old histories, endless quotations, quirky lists, gossip, character sketches, tourist guides, World Exhibition catalogs, chunks on Charles Fourier, Duc de Saint-Simon, Baudelaire, and Marx. On and on it went, seemingly with no end in sight. He spent hour upon hour in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a home away from home for a lot of the 1930s. He’d told Adorno in 1935, “I can only write the work from beginning to end here in Paris.” He said it all began “under the painted sky of summer,” under the library’s great reading room mural, a “dreamy, unlit ceiling ” The mural was “an open sky of cloudless blue,” Benjamin said, “that arched above the foliage and yet was dimmed by the millions of leaves from which the fresh breeze of diligence, the stertorous breath of research, the storm of youthful zeal, and the idle wind of curiosity have raised the dust of centuries” (884).22 Once, he thought of adopting the subtitle “a dialectical fairy-tale” to emphasize how one generation imagines, within itself, another yet to come about. These were “wish-images,” Benjamin noted, “images in the collective unconscious in which the old and new interpenetrate” (5). Other times, The Arcades Project became his “magic ency­

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clopedia,” “the theater of all my struggles and ideas” his “dialectics at a standstill .” Benjamin meant that he wanted a Marxism that was grounded, made more graphic. He wanted to intervene in the dialectical flow of history, to arrest its becoming for just an instant, focusing instead on its being. Most of these long and tall iron and glass edifices came into being during the decade and a half after 1822. They were the forerunners of the grands magasins—the opulent department stores that would flourish after 1850—and of our very own shop­ ping mall: the Parisian bourgeoise and the Californian “Valley Girl” share the same ancestral heritage. Advances in iron construction technology and the emergence of gas lighting energized and dramatized these spaces. They quite literally came alive. In them, people began to eye other people, and strolling and parading became favorite pastimes. Elegant shops lined both sides of marble-paneled corridors, and, with glass overhead, every arcade, said Benjamin, “radiated through the Paris of the Empire like grottoes”; they were each “a world in miniature,” “the hollow mold from which the image of modernity was cast” (873-74). Through these passageways went Benjamin himself, fleeing into a “world of secret affinities” to Paris, “capital of the nineteenth-century,” “a landscape built of sheer life.” It was in such a setting that modern men and women bloomed, those metropolitan types, typically blasé about everything, slumberous with ennui. Benjamin yearned for this disposition himself, wanted a piece of the modem metropolitan action; he found a little of it for a while, sometimes in his own imagination. He knew the “charm of fashion”: he wanted, he said, to “make the charming fruitful” (64). And yet, he equally knew that the bourgeois world was shallow and hollow inside, snobbish and privileged; he knew that “the more short-lived a period, the more susceptible it is to fashion” (80). In one sense, Benjamin was perhaps the^ greatest twentieth-century urban 6b Marxist; in another, he was one of the most troubled Marxist thinkers. One big chunk of Arcades is devoted to Marx himself, in which quotation after quotation on alienation, communism, class, and commodities are stacked on top of each other. In between, we hear a few of Benjamin's own musings; elsewhere, Marx speaks through the medium of Karl Korsch, whose Marxism and Philosophy Benjamin read in 1930. (Apparently, Benjamin didn’t start to study Marx’s Capital properly until 1935, using a version edited by Korsch.) For Benjamin, the rational kernel within all this is the commodity, which wallows within every arcade. “On the walls of these cav­ erns,” he writes, “their immemorial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the most irregular combinations” (872). He tries to deepen and extend Marx’s exegesis on “fetishism of commodities,” which emphasizes, we know, how the actual world of human labor, of grubby production, of toil, exploitation, and minimum wage work appears in the form of things, circulates via money, becomes mystified at the marketplace, adorns enticing labels, glistens in store windows, under­ goes huge advertising campaigns, and is made trendy. Benjamin insists that the “fetish character attaches as well to the commodityproducing society.” The commodity, he notes, had seduced all of nineteenth-century - Pans, penetrated every little niche of daily life. Now, too, image itself became com­

modified—particularly the image (and spectacle) of the crowd, or the phantasmagoria: masses of people promenading through the arcades, pouring into the street and boule­ vard, veiling the real nature of the economy but nonetheless ensuring intense and enchanting human experience. Benjamin captures this flamboyant gaiety with equally beautiful, and seductive, prose: Paria ia a city of mirrora. The asphalt of ita roadways smooth aa glass, and at the entrance to all bistros glaaa partitions. A pro­ fusion of windowpanes and mirrors in cafés, so as to make the inside brighter and to give all the tiny nooks and crannies, into which Parisian taverns separate, a pleasing amplitude. Women here look at themselves more than elsewhere, and from this comes the distinctive beauty of the Parisienne. Before any man catches sight of her, she has already seen herself ten times reflected. But the man, too, sees his own physiognomy flash by. He gains his image

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more quickly here than elsewhere and also sees himself more quickly merged with this, his image. Even the eyes of passersby are veiled mirrors. And over that wide bed of the Seine, over Paris, the sky is spread out like the crystal mirror hanging over the drab beds in brothels. (B77)

Both mystification and emancipation are here embodied in Benjamin’s cult hero, epitomized in the poet Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur. Paris invented this type; back then it alone permitted the fine art offlânerie—aimless strolling, the ability to 64 lose oneself in the crowd, populating ones solitude. In flânerie, Benjamin believes, a man can fulfill dreams, surpass graphic fantasies, answer uneasy expectations. He takes this experience to be available to women as well, since they can now expand their own sexual and personal freedoms: upper- and lower-class women alike, Benjamin notes, do partake in “botanizing on the asphalt in shopping and sauntering in the arcades and in fashionable department stores. “All the women of the people who dis­ play an iris of a thousand colors on our promenades,” Benjamin cites Jules Michelet saying in 1846, “were formerly in mourning” (78). This new cityscape is more open to women, who can also lose themselves in the crowd and “blush before the eyes of no one” (417). Meanwhile, another unprecedented sight is palpable on the street: “the women as cyclist competes with the cabaret singer for a place of honor on Chéret’s posters and gives fashion its most daring line” (882). Baudelaire’s flânerie was akin to what Benjamin calls “the rhythmics of slumber.” Intoxication, for the former, comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through Paris’s streets. Benjamin stalks Baudelaire, follows the poet’s flâneries; but we sense it’s somehow his own adventure that Benjamin is evoking: “With each step, the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of bistros, of shops, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, of a distant square in the fog, of the back of a women walking before him.

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Then comes the hunger. He wants, however, nothing to do with the myriad possibili­ ties offered to sate his appetite, but like an animal he prowls through unknown dis­ tricts” (880). Benjamin loved Baudelaire with all the passion of his soul; he loved the lyric poet more than he loved Marx. The poet and the Marxist critic had plenty in common, sharing the same dark, solitary, melancholic temperament; each had ua whole secret society” inside their heads. Benjamin got turned on by the poets allegor­ ical style and genius, to say nothing of his prodigious passion for Paris. Benjamin always insisted that his work on Baudelaire was more dear to his heart than any other. He likewise wanted the “Christian Baudelaire” to be taken to heaven “by nothing but Jewish angels.”23 With Baudelaire, Paris became for the first time the muse for lyric poetry. With Baudelaire, we follow Benjamin onto the streets of Louis Napoleons Second Empire, cruising up and down those grand boulevards blasted and brutally hacked open by the emperor’s master builder—or “demolition artist”—Baron Georges Haussmann, prefect of the Seine. Haussmann’s city planning ideal prioritized the “power of the straight line,” and the tyrant builder constructed his impressive new thoroughfares accordingly. Benjamin called the practice “strategic embellishment” because the old labyrinthine medieval streets, so handy for barricade building and guerrilla war­ fare, were wiped out, along with traditional working-class quartiers, whose denizens suddenly found themselves exiled to the rapidly expanding banlieue to the north and east. Central-city embourgeoisement accompanied this archetypal gerry­ mandering. Baudelaire, like Benjamin, deplored this, but also acknowledged its ambiguity, its sensual pleasure, its nouveauté, “the inestimable value of novelty” (22). “To plunge into the depths of the abyss—heaven or hell,” writes Baudelaire in the final stanza of Le Voyage, “What does it matter? / Into the heart of the unknown 65 / To seek the Mew.”24 Yet Benjamin spots the dialectic here, commenting, brilliantly, “Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of that illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor. The fact that art’s last tine of resistance should coincide with the commodity’s most advanced line of attack—this had to remain hidden from Baudelaire” (22). Although he cites Engels’s idea about “Haussmann,” Benjamin’s Marxist tack is subtler than that of Engels’s “The Housing Question.” Whereas Engels saw little apart from capitalist modernization, Benjamin was stirred by the whole experience of capi­ talist modernity. For the Engels of “The Housing Question,” “Haussmann” involved moving things elsewhere and never really sought to get to the root of poverty; it invari­ ably meant economic upscaling and displacement of poorer people. Benjamin knew this was true, and said so; but he equally knew what went on within this process. He knew as well that “the “burning of Paris” in 1871 was “the worthy conclusion to Baron Haussmann’s work of destruction” (25). The Paris Commune exposed the fragility and unsustainability of Haussmann’s urban vision. (Baudelaire never lived to see it, bidding adieu in 1867 after syphilis kicked in.) For seventy-three days, between March and May, when Paris was surrounded by Prussian forces in the 1870-71 war with France, the capital became a liberated zone of people power. The barricades went up,

even across those mighty boulevards, amid the carnivals and the pranks (like the tear­ ing down of the Vendôme Column, which commemorated Napoleon Bonaparte’s mil­ itary conquests). For the first time it looked like a working-class revolution wasn’t merely possible, but imminent. It impressed Marx, organizational and tactical reserva­ tions notwithstanding. (It also impressed Henri Lefebvre, as we’ll see in chapter 4, who called it “the only realization of revolutionary urbanism to date.”) The Commune was , a crucial utopian moment, despite—or maybe because of—its defeat. Benjamin said it \ “dispels the illusion that the task of the proletarian revolution is to complete the work ! of 1789 in close collaboration with the bourgeoisie. This illusion had marked the

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period 1831-1871” (24). Benjamin, like the surrealists—and like Baudelaire before them all—is magnifi­ cent at revealing the drama and dynamics of the old (and new) city street. For each of them, streets are “primal” history, the “dwelling place of the collective” (879). Streets are Benjamin’s “cockpit” into modernity. For those who know how to inhabit the street, who know how to read the street, “the city neatly splits into its dialectical poles” (880). It opens up to the flâneur “as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room.” In the street, Benjamin notes, in one of the many buried nuggets in Arcades, The collective i» an eternally wakeful, eternally agitated being that—-in the apace between the building fronts—lives, experi­ ences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of the bourgeois;

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walls with their "Post Ho Bills" are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household. The section of railing where road workers hang their jackets is the vestibule, and the gateway which leads from the row of courtyards out into the open is the long corridor that daunts the bourgeois, being for the courtyards the entry to the chambers of the city. (879)

These days, of course, people in the United States, especially middle-class white people, go on retreating into their neat suburban havens or secure privatopias and gated com­ munities, and shopping malls no longer bolster street life but happily undermine it, purposely disengaging—both geographically and politically—from every sidewalk convulsion. But Benjamin romantically upheld central city street life. He saw the midnineteenth-century incarnation of the shopping mall as happily getting along with the street, each becoming an extension of the other. At one point in Arcades, he cites a vaudeville comedy show from the late 1820s, in which a band of street merchants dash with arcade promoters. The former root for the streets against the arcades. “One hun­ dred forty-four arcades open their mouths wide to devour our customers,” they chant, “to siphon off the ever-rising flow of our crowds, both active and idle. And you want us

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streets of Paris to ignore this clear infringement of our ancient rights!” Yet they soon settle their differences. Suddenly, the whole gallery is illuminated by radiant gaslight, and everybody joins hands to sing and dance “a ballet of streets and arcades” (57). Benjamin’s urbanism likewise strikes up the band and dances in the street. His city is a city of hope, a place full of pedestrians, sexiness, and bustling streets. In his streets, exteriors become interiors, private individuals become public citizens, and strollers become dandies and flâneurs who blush before the eyes of no one. In this way, Benjamin sings a paean to an expansive and inclusive urban public space, one that releases the unconscious yearning of the collective and internalizes the whole wide world. Marx’s wish image of a world literature finds its democratic dwelling place here. So does Fourier’s utopian socialism, which, in the arcades, actually envisioned “the architectural canon of phalanstery,” a model environment where people come together in an authentic, self-supporting community. “Their revolutionary metamor­ phosis with [Fourier] is characteristic,” writes Benjamin. “Whereas they originally serve commercial ends, they become, for him, places of habitation. The phalanstery becomes a city of arcades” (5).

Theodor Adorno thought the major problem with Benjamin’s epic was that it lacked any sense of “mediation.” The project, he said, was in danger of consuming itself, of being engulfed by “its own aura.” He meant that the endless accumulation of facts and quotations added up to nothing in themselves. All the empirical mate­ rial, all the gossip, the citations, every quip and anecdote, didn’t constitute anything alone, and certainly didn’t constitute “knowledge.” Facts don’t speak for them­ selves, and piled up on top of one another, “in unmediated form,” they only “con­ spire,” Adorno wrote, “in an almost demonic fashion against the possibility of its 67 own interpretation.” The text, in other words, screamed out for “theoretical inter­ pretation.” Benjamin’s dialectic had nothing to hold it together, had no mediation, no sense of articulation between its broader social historical yearnings, and the psycho­ logical dramas and “motifs” of its protagonists. “The materialist determination of cul­ tural traits,” Adorno wrote in a letter, “is only possible if it is mediated through the total social processIt was the omission of theory that bothered—and surprised—Adorno most. Consequently, he suggested that Benjamin’s study “is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism.”25 Nobody knows what Benjamin would have eventually done to the manuscript, if only he’d had time to finish, if only his reading lamp hadn’t been dimmed by the Gestapo. In this sense, maybe it’s better we read Arcades as Benjamin raw, his method of inquiry as opposed to his mode of presentation, his Grundrisse rather than his Capital On the other hand, maybe the work was actually Benjamin’s own way of fol­ lowing Brecht’s famous maxim, “Truth is concrete.” Benjamin liked to cite it. The words were painted on a beam supporting the ceiling of Brecht’s study in Svendborg, Denmark. Brecht lived there for a while, in exile, during the 1930s, and Benjamin was a frequent guest. Benjamin was gripped by Brecht, lured toward him somehow, because Brecht was everything he wasn’t: decisive, arrogant, coarse—a gangster at

MetromarxisiD

heart. Brecht put his finger on coarse thinking, Benjamin insisted. “Coarse thoughts,” he said in a review of Brechts “Threepenny Novel” “have a special place in dialectical thinking because their sole function is to direct theory toward practice. They are direc­ tives toward practice, not for it; action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But thought must be coarse to find its way into action.”26 Adorno and Scholem both saw Brecht as a disastrous influence on Benjamin. Such a sophisticated and complex mind, they said, a fine-tuned instrument of precision, was now converted into a crude mallet. (In one letter, Adorno said “it would be a real misfortune if Brecht were to acquire any influence upon this work.” He advised Benjamin “to hold his arm steady until the Brechtian sun has finally sunk beneath its exotic waters”) But Benjamin would hear none of it. He claimed his agreement with Brecht was one of the most important and most strategic points in his entire position. Thus, dialectical crudity and utmost theoretical subtlety would split Benjamin’s Parisian exposés: He’d proceed to mix the dignity of the library with wisecracks of the street, intellectual high life with everyday lowlife, rhapsodic verses with ribald curses. At its best, Benjamin’s Marxism of the city would get “the mediation” about right, would give a new depth of experience to metropolitan Marxism, taking the dialectics of both to a new height, with a new richness, adding dream to the nego­ tiation of the commodity form. Benjamin was the first Marxist to appreciate the capitalist city as a profane illumination, as revolutionary within the revolution, as a veritable city of light. With open wings and head turned backward, the angel Walter can help us understand the pile of debris that accompanies the storm of progress.

In the late 1930s, Adorno and Scholem implored Benjamin to leave France quickly, 6Ѳ before it was too late. He eventually got out in September 1940, fleeing south, with a U.S. entry visa in his pocket. He made it down to the Pyrenees, trekking over a Spanish border crossing at Portbou. But after a bureaucratic quirk and excruciatingly bad timing, he was left stranded, his heart giving out, the frontier closed for the day. He couldn’t go on. In the evening of September 25, Benjamin overdosed on morphine, swallowing his fifty-tablet stash. He’d threatened suicide for years; now, he’d really gone through with it: “In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. It is a tiny village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must come to an end,” he wrote.27 Two years earlier, Benjamin had written to “Teddie” Adorno, from Brechts Danish retreat, that he’d been studying the details of Manhattan’s streets on a map stuck to Brecht’s son’s bedroom wall: “I walk up and down,” Benjamin told his comrade in New York, “the long street on the Hudson where your house is.” He never did take that stroll up Riverside Drive. He’d doubtless have felt at home in the Jewish émigré culture of the Upper West Side. He might even have taught at the New School for Social Research, and hung out on upper Broadway, which he’d probably have loved, with its constant ebb and flow of people and intricate street ballet. But he’d have hated Robert Moses’s mass destruction, hated giant expressways replacing little backstreets, hated the parks commissioner suppressing loud talk and critical thought by closing down Speakers’

Córner in Union Square because it threatened national security. Had Benjamin lived another half century or so, he’d have equally hated former mayor Giuliani’s curbside crusade, been appalled by the merciless crackdown on homeless people, street ven­ dors, jaywalkers (and jaytalkers), the shambling habitués of New York’s sidewalks. Who knows, Benjamin might have been classified as one himself, a flâneur commit­ ting a “quality of life” crime, loitering on the street without intent!

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HENRI LEFEBVRE THE URBAN REVOLUTION

Inhlunar; faces With ghastly spaces That rio heart car; see Find other places: Here you can’t be, You inhuman faces —François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Growiiig Pains and Hegel It’s amazing to think that Henri Lefebvre belonged pretty much to the same generation as Walter Benjamin. He was not quite nine years younger, yet lived for over forty years longer Benjamin was hesitant, melancholy, and German; Lefebvre was confident, exuberant, and French. Benjamin's Marxism was introverted, tragic, messianic, and Jewish; Lefebvre s was extroverted, play­ ful, festive, and Catholic. And yet, despite these differ­ ences, their Marxist urbanism had a lot in common: each affirmed the world of minutiae, was fascinated by commodities, by surrealism, and had a desire to ground Marxism, to make it more graphic, more dialectically concrete—an everyday urban affair. Each dearly loved Paris, too—ambiguities and all. Benjamin knew of Lefebvre, having read his 1936 book La Conscience Mystifiée, which was coauthored with Norbert Guterman. Lefebvre would’ve probably heard of Benjamin, something of a rising star in European criti­ cal and literary circles. Yet there’s no record of the two actually meeting, mutual acquaintances notwithstanding, even though i they were once in the same spot at the same time— Marseilles, in 1940. Both were then on the run, fleeing

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the Nazi occupation of Paris. Benjamin, as we saw, intended to go west, to New York, but never made it across the French/Spanish border. Lefebvre had found refuge for awhile teaching at a lycée in Saint-Etienne. That was until the pro-Nazi Vichy govern­ ment ordered the arrest of all leftist sympathizers. So Lefebvre moved first to his child­ hood home of Navarrenx, near Pau, in southwest France, before later joining the resistance movement around Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence. He wrote stinging cri­ tiques of Vichy for several communist pamphlets, helped derail enemy trains, sniffed out collaborators, loitered in Marseilles’ Café Mirabeau with other résistants, dissidents and intellectuals, and kept the red flag flying. Thus began a life of action and thought, a life that would somehow always be lived on the run, always somewhere in between, often between Paris and the countryside. Lefebvre was once asked, in the late 1970s, whether in fact he was really an anar­ chist. "‘No,” he was reported to have said. “I’m a Marxist, of course ... so that one day we can all become anarchists!”1 It’s a nice reply, elusive and playful, typical of someone who proclaimed himself the last French Marxist. But there were always unexpected twists and turns to Lefebvre’s Marxism and Marxist urbanism, fitting given his life­ long desire—his life spanned almost the entire twentieth century (1901-1991)—to make Marxism less dogmatic and more spatial, and cities more romantic and vibrant. Not only was his life long, it was also rich and adventurous. He lived through two World Wars, drunk wine and coffee with leading Dadaists and surre­ alists (like Tristan Tzara and André Breton), participated in the Philosophes journal, became an ever reluctant Communist Party and ex-Communist Party man (expelled for “ideological deviations” in 1958, yet rejoining the flock during the 1970s). He did a stint driving a cab in Paris, and taught sociology and philosophy at 72 numerous French universities, including those at Strasbourg ana Paris-Nanterre. Meanwhile, he translated and helped introduce G. W. F. Hegel’s thought into France, and developed a whole body of existentialist, dialectical Marxism that trans­ formed “unhappy consciousness” into alienation; he sought erotic as well as rational knowledge, love more than Five Year Plans. He also wrote prolifically—over three hun­ dred articles and sixty books—on art, literature, and philosophy; on everyday life; on Marxism and dialectical method; and on urbanism and space. He was a staunch critic of Stalinism from the very beginning, though this rejection of Soviet-style socialism saw no reason to reject real socialism, nor Marxism, since both bore no necessary con­ nection to that system anyway. In fact, Lefebvre rejected any systematic rendering of Marxism; he never took it as a holy writ, and always emphasized open-ended practice as central to democratic socialism. Fully developed individuality came about through differentiated practice, not through drudge or routine, and differentiated practice was only possible through a differential space, through one’s “right to the city,” through an “urban revolution.” Henri Lefebvre’s adolescence and nascent adulthood was scarred by the experience of war—the religious wars that long plagued Landes, his birth département in the Pyrenees-Atlantique, home of King Henri IV and scene of the “protestant” Catholicism

Henri Lefebvre

of Jansenism and Saint-Cyran; and the two World Wars. His part-Basque mother, Jeanne, the wife of René Lefebvre, a Ministry of Finance bureaucrat, was devoutly— fanatically—religious; Henri often spoke about her narrow, “almost Jansenist” faith.2 Lefebvre mocked his homegrown religious upbringing years later in “Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside,” a breezy little amble through native pastures: “O Holy Church, for centuries you have tapped and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope, every frustration.”3 Lefebvre noted that in his youth he “stud­ ied the history of the Church in the hope of ferreting out a vintage heresy I could res­ urrect, an indestructible, indigestible heresy with which to torpedo the Church. Jansens? Too dry, too terribly eighteenth-century petty-bourgeois, and as far as bore­ dom goes, his Augustinus beats even [Thomas Acquinas’s] Summa TheologiaeT Lefebvre suffered from his Jesuit education and from the wisdom that immediate happiness and gratification had to be postponed, made subordinate to the promise of a better world to come. Moving to Paris in 1920, to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, was the first great liberation—of the body as much as the mind. For years, religion had crippled his physique, repressed him, made him sickly and weak, and ashamed of his flesh. In Paris he grew strong, jettisoned a few universal idols, and discovered surrealism, Dada, and Hegel, and that helped. But the two World Wars cast storm clouds over the philosopher’s journeyman studies and over the first half of the cen­ tury. “I remember very well the upheaval,” he commented late in life, “the fear, the break-up of families as people left, the hardships. The general suffering was borne lightheartedly and concealed in all sorts of ways, such as dancing, music, and going to plays. Beneath that there was a deeper suffering on account of the dead and the wounded. It’s strange remembering that war and the one which followed, how injuries and deaths were masked by a superficial ideology and a certain gaiety 73 beneath which suffering persisted. Those were terrible memories. For me, the Second World War wasn’t greatly different except that I was older and had a clearer understanding of things.”4 Lefebvre stressed 1925 as a watershed year. It was “the crucial date,” he remem­ bered. “I would want to emphasize that, because it is passed over rather lightly in the history books. My memories of it are very precise. A room was hired in the Rue Jacques-Callot, near the École des Beaux Arts, for a meeting between the Surrealists...the ‘Philosophes’ group, and various other avant-garde groups like ‘Clarté.’ The modem revolution was created at that point. We imagined a different economic system, a different social base, and a different State superstructure. What we had was a revolutionary plan in place of the vague aspirations of the ’ 14-’ 18 War and of the immediate post-war period.”5 That same fateful year, one night in winter, Lefebvre also went to visit André Breton at his studio near the Place Pigalle, on whose table sat Hegel’s huge tome Logic “Breton said to me: ‘Read that first and then come and see me!’ He gave me a brilliant exposé of the Hegelian doctrine of Surrealism and of the relationship between the real and the surreal, which was a dialectical one.”6 Lefebvre began to devour Hegel, who led him to Marx. Indeed, if Breton had found in Hegel the bridge spanning the unconscious world of Freud—the world of

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dreams and the id—with the awake real world of consciousness, Lefebvre instead found Marx; the world of consciousness then transformed itself into conscious activity, into wide-awake social practice.7 At first, Lefebvre read Marx as a critique of religion. Back then, he knew only the early Marx, the Marx of 1844, the left-wing Hegelian, not the politicoeconomic Marx of Capital which he’d encounter later. Back then, Lefebvre dragged Hegel ever closer toward Marx, and Marx toward Hegel, staking out a rich Hegelian Marxism, one that saw Hegel as crucial for understanding Marx as the latter’s direct dialectical precursor. Hegel spoke to Lefebvre’s psychic impulses and nourished his maturing Marxist yearnings; Hegel helped Lefebvre synthesize each respective drive, reciprocally enrich­ ing them. Now Lefebvre, the former Catholic boy, could retain certain existential and spiritual motifs—not by reaching upward to the extraterrestrial terrain of theology, but by pulling these motifs down to earth, into the grubby human sphere, into sociology and politics, deepening Marxist thought (especially institutional Marxist thought) en route. Lefebvre s intellectual interest in Hegel coincided with the nation's interest in Hegel. The great idealist thinker was quite the rage in interwar France, enjoying a glittering renaissance, inspiring an array of intellectual circles, spanning the entire political spectrum from left to right, from Marxists and existentialists to phenomenologists and Catholics. In 1929, the philosopher Jean Wahl put a Gallic spin on Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” from the Phenomenology ofSpirit, and Alexandre Koyré and Jean Hippolite likewise became enthusiastic and seminal purveyors of neo-Hegelianism, translating several important works of Hegel’s in 1931 and giving brilliant seminars at the Sorbonne. Another seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology, most enlightening to Lefebvre, was given by Alexandre Kojève at the École des 74 Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939. Kojève was a Marxisant Russian émigré who had studied in Germany. He focused not on unhappy consciousness but on the section preceding it in Phenomenology, the “master-slave” (or “lordship and bondage”) dialectic. Kojève’s classes were never widely attended, but a sparkling cohort of thinkers diligently sat in and took notes: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, poet and sur­ realist André Breton, phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, political theorist Raymond Aron, writers George Bataille and Raymond Queneau, and, of course, Henri Lefebvre.8 Lefebvre met Kojève on several occasions. They had a few conversations together. “He knew Hegel and German philosophy better than I did,” Lefebvre admitted. “But he drew no practical or political consequences from them. It was enough for him to know what Hegel thought. So that created a gulf between us. Because, for me, Hegel’s propositions about contradictions seemed interesting only if they were applied to the present, to current events, to real society of the day and not to that of the nineteenth-century”9 Hegel insisted that all philosophy, thought, and history hinged on “dialectical movement,” where categories of the mind and reality exist in “immanent unity.” Hegelian history is an immense epic of the mind striving for unity, attempting to free itself from itself. From a starting point purified of every “formal” or “empirical” pre­ supposition, Hegel’s Phenomenology generates the objective world as a wholly internal

Henri befebvre

movement of the mind, the mind overcoming itself in a series of theses, antitheses, and syntheses. “Consciousness itself,” noted Hegel, “is the absolute dialectical unrest, this medley of sensuous and intellectual representations whose differences coincide, and whose identity is equally again dissolved ”!0 Unity here is the unity of contradic­ tion, of looking the negative in the face and living with it. Without contradictions, everything is void, nothingness. Contradictions are a bit like internal combustion, incessantly devouring themselves, uprooting being from itself, animating becoming, promoting both life and the annihilation of life. Kojève dug his clawls into contradiction. The “awareness of contradiction,” he said, “is what moves human, historical evolution. To become aware of a contradiction is necessarily to want to remove it. Now, one can in fact overcome the contradiction of a given existence only by modifying the given existence, by transforming it through Action.”11 Contradiction, specifically the contradiction between master and slave, lay at the heart of Kojève’s reading of Hegel: “Man was born and History began,” he main­ tained, “with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave” (43). Universal history—the history of human interaction with other humans and with nature—is “the history of the interaction between warlike Masters and work­ ing Slaves.” (One doesn’t need a lot of imagination to see what Marx got from this!) Human history, for Hegel, ceases once this difference—this opposition, this con­ tradiction—between master and slave ceases. Still, liberation necessitated a fight, a “bloody Fight,” with risk to life and limb, taking hold as a “struggle for Recognition,” a “dialectic of the Particular and the Universal in human existence.” On the one hand, the slave can’t be content with attributing a value to himself alone. He wants his particular value, his own worth, to be recognized by every­ one—that is, universally, and above all by the master, who wont deign to recognize 75 him. On the other hand, the master likewise yearns for universality, but similarly can’t have it so long as he oppresses his other, the slave, who won’t acknowledge the master’s authority. Hence an inextricable antinomy ensues, “two opposed shapes of consciousness,” according to Hegel in Phenomenology, “one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another” (115). The master and slave sit on either side of the fence. But they can recognize themselves only by mutually recogniz­ ing one another. So long as the master is opposed to the slave, so long as mastery and slavery exist, Kojève notes, “the synthesis of the Particular and the Universal cannot be realized, and human existence will never be ‘satisfied’” (58). Hegel thought this conflictual and contradictory history would actually come to an end with the advent of the liberal bourgeois state. Then, personal and individual value would be recognized in its particularity while becoming incarnated universally, in the state, thus resolving the particular-universal contradiction, transcending the mastery-slavery dialectic. Needless to say, Marx and Lefebvre (and Kojève) had a hard time swallowing Hegel’s liberal state medicine. Nevertheless, they followed Hegel in believing that real human individuality—real human freedom—was predicated on overcoming fragmented con­

sciousness and fragmented life, and on synthesizing particularity and universality. It was crucial for individual and social well being. Free development of each, they knew, is the condition for the free development of all, just as the free development of all is the condition for the development of each. Kojève summarized the dialectical dilemma, using crypto-Marxist terminology: [W]hat is recognized universally, by the others, by the State, by Mastery as such, is not Work, nor the worker's »personality,1 but at best the impersonal product of work. As long as the Slave works while remaining a Slave, that is to say, as long as he does not risk his life, as long as he does not fight to impose his personal value on the State, as long as he does not actively intervene in the social life, his particular value remains purely subjective: he is the only one to recognize it. Hence his value is uniquely particular; the synthesis of the Particular and the Universal—

Metromarxiam

i.e. Individuality—is no more realized in the Slave than in the Master, And that is why—once more—the synthesis of Particularity and Universality in Individuality, which alone can truly 'satisfy1 Man, can be realized only in and by a synthetic 'overcoming' of Mastery and Slavery. (60; emphasis in the original)

Individuality, for Kojève—as for Lefebvre and Marx—meant a unity of the indi­ vidual and society, of workers with their means of work, of a state with its citizens. 76 Democracy wasn’t about despotic rule nor one-sided humanism, but “fully devel­ oped individuality,” circumstances in which everybody became, as Lefebvre hoped, “total men”—a humanly, as opposed to stately, incarnation of Hegel’s absolute idea. Hegel, via Kojève, had provided a method, the dialectic; he’d likewise provided a form, the struggle for recognition, the contradiction between particularity and universality. In the years ahead, Lefebvre would give concrete historical content to these abstract Hegelian categories, grounding them in everyday life and in the city itself. He’d find his Marxist humanist voice soon enough. One bold step in that direction emerged in 1939, just as war broke out, with the publication of a little book, Dialectical Materialism, Lefebvre s pesky rejoinder to Joseph Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. The text became a mini-best-seller in France; it helped make the young Marx credible, readable, no longer off limits. But it also brought Lefebvre heat from party bigwigs and from sectarian dogmatists.

From Hegelian Marxism to Everyday bife The inability to unify consciousness in both its particularity and universality is the source of inward disruption in people. It unleashes “unhappy consciousness,” “con­ sciousness of self as a dual-natured merely contradictory being.”12 Hegel said unhappy consciousness is like gazing at one’s own self-consciousness in somebody else’s con­

Henri Lefebvre

sciousness. Consciousness was present, but somehow out there, elsewhere-detached, not present. This severing meant great mental torment. Hegel sought to fix it via the mind, via pure reason, in purely abstract form. In fact, with Hegel it was ail in the mind, all form; there wasn't any real content, any real materiality, any objectivity. Or, more precisely, subjectively was the objectivity. True, masters and slaves existed, but they weren't actual living people rooted in planet earth; they appeared more as forms of consciousnessy as minds without men, as Marx said in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844). Hegel, wrote Marx, “turns man into the man of consciousness, instead of turning consciousness into the consciousness of real men." In Dialectical Materialism, Lefebvre sided with the young Marx: he concurred that Hegel didn't really “get" alienation. Actually, the Marx of 1844 simultaneously rejected and profoundly modified Hegel. He knew Hegel had done critically steady work. But he knew, too, that Hegel's dialectic needed content, unhappy consciousness a materialist anchoring. Content was the real being that conditioned dialectical thought, Marx reckoned. Speculative philosophy needed transcending in the name of action and practice. Practice is this content; it’s both the beginning and end, the origin of thought and the solution to problems of thought. Hegel grasped this, but did so in a “one-sided” manner, recognizing only abstract mental practice, abstract mental labor. For young Marx and youngish Lefebvre alike, practice meant a humanist naturalism, a social prac­ tice, an analysis of pressing social problems, invariably economic problems, which called for practical solutions—invariably, political solutions. Thus, Lefebvre’s “dialectical materialism” constructed a specifically historical and sociological object; it was an analysis and a worldview, an awareness of the problems of the world and a will to transform that world. It was mindful of the economic realm, 77 but didn’t regress into economism; it acknowledged determination, but wasn’t itself deterministic; it established coherence without destroying complexity. It intro­ duced, Lefebvre said, “living men—actions, self-interest, aims, unselfishness, events and chances—into the texture and intelligible structure of the Becoming”; and it ana­ lyzed “a totality that is coherent yet many-sided and dramatic"13 Through practice, humans refashion external nature at the same time as they refashion internal nature, their own nature. Hence practice also involved “the produc­ tion of man."'4 Lefebvre was addressing the production of real, corporeal, sensuous men and women, as was Marx; these were people who breathe “all the powers of nature" and who’re equipped with “essential powers," “vital powers," “drives” and “pas­ sions." Passion, Marx notes, “is man's essential power vigorously striving to attain its object."15 Passionate human beings are protean creatures, desiring differentiated prac­ tice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity, something integral in intellectual, emo­ tional and biological nourishment. If one cuts this off, denies it somehow, converts it into a dread zone of necessity and hollows out the content, then essential powers are henceforth estranged, alienated. Life was lived in Plato's cave, staring at shadows. But alienation is more than “feeling bad ” It may coincide with exploitation; often it does. S’ People, however, might be alienated from what they do, or who they really are, even

when they’re raking in wealth—maybe especially when they’re raking it in! The bour­ geoisie is alienated, too, Marx felt, just as the master’s consciousness is “unhappy” for Hegel. Private property is public enemy number 1 here, of course, since it forges class cleavages; the same is true for division of labor, money exchange, occupational struc­ turing, profit dictates, and bureaucratic administration; and also for technological advancement under capitalism, which inverts huge liberating potentiality, compelling a lot of people to work more, with greater repetition, increasing their burden rather than

Metromarxism

lightening the load. In interwar France, Lefebvre’s hope against hope was that socialism would over­ throw alienated capitalist life while staving off the specter of fascism. The antithesis of alienated man was the “total man,” a character Marx alludes to in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (see “Private Property and Communism”). “The positive supersession of private property,” Marx writes, means “the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life.” Human essence doesn’t just revolve around pos­ session, around simply having or owning; people, according to Marx, appropriate their integral essence in an integral way, as “total people.” Thus, “human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of his individuality... are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object, the appropriation of that object” (351). Lefebvre takes this notion from Marx, yet pushes it much further. He claims that this kind of sensual satisfaction—appropriating the external world and organ­ ically connecting objectivity and subjectivity—has to be a socialist ideal It may never become an actual fact; it is a striving, a hope, a goal, a limit, a possibility, 78 always frustratable and contingent. It comes without guarantees, giving instead “direction to our view of the future, to our activities and our consciousness.”1* It signifies a future open to active human practice, to thought and striving, of putting striving into action, into praxis, to overcome “objective” contradictions. Nothing is assured or definitive, predestined or closed; the totality of the total man is an “open totality.” The total man, Lefebvre notes, expresses “a limit to infinity,” perpetual tran­ scendence, incessant becoming. It’s not a “new man,” somebody who “suddenly bursts forth into history, complete, and in the possession of all hitherto incompatible qualities of vitality and lucidity, of humble determination in labor and limitless enthusiasm in creation.”17 This remark, like the general thesis aired in Dialectical Materialism, represents a thinking radical’s assault on the “official” party Marxism of the day, the custodians of which were Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov (Stalin’s hack theorist). This orthodoxy tried to merge philosophy with the natural sciences and base dialectical method on the “dialec­ tics of nature.” Lefebvre’s Marxist humanism explicitly seeks to scupper such dogma, to loosen the grip of “systematized” Marxism, a Marxism reduced to a single science, a catechism of the future in the form of political economy, with its law-like dialectic supposedly operating objectively, unconsciously, behind the backs of real, thinking people. Soviet-style Marxism, Lefebvre warns, is dangerous because it has seductive

Henri Lefebvre

advantages: “it is simple and easily taught for one thing; “it steers clear of complex problems» this being precisely the aim and meaning of dogmatism” It also “gives its adherents a feeling of both vigorous affirmation and security” Meanwhile, it has a deep mistrust of the complexity and richness of Marx’s early writings. From the mid- 1940s onward, Lefebvre did begin to recast Marx’s thought. As a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (1949-61), working initially on rural sociology, he’d reverse the scale of Marxism, amid cries of heresy, pitching his critique of bourgeois society (and of institutionalized Marxism) to the “everyday,” to quotidian experience, to ground zero—to the scale that most of us find meaningful. “Modern” postwar capitalism continued to exploit and alienate at the workplace, but now alienation also began to cut deep into everyday life itself, into non-workplace everyday life, into reproduction and leisure, flourishing through con­ sumerism, seducing via media and advertising, intervening though state bureaucracies and planning agencies, seemingly lurching around ever corner and booming out on every billboard. Now, claimed Lefebvre, “you are being looked after, cared for, told how to live better, how to dress fashionably, how to decorate your house, in short how to exist; you are totally and thoroughly programmed.” But if this reeked of pessimism and closure—of the sort of “one-dimensional” thesis Herbert Marcuse would commandeer in the 1960s—none was intended. Lefebvre was much too spirited, romantic, and dialectical for that. Everyday life, instead, possessed a dialectical and ambiguous nature. On the one hand, it’s the realm increasingly colonized by the commodity, and hence shrouded in all kinds of mystification, fetishism, and alienation. “The most extraordinary things are also the most everyday,” Lefebvre quipped in Critique of Everyday Life, reiterating Marx’s comments on the “fetishism of commodities,” that 79 “the strangest things are often the most trivial” On the other hand, paradoxically, everyday life is likewise a primal site for meaningful social resistance, “the inevitable starting point for the realization of the possible.” Or, more flamboyantly, “everyday life is the supreme court where wisdom, knowledge and power are brought to judgment.”1* Thus, radical politics has to begin and end in everyday life; it can’t do otherwise. Nobody can get beyond everyday life, which literally internalizes global capitalism; and global capitalism, in turn, is nothing without many everyday lives, lives of real people in real time and space, coexisting with other people in real time and space. Everyday life is like quantum gravity: by going very small you can perhaps begin to understand the whole structure of life. By changing everyday life you can change the world; why change the world if it doesn’t release everyday life? People don’t fight or die for tons of steel, Lefebvre quips; they aspire to be happy in everyday life, to be free, wanting not to work or produce. But a lot of Marxists still held a blinkered notion of class struggle, a largely abstract and idealized version that neglects, Lefebvre reckons, not only the “recent modifications of capitalism,” but also the “socialization of pro­ duction” and “the hew contents of specifically capitalist relations.”19 In other words, some Marxists had let the world pass them by, had turned their backs away from the mundane realities of modern everyday life, not confronted them.

Metromarxism

indeed, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the capitalist system, for all its inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies, actually grew, actually expanded its productive forces, began colonizing hitherto uncolonized parts of life, broadening its web and embedding the culture of commodities deeper into the structural and superstructural fabric of society. The radical hopes that lit Lefebvre s fire in 1925 suddenly seemed naive against the soaring business cycle. Writing later, in 1971, Lefebvre recognized that, “around 1960 the situation became dearer, everyday life was no longer the no­ man’s land, the poor relation of specialized activities. In France and elsewhere neo-capitalist leaders had become aware of the fact colonies were more trouble than they were worth and there was a change of strategy; new vistas opened out such as investments in national territories and the organization of home trade.” The net result, he thought, was that “all areas outside the centers of political decision and economic concentration of capital were considered as semi-colonies and exploited as such; these included the suburbs of cities, the countryside, zones of agricultural production and all outlying districts inhabited, needless to say, by employees, technicians and manual laborers; thus the state of the proletarian became generalized, leading to a blurring of class distinctions and ideological ‘values.’”20 Work life, private life, and leisure all became fair game, “rationally” exploited, cut up, laid out, and put back together again, timetabled and organized by various corporations and assorted Kafkaseque bureaucracies and technocracies. Now a massive scientific and technological revolution had occurred, a perverse inversion of—and substitute for—the social and political revolution that never came. That was like waiting for Godot. And when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956, crushing Hungary’s democracy movement, it confirmed what many socialists and 80 communists already privately knew: the Soviet revolution had failed. China’s situa­ tion, too, was uncertain and suspect. So “there was this gap,” Lefebvre said, “and then the rise of a new social class, that of the technocrats. And then the advent of the world market, that is, a world market after the period of industrial capitalism. This world market became an immense force with consequences even for the ‘socialist’ countries.”21 What’s more, the massive technological revolution was matched by equally massive processes of urbanization and modernization, which began transforming industries and environments everywhere, seemingly without limit, opening out new vistas, but also creating immense new voids, new desert spaces, deserts for the mind and body.

Urbanization in the Modern World “Whenever I set foot in Mourenx,” Lefebvre writes in Introduction to Modernity, “I am filled with dread.” Mourenx is a prototypical species, a French “New Town,” which, like other New Towns sprouting up on the European (and American) landscape, “has a lot going for it.” The overall plan,” Lefebvre writes, “has a certain attractiveness: the lines of the tower blocks alternate horizontals and verticals. .. . The blocks of flats look well planned and properly built; we know that they are very inexpensive, and offer their res­ idents bathrooms or showers, drying rooms, well-lit accommodation where they can

Henri Lefebvre

sit with their radios and television sets and contemplate the world from the comfort of their own homes.... Over here, state capitalism does things rather well. Our technicists and technocrats have their hearts in the right place.”22 And yet, every time he sees these Corbusierian “machines for living in,” he’s terrified. He’s adamant that such an urbanization paradigm is Cartesian through and through, compartmentalizing differ­ ent spheres of human activity, zoning things here and there, creating functional spaces, but despoiling everyday life at the same time, turning people inward, not outward, turning them away from each other. René Descartes and the Cartesian tradition within Western philosophy and the humanities began this severing in a noble pursuit of “rational” knowledge, carving out a debilitating disjuncture between mind and body. New Towns like Mourenx were really the spatial embodiment of this Logos, this big technocratic brain at work, and Lefebvre knew it firsthand: Mourenx, after all, overlooked the cherished medieval Navarennx, his childhood home and timeworn summer residence. He saw the New Town rise up out of nothing. And he was able to witness what Navarennx had that Mourenx didn’t. His grumble was a strange, lonely voice in the Marxist world, since he demanded existential freedom alongside the material freedom that had supposedly been granted “the masses.” His voice combined Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov with Karl Marx: he cautioned that planners had now become new “grand inquisitors,” promising bread as long as they controlled everybody’s free­ dom. The accusation, of course, merely reaffirmed Lefebvre’s Marxist humanism; only now it became a ^spatial” Marxist humanism as well. Now, a more wholesome personhood was predicated upon a more wholesome spatial organization; each needed the other. Lefebvre’s brand of Marxist-humanist urbanism demanded bread and freedom, ethics and aesthetics, praxis and poiesis. 81 Alas, in Mourenx ennui had set in. Spontaneous vitality and creativity had apparently been wrung out. Strangely, there aren’t many traffic lights in Mourenx, even though the place is described as being “nothing but traffic lights.” Its whole phys­ iognomy, meanwhile, is left naked, robbed of meaning, “totally legible.” In Mourenx, Lefebvre writes, “modernity opened its pages to me.” But here “what are we on the threshold of?” he inquires, is it “socialism or supercapitalism? ... Are we entering the city of joy or the world of unredeemable boredom? ... As yet I cannot give a firm answer” (119). One conclusion, at any rate, is evident: Mourenx’s world expresses an ordered, enclosed, an had just been launched. It was a shot over the bows of the mainstream, fired from the fringe and plotted underground. Produced on a shoestring out of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Antipode was unashamedly oppositional, designed to elicit social change, not feather smug careers. The journal sparkled with regular features and hard-edged takes on urban poverty, neoimperialism, geographically uneven development (between the “First” and “Third Worlds,” between the city and the countryside, the inner city and the suburb, etc.), gender and environmentalism. Harvey rolled off some early barbs within its pages, and jousted with establishment figures like Brian Berry; Antipode 156 likewise helped resurrect geography’s buried radical tradition, its best-kept secret, exemplified by Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, the nineteenth-century Russian and French anarchist geographers. Reclus, author of the massive six-volume tome L’homme et La Terre (1900), had done active service as a Communard in 1871; and Kropotkin’s anti-imperialist, antiracist “What Geography Ought to Be” (1885) became an instant hit, an inspirational document for fledgling radicals, three-quarters of a cen­ tury later. Geography, in short, had its heroes and had something meaningful to say about the world’s ills. Indeed, many of those ills had a geographical and geopolitical basis. Harvey himself had begun a book on urbanization that started out liberal; but as the writing progressed, and as he became increasingly radicalized, so too did the text Paradoxically, the work took a turn for the better as the world took a turn for the worse. After awhile, Harvey looked toward Marxism for guidance, and got it. Social Justice and the City ( 1973), like Castells’s Urban Question, captured the Marxist moment, sparking a new Zeitgeist by denouncing the old Zeitgeist. It marked a dramatic intellectual shift

j

from Explanation in Geography> Harvey’s very own epistemological break, which not only transformed thinking about the urban hereinafter but also transformed thinking

j

J

about geography hereinafter. And although he had no inkling then, it was reinventing -.I: Marxism, too, giving a brilliant new critical vision that brought Marx to bear on space, : £|

and space to bear on Marx, begetting a historicogeographical materialism of the city, a truly revolutionary urbanism.7

Revolutionary Marxism, Revolutionary Urban Theory Social Justice and the City is really two books rolled into one—or rather a thesis and an antithesis that broke ground for a provocative synthesis, itself a fresh, new, radical opening. In part 1, the thesis, Harvey presents '‘Liberal Formulations” to the urban question and to the problem of social justice; part 2, his antithesis, offers “Socialist [Marxist] Formulations.” Harvey notes that Marx regarded “ideology” as an “unaware expression of the underlying ideas and beliefs which attach to a particular social situ­ ation, in contrast to the aware and critical exposition of ideas in their social context which is frequently called ideology in the west.” As such, the essays comprising part 2, Harvey writes, “are ideological in the western sense” whereas those in part 1 “are ideo­ logical in the Marxist sense.”8 Weaving through both parts are four distinct but interactive threads that kept the argument tied together: the nature of theory, the As far as theory goes, old positivist staples—like the separation of methodology from philosophy, facts from values—now gets sent out the window. In Harvey's opinion, to regard reality as possessing an identity independent of human percep­ tion and action is idiotic and ideological—ideological in the Marxist sense: “I now reject these distinctions as injurious to analysis even in their apparently harmless

David Harvey

nature of space, the nature of social justice, and the nature of urbanism.

form of a separation of convenience” (12). He opts instead for Marx’s method, with its relational mode of thought and concept of “totality,” and rejection of the stubborn dualisms that beset Western philosophy. Marx acknowledged how differ- 137 ent aspects of the physical and human world are somehow interrelated, and Harvey tries to frame this belief around Bertell Oilman’s reading of Marx, quoting the latter’s Alienation as clarification. “(T]he twin pillars of Marx’s ontology,” or theory of what exists, wrote Oilman, “are his conception of reality as a totality of internally related parts, and his conception of these parts as expandable relations such that each one in ■ its fullness can represent the totality.”9 Harvey equally had recourse to the “operational structuralism” of the French child psychologist Jean Piaget, whom Harvey notes “arrives at a conception of method that r is very close indeed to that practiced by Marx” (287). In Structuralismy Piaget pointed ptothe notion of “emergent totalities,” in which it’s “neither the elements nor the whole pthat comes about in a manner ones knows ... but the relations among elements that Ej-count,” How things hang together is the crux, not the things in themselves. Totalities are ytructured wholes that are under constant transformation; in fact, Piaget wrote, “were p not for the idea of transformation, structures would lose all explanatory import jjKnce they would collapse into static forms.”10 Relationships within and between total5 are thus inevitably dynamic, inevitably contradictory and conflictual. Any trans­ nation usually occurs through the resolution of contradiction and conflict, *lting in a restructuring and a renewal of the totality—together with its contradic-

fions. Harvey suggests that research now needs to discover such “transformation rules,” figuring out how society, especially urban society, is constantly being transformed. Urbanists must give up on finding “causes” in an isolated, atomized sense. Verification, he posits—sticking tight to Marx’s last thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach—“is achieved through practice, which means that theory is practice in a very important sense. When theory becomes practice through use then and only then is it really verified” (12; emphasis in the original). This notion of theory has weighty implications for the nature of space, justice, and urbanism. Space, for a start, can’t be regarded as a “thing in itself,” bereft of content and texture. One must assume a relative viewpoint, understanding it as not an “it” at all, but as a relationship between objects within a structured totality, “as being con­ tained in objects in the sense that an object can be said to exist only insofar as it con­ tains and represents within itself relationships to other objects” (13). “What is space?” henceforth becomes a redundant question. Itjis much better to ask, “How is it that dif­

Metromarxiam

ferent human practices create and make \use of distinctive conceptualizations of space?” “Created space,” not “effective space,” now becomes “the overriding princi­ ple of geographical organization.” The property system creates “absolute” spaces within which monopoly can assert control. But this absolutism is really predicated on relativity: parcels of urban land get appropriated because their benefits derive from relationships with other parcels of land. Standing alone, they constitute nothing. The urban system is conditioned by relative and monopoly rental and property values, as is the circulation and direction of surplus value flowing through the built environment. They’re all highly specific human activities, his­ torically and geographically contingent, but with their own laws of transfórma­ las tion. Understanding urbanism and the social process/spatial form theme consequently means understanding “how human activity creates the need for spe­ cific spatial concepts and how daily social practice solves with consummate ease seemingly deep philosophical mysteries concerning the nature of space and the rela­ tionships between social processes and spatial forms” (14). The same logic applies to social justice. Eternal ethical principles, Harvey notes, can’t be laid down with the full force of absolute law. Nor can social and moral philos­ ophy be approached as a distinct field of enquiry, cut off from specific social and spa­ tial practices. Marx himself was leery of taking justice as a “universal” truth. He knew how universal truths had a nasty habit of operating ideologically, of functioning as disguised and perverted wills to power for the ruling class, who’d “legalize” their own ideal as everybody’s ideal. That’s what he was getting at in The Communist Manifesto when he noted that communism would “abolish” all justice and morality. Marx wasn’t giving up on ethics and justice. Instead, believes Harvey, he meant that they “relate to and stem from human practice rather than with arguments about the eternal truth to be attached to these concepts” (15). One of the biggest, and most influential, culprits of the universalist line is John Rawls, the political philosopher whose Л Theory ofJustice (1971) remains the magisterial “liberal formulation” of social justice, warts and all Harvey doesn’t dismiss Rawls wholesale. But he does say that Rawls’s neo-Kantian

views retain dualist assumptions and posit a faulty one-sided and abstract analysis of distributive justice. Rawls never mentioned production. He pushed for prophylaxis rather than radical surgery, for fixing institutions rather than fixing the market system. And he did so on a pinhead and without historicity. “If law and government,” Harvey quotes Rawls as writing, “act effectively to keep markets competitive, resources fully employed, prop­ erty and wealth widely distributed over time, and to maintain the appropriate social minimum, then if there is equality of opportunity underwritten by education for all, the resulting distribution will be just” (109). Marx himself, of course, collapsed the separation of whole and parts, of system and institutions, of distribution and produc­ tion. He felt that production is distribution, and that the historical laws of production produced their own laws of distribution, that it's simply impossible to understand one without the other. Slice them in two and you slice your analysis in two, for the worse. Marx reckoned income (and hence distributive justice) was itself defined by produc­ tion, and the evolution that occurs in Social Justice and the City, from a liberal to a Marxist conception of the problem, tries to recouple the productive and distribu­ as a matter of eternal justice and morality to regard it as something contingent upon the social processes operating in society as a whole” (15). The most revealing demonstration of this evolution is the book’s pinnacle essay, “Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation,” a set piece that equally tells much about the nature

David Harvey

tive realms. “I move,” Harvey writes, “from a predisposition to regard social justice

of urbanism in a capitalist society. Here Harvey really gets geographical, and applies his new heightened Marxist powers to the question of ghetto formation. It is generally accepted, he hypothesizes, “that ghettos are bad things and that it 1S9 would be socially desirable to eliminate them without eliminating the populations they contain” (130-31). And yet, to say something meaningful in this vein requires a “revolutionary geographical theory to deal with it.” The big stumbling block is that textbook urban truths tend to be either status quo or downright counterrevolutionary. The former ground themselves in reality, but are suffused with apologetics; the latter directly blur and obscure truth—sometimes knowingly, other times unknowingly. Revolutionary theory, though, is critical and dialectically formulated, and creates truth rather than finds it. Chicago school sociology is classically status quo; it interprets the concentration of low-income and ethnic groups in ecological terms, in terms of “social adaptation,” specialization of function, lifestyle, and competition for living space. Its main thrust is descriptive. “It is curious to note,” writes Harvey, “that Park and Burgess did not pay a great deal of attention to the kind of social solidarity generated through the workings of the economic system nor to the social and economic relationships ' which derive from economic considerations.” In contradistinction, Harvey suggests ' that Engels offered not only a more realistic interpretation of urban land-use, but also ¡ provided a revolutionary theory, which, 128 years on, is still far more in touch with id economic and social realities, with hard ghetto realities. “The social solidarity jjwhich Engels noted was not generated by any subordinate ‘moral order,’” Harvey

reminds us. “Instead, the miseries of the city were an inevitable concomitant to an evil and avaricious capitalist system. Social solidarity was enforced through the operation of the market exchange system” (133). The essential characteristic of this exchange system is, in blunt terms, the essential problem. Chicago school status quo theory addressed everything but the essential problem. That’s why it was impossible to change the world through its interpretation of the world. Meanwhile, marginalist economic land-use theory uncritically accepted “competitive bidding,” and thus was at best status quo, at worst counterrevolutionary. Rich and poor jostle for a piece of the action, it posited, bid for space in the city. It’s a drama in U.S. cities that supposedly pits housing costs with travel to work costs. The economist William Alonso devised “bid-rent” curves to measure the optimum out­ come, to assess the inevitable trade-off, the best of all possible wdrlds. The poor, he claimed, have limited resources to spend on transportation and are compelled to live near the city center, where they generally find employment. But rents there are exorbi­ tantly high; the only way they can survive is toj multi-occupy, to live in overcrowded,

Metromarxism

usually shoddy, accommodations. The “natural” outcome is that the most vulnera­ ble populations live where they can least afford it, on the most expensive land. Glitches here might be temporarily bandaged by subsidizing mass transit systems— enabling poorer people to live more cheaply on peripheral land; alternatively, some form of rent control could be introduced, as could newly built subsidized housing. All these palliatives would certainly help; but they have as their basis, Harvey grum­ bles, “the tacit assumption that there is disequilibrium in urban land use and that policy should be directed towards getting urban land use back in balance. These solutions are liberal in that they recognize inequity but seek to cure that inequity 140 within an existing set of social mechanisms” (136). Getting rid of ghettos means getting rid of the conditions that gave rise to the truth of the theory of ghettos. In other words, we wish Chicago school sociology and Alonso’s land-use theory “to become not true” (137; emphasis in the original). The simplest approach, Harvey notes, “is to eliminate those mechanisms which serve to generate the theory. The mechanism in this case is very simple—competitive bidding for the use of land.” Of course, Harvey isn’t saying that economics are the only cause of ghettos; racism and xenophobia play obvious parts. What he does say, however, is that the foundation of the market—scarcity—actually kills two birds with one stone: it makes racism prosperous and it fosters racism. Scarcity, needless to say, is socially, not naturally, induced; the market system can’t function without it. So if scarcity goes, the market economy, the source of productive wealth under capitalism, will presumably go as well. There would then be no competitive bidding, no dog-eat-dog land and housing market, no incentive or mechanism to prey oft or “naturally” segregate the poor. The curious thing about U.S. cities, Harvey emphasizes, is the way assorted finan­ cial institutions and property capital actively produce scarcity, actively structure urban land use and residential patterning through their “normal” daily functioning, their “normal” desire to maximize profits. Sometimes this veers toward the unethical; but usually the unethical is really ethical, made sound business sense. Redlining is one

shady act of finagling* of deploying discriminatory loan and insuring practices* of deeming specific neighborhoods (and their denizens) ubad risks,” thereby depriving needy funds for areas and people that need them most; the same is true for blockbust­ ing, where buildings on centrally located land with “latent” economic value get delib­ erately milked. Landlords desist from doing repairs, from providing proper services, even resort to arson and tenant intimidation. The idea here is to plunder properties and people until the land is ripe for redevelopment, for potential upscaling, when the “wrong” people have to be supplanted by the “right” people. Whole blocks are willfully, and surreptitiously, devastated. “Respectable” people are usually glad to see them even­ tually torn down, or renovated, and their scruffy inhabitants displaced, but are absentminded, or ignorant, about the block's dubious past life. So, “it is a general characteristic of ghetto housing that if we accept the mores of normal, ethical, entre­ preneurial behavior, there is no way in which we can blame anyone for the objective social conditions which all are willing to characterize as appalling and wasteful of potential housing resources” (140).

Harvey confessed that Social Justice contained “serious weaknesses ” The category of rent was one of them, and soon he began to address this defect more systemat­ ically, from a Marxist perspective. Two studies of Baltimore stand out here. In both, the concept of “class-monopoly rent” and “finance capital” burst forth, and tackle aspects of urbanization largely subdued in Castells s The Urban Question.

David Harvey

Knife-Edge Urbanism

Harvey now equates urban “class-monopoly rent” with the rural “absolute rent” Marx conceived in volume 3 of Capital The key concept here is class power. Landlords gain their class power, as well as their legitimacy, from the way they 141 monopolize space. But the most powerful landlords can, and do, create special islands of scarcity, taking patches of their land off the market; they can survive well enough without releasing every unit under their command. They'll release these spe­ cific units only if they receive a rate of return above the more uniform “differential” rents operative elsewhere in the city. The extra premium represents extragreedy land­ lords diverging from their already greedy class interest. So, in one sense, class-monop­ oly rents actually hinder the operations of any “free” land market and are divisive within the capitalist class. In another sense, they paradoxically ensure a dynamic and healthy land market, coordinating “rational” use of space while wreaking havoc for the propertyless. Harvey investigated Baltimore's housing market with graduate student Lata Chatterjee, and in 1974 wrote a seminal article that appeared in Antipode, called “Absolute Rent and the Structuring of Space by Financial Institutions.” It was a raw illustration of how the city’s residential structure was produced by the interacting poli­ cies of financial and governmental institutions. Various markets and submarkets > ousted, both privately and publicly financed, owner-occupied and tenant-based, some i with high turnovers and others with a stable class of dwellers. The paper’s basic mes; sage is about how coldhearted institutional rationality and speculator landlords played

a fundamental role in shaping Baltimore’s residential structure; even industrial (pro­ ductive) capitalists were subservient to the power, as a class, of FIRE concerns— finance, insurance and real estate. There was nothing accidental about the perpetuation of prim islands of privilege surrounded by a sea of wreckage and want. By denying or granting finance, by manipulating the political and institutional process, a class of financial capitalists were not only dominating housing and land markets; they were becoming a preeminent force in the overall dynamics of U.S. urbanization. In a later, more refined version of this thesis, “Class-Monopoly Rent, Finance Capital and the Urban Revolution,” Harvey admits that his conclusions closely resem­ bled Lefebvre s. The former said that “distinctions between land’ and ‘capital’ and between ‘rent’ and profit’ have become blurred under the impact of urbanization.”11 The ability to extract class-monopoly rents—which is to say. amexorbitant rent above the generally accepted “normal” rent—have enhance*! the rate of blurring because, according to Harvey, it has lured and accelerated thé shift of financial resources into land and property speculation. Class-monopoly rents can now be garnered because

Metromarxisin

of absolute command of a special relative location. Because of private property rights, this is a class prerogative under capitalism; and yet, class-monopoly rent takes this class prerogative even further. It emanates, above all, not only from the power of landlords as class, but from how the most individually powerful landlords can monopolize at whim, above and beyond the general interest. “It may be,” Harvey notes, “that problems of ‘stagflation in advanced capitalist countries are connected to the land and property boom evident since the mid-1960s.” Since then, urbanization has changed, and goes on changing, “from an expression of the needs of industrial producers to an expression of the power of finance capital over the 148 totality of the production process.” In a nutshell, “finance capital” steps in as medi­ ator and facilitator of the “urban revolution.” The accumulation of capital via the production of goods—the primary circuit—now concedes ground to the accumula­ tion of capital via investment in the secondary circuit of land and property, in which windfall gains reside. Harvey’s Marxist theory, like Lefebvre’s, thereby accredits a much more offensive role for the city and for space under capitalism. Space and urbanism don’t just help reproduce labor-power, as Castells believed, in a relatively defensive manner; the very spatial dynamics of urban land and property markets, to say nothing about “fixed cap­ ital” infrastructure (roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, etc.), actually boost the accumu­ lation of capital. Urban space under capitalism is an “active moment,” proactively productive and not merely passively reproductive; it is, Harvey argues, a unit of capital accumulation as well as a site of class struggle. The urban process pivots on this antago­ nism. These, in Harvey’s eyes, are the “twin themes” in the metropolitan dialectic. Given the dictates of the former, the latter class struggle unfolds between capital and labor and as an internal squabble between different factions of the bourgeoisie— between vying industrial, merchant, and financial capitalists and landed property. The metropolis is highly contested terrain where capital accumulation exigencies and class struggle offenses collide and get worked through. Accumulation and class struggle

become integral to each other» are different sides of the same capitalist coin.'2 Working-class resistance has to be viewed within the laws of capital accumulation; the laws of accumulation have to incorporate class struggle. Accumulation is the perpetual augmentation of money, money thrown into pro­ duction, “money in process” that sucks blood from living labor to generate surplus value, which becomes the source of profit (and of rent and interest). Some profits get used unproductively for individual consumption; others must be tossed back into the daily grind and become the basis for expanded production and for filching even greater rates of surplus value. The unbroken whirring motion whereby money begets more money, capital begets more capital, is the process Marx termed “the accumula­ tion of capital ” Accumulation is the sine qua non of capitalism. Harvey is a classically Marxian Marxist to center his urban drama around accumulation. He knows, as Marx did, how capitalism expands through the application of living labor in production. Profit is herein but transformed surplus value, a quanta of surplus labor time. Time is vital not only in the production of commodities but in their circulation and turnover: in the time it takes to produce and transport them to markets, in the time The quicker the turnover, the quicker capital can be accumulated. So reducing the time in motion compels capitalists to innovate technologically, to deploy new machines, new devices, time-saving techniques, speeding up work time and the whole tempo of social and urban life, helping boost production for productions sake, accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Accumulation fuels competition, and

David Harvey

it takes assorted capitalists to sell commodities and pocket their respective booty.

competition turns into an external coercive force that disciplines everybody, both capitalists and workers, though in uneven ways and with varying fortunes. Harvey follows Marx to a tee, arguing that the process of capital accumulation 143 is inherently crisis prone, periodically spinning out of control, producing too many goods to be absorbed relative to market demand, bizarrely forcing people to live off too little because too much gets produced. Overproduction and overaccumulation appear as systemic psychoses; yet really they’re a kind of normal capitalist unhappi­ ness. Surplus capital lying idle, labor power getting “set free,” and dips in profit rates are all endogenous—not exogenous—to the business cycle. In slump times, Harvey notes, overaccumulated capital can be rechanneled into the secondary circuit of capi­ tal, into urban space, into an immobile built environment, where its value can t be moved without being destroyed. The secondary circuit, accordingly, is that circuit of capital investment, and surplus value production, that both flows and accrues through making space. In particular, its participants included those fractions of capital who embody the real estate sector (like constructors, property companies, realtors, finan­ ciers, landlords, etc.). But, in general, the secondary circuit alters the whole trajectory and functional demands of a capitalist economy, periodically altering the balance of

If power between capital chasing profit through industrial production and capital chasil Щ profit through spatial production. I When the industrial sector is in the doldrums, Harvey notes, the secondary circuit I gains prominence; it can help keep afloat accumulation exigencies. Investment here

entails the creation of whole physical landscape for production, circulation, exchange and consumption, and becomes one feasible, though temporary, cure for overaccumu­ lation overdoses in the primary, industrial circuit of capital. The “fix” is hardly methadone, though: it anticipates more frantic cravings, deeper yearnings, more fla­ grant contradictions to come. It creates a new physical landscape functional for the general interest of capitalism at one moment in time. Yet it literally imprisons future fixes, future crises, and there will always be a next time, always another crisis ahead. Capitalism, as an economic and political system, has somehow to negotiate “a knifeedge path between preserving exchange values of past investments in order to open up fresh room for accumulation.” Under capitalism, then, there is a perpetual struggle in which the ruling class “builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usuallyjn the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time. The temporal and geographical ebb an4 flow of invest­ ment in the built environment can be understood only in terms of such a process.”11

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Harvey had made a remarkably original contribution to Marxist theory here, and to geography and urban studies. It’s impossible to understand Harvey the man, as well as Harvey the Marxist thinker, without understanding the personal and episte­ mological interplay between this trinity. He had woven space and space-time rela­ tions into Marx’s historical materialist canon while at the same time giving it an urban bent, adding political and analytical clout to urban geography and to Marxian political economy, respectively. As ever, he viewed this body of scholarship as work in progress, as theoretically preliminary, as abstract propositions that needed relating to actual historical experience and practical politics. In 1976-77, he 144 said he wanted to straighten out ruffles in his Marxist position; he needed to go to Paris to learn from French Marxist discussions. So, on his years sabbatical, he plunged into the world of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, but straightaway he knew he could never fit into their rarefied milieu. He knew almost instantaneously that this world of the maître penseurs would never accept an Anglo-Saxon geographer into their fold. Besides, he didn’t want in anyway. He found the protagonists arrogant and distant. (He even said he felt a twinge of sympathy for Edward Thompson s spir­ ited attack on Althusser.14) In any event, Paris intervened. Harvey became increasingly intrigued by Paris itself, especially the city of Baron Georges Haussmann and Louis Napoleon, the Paris of the Second Empire. His interest here also helped him inch along with a bigger, ongoing project, The Limits to Capital Harvey’s most definitive Marxist intervention yet.

Spaced Out ir; Paris Limits to Capital ( 1982) took the best part of a decade to complete. “It nearly drove me nuts,” Harvey later said. “The book grounded everything that I’ve done since. It is my favorite text, but ironically it s probably the one that’s least read.” Economists ignored it, geographers didn’t understand it, and Marxists couldn’t deign to any geographer.15 Harvey’s aim was “to get to the point where the theory could help me understand

urban issues—and that I couldn’t do without addressing questions of fixed capital, which no one had written about at the time. There was the problem of finance capital, fundamental in housing markets, as I knew from Baltimore. If I had stopped with the first part of the book,” he believed, Limits “would have been very similar to many other accounts of Marx’s theory.... It was the latter part, where I looked at the temporality of fixed capital formation, and how that relates to money flows and finance capital, and the spatial dimensions of these, that made the book more unusual.”* The book seeks to fill a few “empty boxes” in Marxist theory, and grounds this fuller and weightier Marxist theory in urbanization and in space. At first, Harvey thought he could integrate the detailed historical studies he’d done on Baltimore’s housing markets and on “creative destruction” in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. But the project would become too unwieldy via that route, and would probably never get finished. So it became a text of pure theory, without reference to history. The most innovative material comes two-thirds into the book, where a “third cut” crisis figures as a crisis in the capitalist space-economy and festers through uneven geographical development. Hitherto, Harvey had plotted “first cut” crisis theory, the classic vari­ The temporal fix for that crisis—in which a credit money could be loaned out in advance to help producers produce and consumers consume—only unleashed a “second cut” kind of crisis, a monetary and temporal crisis and financial melt­ down. Harvey now deepens his analysis of finance capital and of the struggle between landlord and capitalist and landlord and the working class. He places “the

David Harvey

ety of crisis, epitomized by orgies of overproduction and devaluation of capital.

production of spatial configurations” within the circulation of “fictitious capital,” developing a formidable analysis of urban space as a pure financial asset, some­ thing that brings a stark dose of twentieth-century urban realism to Marx’s rural X45 ideas about rent and to his nineteenth-century notions of finance capital. Movements in the rate of interest, Harvey posits, now impose strong temporal rhythms on space, bringing land and property inextricably into the orbit of accumu­ lation and supply and demand for money capital. Ebbs and flows in interest rates spell ebbs and flows in urban land markets. Financial capital circulates through land and pursues rental income. If ground rents are rising and offer better rates of return than other sectors of the economy, and if money capital is available at affordable interest rates, investment will flood into real estate. From a capitalist’s point of view, this makes bottom-line sense. After all, it will promote activities on urban land that conform to the “highest” and “best” uses. Soon, certain profitable locations get pillaged; finance capital makes this pillage both possible and rapid. But capital following its pocket is usually socially reckless and humanly destructive, for excessively optimistic financial hopes spark binge investment. The specter of overinvestment looms; uneven geo­ graphical development is exacerbated because some locations lose investment as others gain it. But not everywhere will prosper and not every investor can win. Before fong, pyramids of debt congeal in space, literally with nowhere to go, and have little ÿ prospect of ever realizing their initially projected rates of return. Of course, finance I capital makes speculation happen and lubricates the flows and switching of money

between circuits of capital. As such, Harvey notes, speculation in land is necessary to capitalism. But at the same time, “speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.”’7 On the one hand, a land market in tune with the circu­ lation of finance capital “rationally” coordinates a landscape in capitalism’s own image, demonstrating how space production is both an “active moment” in its expansion and reproduction and a “spatial fix” to first- and second-cut crises formation. On the other hand, the wriggling out of one crisis, the buying of time for itself out of the credit it has borrowed and the space it has conquered, actually spreads and enhances the speed of capitalist crisis. It prods, Harvey reckons, the upper and outer geographical limits to capital itself, not just in cities, but across the whole globe.18 In the introduction to the 1999 Verso edition, Harvey reflected that the “three cuts’ at understanding crisis formation in Limits must, 1 emphasize, be read as distinguish­ able but simultaneously co-present moments within the internal contradictions of cap­ italism.”19 Within an explicitly urban context, nowhere was that contradictory

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copresence as legion, nor as instructive for Marxist urbanists, as in Second Empire Paris, which is why, while on sabbatical, Harvey trekked down the path already trodden by the likes of Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre. But he’d do so with differences. He’d mobilize a much more Marxian political economic brand of the­ orizing than either, putting Limits to Capital through its historical paces, tracing out the speculative transformation of Paris’s built environment, an epic process engi­ neered by finance and rentier capital in cahoots with Baron Haussmann and Napoleon III. It was a truly immense restructuring of Parisian space relations, rekindling capital accumulation for awhile. And it was likely on Harvey’s mind as he scribbled away at early drafts of Limits from his seventh-floor garret near the 146 Boulevard St. Michel. Part of Harvey propelled his theoretical insights toward the next crisis of capi­ talism. Another part believed that Marxists could learn about the next crisis from past crises, from crises like the one afflicting Second Empire Paris. Without further ado, he began exploring in detail its tax and credit system, its labor markets, its relations of reproduction and consciousness formation, and its class struggle. Everything he’d writ­ ten and thought about hitherto was condensed into a long, almost book-length essay called simply “Paris, 1850-1870.” It became his testing ground for past and present urban theory, effortlessly shifting from tax base and ground-rents statistics and the volume of bricks entering Paris, to the art of Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet, the prose of Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and the politics of Louis-Auguste Blanqui. For those critics who’d once accused Harvey of economic reductionism and “capital logic” excesses, this was a stunning rejoinder, deftly weaving together economic, social, political and ideological phenomena without reducing any one to the other. Marxist political economy, plainly, was more than just political economy. “The Second Empire,” Harvey wrote, “proved the golden age in a century noted for relatively secure and high rates of return and appreciation on Parisian property. But it was also an era in which the social meaning and orientation of property ownership in the city changed radically. Parisian property was more and more

appreciated as a pure financial asset, as a form of fictitious capital whose exchange value, integrated into the general circulation of capital, entirely dominated its use value. There was a world of difference, as Zola himself recognized, between the mas­ sive speculation of his anti-hero Saccard (La Curée) and the minor dabblings described in Balzac’s Cousin Bette.”20 On display is “the geopolitics of urban transformation” a dramatic shift from an erstwhile “introverted, private and personalized urbanism” to an “extroverted, public and collectivized style of urbanism under the Second Empire.” Public investments are organized around private gain, and public spaces appropriated for private use: “The boulevards lit by gas lights, dazzling shop window displays and cafés open to the street, became corridors of homage to the power of money and commodities, play spaces for the bourgeoisie” (204). The irony, we know, was that the new modes of communica­ tion and publicity, as well as this radiant illumination, opened everything up, in Baudelaires words, to the “eyes of the poor,” inspiring awe, acrimony and organiza­ tion; their anger, and their organization, would climax on the barricades of 1871. Harvey is oddly as silent on the Paris Commune as Benjamin, Lefebvre and the sitso he leaps to the post-Commune period, focusing on the building of the Sacré Coeur, a structure he personally hates and wants to demystify, ideologically.21 Yet as he brings his long monograph to a close, he nonetheless acknowledges that the Commune was “produced out of a search to transform the power and social rela­ tions within a particular class configuration constituted within a particular space of

David Harvey

uationists are vociferous. He claims that what happened there is “beyond our ken,”

a capitalist world itself in the full flood of dramatic transition. We have much to learn from the study of such struggles. And there is much to admire, much that inspires there too” (220).

147

Harvey’s Parisian analysis argues that investment in the built environment obeyed a certain logic, having a distinctive pattern and knowable consistency. Periodic gales of “creative destruction” in the urban fabric devalued capital tied down in space, destroyed its old use value, only to make way for fresh use values and new, increased exchange values. The physical landscape wavered between devaluation and revalua­ tion, crisis and speculative binge, a ravaged built form and a new built form—and a renewed basis for accumulation. One day it was a warehouse, the next it was a living space. The tearing down and rebuilding of metropolitan space—and hence its uneven geographical development—had its own rhythm that wasn’t entirely arbitrary. In fact, the metropolis’s rhythm was conditioned by rhythms of capital accumulation and by movements in the business cycle. Curiously, too, Harvey suggested that there was enough historical evidence to support the notion of regular “building cycles,” ranging from long-wave “Kondratieff” cycles of fifty years, to medium- and short-run “Kuznet” and “Juglar” cycles, spanning ten to thirty years, all of which periodized the historical geography of urbanization. One of the fascinating things about these ideas is that they gave the critical urban L analyst a firmer grip on what was going on in contemporary climes. Indeed, as the

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1970s rolled into the 1980s, and as the 1973 oil crisis had shaken up the political econ­ omy of advanced capitalism, all kinds of new building booms, architectural tropes, and bright new urban redevelopment programs flourished and became ever more pal­ pable in space. By the mid-1980s, Harvey himself began to suggest that urbanization, like everything else, had changed its spots in the United States since 1972-73. For one thing, the global stagflation (rising unemployment and inflation) of that time had ripped apart urban employment bases. In response, ruling-class alliances in urban areas got tough—whether they liked it or not—and adopted much more competitive postures. The social democratic managerialism, so characteristic of urban governance in the 1960s and early 70s, as Castellss work emphasized, was replaced by a new motif of entrepreneurialism, where lean government divested from collective consumption obli­ gations and entered into “public-private partnerships” to capture new investment and growth. Harvey soon recognized that this meant heightened“interurban competition” Now, cities went at it head to head, trying any ploy that would improve their place image and business friendliness, anything tljiat would make them hot contenders. They’d wrestle with peer cities with respect^ to their position in the international division of labor (where money is earned) and in the division of consumption (where money is spent), trying to lure control and command functions (financial and administrative power especially) and/or captüre governmental redistributions (like military contracts). None was mutually exclusive; any mix would do. Harvey only had to venture no further than his own backyard for testimony: Baltimore was turning toward tourism as a saving grace, with probusiness mayor William Donald Shaefer at the helm. Soon to emerge out of the dockland ashes was Harborplace, James Rouse’s prototypical shopping arcade; the Maryland Science Center; the 14b National Aquarium; a marina; several chain hotels (one, the Hyatt, actually had its palms greased with an eleven-million-dollar low-interest loan, a so-called Urban Development Action Grant). From being "the armpit of the East” in the 1960s, Baltimore suddenly rose to postindustrial prominence, hitting the front page of Time magazine twice during the 1980s. Amazingly, it was now somewhere attractive for developer capital, for financial services, for cultural entertainment—in short, attractive for all the big growth sectors in the U.S. economy. And yet, there was rot beneath its glitter. "A scream started inside me,” says Robert Ward’s character Red Baker. "Across the street I found the new mall bar. It was called the Angry Oyster and had a picture of a little demon oyster popping out of a shell with a rough-and-ready look on his face. The new Baltimore. Inside the place was built like a schooner, with portholes and fake teakwood and waitresses push­ ing fifty done up in pirate miniskirts, black patches over their eyes, and rags wrapped round their heads. I looked at their varicose-veined legs and thought of Wanda and of myself, old sailors rotting away down on Pier One.”22 Red looked down—as Harvey had looked down in an essay called “A View from Federal Hill”—at the Inner Harbor, "where they were building the new condos. Nice, smooth, poured concrete for nice, smooth lawyers with their hanging plants and sailboats. I kicked through the snow and saw a wire trash can with ‘Balmere Is Best’ on it and picked it up and threw it with

David Harvey

all my might down the snowy hill towards the docks. It bounced twice, slammed into a parked BMW, and then rolled on until it came to rest by a huge, impassable hill of snow”23 “Certain things stand out in a city,” Harvey wrote. “A medieval European city immediately signals that religion and aristocracy were the chief sources of power by the way cathedrals and castles dominate. The United States struggled long and hard to get rid of aristocratic privilege, but Baltimore’s downtown skyline says that a financial aristocracy is alive and well. As you look down on the city from Federal Hill, banks and financial institutions tower over everything else, proclaiming in glass, brick, and con­ crete that they hold the reins of power.”24 Something qualitatively new was happening to cities, to economics, politics and ideas, and all of it needed figuring out because all of it was somehow entwined. It was capitalism as usual, but with added and novel twists. The concern for intensified com­ petition was transforming labor markets, labor processes, products and patterns of consumption everywhere, making them much more “flexible,” paralleling flexible transformations in the whole physicality of cities themselves. New office blocks began to mushroom; so did glitzy hotels, waterfront marinas, sports stadiums, shopping and cultural centers, encased in often shocking and eye-catching archi­ tectural styles, replacing drab old dockland factories, mills, wharves, and ware­ houses. No longer was government coughing up for public service provision and collective consumption budgets; now it subsidized corporate and developer invest­ ment, lubricated private capital circulating into the secondary circuit of capital, tried to leverage business and capital back into cities, into spaces and places they’d once—and still would otherwise—shun. “Trickle down” became the new mantra. That was how cities would supposedly regain, or cling on to, economic prowess and deliver goodies to their citizens. By 149 1987, Harvey had designated these shifting social and cultural circumstances “postmodern”; and they were related to these “flexible” accumulation trends. He was bothered about what he saw and felt, bothered about what he heard in politics and scholarship. His antennae detected a retreat from Marxism as well: it was deemed old hat, moribund, a modernist “metanarrative,” something about to be superseded by a looser being called “postmodernism.” “Suddenly, there was all this talk of postmod­ ernism as a category for understanding the world,” Harvey later recalled, “displacing or submerging capitalism. So I thought: I’ve written The Limits to Capital; I’ve done all this research on Second Empire Paris; I know a certain amount about the origins of modernism, and a lot about urbanization, which features strongly in this new dispen­ sation; so why not sit down and produce my own take on it?”25

Postmodern Compression ; Harvey’s original intention was to write a book about postmodernism in the city. He’d î given an early glimpse of that desire in an Antipode piece called “Flexible %Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘Postmodernism’ in the [ American City” (1987). He noted there that, since 1972-73, urban life, under a regime I of flexible accumulation, had presented an “immense accumulation of spectacles.”

Metromarxiam

(We ve heard this language before, of course, from Guy Debord, whom Harvey cited approvingly.) The symbolic demise of modernist architecture in 1972 was itself an immense spectacle, if we believe the critic Charles Jencks; it came with the dynamiting of St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe housing complex on July 15 of that year. (Jencks, a postmod­ ern savant, even gave a precise time: 3:32 p.m. “or thereabouts”) The complex was an unlivable hellhole. Its destruction was the death-knell of Le Corbusier’s “machines for living in” principle, the barrack-block, penal-style design that once became the costeffective solution for low-income public housing. That same year, Robert Venturi also urged the architectural profession to “learn from Las Vegas,” to give up on grandiose and austere minimalism, and embrace the honky-tonk strip malls and garish neons of Nevada’s infamous gambling resort. Venturi’s manifesto was a rearguard indictment of the lost purity of the modern planning movement He never actually mentioned “post­ modernism” in this indictment, but he nonetheless legitimized postmodernism, help­ ing shift the ballast away from an architecture based on social reform (modernism) toward one based on play (postmodernism). jFrom now on, Venturi said, the pro­ fession should be self-ironizing and schizoid rather than high-strung and homoge­ neous, pluralist and popular rather than singular and intellectual—Forrest Gump rather than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Venturi, and the self-proclaimed postmod­ ernists who followed him, reckoned that modernism had ruined our cities with its inhuman brutalism, formalism of design, and functional planning credos; post­ modernism, by contrast, respects spontaneity and chaos, is more sympathetic to vernacular styling, and hence is more democratic. Harvey, though, smells something rotten here. His argument broadly concurs with that of Lefebvre and the situationists. He notes that the problem with mod150 ernism isn’t so much its planning principles per se, but how modem planners and architects are disciplined by market imperatives, by commodity and profit dictates. Postmodernism offers more aesthetical emancipation rather than real social emanci­ pation, a change of form rather than a change of content. It goes with the grain of the market rather than against it. Postmodernism touts architectural fantasy, but in reality it is shallow serial reproduction. Its “spectacular” designs, Harvey notes, became so ubiquitous that already they have a predictable monotony about them. They have, he writes, been “captured as both a symbol and instrument of community unification under bourgeois control in conditions where unemployment and impoverishment have been on the rise and objective conditions of class polarization have been increas­ ing.”26 The postmodern style “explores the architecture of festival and spectacle, with its sense of the ephemeral, of display, and of transitory but participatory pleasure. The display of the commodity became a central part of the spectacle, as crowds flock to gaze at them and at each other in intimate and secure spaces like Baltimore’s Harborplace, Boston’s Feneuil Hall, and a host of enclosed shopping malls that sprung up all over America” (271). Interurban competition has made this spectacular desire ever more frantic, need­ less to say. But it has, Harvey argues, equally produced “socially wasteful investments that contribute to rather than ameliorate the overaccumulation problem that lay

David Harvey

behind the transition to flexible accumulation in the first place” (273). Put simply, how many successful convention centers, sports stadiums, Disneyworlds, Harborplaces can there be? “Overinvestment in everything from shopping malls to cultural facilities makes the values embedded in urban space highly vulnerable to devaluation,” he writes. “Downtown revivals built upon burgeoning employment in financial and real estate services where people daily process loans and real estate deals for other people employed in financial services and real estate, depends upon a huge expansion of personal, corporate, and governmental debt If that turns sour, the effects will be far more devastating than the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe could ever symbolize” (273). Postmodernism had become so pervasive, so persuasive, so all-embracing within social, cultural, political and urban life that its “condition” necessitated more thor­ ough delineation and in-depth scrutiny. Such in-depth scrutiny figured in Harveys The Condition ofPostmodemity (1989), which he deemed “one of the easiest books I’ve ever written.” Unlike certain other Marxists, Harvey acknowledged the actual pres­ ence of postmodernism as an ontobgical category. It did have real existence, he said. There was, in fact, such a thing as the postmodern city, as a postmodern world, and Marxists now had to figure out what to do in that world. One immedi­ ate problem here was the extent to which the Left had gulped down postmodern potions. Indeed, the canonical text so far, giving philosophical endorsement of postmodernism, came from a former “socialism or barbarism” activist, an exParisian ’68er, Jean-François Lyotard, whose The Postmodern Condition (1979)—a title Harvey’s book played upon—reduced the world to multiple “language games” bereft of any big story or “grand narrative.” Lyotard was a child of Marx and an adult of Coca-Cola. Modernist reason and rationality, the “march of the prole- 151 tariat,” universal truth, were all the grand narratives that postmodernists like Lyotard loathed. They were apparently totalitarian and necessarily led to the gulag. A much more plural, ostensibly more humble form of postmodern truth and politics involved “local narratives,” all of which abandoned the great hope of wholesale social and political transformation. (Harvey, by the way, was quick to remind readers that the absolute rejection of absolute truth was itself absolutist, itself a pretty universalist statement, postmodernism's own grand narrative.) Harvey was wary of what frag­ mentation meant for a united Left. If everybody retreated locally, splintered into their own identity or affinity group politics, embraced only those with matching skin color, with the same sexual leanings and gender orientation, who could confront the agents of the world market, a metaforce that measured everyone according to a universal yardstick? Harvey insisted that there’d been a sea change in our experience of time and space, which bonded postmodernity in architecture, culture, and thought to flexible accu­ mulation in economics. And it was no coincidence that various neoconservative gov. emments provided the institutional adhesive. The once-dominant “Fordist” regime of • mass production and consumption, underwritten by rigid economies of scale and ^unionization, were now largely bypassed by flexible modes of producing and consum-

Hetromarxiam

ing, by versatile economies of scope with just-in-time labor processes and nonunionized work practices. At the same time, an unprecedented autonomy and volatility of finance capital, now deregulated and free floating, had decoupled from actual material production. This “hypertrophy of finance capital,” Harvey said, was the mainstay behind “time-space compressionbehind the speeding up of time relations—twentyfour hours is forever on today’s global stock markets—and a corresponding shrinking of space relations. In a sense, this was exactly the necessary capitalist relativity Marx chronicled in his Grundrisse (1857-58), calling it “the annihilation of space by time.” It’s an imperative that accentuated the “volatility and ephemerality of fashions, prod­ ucts, production techniques, labor processes, ideas and ideologies, values and estab­ lished practices. The sense that all that is solid melts into air’ has rarely been more pervasive.”27 And yet, while these circumstances were somehow new, they were not that new. They were, according to Harvey, still graspable from a Marxist perspective, “even capa­ ble of theorization by way of the meta-narrative of capitalist development that Marx proposed” (328). Harvey, accordingly, proposed a dialectical Marxism that could grasp postmodern capitalism as simultaneously the same as in Marx’s day but also different: business as usual, but business with a new product line, with a faster turnover and with a new store manager. “There are laws of process at work under capitalism capable of generating a seemingly infinite range of outcomes out of the slightest variation” (343). Wherever capitalism went, its illusory apparatus, its fetishisms, its smoke and mirrors, trailed close behind; and sometimes that appara­ tus led the way. Harveys Marxism thus clung onto a modernist rope, dangling across a postmodern abyss; his Marxism sought to retain critical distance from the 152 postmodern trappings that lay below; it retained the rationality that postmod­ ernism rejected. He still believed reality existed in some knowable totality, still believed the dialectical totality could interpret the world in order to change the world. In short, Harvey’s Marxism believed that Marxist politics had to be the same as it ever was, yet different from what it once was.28 In a rallying denouement to The Condition of Postmodemity, Harvey listed four new, and indispensable, features for Marxism at the current conjuncture (355). First, the importance of reworking race, gender, and social “difference” into more fundamental Marxist categories (like class, monetary power, and capital accumula­ tion) can’t be overestimated; these features weren’t something to be merely added on, he said, but as something “omnipresent from the very beginning in any attempt to grasp the dialectics of social change ” Second, the production of “images” and “dis­ courses” now had to be given serious Marxist recognition, “analyzed as part and parcel of the reproduction and transformation of any symbolic order. Aesthetic and cultural practices matter, and the conditions of their production deserve the closest attention.” Third, historical materialism had to give due recognition, in analysis and politics, “that there are real geographies of social action, real as well as metaphorical territories and spaces of power that become vital as organizing forces in the geopolitics of capitalism ” Finally, “historical-geographical materialism” had to be seen as “an open-ended and

dialectical mode of enquiry rather than a closed and fixed body of understandings Meta-theory is not a statement of total truth but an attempt to come to terms with the historical and geographical truths that characterize capitalism both in general as well as in its present phase.” From this basis, it then becomes possible to embark upon a “counter-attack of narrative against image, of ethics against aesthetics, of a project of Becoming rather than Being, and to search for unity within difference.” From this basis, it then becomes possible to create a few “fusions at the edges” of the cracked postmodern mirror. It becomes possible, in other words, to promote a new version of the Enlightenment project that sees the present as valid because of its openness to the future, a future that’s always up for grabs. It really does last forever.

No Exit? Dream Or; l

David Harvey

The postmodern challenge preoccupied Harvey as he reacclimated to English culture in the late 1980s; he’d decided to relocate to Oxford University. (He’d return to beloved Baltimore in 1993.) “I felt I was spinning my wheels a bit in Baltimore at the time, so when I was asked if I would be interested I threw my hat into the ring, for a dif­ ferent experience.” At Oxford, he soon got involved in a local campaign to defend the Rover auto plant at nearby Cowley The factory was threatened with eminent closure and the selling off of its profitable land, probably as high-tech or office space, spelling thousands of manufacturing job losses and a huge gaping hole in the local community. The campaign, and the torn loyalties involved, received honest explication in Harvey’s bulky treatise Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference ( 1997), in which the political and ecological ideas of Raymond Williams filled the frame. Harvey began to reread the novels of the Welsh drama critic and Marxist, using them to resume the steady work of opening Marxism up to differ- Xb’ó ence, of staking out a radical vision that was sensitive both to local politics and to an eco-aware “global ambition.” This theoretical and practical problematic also received trenchant treatment in Spaces of Hope, a more recent Harvey work rooted in Baltimore and mindful of Williams’s contention (from Resources ofHope) that socialism must necessarily involve a “politics of place.” Of course, socialism had to develop a “politics of space” as well, a politics in which people and places “bond” with other people and places, coalescing across a larger scale, wrestling with mobile corporations and global financial flows on a level playing field. Harvey believed that sustained political struggle was now impos­ sible without the hope of a better society that could, in principle and in outline, some­ how be imagined. He wanted to transcend both the prevailing leftist pessimism and free-market triumphalism (whose business agents and economic apologists happily assure us of our eternal bourgeois present). On Harvey’s agenda is nothing short of a “concrete utopia,” signaling, in effect, a rehabilitation of Ernst Bloch’s rehabilitation of Marxism, swapping him for Engels, offering not a blueprint but a hazy recognition of the concrete potentialities and capacities immanent in what we already have. Getting real now meant abandoning the j: “abstract utopias” of overcautious pragmatism, a world too small to deliver on any

large promise and empty of the politics of getting there. The logic behind all this isn’t that lofty revolutionary ideals are realistically attainable—we can never know that in advance. It’s more that in reaching for the stars the Left might be able to stand upright. Didn’t the young Marx recognize that drives, yearnings, and sensual desires are char­ acteristic to our “species-being”? Didn’t he know, too, in older age, how these vital powers enable us to erect structures in our imagination prior to building them in real­ ity? So why can’t the Left imagine a viable alternative to the “no” alternative? Can’t we blend an “optimism of the intellect” with that of the will, become “insurgent archi­ tects,” masterminding and producing our own future? Must we always be “helpless puppets of the institutional world we inhabit”?29

Metromarxism

David Harvey has been waxing Marxist for over thirty years now. His conviction to the Marxist project of radical social change has been rock solid throughout. But this con­ viction has never been set in stone, has always been open to revision anchi4aptation in the light of shifting objective circumstances. Within this Marxism, the city and space have been at the eternally reoccurring center stage. As geopolitical phenom­ ena, he has grafted each into the general theory of capitalist development that Marx gave us in Capital. The dynamics of urbanization and space, Harvey notes, are closely bound up with the dynamics of accumulation, and the intentional destruc­ tion and devaluation of the city’s built environment is a drama that pushes and pulls at different factions of capital while it unleashes class struggle between capital and labor. In the city, these class struggles are often “displaced” types of struggle, conditioned by relations of production but not always determined by them. Harvey’s metropolitan dialectic emphasizes that accumulation and class-strug154 gle antagonism didn’t merely “take place.” In fact, space lies at the very core of class relations and is an “active moment” in defining the city itself, in energizing accu­ mulation. Marxism, accordingly, had to figure this out analytically while confronting it politically. Harvey would be the first to admit that he’s had more success in the former sense than in the latter. Long ago, in the early 1970s, his spatialized Marxism espoused social justice; at the century’s end, it speaks of hope. Hope isn’t naive optimism, but a concrete longing, a “wish society” where everything is more solid, less likely to be swept away by the innovative self-destruction of the productive forces and raw power of cap­ ital accumulating, bursting through all barriers, leaving nothing and nobody untainted and innocent. It’s a future that has to grapple, in both thought and action, with Marx’s “melting” and “solid” dialectic. It’s a future that has to find some basis in a world that has no real basis, a world that constantly tears up any basis, replacing it and renewing it for awhile, only to tear it up once again, in the dialectical dance of capital accumulating. Harvey never goes quite as far as Marshall Berman, for whom Marxism is precisely a life of paradox and contradiction, of danger and thrill, a permanent adventure within this maelstrom, within market nihilism. Marxism, according to Berman, helps modem people find a basis, however fleeting; it helps people develop mutual bonds, discover fervid freedom, especially as the world all around them melts away If Harvey stuck

David Harvey

tight to Karl Marx, Berman reinvents the Marxist mysticism of Walter Benjamin, and brings it to life on the streets of New York, our final dialectical staging post If reigned as the capital of the modernist imagination, the capital of the nineteenth-cen­ tury, the twentieth-century has been the American century, a century in which New York became its indisputable capital, the capital of capital itself. Those perennial gales of “creative destruction” would never be quite as creative or destructive as in New York. Considering “the rapidity and brutality of capitalist development,” in New York, Berman writes, “the real surprise is not that so much of our architectural and con­ structed heritage has been destroyed but that there is anything still left to preserve.” Berman notes that Frederick Engels “was appalled to find that workers’ housing, built by speculators for fast profits, was constructed to last only forty years.” Engels little sus­ pected this would become the archetypal pattern of all construction in bourgeois soci­ ety. Even “the most splendid mansions of the richest capitalists would be gone in less than forty years, not just in Manchester, but in virtually every capitalist city—leased or sold off to developers, pulled down by the same insatiable drives that threw them up”* The American century and its urbanization, both Harvey and Berman know, has embodied all those demonic powers that Marx’s analyses conjure up, the sense of wonder and awe, as well as the sense of dread and foreboding.

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MARSHALL BERMAN A MARXIST URBAN ROMANCE

I aid for a Marxism that embroils itself with everyday crap arid comes out од top. I am for a Marxism that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for a Marxism that helps old ladies across the street. —adapted from Claes Oldenburg, 111 am for an Art . But the true travelers are those who go Just for the sake of going, hearts at ease; Their destiny their luggage. They don't know What strange compulsion drives them to far seas. —Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage

The Block and Beyond One of the most telling things about Marshall Berman s Marxism comes from the dust jacket of his book Adventures in Marxism (1999): an image of a dancing Marx Despite his huge gray mane» the old prophet still knows a few slick dance moves. He might be grooving to sixties rock and roll, a street fighting man demanding the world and wanting it now; but his gleaming blue zoot suit suggests a jazzier Marx, a fifties retread, mellow and free, improvising and syncopating to a bebop alto sax. Berman has his millennial sage straddle both decades and affirms a Marxism that is melodic and ironic, yet somehow loud, rough, and sexual, too. Here Berman’s Marx isn’t merely a “poet of commodities”; his whole body is animated by commodities, contorting and twisting, matching their inexorable flow, trailing them as they exchange and circulate and shape the world in their own image. Straddling both decades is something Berman’s urbanism does as well. He grew up in a humble lewish neighborhood in Morrisania in the

South Bronx. During the 1950s, as a teenager, a lot of that neighborhood was hacked open and torn apart by Robert Moses, New York’s titanic construction chief, to make way for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Berman never forgot what happened there, the destruction and devastation, the evil forces released in the name of modernity. Then, as a college student in the 1960s, he actually got to do a little demolition himself, as an active member of Students for a Democratic Society, participating in a different kind of modernism, one the great Columbia critic and Berman’s old tutor, Lionel Trilling once called “modernism in the streets.”

Меігошагхіізш

For a lowly working-class kid, Berman has impressive Ivy League credentials: a gradu­ ate of New York’s Bronx High School of Science, he went on to acquire a history degree from Columbia University, an advanced degree from Oxford, and a Ph.D from Harvard, minted in 1967. “I didn’t open up to Oxford as a place,” Berman wrote years later. “I didn’t let myself enjoy it. It was the first time I had ever been, more than a couple of hours away from the Bronx, and Oxford felt so utterly other.Iimow I loved the architecture, and filled my letters home with sketches of Classic domes, Gothic towers, Romantic parks. But soon it got dark and cold, the gorgeous build­ ings cast long shadows, and I got lonely and paranoid.”1 After Harvard, he landed his first, and only, academic job, teaching political science and urbanism at the City University of New York, an ever-beleaguered public institution, working in Harlem and midtown, maturing as a citizen of Gotham, struggling to become an “organic intellectual” of his hometown, playing it stickball tough and seminar smart. It was Antonio Gramsci, of course, who called intellectuals organic if they somehow belonged to a place and to a people—or, as Gramsci liked to say, if they belonged to 15Ö “tfie people ” He contrasted this with “traditional” intellectuals, free-floating root­ less types who generally contract out their knowledge. Berman knows an organic relationship is hard to sustain. In modern society, in the modern dty, in which “all that is solid melts into air,” how is it possible for your mem­ bership to be organic? The city keeps changing and growing, and so do you, and your relationship is always problematic. But you have to keep trying, and Berman has kept trying, with both Marxism and New York, letting each fuel the other. Berman typifies a more recent incarnation of a longer lineage, a lineage of New York Jewish intellectuals, of writers and artists like Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Henry Roth, Grace Paley, Meyer Shapiro, Norman Mailer, Harold Rosenberg, Paul Goodman, Kate Simon, and Maurice Sendak. They’re people who never forget the old streets and neighborhoods they came from, the old front stoops, subways, and playgrounds, no matter how much they rise to fame and fortune. “Their vision of life,” Berman himself writes, “is always colored with childhood memory and desire and always cleft into two: the grimy vibrant streets in the foreground, the bridges and sky­ scrapers of the golden city in the distance, the cosmic rupture that Kazin once called ‘The Block and Beyond.’ America needs its New York Jewish intellectuals because until it can leam to know both, and be both, it can’t even start to be true to itself.”2 These intellectuals, Berman included, have all happily identified themselves with New York,

Marshall Berman

and have tried, in one medium or another, to develop a vision of universality—a uni­ versal human vision—from a particular vantage point, from a personal connection with a place. New York is writ so large in their imagination and in their respective lives that the personal is almost intuitively the political. They’ve somehow followed the maxim of the seventeenth-century French maverick, J.-F. Paul de Gondi (a.k.a. Cardinal de Retz), disturber of public peace and agent provocateur in several uprisings known as the Fronde: '‘In bad times, I did not abandon the city; in good times, I had no private interests; in desperate times, I feared nothing.”3 Berman stuck with the city during its bad times in the 1960s and 1970s, when it came under fire from a variety of directions: from global economic slump; municipal fiscal crisis; corruption and mismanagement; pillage, rape, and violence. Violent death—of buildings, neighborhoods, and people—seemed to be a intimate part of everyday New York life in this checkered period, when its homicide rates soared, quin­ tupling from the 1930s to over 1,500 per year. (For much of the 1970s this figure fluc­ tuated between 1,500 and 1,800. In the 1980s, it topped 2,000. By the mid-1990s, it had fallen to below 500.)4 wWe were used to walking through streets full of quiet desperation,” Berman wrote in 1987, in one reflective essay on dark skies and chilly weather. But in the 1970s “we had to learn to negotiate streets full of people shriek­ ing in rage and despair at the top of their voices, and often directing their shrieks at us.”5 Back then, the city lurched between “sophisticated nihilism” and “crude erup­ tions of tribal fear and rage.” It needed its intellectuals more than ever, a lot of whom fled the city. But more stayed, even if they stayed upstairs and indoors, in their apartments. And yet, for Berman, New York intellectuals had to fight the machine, the economic and political machine, which ate away at the city’s neigh­ borhoods, culture and people. If intellectuals didn’t fight back, he insisted, they 159 weren’t doing their job: “Civic culture was bom, in ancient Athens and Jerusalem, when intellectuals took their stand in public spaces, and took it on themselves to act as the consciousness and conscience of their cities.”6

The Machine on the Highway One weapon in any intellectual’s arsenal for fighting the machine is a mode of critical thought that Berman sees as apt for New York as the Empire State: Marxism. His grad­ uate work at Oxford in the 1960s anticipated what lay ahead, evincing a quirky Marxism in the making, something laced with Millian liberalism and Rousseauian romanticism as much as the labor theory of value. This is likely Isaiah Berlin’s doing; young Berman’s bachelor’s thesis, written under Berlin’s tutelage, was entitled “Freedom and Individuality in the Thought of Karl Marx,” and it evoked Marxism as “an experiment in living,” steeped in an ideal of liberty and freedom that yearned to ¿ puncture the “fetishism of freedom” in bourgeois culture. “When he describe[s] capi­ talist society,” Berman notes, “Marx is constantly making the point that everything in |*t is under ‘illusions of the epoch,’ is dominated by ‘fetishism,’ and hence is unfree— percept, of course, for the ‘fully conscious’ revolutionary group”7 Freedom here is only g№ appearance, and appearances, notoriously, are deceptive.

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Berman suggests that Marx actually used the ideal of freedom in a “negative” sense, as an absence of restraint, insisting that being free meant being conscious of ones free­ dom. For average folk, for people whose thought is fetishistic,“no such consciousness’ exists, no such disposition will be found” (41). He reckons that Marx “places his hope in a sort of therapy-by-history” By showing that humans make economics and that markets are historical and not natural products, Marx has shown that modes of pro­ duction are not beyond the reach of these “average” folk after all; the capitalist mode of production isn’t eternal and necessary. It is, in fact, a relatively recent innovation. Real freedom, by contrast, means “that I am not compelled to live according to any a priori rules, but may prescribe my own rules and shape my life as I choose” (55). The caveat here, of course, is that you can do this as long as you don’t interfere with others, that your freedom also recognizes others as free agents, too. Marx noted that only in a “real community” or in a “real association” did this kind of freedom reside; he likewise felt the formula for freedom was “practical-critical activity”: “the activity of forming proj­ ects and plans for one’s life, modifying them in the light of ехрЫепсе, and striving to put them into effect. In a society that would dissolve all individual identity and press all men into molds—such as the bourgeois society of Marx’s day—practicalcritical activity’ must take the form of‘revolutionary activity,’ for only through con­ scious resistance to such a society can individuality survive” (54; emphasis in the original). The free self is thus the authentic self. The theme of authenticity is deeply infused in Bermanesque Marxism and urbanism, creating ambivalence in each. In its earlier dispensation, the idea owes much to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (an early love for Berman), whose own ambivalence with finding authenticity in the 160 eighteenth-century modern political world was epitomized by his ambivalence with Paris. Rousseau, Berman notes, was one of the first to help frame a dialectical dilemma that perpetually afflicts modern life—especially modern urban life: “the tree on the highway,” the antithesis of the machine and tool, of becoming and being. “The Machine,” Berman explains in his debut book, The Politics ofAuthenticity, “is under­ stood to symbolize everything that is rigid, compulsive, externally determined or imposed, deadening or dead; the Tree represents all man’s capacity for life, freedom, spontaneity, expressiveness, growth, self-development—in our terms, authenticity.”8 At the beginning of the Romantic age, Rousseau understood this antithesis better than anyone, certainly better than his Romantic successors. Rousseau thought that human beings were essentially trees, not machines; but he rejected the naive dualism that posited the tree over the machine. Indeed, he knew that the machine was itself an outcrop of the tree, that their coexistence was the great paradox of modernity. Rousseau, Berman writes, “tried to look this paradox in the face and live with it.” He aimed neither to integrate modern men and women into the machine, nor to blow up the machine. He “felt that even when these men seemed completely within its grip—in the swing of things, as our own idiom puts it vividly—impulses and ideas were germi­ nating within them which could burst the bonds that the machine imposed upon ; them, and control its energy for their own happiness and growth.”9 Ideally, the machine

Marshall Bermar;

shouldn't kill the tree; it should help it to live and flourish. The predicament of modern men and women—the predicament of advanced urbanized machine soci­ ety—is that of a tree on the highway, of learning to develop human nature within machine nature, of nurturing the roots of a tree in the middle of the highway, smack in the center of the road that “history has laid out” (166). It was Marx who best understood this paradox of modernity. His vision and cri­ tique of capitalism, we know, was no rage against the urban machine, no escape from modernity: it was an embracing of modernity, in the name of the tree of life, the multi branched good life. For Marx, machine society was synonymous with capitalist soci­ ety, the first epoch to show what human activity can really bring about. “It has,” Marx reminds us in the Communist Manifesto, “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.” It has, he writes, “in its rule of hardly a hundred years, created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”10 Berman points out Marx’s com­ plexly dialectical take on the developmental power of the bourgeoisie. Even as he attacked their industrialization, which made people appendages to machines and living commodities whose activity generates capital, Marx also praised bourgeois society, often in lyrically extravagant ways. As Berman notes, Marx vividly illumi­ nated “how the bad things and the good things in the world spring from the same place, how suffering could be a source of growth and joy, how radical thought could escape doldrums and dualisms and gather vision and energy for better times"11 Marx’s reading of modern life lay at the core of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, one of the most provocative and original urban and Marxist texts to emerge in the post-war period, though seldom recognized as either urban or Marxist. In the 161 drama, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. W. von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as a host of other modem thinkers, novelists, artists and poets, play active roles; but it was Marx’s Manifesto that reigned supreme in Berman’s fertile imag­ ination.12 Whereas Rousseau and Goethe shed light on the spiritual ambivalence of modem life, Marx delved into the spiritual and material ambivalence, reconstructing a modem vision and a vision of modernity that combined both as a coherent whole, bringing together “modernization” in economics and politics and urbanization, and “modernism” in art, culture and experience. For Berman, the metropolitan dialectic revolved around the dialectic between modernization and modernity, between the objective material, machine-like process, and subjective sensibility, between the incan­ descent heat that destroys and the superabundant energy that it generates. For him, the Manifesto “expresses some of modernist culture’s deepest insights and, at the same time, dramatizes some of its deepest inner contradictions ”13 This “melting vision” also lay deep within the “creative destruction” and “spatial fix” of David Harvey’s Marxist geopolitics of urbanization; everywhere it pulls like an undertow in Marx and in Berman’s Marxism. Nevertheless, Berman nudges toward ! the creative flank, liking to emphasize the good news rather than the bad. After all, Ь.Магх sees, according to Berman, “in the dynamics of capitalist development—both

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the development of each individual and of society as a whole—a new image of the good life: not a life of definitive perfection, not the embodiment of prescribed static essences, but a process of continual, restless, open-ended, unbounded growth. Thus he hopes to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity” (98). Everything the bourgeoisie does, everything it builds, makes and orchestrates, Marx takes as somehow ephemeral, solid for an instant, soon to be torn down, smashed and depreciated and destroyed to make way for further, more profitable schemes. One of the most heartrending acts of destruction in New York, done in the name of the bour­ geois bottom line, was the demolition of the old Penn Station. Between 1963 and 1966, the monumentally beautiful building was torn down by its owner-,-Pennsylvania Railroad, and replaced by an egregiously ugly twenty-nine-story speculative office complex, replete with a 20,000 seat sports arena, Madison Square Garden. Once, archi­ tectural historian Vincent Scully said, people used to enter New York like gods; now they scuttle in like rats. “Tear it up! Knock it down! Throw it away! Let’s get it cleaned up! Lets make it neat!” wrote Kate Simon of postwar New York. Poet James Merrill concurred: “As usual, in New York, everything is torn down, before you had a chance to care for it.”M And yet, there’s somehow a brighter side to this brutality, a radiant light and spirit that emerges in and through the darkness, a new potential lurking some­ where within the nihilistic destruction of capitalist modernity. It resembles, Berman notes, the radical hopes that Friedrich Nietzsche enunciated in 1882 through the “Death of God”; only Marx located it in “the seemingly banal everyday working of the market economy. He unveiled the modern bourgeois as consum­ mate nihilists on a far vaster scale than modern intellectuals can conceive” (112). 162 Marx, like Nietzsche, urges us to have the strength to look down this abyss, and to see the human costs of looking the other way. The bourgeoisie themselves, he knows, repress the world they’ve made; they lack the courage to stare into the darkness they’ve help conjure up. But the working class, conversely, can be aroused, animated into action, by those very forces that threaten to annihilate them. Berman believes that Marx admirably lays out “the polarities that will shape and animate the culture of modernism in the century to come: the theme of insatiable desires and drives, perma­ nent revolution, infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in every sphere of life; and its radical antithesis, the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruction, the shat­ tering and swallowing up of life, the heart of darkness, the horror” (102). Berman reckons that Marx orbited in the tragic tradition. (It’s hardly surprising: he had enough tragedies himself, living in a sickly poverty and having four young children predecease him. Marx’s personal pains far exceeded his political woes.)15 For Marx, peoples’ clothes under capitalism are ripped off, halos lost, veils torn away, stripping everybody naked in a violent, brutal manner, only to culminate, somehow, in a happy ending. Berman likens this tragic idea to that of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, who, out on the heath, wilting under the icy blast, knew that “naked truth is what a man is forced to face when he has lost everything that other men can take away, except life itself” (121). “The bourgeoisie,” Marx has it, “has stripped of its halo every occupation

hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.... The bourgeoisie has tom away from the family its sentimental veil.... In place of exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has put open, shameless, direct, naked exploitation.”16 When all protection has gone, and humans are exposed to the storm's full fury, they have nothing left but themselves, have no other solution but to recognize common connec­ tion with other people, like people, similarly stripped bare of everything, similarly forced to confront, with sober senses, their real conditions of life and their relations with their fellow human beings.17

Hoots, Ruins and Renewals: Bronx Primitive

Marshall Berman

Nowhere, for Berman, was this solid and melting dialectic of modernity so palpable as in the Bronx, whose tragic fate comprised the climatic chapter to AU That Is Solid Melts into Air. It's in his own backyard, then, where Berman confronts, with sober senses, the real conditions of capitalist modernity and urbanity. It’s in everyday life where this dialectic most tellingly comes home to roost. Everyday life in the modern world internalizes both the tree and the highway; the balance is usually precarious. In the Bronx, it once signified the tree world of the Grand Concourse, the delis, the kosher butchers, the synagogues, the apartment blocks, and humble abodes for tight-knit, hardworking families. It also signified the machine world of Robert Moses’s Cross-Bronx Expressway, which melted that tree world into air, hacked it down, cut a huge and deadly swath right through the borough’s center. The machine world turned “potential long-range entropy” in the Bronx “into sudden inexorable catastrophe,” hastening the exodus of the 1970s and 1980s, the thousands of abandoned buildings, the drugs, the arson, the gangs, the homicide, the blockbusting and redlining, the “planned shrinkage” of public services, the 16Ъ speeding cars and trucks with one frantic intent: get out fast. “For ten years, through the late 1950s and early 1960s,” Berman recalls, “the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed. My friends and I would stand on the parapet of the Grand Concourse, where 174th Street had been, and survey the week’s pro­ gress. . .. The Grand Concourse was our borough’s closest thing to a Parisian boule­ vard. Among its most striking features were the rows of large, splendid 1930s apartment houses: simple and clear in their architectural forms.. .open to light and air, as if to proclaim a good life that was open not just to the elite residents but to us all. The style of these buildings, known as Art Deco today, was called modern’ in their prime” (292-95). Moses was an archetypal “Faustian man” whose reconstruction program dwarfed ij: anything Baron Georges Haussmann ever did in Paris. In New York, the Second ; Empire boulevard proved no match for the Interstate freeway and for the thoroughly modernized anticity, for the city of superblocks and automobiles. Moses seemed to ij revel in the destruction, claiming you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. The real tragedy was that, apparently, he loved New York, his hometown, and amid the Й fives he wrecked and communities he helped obliterate he provided new homes for 1‘over 600,000 New Yorkers. His massive “readjusting” of New York was only a dress

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rehearsal for an even more massive readjusting of postwar urban America. “This new order,” Berman notes, “integrated the whole nation into a unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile. It conceived of cities principally as obstructions to the flow of traffic, and as junkyards of substandard housing and decaying neighborhoods from which Americans should be given every chance to escape ” Thousands of urban neigh­ borhoods were obliterated by this new order; the Bronx was only the most dramatic instance of something that was happening all over America. And, in effect, America couldn’t survive without it, without the massively capitalized highway construction and Federal Highway Administration suburbanization. This transformation of American life would also “serve to draw millions of people and jobs, and billions of dollars in investment of capital, out of Americas cities, and plunge these cities into chronic crisis and chaos that plague their inhabitants today. This wasn’t what Moses meant at all; but it was what he inadvertently helped bring about” (307-308). The more Berman looked, and the more he thought about this wreckage in the years to come, the more he came to recognize that it expressed a problem endemic to modern life itself. And its a problem crystallized and intensified within urban life, a problem urban Marxism had to confront. Indeed, he writes, “often the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the destruction not merely of‘traditional’ and pre-modern’ institutions and environments but—and here is the real tragedy—of everything most vital and beautiful in the modern world itself. Here in the Bronx, thanks to Robert Moses, the modernity of the urban boulevard was being condemned as obsolete, and blown to pieces, by the modernity of the inter­ state highway.... To be modern turned out to be far more problematical, and more perilous than I had been taught” (296). The modernity of the expressway world, 164 Berman noted, “would reach a pinnacle of power and self-confidence in the 1960s, in the America of the New Frontier, the Great Society, Apollo on the moon.” On the other hand, it would unleash an alternative modernist “vocabulary of opposition,” inspiring people to confront the expressway world that seemed oblivious to where it was headed. These people would soon begin to stand in the middle of that expressway, even as the juggernauts sped by. This opposition was notable for a couple of things. First of all, it would show that the expressway world was only one possible modern world, and that there were other, better, directions in which the modern spirit could journey Meanwhile, they would discover that the most vital and primal expressions of modern energy and affirmation were in fact closer to home, were there where few would have dreamt of looking for it: in the everyday life of the street. Here Berman draws inspiration from certain modernist texts of the past, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the young Stephen Dedalus had shown how history wasn’t the will of God or representative of nation-states, but a “shout in the street.” It’s in the plain old city street that Berman wants to locate his Marxism. It’s there ’ that it becomes a modernist vocabulary of opposition, a veritable shout in the street, drawing on the untapped energy of street spontaneity and diversity. Such Marxism somehow had to keep the chaos and disorder of the “old” environment alive, “because it is uniquely capable of nourishing modern experiences and values: the freedom of the

city, an order that exists in a state of perpetual motion and change, the evanescent but intense and complex face-to-face communication and communion” (317-18). For awhile, Berman’s New Left generation discovered how power resided in the street. In the late 1960s, across the United States, Europe, and the world, millions of anony­ mous people partook in building occupations and street demonstrations, rallying against the expressway world of bombs, tanks, and imperialism. “Their initiatives,” Berman notes, “showed that obscure and decaying old places could turn out to be—or could be turned into—remarkable public spaces; that urban America’s nineteenthcentury streets, so inefficient for moving twentieth-century traffic, were ideal media for moving twentieth-century hearts and minds. This modernism gave a special rich­ ness and vibrancy to a public life that was growing increasingly abrasive and danger­ ous as the decade went on” (321).

Marshall Berman

In 1984, Berman dug deeper into the literature on ruins, and traced its sublime legacy back to the Ancient Greeks and Old Testament prophets. He thereby gave a richer metaphysical and existential layering to his Marxist vision of modernity. He even coined a neat new term, which never caught on, for urban devastation, for the wrecking of those public spaces that had once been alive: urbicide, the murder of the city. But the tragedy of ruins and destruction, paradoxically, had a flip side, for it spurred catharsis, something that had redemptive qualities, that had the capacity to drive people to live with—and through—disappointment. It prompted people to invent new values when it seemed all values had gone; above all, it inspired people not to leave town but to rebuild their city, frequently from rubble. (“When the house burns,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil “one forgets even lunch. Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes”) The old literature on urbicide, 165 Berman said, is of course cruel and painful, but luminous and profoundly instruc­ tive for us moderns as well. It forces us to “look at the world from inside the ruins, to communicate by signaling through the flames ... [and] has enlarged the people who could survive it”18 The Old Testament books of Jeremiah and Lamentations are full of raw details of the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 583 B.C.; and Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women, written about a hundred years later, chronicled the destruction of Troy. “Troy bums,” wrote Euripides, “City of cities, uncitied now.” “Our city burns,” screamed Hebuca. “Our warriors are gone, / Our daughters raped. / Weep, weep.” “Only the dead live free of pain,” she thought. And yet, death is emptiness, and “to live is to hope.” The prophet Jeremiah similarly presented a dialectical vision of destruction in bwhich the ruination of Jerusalem coexisted with a triumphant rebuilding. “I shall I rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall build vineyards and drink their ; Wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.” The first reconstruction of Jerusalem was actually described in the Book of Nehemiah, “a paradigm of urban Ipitiiewal ” Berman reckoned. Ironically, the Bronx now has got such a “Nehemiah |Йап” It’s a homesteading program that empowers local residents—empowers those |pho ve stuck around and clung on—to empower themselves, to repair houses, to

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transform garbage-strewn lots, once deserted and menacing, into fertile community gardens. “It is painstakingly, infuriatingly slow,” writes Berman, “but it does seem to be happening. New Yorkers are organizing themselves to transform their ruins into pieces of a city again and to make these fragments their own.”19 One component in this revi­ talization is cultural creativity, which somehow has flourished in the Bronx because of the ruins. Berman points to the Bronx's pioneering graffiti and mural artists, rappers, breakdancers and poets, young black and Latino men who ve distanced themselves from flames and ruins and have emerged indefatigable. Their use of wild primary colors and extravagant forms, their blend of wise guy attitude and global culture, their verbal dexterity and immediacy—all have communicated, according to Berman, the message, “We come from the ruins, but were not ruined Г Some, in the process, have become rich and infamous celebrities in the art and music worlds. Fifteen years on, Berman revisited his native borough, and reftamed the “view from the burning bridge.”20 Now, with hindsight, he assessed the underground art of the Bronx, as featured in a Bronx Museum of Art exhibition called Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented since the 1960s. On show were 150 works, ranging from film, graffiti, and documentary photography to sculpture and painting. Now, however, it seemed the borough s seasons in hell, its “Fort Apache” troubles, were over, maybe forever. The fires have abated; the vacant voids, former junkie hangouts, now have houses or gardens on them; some 30,000 new homes have gone up. There’s still ample crime and poverty, but it approaches “normal” New York levels these days. And for the first time in a long while, people are actually returning to the neigh­ borhood. A few things have been lost; but this may not be necessarily bad news. Indeed, as the ruins have been rebuilt, the Bronx, Berman writes, “has become a less 166 compelling subject for art. It isn't in the news very much. It doesn’t signify the way it used to. You could say the Bronx has lost its aura. Should we be sad? I don’t think so.... Art and artists were among the forces that helped it up, and helped it get back into the flow of normal, ambiguous modern life. A great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx’s ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration. . .. Although plenty of terrific art springs from desperation, I think most great art grows out of normal life.”21

Marxism and Everyday Crap: Heading the Signa in the Street What kind of Marxism is being purveyed here? And what is the link between this “low” version of modernity and actual revolution in the Marxist sense? Such are the ques­ tions esteemed historian, Marxist critic, and founder of New Left Review, Perry Anderson, voiced to Berman, in his donnish critique entitled “Modernity and Revolution.”22 Anderson, meanwhile, gave a few eloquent answers himself, pitched from a more classical Marxist mound. According to Anderson, Berman’s idea of mod­ ernization means an ongoing and perpetual rush toward new frontiers of develop­ ment. This “melting” process is disintegrative and uncertain, dizzying and scary, but liberating and thrilling for Berman as well. Above all, it promises an experience of

Marshall Berman

modernity a subjective sensibility that offers unlimited self-development, unprece­ dented psychic and spiritual promise, a rich life of adventure for those who let go, and go with the flow. Anderson, though, cautions that Marx’s conception of human reality operated differently: the self wasn’t somehow prior to society, but was constituted by relations with others; men and women exist as social individuals, as collective beings without “infinite ontological plasticity” (111). “The vision of an unhinged, nihilistic drive of the self towards a completely unbounded development is,” Anderson writes, “thus a chimera. Rather, the genuine ‘free development of each’ can only be realized if it proceeds in respect for the ‘free development of all,’ given the common nature of what it is to be a human being” (111; emphasis in the original). Berman’s version of Marxism, he notes, smacks of a “culture of narcissism,” of a formless sixties radicalism, politically progressive in one sense, yet incompatible with historical materialism in another, indistinguishable from gradual or piecemeal reformism. Marxist revolution, Anderson writes, “is a punctual and not a permanent process,” necessitating the “polit­ ical overthrow from below of one state order, and its replacement by another” (112; emphasis in the original). “The vocation of a socialist revolution, in that sense, would be neither to prolong nor fulfil modernity, but to abolish it” (113). Berman’s response tells us a lot about his vagabond Marxism and the task of the free-spirited Marxist intellectual, a species exemplified by Berman himself. En route he gives short shrift to “academic” Marxism, to a Marxism of messianic world-historical revolution, of chapter and verse Marxology, with a theoretical framework so pure that it’s arid and airtight, communicable only within the inner circle of New Left Review editors. Berman feels that Anderson should loosen up and lighten up, venture out a bit more into the world, where there’s plenty of trouble and messinèss but also more light and space and air, more atmosphere in which 167 theory can move and grow. So Berman presents, in his own defense, scenes from an open and crowded New York everyday life, hoping to show “how modernism is still happening, both in our streets and in our souls, and how it still has the imaginative power to help make this world our own.”23 His vignettes pick up on Baudelaire’s tradi­ tion of modernism, as espoused in an 1846 essay called “The Heroism of Modern Life.” There’s an “epic quality” to modern life, Baudelaire insisted there. Our age is no less rich than ancient times in sublime themes. “The life of our city,” he wrote, “is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. The marvelous envelops and saturates us like an atmosphere; but we fail to see it... we only have to open our eyes to see and know the heroism of our day.”24 Berman loves the nineteenth-century lyric poet, and reinvents him prowling through New York’s boroughs, pacing its streets and avenues, riding the subway—conjuring him up as a Coney Island tripper rather than an arrondissement dandy. Berman and Baudelaire each yearn “to become one flesh with the crowd.” The crucial point about Baudelaire’s modem heroism, Berman notes, is that it emerged in conflict, “in situations of conflict that pervade everyday life in the modern world ”25 Modem artists—read: modern intellectuals—have, in Baudelaire’s words, “to set up \ their house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” For Berman, the modern Marxist intellectual

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had to follow suit, similarly had to find “singular intoxication in this universal com­ munion,” similarly had to let themselves go in “a divine prostitution of the soul,” giving themselves entirely, as Baudelaire urges, “all its poetry and all its charity, to the unex­ pected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes Bermans Marxist perspective, like Baudelaires poetic perspective, is fundamentally a people’s perspective. His is quintessentially a humanist odyssey, insisting upon the “human touch.” Populating this heroic everyday world are diverse characters like Korean fruit-stand owners, Russian bakers, Indian stationers, Latino delivery boys, doormen, and janitors; Dostoevskian underground men, street people, panhandlers, hustlers, Beat poets; rich and poor families playing in Riverside and Central Parks; graduate students who dream epic neo-idealist visions while driving cabs all night to make the rent; MTA buses in the Bronx, crowded with black kids bantering with their mothers, talking about modern life, modem bodies, and modern babies. “Don’t worry Mama,” Berman hears one daughter saying, “were modem. We know how to take care of ourselves.” “Life is rough in the South Bronx, but the people aren’t giving up,” reassures Berman, “modernity is alive and well.” He knows how Marx, too, was intimate with real people. There are plenty of them, with lively tongues, in Capital\ and Marx chroni­ cled them with verve and skill, taking us back to the “glory days of the nineteenthcentury novel.” Berman’s own Marxism is secretly a nineteenth-century novel, a sort of prose poem of the street, teeming with figures we’d recognize from Charles Dickens, Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac. “I’ve tried increasingly to situate my exploration of the modern self,” Berman writes, “within the social contexts in which all modem selves come to be. I’m writing more about the environments and public spaces that are available to modem people, and the ones that they create, and the ways 16Ö they act and interact in these spaces in the attempt to make themselves at home.”27 Ordinary people and everyday street life flood into Berman’s purview because Anderson’s Marxist vista incorporates neither. It “only has eyes for world-historical Revolutions in politics and world-class Masterpieces in culture; he stakes out his claim on heights of metaphysical perfection, and won't deign to notice anything less.” Instead of focusing on masterpieces or political revolutions, Anderson, Berman thought, should acknowledge how modernity can “generate sources and spaces of meaning, of freedom, dignity, beauty, joy, solidarity.” Then he’d “have to confront the messy actual­ ity in which modem men and women and children live.” Then, too, he might even find “some masterpieces or revolutions in the making.”28 Marx viewed the proletariat, the modern working class, as the only group that had any chance of becoming “world his­ torical.” However, intellectuals—the poet, the thinker, the person of science—can make a “special contribution to this ongoing project.” “If our years of study have taught us anything,” Berman notes, “we should be able to reach out further, to look and listen more closely, to see and feel beneath surfaces, to make comparisons over a wider range of space and time, to grasp hidden patterns and forces and connections, in order to show people who look and speak and think and feel differently from each other—who are oblivious to each other, or fearful of each other—that they have more in common than they think.”29 Leftist intellectuals need to ally with the working class, need to gen-

erate ideas and solidarity and class-consciousness. But we can't do it unless we know how to recognize people, as they really experience the world. “Reading Capital won't help if we don't also know how to read the signs in the streetT To repeat: The journey isn’t just To the Finland Station; it’s to Grand Central Station as well.

The Open Road and the Day of the Locust

Marshall Berman

Openness, for Berman, is one of the things that makes New York so endlessly exciting. The city prides itself on the openness of its vibrant street life. At the same time, “all the tensions that have been seething throughout American society—tensions between races, classes, sexes, generations—have boiled over instantly on the sidewalks of New York. At such times, our wonderfully open city has felt like a great, festering open wound.”30 And yet, the paradigms Marx developed in the early 1840s can, Berman assures, still be fruitful for understanding, and working through, this ambivalence. Marx knew that the typical modern person was somebody split into a public person and a private person, into a communal being and an egoistic individual, a social creature and a market participant. Overcoming this double life, converting atom­ ized individuals into citizens—fulfilling the Declaration of the Rights of Man— was, Marx said, key to the “political emancipation” of people. This was one necessary and progressive step toward what Marx called “general human emanci­ pation,” which hinged on the more radical transformation of economy, state and society.31 The dual life, this split between public and private person, still persists in our own “democracies” today. It's in this context that an open and integrated public space takes on a special urgency. “A society of split men and women,” Berman writes, “badly needs a terrain on which people can come together to heal their inner wounds—or at least to treat them—and advance from political to human 169 emancipation.”32 Marx never provided a precise spatial formula here, so Berman lends a hand, imagining an environment that could help it happen, open to everybody, someplace where society's inner contradictions could emerge freely and openly, allow­ ing people to begin to deal with these contradictions and try to work them out. “Implicit in our basic democratic rights, then, is the right to public space” (477). In a genuinely open public space, dissonance and conflict and trouble would be there; but that’s “exactly what we'd be after... all of a city's loose ends can hang out, all of society’s inner contradictions can express and unfold themselves. Just as, within the protected space of a psychoanalytic session, an individual can open himself to every­ thing he has repressed—so, maybe, in a protective enclave of public space, a whole society might begin to confront its collective repressions to call up the specters that haunt it and look them in the face” (484-85). One specter here is the specter of the poor, the underclass, the street lumpenproletariat, people who are not so lovely or nice but nonetheless present—products of the “rational” functioning of a market soci­ ety. Rather than shift these people elsewhere, or brush them under the carpet, a dem­ ocratic and “open-minded” public space would ensure the shock of recognition, the recognition that the poor are “part of the same city and the same society as ourselves, . linked with us in a thousand ways” (482).

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Dealing with the poor» and dealing with ourselves, is one way we can “grow up in public.” “You can hold back from the suffering of this world,” Berman notes, quoting Franz Kafka; “you have free permission to do so, and it is in accord with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided” (485). Ironically, repressing these sufferings and inner contradictions makes urban society not only politically torpid; it also makes that society spiritually dead. The masses of people who’ve fled from cities may have found peace, comfort and security in the suburbs, remote rural areas, edge cities, pastoral small towns and gated privatopias, but “many seem to have felt a sense of emptiness amid the flowers and the freeways, and yearned for a world they had lost” (484). Something is missing; not so much in the urban forms themselves as in the human texture, “a thickness and intensity of human feelings, a clash and interfusion of needs and desires and ideas”; their luminous explosion out on the streets, in the city’s public spaces. Cities, for Berman, are life forms invariably hostile, frequently menacing, but always abundant with life, genuine and “natural” habitats for the human species, in spite of it all. Within the danger and the menace is an environment that catalyzes freedom and nourishes authentic selfhood. Berman’s New York is the city, above every other, that epitomizes this freedom, this authentic affirmation of selfhood. His thesis also helps partly explain why, in the face of everything that’s been flung at it, New York has never died. Its streets have stayed alive, have remained vital, when the crusade to “kill the street” succeeded practically everywhere else: “once the Interstate Highway System was in place,” Berman laments, “the most ordinary everyday activities—walking to the corner for a quart of milk, taking the bus down­ town to see a movie, having a soda under Main Street’s bright lights—were sud170 denly impossible.” But despite this billion-dollar blight, this federally sponsored vandalism, criminal in its fervid desire to do cities in, for sound economic reasons, New York “kept its classic streetscape and city form remarkably intact. In preserving itself, it became radically different from all the others whose street systems were swept away.”33 Its sidewalks are still as dense as ever, and underlying their difficulties and threats is a beauty and heroism that Berman lovingly evokes. Berman’s kind of Marxist urbanism is unashamedly a Marxism of affirmation. It does­ n’t voice just negation and critique, but spots the positive, empathizes with the good little guys as much as raging against the evil big guys. It’s a spirit that differs markedly from a lot of peers, from other leftist voices resonating in the United States, which typ­ ically rally around hatred (and self-hatred), and infuse an oppositional tone with sub­ lime power. It’s a Marxist spirit very different, for instance, from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, the highly acclaimed radical jeremiad to twentieth-century Los Angeles. The ex-trucker and meatcutter’s take is harder-edged than Berman’s, yet similarly vast in scope. Davis’s Marxism homes in, as we’d expect, on the less glamorous, nonHollywood side of the City of Angels: its industrial and political history, its aerospace industry and real estate shysters, its mégalo maniacal developers and newspaper men, its bizarre mystical cults, gangsta rappers and fascist police force, its “sunshine and

Marahall Berman

noir” and triste tropique. But it’s a book, as well as a Marxism vision, with a brooding, doom-laden undertow. Davis’s Marxism is weirdly Californian just as Berman’s is quirkily New Yorker. It’s a homegrown militancy of the underpass rather than of the sidewalks, of Day of the Locust rather than Song ofthe Open Rood, of Charles Bukowski rather than Frederick Engels. Davis’s Marxism bespeaks an urbanism that lacks public space and denies any sense of collective experience. It’s a Marxism of closure that’s fittingly reactive to an urbanism of closure—to an urbanism of the lonely crowd, a crowd whose only source of social mixing is out on a gridlocked freeway. For that reason, it’s a Marxist urbanism that expresses only contempt for one’s own city, perhaps for good reason; but it loosens the metropolitan dialectic that other Marxists in Metromarxism have tried to keep taut. In his own review of City ofQuartz, Berman suggested that Davis’s Marxism keeps flaring up “with technopocalyptic Blade Runner fantasies” and attributes L.A.’$ nihilistic Crips and Bloods youth gangs “with a revolutionary aura.”34 It’s a manifesto of one-way streets (freeways?), menacing catastrophe, Spenglerian junkyards, plagues of locusts and killer bees—all of which haunt and darken the cityscape in politically problematic ways. Davis’s evocations “of the efforts of the comfortable to lock out the poor is more vivid than his descriptions of the poor themselves.” His prose, Berman thinks, “soars as soon as he gets back to the bad guys moving the big bucks around,” but “sags when he tries to talk about the good folks in the barrios and ghettos.” Ultimately, contra Berman, this is a Marxism and an urbanism evac­ uated of agency, a hypercritical thought waiting for a cataclysmic end, maybe even waiting for “after the end.” Davis’s Marxism really does have two souls dwelling in it, “the radical citizen who wants to grasp the totality of his city’s life, and the urban guerilla aching to see the whole damned thing blow.” Who will he be, or try to be, 171 at the dawn of the millennium—-“Whitman or Céline?” asks Berman. “He sounds unsure, but I’m rooting for Whitman.”35 The freeways and the strip malls go on devouring the pedestrian street; yet Berman still appeals to open-minded public spaces, to “experimental neighborhoods” in our cities. Cities and Marxism, he notes, can still prosper from places where people and ideas bump into each other, “and where young people, with little experience but boundless energy, along with middle-aged people longing to escape from 'uptown or ‘the boroughs’ or‘suburbia,’ can find or imagine new ways to put ideas together, and to act out their syntheses.” Berman still thinks Marxism can ferment “jaytalking”: side­ walk chutzpah, “talk back; to talk against the lights; to talk outside the designated lines; to talk like our great American blue jays ... small birds who emit loud and raucous cries that no one can ignore.”36 As a raucous cry, Marxism remains provocative, is still “capable of endlessly new syntheses, spin-offs, and hybridizations___No one has the authority to say definitively what these ideas mean. Not even the founding fathers could close the floodgates they had opened.”37 Thus Marxism is indispensable in the fight for a critical culture and democratic public space; for public education, public health, public transit and public housing—for ideas that people can share, and share through the new media we presently possess. With Marxism, Berman concludes, “we

are aU living on top of radical gold mines” Digging for rich nuggets can be a thrilling romance and adventure—an adventure and a victory, even if we lose. \

Eiidleas Adventures in Marxism

Metromarxism

Berman’s most recent Marxist adventure wants to rescue Walter Benjamin from the brink, from the Mediterranean abyss he’d plunge down at Portbou. It equally wants to share war stories with Isaac Babel, the Russian scribe who knew something about “daring and dread,” but who was nonetheless “fully alive.” Babel was as well acquainted with sadistic Cossack officers as he was with Jewish mystic visionaries, with figures like Gedali, solemn old men with little gray beards. “You do not know what you love, Gedali” said one Cossack in a typical Babel tale. MI will shoot at you, and then you will find out, I cannot do otherwise than shoot, because I am the revolution.” But Gedali remained “the founder of an unrealizable International,” a “revolution of good deeds and good men.” “Where is the joy-giving revolution?” the perplexed Gedali asked the army commander.38 Berman still believes Marx to be the messenger of any joy-giving revolution. Marx, after all, is somebody who knows what being “on the rack” means, and who implores us to renew our capacity to configure the world beyond the daily grind of selling one’s labor to stay alive. Berman’s Marxist adventure gives three cheers to the demise of Marx’s iconic status; it loves the new, post-1989 ironic Marx, the mortal Marx, whose voice is heard loudest at ground level, in the city, alongside real people, people like you and me. This adventure laments blue- and white-collar downsizing and outsourcing, laments people carving up their personalities, feeling the vicissitudes of competition for their labor power, looking in the mirror every172 day and thinking, What have I got that I can sell today?3* This adventure is loyal to Marx’s long-range faith in “the masses,” where people are the “bearers” of economic interests and are members of the working class even when they don’t know it. Many people, Berman says, “identify happily with the owners of capital,” yet “have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are.”40 Other workers, “lacking diplomas, not dressed so nicely, working in cubicles, not offices, may not get the fact that many of the people who boss them around are really in their class, and share their vulnerability.” How can this reality be put across to people who don’t get it, or can’t bear it? “This,” Berman thinks, “is what organizing and organizers are for.” The process of organizing and analyzing, of getting to the “point where Raskolnikovs won’t rot on Avenue D, and where Svidrigailovs won’t possess thousands of bodies and souls, should be enough to give us all steady work.” And should we ever get to that point and “come to see that our inner bad guys will never go away, our steady work will have given us experience, and taught us how to cooperate for our mutual self-defense ”41 Most of all, then, Berman sees this Marxist adventure happening now, happening against the spaces that capitalism has constructed, but also happening within them, even within spaces like the new Times Square. There are spaces everywhere, he thinks, that are big enough and ambiguous enough for us to make—and remake—for our-

selves. Many people today, Berman believes, are “arresting themselves,” cordoning themselves off, “not only from a great source of joy, but from the moral and psycho­ logical growth that city life can bring; ” Our cities and our citizens, he says, “need bright lights as badly as they need critical theory. Both are part of what Henri Lefebvre calls ‘The Right to the City/ It’s a right for which the left has to learn to fight, not only against our rulers but even sometimes against ourselves, against our desire for purity and perfection.”42 On display here, under the spotlight and in the gutter, is a Marxism that retains a fierce loyalty to neighborhood and to an urbanism of promise. It’s a vision that can help us learn to create ourselves, and our cities, while we try to change the world.

M a rs h a ll Berm an 173

AFTERWORD

Karl Marx has been dead for almost 120 years, but well-wishers of all ages and nationalities, both the curious and the con­ verted, continue to visit London’s Highgate Cemetery, where fresh flowers and moving inscriptions, in almost every language under the sun, regularly adorn the revo­ lutionary’s gravestone. Towering overhead, indomitably, is the man himself, or rather a gigantic bronze bust of him, with menacing eyes staring out into the distance, maybe even frowning at his conservative rival, Herbert Spencer, whose remains lay nearby. This is the iconic Marx, the overwhelming image that most popularly endures today: the Marx of statues and flags, of dogma and gulags, of party hacks and holy orthodoxy—a vision of Marxism that invariably looks down upon (and frequently through) real mortals, people who exist in the messy profane world below. Press portraying this iconic Marx amply bounds, of course—in its Left and Right incarnations. Yet even good press, press suppos­ edly professing allegiance to a profane Marx, to an ironic Marx brought down to ground level, also tends to distort or stereotype his thought, caricature it somehow, dilute its richness. Take John Cassidy’s article in an unlikely edition of the New Yorker magazine, in which Cassidy heralds Marx as “the next big thinker,” wrong about communism but right about a troubled capital­ ism. Marx’s revolutionary hopes, Cassidy thinks, are doomed, and only a residual Marx prevails, a Marx-lite, a Marx reduced to a rather benign commentator on the perils of bourgeois political economy, a “student of cap­ italism and that’s how he should be judged.”1 In reality, Marx was no mere fixer and tinkerer of a defective capitalism, no closet Keynesian who merely

Afterword

kept Wall Street bankers on their toes. Marx didn’t just analyze capitalism; he inquired into the power of capitalists, explored the limits of that power, and pinpointed the char­ acter of those limits.1 Marx’s criticism, accordingly, was a special kind of criticism, a crit­ icism unique in its intent to make room for its own abolition, plotting to overthrow the existing order at the same time as it plots to overthrow itself. It’s often difficult for both critics and sympathizers to grasp that, to understand how Marxism is actually a praxis—a critical analysis and critical practice—not a system of government, nor a blueprint of how to run and organize a classless society. Marx was always mindful about how the demise of capitalism—as well as the abolition of Marxist thought itself—would necessitate a practical struggle around theory, in the here and now, and around everyday life; this struggle, he knew, couldn’t be displaced into any future nether-nether land where the ends have no means. He knew that within the means were the ends: “By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital,” Marx reminded his comrades, “ [the working class] would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.”3 The various Marxist thinkers I’ve presented here fully understand Marx’s injunction. They’ve been categorically in favor of the initiation of “any larger move­ ment”; but they’ve also comprehended the everyday nature of Marxism, and the nature of its everyday conflict with capital—particularly everyday conflict with cap­ ital in the city. These writers know there’s plenty of theoretical and practical work to do; and in doing it every day, they know social and urban life becomes better and promises to become better still. They’ve upheld a Marxist line much less shallow than the John Cassidys of the world, presenting a richly textured dialectical Marxism. In varying ways, they’ve shown how Marx occupied profane turf himself 176 and that his deification is antithetical to the best principles of Marxism: intellectual openness and nondogmatism, a critical thought grounded in reality but not mired in reality. Indeed, they’ve shown how Marxism can brim with adventure and life, not be burdened with dread and death. The toil of the Marxist, they know, is the toil of Sisyphus; but they know too that this collective and individual toil has fostered kindred connection, brought grueling yet satisfying meaning to life, and helped people see light in darkness and feel progress in their midst. Those Marxist voices I’ve documented and tried to amplify haven’t steered clear of complexity and contradiction in city life and in Marxist thought, nor have they offered trite shibboleths about truth and revolution. They haven’t fled behind the aegis of simplicity, nor developed a Marxism of affirma­ tion and certainty: They’ve looked the negative in the face and lived (and sometimes died) with it. In a sense, the Marxist canvases they’ve individually sketched out form pieces of the bigger canvas I’ve sought to sketch out. It’s a bigger canvas in which each thinker’s ideas and influences, approach and life appear as simultaneously discrete and generic, as fragmented and whole. Each respective chapter of Metromarxism signifies one piece that’s juxtaposed to all other pieces, to all other chapters, sometimes overlapping with them, elsewhere undermining them. Meanwhile, certain pieces (chapters) illuminate others, while on occasion they shadow them. What I’ve tried to provide, in short, is an

Afterword

image of dialectical narration, an image of dialectical thought and of the dialectical city, presenting it in a dialectical way, as a sort of cubist painting, as a landscape with four dimensions. Each idea in each chapter thus has its own three-dimensionality: it can be inferred to be in front of or behind another, connected to and separated from other chapters. However, we can never properly understand each piece (each chapter) if it’s severed from the other pieces (chapters). Nor can we understand each piece if we overlook how these pieces change in a fourth dimension: that of time. As such, I ask the reader to visualize and comprehend Marxist thought as a dynamic process, unleashed by Marx and Frederick Engels in the early 1840s but open to new mixes and hybridizations and innovative revisions, contingent on time and space; an impervious monolithic bloc it isn't. On this canvas we can also spot a number of characteristics about the capitalist city and about Marxists' renderings of that city. Two motifs are especially palpable: ( 1 ) the historicity of the city and Marxism; and (2) the metropolitan dialectic. In the first case, its been possible to see how each chapter somehow periodized a specific phase of capitalist growth and a corresponding phase of capitalist urban development. Each respective writer framed a story about the Marxism and the city of his day. Their specific Marxist theories thereby analyzed specific historical embodiments of the capitalist city. Marx, for one, recognized that the relationship between the development of capitalism and the development of urbanization was predicated on the "division of labor." He saw a tight connection between the separation of physi­ cal and mental labor and the separation of the town and the country. In texts like The German Ideology, he mapped out the disintegration of feudalism, the gradual shift: from artisanal labor to manufacture, manufacture to the giant factory, and the beginnings of large industrial cities, which, he said in 1846, “have sprung up 177 overnight." A few years later, The Communist Manifesto updated and affirmed this industrializing and urbanizing impulse, praising the demise of traditional gemeinschaft narrowness and relishing the rise of gesselschaft cosmopolitanism. With obvi­ ous qualifications, Marx welcomed capitalist urbanization as a Faustian force—creative yet destructive, civilizing yet barbaric, alive yet unstable. And yet, Marx passed deeper and more extensive analysis of the "great industrial town” to buddy Frederick Engels, who admirably chronicled the link between latenineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. It was Engels, we know, who really spawned urban Marxism, spawned a "modern" analysis of the “modem” metropolis in the making. But it was Walter Benjamin, our angel in the city, who first understood the texture of the modern metropolis, the dialectical experience of the modernity, within the modern industrialization and urbanization process. Benjamin brought a deeper vision to the capitalist city; Paris and Berlin and Naples, he knew, were more than just giant factory towns. Benjamin never mentioned “consumer capi­ talism.” He perished at a Spanish border town as World War II engulfed Europe. It was after the fighting stopped that capitalism really colonized everyday life, really started to b organize everyday life and city space in the image of the commodity and the spectacle } of the commodity's image. Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord knew this well, living

Afterword

longer than Benjamin. Modem postwar capitalism, both men insisted, continued to exploit and alienate at work; but now alienation lurked around ever corner and boomed out on every billboard, TV, and radio. And cities bore the major brunt of this alienating penchant. As the seventies unfolded, the city increasingly became domi­ nated by “monopoly capitalism "This beast, Manual Castells noted, relied on an inter­ ventionist state to stimulate demand for the consumer durables big corporations excessively churned out. Castells’s urban paradigm was thus reflective of the golden age of postwar industrialization, and his urbanism and Marxism wedged itself somewhere between “Fordist” and “post-Fordist” city. By the 1980s, he’d said that Marxism couldn’t confront the ascendance of the latter. David Harvey begged to differ; he stuck hard to Marxian moorings. Marshall Berman, like Harvey, saw this developmental process as inherently Faustian, scary and dark and devastating. Both, in different ways, reminded us how good things in the world spring from the same source as the bad things. And good things can be grasped by modern men and women, by ordinary people who keep on keeping on, in spite of the bad things. Berman and Harvey’s city was forever a modern city; postmodernity, for each of them, is a smokescreen. Modernism lives on, in our streets and in our souls; and Marxism can help us belong in this stormtossed ocean. This historicity of capitalist urbanism has equally documented an evolving met­ ropolitan dialectic. The Marxists who figure in Metromarxism have shown how it’s possible to love a capitalist city and still remain Marxist. If anything, it is because of this love that they embraced Marxism. They especially love cities with thriving cen­ ters. They want to broaden this center, make it livable for others, not just for the rich, who usurp it or plunder and flee it. These Marxists want a core that has both 17Ö definition and latitude, that bustles with citizens who engage with this space, and who feel empowered in it. For those critics denouncing Marxism as a preeminent culture of complaint, a plague-on-your-house mentality, wherein participants foam at the mouth with apocalyptic rage, I hope Metromarxism makes them think again—or else has them think a first time. How many urbanists can write as tenderly about Paris as Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, or Guy Debord? Who better describes the quirki­ ness of Baltimore than David Harvey, or the streets of New York as lovingly as Marshall Berman? For all of them, urbanism blossoms out of poetry as well as political econ­ omy. In their writings, we can witness two souls dwelling in their breasts at the same time as we can witness the dual forces of urbanization, its heaven and hell creden­ tials—“Roses are planted where thorns grow,” wrote poet William Blake, perceptively. Marxist urbanism, each thinker knows, gives us a practice and a politics that can defend and attack, that can help preserve fast-disappearing affordable street-corner societies while prefiguring new experimental neighborhoods, new futuristic cities. Marxist urbanism reminds us of what we already have—or once had—to make urban life dynamic, exciting, and free; it also lets us know what we still need, the justice we have yet to achieve. And it poses the sorts of questions that force us to understand this link through past, present and future. The Marxist urbanism evinced in Metromarxism knows that city life gets dramatized by novelty and spontaneity, and by organic growth;

Afterword

but it knows, too, that planning is required, that democratic intervention and conceiv­ ing the world in our imagination, via abstraction, is paramount, These tensions remain vital points of reference for any contemporary discussion about the future of the city, about how to make our cities exciting as well as livable, aesthetical as well as ethical, ordered as well as disordered, managed yet somehow spontaneous. Marxism can inspire urbanism, much as cities are fertile stomping grounds for Marxists and fellow-traveler free spirits, for people disgruntled with the status quo. The city these Marxists both love and envision—see in microcosm and yearn for in macrocosm—is a planet away from what some associate with Marxist urbanism: drab Eastern bloc penal housing estates, gray austerity, grim-faced people going about a life of routinized drudgery. It is a universe away from the “steel cities” and “energy cities” that the Bolsheviks initially conceived for postrevolutionary Russia. The future city then, especially as the Soviet constructivist Alexei Gastev had it, resembled something out of a Meccano model, with row upon row of steel cranes and girders, escalators, conveyor belts and assembly lines. This superurbanized, superindustrialized envi­ ronment made people little more than productive fodder, mere automatons in a massively centralized industrial process, designed around “Taylorist” perpetual motion techniques/ It was scientific rationality gone mad, a world satirized mag­ nificently by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 masterpiece We, in which the mathematician protagonist D-503—a mere number, not a person—is a true believer of the “One State” urbanized world that Zamyatin, and our Metromarxists here, detested. “My pen,” D-503 says, “accustomed to figures, is powerless to create the music of asso­ nance and rhyme.” Instead, D-503 yearns “to unbend the wild curve, to straighten it tangentially... to flatten it to an undeviating line. Because the line of One State is a straight line. The great, divine, precise, wise straight line—the wisest of all 179 lines.”s One of great ironies about this indictment of former Soviet communism, which many avid capitalist types and Business Week pundits would likely endorse, is that it can just as easily be turned against twenty-first-century capitalist society as well; for nowadays we have our own One State, with its global reach, ordered by the commod­ ity, characterized by market rationality and regimented by detailed divisions of labor, in which workers toil longer and longer hours. (At least they do in the United States, where the workforce now averages almost 136 hours a year more than it did in 1980.) It’s a world where people dream—if they still dream—of only what they know they can get, because the ad men promise it and the corporations guarantee it. “I wake up,” says Zamyatins true believer. “Mild bluish light. The glass walls, the glass armchairs, the table were all glistening. This was reassuring. My heart stopped hammering. Juice? Buddha? What kind of nonsense... ?” He continues, It was clear: I was sick, I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of hor­ rible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, Juice. But today

we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronométrieally perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust to dull its shine. . . . The cheerful little crystal bell in my headboard dings 7:00 a.m: time to get up. No doubt about it, that Taylor was the genius of antiq­ uity. True, it never finally occurred to him to extend his method over the whole of life, over every step you take right around the clock. He wasn't able to integrate into his system the whole spread from hour 1:00 to hour 24:00.6

Afterword

The Taylorist stamp on urban America did eventually spread from hour 1 to hour 24. We see it everywhere today in the sacked downtowns plaguing many cities, hollowed-out spaces devastated by interstate highways, by “people movers” lined with faceless office parks, anodyne shopping malls, bland pedestrianless streets—spaces where, as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s underground man once said, “there’s nothing left to do or understand.” Here, where beltways become the new Main Streets, there really is “nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation ”7 Bottling up the five senses was something Marx himself had big problems with. It was pivotal, he said, in the “devaluation of human beings ” The devaluation of the human world, he said, “grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things.”* For Marx, the overwhelming subjugation of people to this thingworld cut off “human relations to the world.” The environment he envisioned was an environment of “human effectiveness,” somewhere that stimulates the senses, arouses them to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think, want, act, and love (the list is ABO Marx’s own). It’s a project, he knew, that had to recouple the human subject with the human object, had to reunite the inner world with the outer world, inner nature with external nature, people with places. It means transcending the split between humans and other humans, and humans and their degraded surroundings. It’s a prob­ lematic enacted both inside and outside people, conditioning us and conditioned by us. It means changing a world in which mass abundance and mass production, effi­ ciency and rationality, forces people to live off either too little or too much of nothing. It means addressing a world antithetical to Marx’s ideal of the good life. Marx told us that we had to appropriate ourselves in an “integral way,” as “total people,” not as one-sided people, not as people where “all physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the sense of having.”9 “Having,” he said, is the only sense that really matters under capitalism. As a collective impulse, the desire to have and to possess—to organize the world around possession—drove a wedge between our sub­ jective selves and our objective environment. Marx, instead, wanted our senses to become subjectively human, not objectively inhuman. He wanted our senses not to be senselessly concretized in bricks and mortar, in highways and shopping malls, in office blocks and parking lots, but sensitively nourished as “organs of life.” He felt that we had to affirm ourselves in this objective world in all our senses; otherwise we would ampu­ tate ourselves from that world, while amputating that world itself. As such, any urban

Afterword

society that’s truly “fully developed” would let people live “in all the richness of their being”10 It suggests, above all, a physical and social environment with texture, with a depth and complexity of meaning not a flattening or simplification of meaning. Environments with texture suggest places with the “deep song” sensibility that Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca hailed as luminously creative and a luminous creation. It suggests places where people dynamically and spontaneously interact with their sur­ roundings, surroundings where the antithesis between our inner and outer worlds, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity—between being fully alive and half dead—has been collapsed. (In many “edge city” environments nowadays, shop­ ping and living spaces are so utterly flat and sterile that planners and owners ludi­ crously have to “program” them for animation. Spontaneous expression is thought so unlikely in these contexts that consultants are employed to hire street musicians to perform!") Marx knew that “the practical energy of man” could help here. Indeed, “the prob­ lems of knowledge” and “the problems of life” could only be resolved practically, could only be resolved by human essential powers vigorously striving to achieve their objective. It’s in everyday life—in everyday urban streets—that people per­ haps struggle for that objective most vigorously and practically; its there, for instance, where they practically challenge private property rights, ownership of capital and land, exploitation of labor, deadening alienation. Streets play a key role in releasing these “practical energies of man.” It’s in streets that the “problems of knowledge” and “the problems of life” often get worked through. This notion seems pretty unanimous among our protagonists; they all somehow agree that streets are where an authentic urban Marxism germinates. The street, more gener­ ally, isn’t a bad barometer for gauging what’s what in social, political, and eco- 1Ѳ1 nomic life. It’s a place, of course, where a lot of us sustain our lives. Frequently, streets bear the scars of people who don’t sustain their lives, whose lives have fallen apart. Streets are where the metropolitan dialectic comes home to roost, with a glaring realism, out in the open. That’s why streets pose threats both to the rich and to the poor. But since November-December 1999, streets have gotten explicitly politicized in ways reminiscent of the 1960s; then in Seattle, hundreds of thousands of different people came together to protest the World Trade Organization, whose global pro­ grams affect the dynamics of millions of streets everywhere, particularly poor streets. Street politics have henceforth started to fill the large void left by institutionalized party politics. The upsurge in street activism has signaled an upsurge in radical contestation, a force that may have made Henri Lefebvre’s and Guy Debord’s hearts soar had they lived to see it. Although not all radicalism here is avowedly Marxist, it’s nonetheless a breeding (and testing) ground for Marxism. “Spectacular agitation” has erupted in a lot of streets, in North America and Europe, in Southeast Asia and Australia, counter­ ing the arrogance of “spectacular capitalism.” Agitation has captured popular imagi­ nation, politicizing people and places, sometimes for the first time. Grassroots stalwarts now voice varying agendas that coalesce at varying spatial scales: canceling

Afterword

“Third World” debt, creating living-wage legislation, banning child and sweatshop labor, reclaiming our streets from automobiles, keeping city life vital, saving turtles, shutting down the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, taming unfet­ tered globalization. City streets aren’t always the stake; but invariably they’re arenas for challenging ruling class power, for sniffing that power out, for initiating a radical poli­ tics and for promoting a radical urbanism. In city streets, people participate in the political as well as the urban process. It’s there where they can join hands with one another, like the old guys Marx and Engels said—as the batons flail, the tear gas flows, and the cavalry charges. In April 2001, 30,000 protesters piled into Quebec City, where 34 heads of state gathered to talk about a “free trade” bloc for the Americas, a sort of North American Free Trade Agreement on steroids. Eight hundred million people would be drawn into its web, spanning Alaska to Argentina. Smash capitalism, one oppositional graffito read; Freedom can’t be bought, read another. Cheerleaders, using bullhorns, sang “Welcome to the Carnival against Capitalism.” Gray-haired activists linked arms with their young green-haired comrades, and as well as marching in the street, chanting and singing, they organized their very own “Peoples’ Summit,” with its alternative globalization manifesto, a grassroots version. Surrounding the venue was a giant chain-link fence, a “security zone ” keeping demonstrators strictly off limits. “The Wall of Shame” became its nickname before rabble-rousers tore it down. As ever, civic commotion to corporate promotion faced a predictable ideo­ logical barrage from mainstream media, from free trade pundits, from experts, con­ sultants, business school professors and economists. Many now comprise a new complex of organizations and institutions engaged in management and decision102 making, superimposed on economic organizations proper. They appear to consti­ tute a “system” that, rather than undermine Marx’s thought, has made his thought more vital, because now the “capitalist system” is more political These organizations have given fresh meaning to the “political economy.” Thus, on the one hand, cities, regions, nations and nationality have been engulfed by economic factors and com­ modity dictates, as the Communist Manifesto predicted; on the other hand, Marx clearly overstated bourgeois commitment to “free trade,” to its tearing down of every barrier to production and exchange. In fact, the most powerful members of this class have collectively devised assorted regulatory (and deregulatory) mechanisms to politically finagle and actively manipu­ late and control certain markets, establishing new superstate and suprastate authori­ ties, gigantic new executive committees for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, with an ever-growing list of organizations, trade agreements, and acronyms. Just how, finally, all this bodes for the future of Marxism itself (and for cities) remains to be seen. But insofar as “truth”—in Marxist terms—is determined practically by “who wins,” we can rest assured that, by this criterion, the war isn’t over yet. Battles around class and free markets will continue to be waged, out on the streets, despite bourgeois pipe dreams. Meantime, Marxism offers handy tips about strategy and analysis, about how people can maneuver through contradictions and conflict,

about how the Marxist message is a message about modern times and not just a Dickensian tale of nineteenth-century hard times. It’s a story that believes the future can be different. Indeed, it’s a story that still believes in the concept offuture. And yet, it doesn’t come with guarantees about what that future might, or ought to, be. It’s a story about realistic hopes and visions of an open-ended civilization, forever change­ able and always up for grabs. To that degree, Marx lives on as a mover and shaker, as a thinker who turned answers into questions, and questions into life-and-death politics. Marx’s tale, and the Marxist story, was, and still is, our story, de te fabula narratur, as he said: a tale about us, necessary for today, indispensable for tomorrow. It’s a story that brings together comedy and tragedy, and instead of depicting farce, gives us narrative realism, something that can make us laugh and cry, often at the same time. How else can sane people live under our current system?

Afterword

Maybe, in the end, there is no end. So, in the meantime, I ask the reader not to take my word as final. Go off and read Marx and Engels for yourself, seek out in libraries or bookstores (used) copies of The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, volume 1 of Capital, Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class and The Housing Question. Study them slowly and carefully The secondary Marxist literature is colossal, and a mixed bag. The texts I’ve found particularly helpful in illuminating the primary material are Bertell Oilman’s Alienation (Cambridge University Press, 1971) and Dialectical Investigations (Routledge, 1993), both of which clarify dialectical method and thought wonderfully; elsewhere, the very comprehensive Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore and colleagues (Blackwell, 1983), has a stellar lineup discoursing on everything Marxist from A to Z; and Raymond Williams’s 183 Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977) provides potted sum­ maries of classic Marxist concepts with typical verve and originality. The muchmaligned Louis Althusser still packs a punch, and For Marx and Essays on Ideology give brilliantly lucid interpretations of dialectical method, historical materialism and ide­ ology; they’re well worth pondering over. On the other flank, Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism is a lovely little book, readable, reliable, and romantic, second to none in spreading the Marxist humanist word. As for specifically Marxist urban texts, well, they’ve been omnipresent in the pre­ ceding narrative so far; but I would underscore the following: For Walter Benjamin, whose fame alas came posthumously, Illuminations (Schocken, 1969) and Reflections (Schocken, 1978) are joyous sources, loaded with snippets and set pieces on cities and urbanism. The massively intimidating Arcades Project (Belknap Press, 1999) warrants selected plundering, with its buried nuggets on “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” and on Charles Baudelaire and Baron Haussmann’s boulevards. An abridged rendering of this Paris material can be found in Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (Verso, 1973). Extracts of Henri Lefebvre’s urban musings have been brought together in Writings on Cities (edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elisabeth Lebas; Blackwell, 1996); The Production of Space (Blackwell, 1991) is a

Afterword

rich, yet difficult text, as is Critique of Everyday Life, volume 1 (Verso, 1991). They should be struggled with, however, because the gains are rewarding. His Introduction to Modernity (Verso, 1995) contains the thought-provoking “Notes on the New Town,” which condenses Lefebvre's “organic” urban yearnings. Manuel Castells seldom writes specifically about cities these days, and writes even less about Marxism; but The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Edward Arnold, 1973) makes up for what he no longer says about either, five always felt that City, Class and Power (Macmillan, 1978) was an underrated book; it does a nice job both summarizing Castells’s earlier Mandst-urbanist line while updating it empirically and politically, launching it into a Eurocommunist orbit. The City and the Grassroots (Edward Arnold, 1982) is intriguing for its Marxist mea culpa, yet its case studies are wonderful, and in many ways complementary to more imaginative adaptations of Marxism, despite what Castells says himself. David Harvey's oeuvre is prodigious and continues to get more so by the year. The seminal Social Justice and the City (Edward Arnold, 1973) is still a must read, as is The Limits to Capital (Blackwell, 1982), his magnum opus, as close a rendering as possible of what Marx might’ve done if he'd gotten around to the planned fifth and sixth vol­ umes of Capital (He never actually managed to finish volumes 2 or 3.) Harveys more recent Spaces ofHope (University of California Press, 2000) is fascinating in its Marxist striving for a utopian city. A smattering of Harvey's old and newer writings figure in a very convenient collection called Spaces of Capital (Routledge, 2001 ), his latest offering. Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Verso, 1983) is a brilliant text, more eclectic than a lot of the aforementioned works, but sweepingly Marxist in its scope and depth. Berman’s output since then has been steady rather than prodigious, revolving around periodic review essays and shorter interventions І84 in nonacademic publications like The Nation and Dissent. Some have been brought together in the entertaining and engaging Adventures in Marxism (Verso, 1999), a lovely edition to any Marxists' and/or urbanists' bookshelf. These books, and their ideas, though, come with a health warning. Years ago, when I first encountered many of them as an undergraduate, they transformed the way I thought about life, cities, and myself. They posed all kinds of questions about the world, how we live, what my own role was in that world. Nothing was ever the same again; neither was my appreciation of, and frustration with, cities. For any budding Marxist, we can recognize the Hegelian moment here, the moment when ideas can help shape the world, rather than vice versa. Ideas always mattered for Marx, and they should always matter for Marxists. They can be, and frequently are, sources of great excitement as well as the beginnings of great trauma and difficulty, particularly when one tries to live out those ideas (and ideals) in a world unsympathetic to them. Meanwhile, these ideas—the conflicting and complementary ideas I've documented in Metromarxism—can help people change themselves as they struggle with changing the world. Marxist ideas can help you make it through till morning, can get you out of Plato's cave. For Hegel, ideas helped the owl of Minerva spread its wings only with the falling of dusk; for Marxists, ideas can help people become that owl of Minerva, a night owl even in broad daylight.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 71; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 90-91. 3. Robert Park, Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology (New York: Free Press, 1952), 73. 4. “Speech at the Anniversary of the ‘People’s Paper,’” reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 577-78. Marx’s actual speech, addressed in English in 1856, makes wonderful reading: “In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem brought by the loss of character.... Even the pure light of sci­ ence seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.” And yet, for all that, Marx adds, a little further on, “On our part, we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit

5. 6. 7. 8.

that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men—and such are the working men.” Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Tucker, R. (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 595. Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002). John Kifher, “New Mission at City Hall: 'Get Marxists off Streets,’” New York Times, December 20,1999, A34. Jeff Byles, “Dialectical U,” Village Voice (Education Supplement), January 23, 2001,102.

Notea

Chapter 1

186

1. Postface to Capital, vol. 1,2ded. (New York: Vintage, 1977), 102-3. All citations from Capital vol. 1 throughout this book refer to this edition. 2. Cited in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 37. 3. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1991), 79, 80; emphasis in the original. 4. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), 356; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 5. Karl Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844, in The Letters of Karl Marx, ed. Saul Padover (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice НаII, 1979), 34^35. 6. Ibid., 35. 7. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Early Writings, 421; emphasis in the original. 8. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 103; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text 9. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 475; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text Although Engels is normally accred­ ited as coauthor, it’s widely accepted now that Marx wrote most of the mani­ festo. More controversy surrounds the part played by Marx’s former communist ally and friend Moses Hess, who may have actually drafted certain passages. 10. Karl Marx, “Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture,” chapter 15 of Machinery and Large-Scale Industry, in Capital, vol. 1,637. 11. Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 20. 12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 101. 13. Marx, Capital vol. 1,163-64; hereafter cited parenthetically.

Chapter 2 1. Frederick Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in 77ie Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tlicker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 681-82.

Notea

2. The first English-language translation of the book appeared in America in 1886; it didn’t get published in England itself until 1892. 3. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Penguin, 1984), 27; emphasis in the original. All citations hereafter refer to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text. 4. The belief was reiterated by Marx in the 1867 preface to volume 1 of Capital (New York: Vintage, 1977), 90-91. Marx called England the “locus classicus” of the capitalist mode of production, showing the rest of Europe and the world “only the image of its own future .” 5. In the groundbreaking Social Justice and the City, David Harvey invokes Engels’s vision of Manchester in response to the land-use theory propounded by the so-called Chicago school of urban sociologists. In postwar America, its “ecological” explanations of city growth and structure have been staple reading for any would-be urban sociologist, planner, or geographer. While I want to look at Harveys work more thoroughly in a later chapter, suffice it to say here that Harvey opts for Engels any day. He reckons his take is “far more consistent with hard economic and social realities than the cultural approach of Park and Burgess.” In fact, “Engels’s description could easily be made to fit the contemporary American city (concentric zoning with good transport facilities for the affluent who live on the outskirts, sheltering of commuters into the city from seeing the grime and misery which is the complement of their wealth, etc.). It seems a pity that contemporary geog­ raphers have looked to Park and Burgess rather than to Engels for their inspiration. The social solidarity which Engels noted was not generated by any superordinate "moral order.5 Instead, the miseries of the city were an 1Ѳ7 inevitable concomitant to an evil and avaricious capitalist system.” See Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 133. 6. This is voiced in Engels’s 1893 preface to the Italian edition of The Communist Manifesto. 7. This became the basic point Marx develops in Capital In “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” chapter 25 of volume 1, Marx views the general movement of wages as exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of “the relative surplus population.” Wages, notes Marx, aren’t “determined by the variations of the absolute numbers of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into an active army and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of sur­ plus population, by the extent to which it is alternately absorbed and set free.” If capital accumulation in the overall economy is such that it increases the demand for labor, on the one hand, “it increases on the other the supply of workers by "setting them free/ while at the same time the pressure of the unem­ ployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labor, and therefore makes the supply of labor to a certain extent independent of the supply of

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workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand for labor on this basis completes the despotism of capital.” See Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1,2d ed. (New York: Vintage, 1977), 790, 793. 8. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: Pelican Classic, 1976). 9. Wed see these images of urban desolation crop up again a few years later, across the English Channel, brought to life in a different medium by the poet Charles Baudelaire. His prose poem “Eyes of the Poor,” for instance, parodies the class polarization arising from Baron Georges Haussmann s titanic reconstruction of Paris between 1850 and 1870. Lining the vast new boulevards were dazzling new cafés, full of the beautiful bourgeois, carousing amid gaslights and gold cornices with fine food and wine. Outside one gleaming café, however, “with their great saucer eyes,” is a family dressed in rags, street people who look in with admiration: “How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is!” cries the little boy. “But it is a house where only people who are not like us can go.” Baudelaires writings, as we'll see in the next chapter, will get a distinctive Marxist mooring in the imagination of Walter Benjamin. 10. “Preface to the English Edition of The Condition of the Working Class,” written by Engels in 1892. Reprinted in The Condition of the Working Class, Penguin ed., 1987. 11. Engels could have easily been talking about the Service Employees’ International Union and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union, now at the vanguard of America unionism and working-class radicalism, especially in states like California, where they busy themselves organizing thousands of low180 wage janitors, home care workers, hamburger flippers, waiters, and hotel maids. These “new” rank and filers are spreading the union word in decibels not heard since the “old” auto and steel union drives of the 1930s. 12. Frederick Engels, “The Housing Question,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 23 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 324. 13. The FIWMA was a worldwide federation of working-class groups, based mainly in western and central Europe and to a lesser degree in America, founded in 1864 and designed to revivify the labor movement after the defeats of 1848-49. Marx and Engels played a key role in its general council, which was seated in London until 1872. After moving to New York, the organization steadily divided between dedicated followers of Marx and Engels (the “Marxists”) and those rooting for one of the founders of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin.

Chapter à 1. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2,1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 612. 2. Walter Benjamin to Herbert Blumenthal, May 14, 1912. Cited in Мошше Broderen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (London: Verso, 1996), 37-38. 3. Benjamin had more in common with Simmel, psychically and intellectually,

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than he would, or could, have realized at this point. Both were Jews at the Reich’s pinnacle university; both were “strangers” somehow. Simmel had actu­ ally dealt with the idea of “the stranger” in fairly coded sociological terms in an essay of the same name; Benjamin probably read or heard it. The stranger’s “position in [the] group,” Simmel said, “is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not stem from the group itself... . His position as a full-fledged member involves both being outside it and confronting it.” See “The Stranger,” reprinted in The Sociology of Georg Simmel trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 402-3. 4. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” reprinted in Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 409-10; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 5. Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story ofFranz Biberkopf (New York: Continuum Books, 1993), 53-55. 6. Marshall Berman brilliantly sums up Benjamin’s fragmented urban con­ sciousness, his Marxism with charm, in a throwaway line in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, 1983). Berman, as we’ll see for our­ selves in a later chapter, might be talking as much about himself as Benjamin when he writes, “[Benjamin’s] heart and his sensibility draw him irresistibly toward the city’s bright lights, beautiful women, fashion, luxury, its play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes; meanwhile his Marxist conscience wrenches him insistently away from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering world is decadent, hollow, vicious, spiritually empty, oppressive to the proletariat, condemned to history” (146).

189

7. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2,1927-1934,337. 8. Walter Benjamin, “Chronology, 1892-1926,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings—Vol 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 512. His comments on “the role of language in TrauerspieV thus sound especially poignant: “Sadness is not confined to the mourning play. What is more, the mourning play is not the saddest thing in the world. A poem can be sadder, as can a story or a life. For sadness, unlike tragedy, is not a ruling force. It is not the indissoluble law of inescapable orders that prevails in tragedy. It is merely a feeling. What is the metaphysical relation of this feeling to language, to the spoken word? That is the riddle of the mourning play. What internal relation at the heart of sadness causes it to emerge from the realm of pure feeling and enter the sphere of art?” Walter Benjamin, “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 59. 9. Walter Benjamin, “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novusï* in Selected Writings, vol. 1,292-96. 10. By the mid-1950s, Lukács himself was on the run from the party mainstream. His book had been condemned for its ideological deviations, for its blatant

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political heresy. Things took on a tragic cast for Lukács, who was forced to recant his masterpiece and come dean about the philosophical idealism so repugnant to Stalinist hardliners. More recently it was discovered that Lukács really believed everything all along: he’d actually written an essay in his own defense, renouncing his earlier denundation of his great text. Nobody knew anything about it until it surfaced suddenly in post-Perestroika Russia. It has since been translated into English and published under the title Л Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2000). 11. Lacis was also a theater director and associate of Bertolt Brecht. She invited Walter Benjamin to Moscow in the winter of 1926-27 and introduced him to Brecht in 1929. Benjamin had desires to marry Lacis, but when he finally made it to Moscow she was already married and recovering from a nervous break­ down. Benjamin’s “Moscow Diary” recounted his political and personal tales of woe; it’s a fascinating, albeit painful, read. He was ambivalent about what he saw in the Soviet Union, and he tormented himself about whether or not he should join the Communist Party (he never did). As ever, though, Benjamin was the master urban physiognomist, and brought Moscow to life the way Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky brought St Petersburg to life. As for Lacis's fate, she later encountered Stalin and spent ten years in the gulag. 12. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 83; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 13. “Naples,” in Reflections: Essays, Aporisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 166; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 190 14. Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles” in ReflectionSy 139. 15. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” in Reflections, 179. 16. Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises (New York: Citadel Press, 1996), 51-52. 17. André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 112-13. Benjamin used part of this quotation as an epigraph to his essay, “Marseilles,” which is also reprinted in Reflections. 18. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 20. 19. Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, May 31, 1935. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Harvard University Press, 1999). 20. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 182. 21. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 82; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 22. The book has a legendary history. After Benjamin’s death in 1940 its where­ abouts were unknown. Was the manuscript in that big battered briefcase he lugged across the French-Spanish border? Was it confiscated by the authorities? In fact, it came to light that Benjamin had stashed the fated text in the Bibliothèque Nationale before he fled Nazi occupation. In 1981, it miraculously

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turned up in the estate of Benjamin’s friend and a former archivist at the library, Georges Bataille, who’d died in 1962. A year later, Passagen-Werk made print in Germany, and after a very long wait the Belknap Press has finally given us an English version. 23. Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, August 6,1939, in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 317. 24. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage,” in Les Fleurs du Mal (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), 335. 25. Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin, October 11,1938; emphasis in the orig­ inal. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Harvard University Press, 1999), 279. 26. Walter Benjamin, “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel,” in Reflections, 199. 27. Benjamin s remains are buried at Portbou’s little cemetery, perched on the cliff edge, a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean, toward the south of the town, now a tacky tourist haven. His dark marble headstone reads: “There is no document of culture that is not also one of barbarism.” The memorial to Benjamin, and to other European exiles between 1933 and 1945, by Dani Karavan, a Tel Aviv artist, is approachable from the cemetery, via several metal steps adjacent to a lone olive tree. A narrow, rusty steel passageway, literally hacked through rock, leads you down steps that seem to descend into the sea itself. But a glass panel prevents your falling. On it there’s an inscription from Benjamin, in French, Spanish, German and English: “It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the name- 191 less.” The panel purposely has a bullet hole near the bottom, and a huge crack across the center, evoking shocking violence and violation. It’s an amaz­ ing vision down at the bottom of the interior staircase, down the oxidized path to nowhere or everywhere: you can see, all at once, the blue-green sea, steep cliffs across the bay, the nearby Pyrenees, and the reflection of the sky and clouds overhead—to say nothing of your own dark shadow. Lamentably, the day I visited the site, it looked depressingly forlorn, with litter, stones, straw, and cigarette butts accumulated in the passageway, familiar debris from our own storm of progress.

Chapter 4 1. That somebody was Edward Soja, the UCLA geographer who posed the ques­ tion to Lefebvre in 1978. The incident is recounted in Sojas Thtrdspace (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 3 note 8. 2. Jansenism takes its name from Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), the Dutch the­ ologian and Bishop of Ypres. He gave a hardcore interpretation of Augustinian doctrine, and favored absolute predestination: humans weren’t able to be good without God’s unsolicited grace, Jansen said, and only a select few would ever

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find divine salvation. 3. Henri Lefebvre, “Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside,” in Critique ofEveryday Life, vol. 1 [1947] (London: Verso, 1991). 4. Henri Lefebvre, “A Group of Young Philosophers: A Conversation with Henri Lefebvre,” in Bernard-Henri Levy, Adventures on the Freedom Road (London: HarvilJ Press, 1991), 132. 5. Ibid., 132. 6. Ibid., 133. 7. Lefebvre and Breton became card-carrying communists in 1928. They were close to each other for awhile, but fell out in the early 1930s. Breton flirted with Marx and communism, as did Lefebvre with Surrealism; each never really seemed sincere. In the 1960s, Lefebvre would rediscover surrealism when he began to write about urbanism and space. 8. Queneau supervised the eventual book version of the seminars, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), compiled from Kojève’s scattered notes and draft papers. The late American conservative scholar, Allan Bloom, immortalized in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein, edited and introduced the text Kojève himself, ironically, died in May 1968, just as many radical students were attempting to transform the master-slave dialectic out on the streets of Paris. 9. Lefebvre, “Young Philosophers,” 138. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 124; emphasis in the original. Hereafter cited paren­ thetically in the text. 192 11. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 54-55; emphasis in the original, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. All the capital letters here and in subsequent quotations are Kojève’s. 12. Hegel, Phenomenology ofSpirit, 126. 13. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 103. 14. Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 114-67. 15. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 389-390; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text 16. Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 164. 17. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1991), 66-67. 18. Ibid., 13,6. 19. Lefebvre, Critique ofEveryday Life, 37-38. 20. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modem World (London: Penguin, 1971), 58. 21. Henri Lefebvre, “An Interview with Henri Lefebvre,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5 (1987): 27-38. 22. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity (London: Verso, 1995), 118; here­ after cited parenthetically in the text. 23. Lefebvre, Critique ofEveryday Life, vol. 1,202.

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24. Lefebvre» Everyday Life in the Modem World, 36. The issue of spontaneity actu­ ally has a history within Marxism itself, having brought Rosa Luxemburg to blows with Vladimir Lenin in 1904. In One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, Lenin writes that the “spontaneous development of the workers’ movement leads precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology” What is needed, he feels, is a party, led by an elite vanguard, by dedicated intellectuals who’d make revolution their calling, who’d purge the movement of its spontaneity, dictating a tight, tactical program of action, especially “to rebellious students ... to dis­ contented religious sectaries, to indignant school teachers, etc.” Luxemburg had no truck with Lenin’s “ultracentralist” tendency, rejecting his contempt for nonaligned, working-class activism. In Leninism or Marxism? she reckons that different working-class federations need a “liberty of action,” to “develop their revolutionary initiative and ... utilize all the resources of a situation ” Lenin’s line is “full of the sterile spirit of overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit.” Luxemburg, like Lefebvre, is more generous, more sensitive to the ups and downs of progressive struggles, in the course of which a movement emanates and grows. Social democracy, for both Luxemburg and Lefebvre, isn’t just “invented”; it’s “the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.” V. I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978); R. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). 25. They include: La Proclamation de la Commune (1965), Le Droit à la Wie (1968), Du Rural à Uurbain (1970), La Révolution Urbaine (1970) and La Pensée Marxiste et la Ville (1972). Scandalously, only The Right to the City 193 has ever made it into English, and that in an abridged version. 77ie Right to the City is the centerpiece of Eleonore Koftnan and Elizabeth Lebas’s Writing on Cities: Flenri Lefebvre (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); they have translated and edited the text while bringing together other Lefebvre essays and interviews on urbanism. There’s also a lengthy introduction by the editors, which does a solid job locating Lefebvre in both French intellectual life and Anglo-American geography and urbanism. Surprisingly, La Révolution Urbaine, arguably Lefebvre’s most pathbreaking urban book, is entirely absent from Kofman and Lebas’s offering. Still one of the best renderings of Lefebvre’s “urban revolu­ tion” thesis, in extracted form, is that of David Harvey, the first Anglophone urbanist to acknowledge Lefebvre’s brilliance. Near the end of Social Justice and the City, Harvey quotes from Lefebvre’s La Révolution Urbaine using his own translation: “(WJhen we use the words ‘urban revolution’ we designate the total ensemble of transformations which run throughout contemporary soci­ ety and which serve to bring about the change from a period in which ques­ tions of economic growth and industrialization predominate to the period in which the urban problematic becomes decisive, when research into the solu­ tions and forms appropriate to urban society takes precedence ” See Harvey,

Notea

Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 306. 26. Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, eds., Writing on Cities, 78, 80-81; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 27. Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution of І968 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 28. As the Seattle anti-World Trade Organization protests have recently shown, sometimes street spontaneity can even keep power from getting into the confer­ ence room! 29. Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism [ 1973] (London: Allison and Busby, 1976), 20. 30. Ibid., 21; emphasis in the original. 31. Henri Lefebvre, La Révolution Urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 13. 32. This is a very important idea that also underscores a lot of David Harvey’s influ­ ential work. Harvey actually quotes Lefebvre at length on the matter in the “Conclusions and Reflections” of Social Justice and the City. The English geog­ rapher, as we’ll see in chapter 7, aside from a few points of divergence, became the Anglo-American kindred spirit of Lefebvre. 33. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. Introduction,” in Karl Marx Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 251. 34. Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 113; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 35. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 87; emphasis in the original, 194 36. Lefebvre, “Interview with Henri Lefebvre,” 31.

Chapter 5 1. Guy Debord, Panegyric (New York: Verso, 1991), 12—13. 2. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” [1955], in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), 5. 3. Debord’s first love was cinema. His rants against bourgeois cinema also extended to rants against the avant-garde, particularly the “respected” avantgarde, like Jean-Luc Godard. In Godard, he once said, “the repetition of the same clumsy stupidities is by definition breathtakingly innovative.” Godard’s critiques, Debord added, “never go beyond the innocuous.” Godard is to film what Henri Lefebvre is to social critique: “each possesses the appearance of a certain freedom in style or subject matter. . . . But they have taken this very freedom from elsewhere: from what they have been able to grasp of the advanced experiences of the era. They are the Club Méditerranée of modern thought” (Guy Debord, “The Role of Godard” in Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, 175-76). Assaults notwithstanding, Godard did hit the target in Masculin/Feminin ( 1966), when he called the 1960s radical generation

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“Les Enfants de Marx and Coca-Cola” “Think of it what you like” the follow­ up caption provoked» amid staccato gunfire. In one sense, this was Debord’s generation as well; in another, he was of an older mold, actually coming of age in the 1950s. If anything, Debord’s disposition was more classical, more baroque: his Marxism went back to the future from the seventeenth century. “I was not converted by May 1968,” he said in Considérations sur Vassassinat de Gérard Lebovici (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 64. “I am an older bandit than that.” Debord liked to call himself “Gondi” after the strange seventeenth-century Cardinal de Retz, Jean-François Paul de Gondi. Gondi was something of an elegant folk hero, a trusted patron of Paris’s poor and dangerous classes, who, between 1648 and 1652, apparently incited the street protests against Louis XIV’s reign, revolts that became known as “The Fronde.” 4. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludern: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 9. 5. Ibid., 89. 6. The film’s monologues are reprinted in Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, 29-33. 7. In “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Debord describes psy­ chogeography as “the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (Situationist International Anthology, 5). 8. Henri Lefebvre, “Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International,” October 79 (1997): 80. 9. Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem, “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism” in Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, 67. 195 10. Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life” in Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, 75. 11. Cited in Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon: The Hype-Architecture ofDesire (Rotterdam: Olo Publishers, 1998), 34. 12. “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism,” in Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology. 13. Debord, Panegyric, 43—44. 14. “Lefebvre on the Situationist International,” 69-70. 15. The Assassination of Paris was, of course, the title of Louis Chevalier’s 1977 book, a text Debord admired, but one, alas, he saw harking in the wind. “So we could,” Debord noted in Panegyric, “count at least two righteous people in the city at the time” (46). His cinematic offering, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, is a Latin palindrome that translates, “We go around and around in the night and are consumed by fire.” The filmscript has been trans­ lated into English by Lucy Forsyth, and was published in 1991 by Pelagian Press, London; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 16. The original site of Chez Moineau, at 22 rue du Four, in the Sixth Arron­ dissement, is today a rather prim little establishment specializing in aromatic

Notea

fragrances and herbal medicines. Surrounding it, without humor or irony, are endless upscale boutiques, tourist cafés, and extensive antique stores. 17. Debord, Panegyric, 63-64; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 18. Guy Debord, Thesis 35, in Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red Books, 1977); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 19. “Préface à la Quatrième Édition Italienne de la Société du Spectacle,3" in Commentaires sur la Sodeté du Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 145. 20. Ibid. 21. Karl Marx, in Karl Marx—Early Writings, 326. 22. Guy Debord, “The Beginning of an Era” [1969], in Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, 227-28; emphasis in the original. 23. “Lefebvre on the Situationist International,” 81. 24. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society ofthe Spectacle (London: Verso, 1990), 73. 25. Ibid., 2-3. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Debord, Panegyric, 48. I visited Champot once, several years after Debord's death. Champot is actually two old stone houses, once part of a farm: Champot Haut and Champot Bas. Debord lived in the former, which is protected by an eight-foot-high exterior wall, made of pale rough boulders, rendering the twostory house invisible from the outside. Surrealiy, his and Becker-Ho’s names still appear on the mailbox. The two residences stand alone, amid thick woods and barren fields, five miles from the nearest village, Bellevue-la-Montagne. One feels very far from anywhere and anybody here, light years away from Paris. In Panegyric, Debord wrote about his Champot sojourns with great tenderness 196 and beauty: “The house seemed to open directly on to the Milky Way,” he noted. “At night, the nearby stars would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist And so too our conversations and orn­ eeleb ratio ns, our meetings and our tenacious passions.” “The weeks passed imperceptibly,” he recalled “One day the morning air announced the arrival of autumn. Another time, a great sweetness in the air, a sweetness you could taste, declared, like a quick promise always kept, the spring breeze.... In regard to someone who has been, as essentially and continuously as I, a man of the streets and cities ... the charm and harmony of these few seasons of grandiose isola­ tion did not escape me” (50). 28. Guy Debord, Cette Mauvaise Réputation [ This Bad Reputation] (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 52. 29. Debord, Panegyric, 14. 30. In drum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 57. 31. Cited in Len Bracken, Guy Debord: Revolutionaries (Venice: Feral House, 1997), 234.

Chapter 6

Notes

1. Manuel Castells, “Citizen Movements, Information and Analysis: An Interview with Manuel Castells,” City7 (1997): 146-47. 2. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), viii-ix; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 3. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1971), 36. 4. Ibid., 33-34. 5. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx (London: Verso, 1979), 112-13; emphasis in the original. 6. Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic” in For Marx, 205. 7. Manuel Castells, “Afterword 1975,” in The Urban Question, 463. 8. Castells directed a team of full-time researchers on the Dunkirk experience, carrying out large-scale empirical surveys, specifically 120 in-depth interviews with key informants. The results appeared in a 1974 monograph called Monopolviüe: Venterprise, Гétat, furbain, cowritten with Francis Godard (Paris: Mouton, 1974). 9. New York Daily News, October 30,1975,1. 10. Manuel Castells, City; Class and Power (London: MacMillan, 1978), 93; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) had first adopted the Eurocommunist line in 1973. (The label, apparently, was coined by an Italian journalist.) In alliance with the dominant Christian Democrats, the PCI had high hopes for a radical reform program, and made significant gains at the 1976 election. So did the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), who emerged after years in the 197 doldrums under Franco. The French Communist Party (PCF), meanwhile, joined hands with the socialists, and at its twenty-second congress in 1976 aban­ doned the Soviet model of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” By the early 1980s, Eurocommunism had all but collapsed at the national scale. The union of the Left had shattered in Italy; factional disputes chronically hampered the PCE; and in France the PCF reverted to a harder line when François Mitterrand's right-drifting socialists won the presidential elections in 1981. In Britain, Eurocommunism seemed to go local in the 1980s, and showed great promise for a while in London, Sheffield, and Liverpool before clashing ideologically with Thatcher s Tory central government. Curiously, there was—and still is—a tiny strain of local democratic socialism in the United States, especially in cities like Santa Monica, California, with its “Peoples Republic,” and Burlington, Vermont, where Bernie Sanders (and his “Sandernistas”) won successive mayoral elections, amid overwhelming popularity, on explicitly left-leaning tickets. 12. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (1978] (London: Verso, 1980), 18; emphasis in the original. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

Notea

13. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, book 2, chap. 18 (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), 573. 14. Ibid., 572. 15. The year 1979 was also when Nicos Poulantzas flung himself off the twentysecond story of Montparnasse Tower. This suicide was a tragic loss for Marxism and for the Left. Poulantzas had been depressed for years, and was, his friend and former mentor Althusser said, “in an acute state of persecution mania.” Immediately prior to the incident, Althusser recalled meeting Poulantzas in the street. “Nicos was cheerful with me, never said a word about his own suffering, nor about his first attempted suicide which he disguised as an accident, talked about his work and research projects, and asked me about mine. He embraced me warmly when he left, as if he expected to see me again the next day. When I later discovered what he had in mind, I could not contain my admiration for what had been not only an exceptional gesture of friendship on his part but a truly heroic act.” Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever (New York: The New Press, 1993), 260. Althusser’s own eventual demise, a year later, was equally tragic. In November 1980, while supposedly massaging the neck of Hélène, his wife of over thirty years, he discovered he’d in fact strangled her. It happened almost in a daze, Althusser claimed, as a surreal nightmare, the details of which he chronicled in his grim memoir, written in an insane asylum. Officials had granted him “temporary insanity,” and Althusser remained institutionalized until his death in 1990. One theme emerging from Althusser’s sanatorium note­ book that would’ve surprised his anti-Marxist critics if ever they’d listened, was that Marxism (and the Communist movement) had been the healthy strand of 19b Althusser s fragile inner and outer life; it was Catholicism that had permanently scarred him, had driven him over the edge, insane with guilt and self-doubt. 16. Castells, The City and the Grassroots (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 294; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 17. David Harvey, “Labor, Capital, and Class Struggle around the Built Environment in Advanced Capitalist Societies” in Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 61-62. 18. “Citizen Movements,” 145. 19. Manuel Castells, The End of the Millennium; vol. 3 of The Informational Age: Economy Society and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 359. 20. David Harvey, “Three Myths in Search of a Reality in Urban Studies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5 (1987): 369.

Chapter 7 1. David Harvey, “Three Myths in Search of a Reality in Urban Studies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5 ( 1987): 369. 2. Thiinen’s blend of philosophical idealism and positivism, typified by “isolated state” and “frontier wage” notions, actually struck a cord with Marx as well as with Harvey, the Cambridge graduate student. Thiinen had explored the idea of cultivating free and open land on the edge of the isolated state, plains essen-

3.

8. 9.

Motes

4. 5. 6. 7.

tially beyond competitive capitalist land and labor markets. By making peripheral lands readily available and freely open, Thünen said “equilibrium wages” would be maximized, benefiting the capitalist and laborer alike. It would pacify class struggle, foster cooperation, and raise human beings to their true “spiritual estate.” Karl Marx, in volume 1 of Capital credited Thünen for asking the right question about the link between wage levels at home and colonization abroad, but claimed his harmonious solution to geo­ graphical expansion “simply childish” (chapter 25, section 2, footnote 9). Years later, Harvey, now a Marxist professor, would revisit Thünen and Marx’s curi­ ous footnote, while bringing G. W. F. Hegel into the plot, to evaluate capital­ ism’s prospective “spatial fix” to its historical contradictions. See “The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thunen and Marx” [1981], reprinted in David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 284-311. David Harvey, “Reinventing Geography: An Interview with the Editors of New Left Review,” reprinted in Spaces of Capital 4. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital 7. Robert Ward, Red Baker (New York: Washington Square Press, 1986), 5. Harvey, “Reinventing Geography,” 6-7. Harvey wasn’t the only positivist to radicalize and urbanize. Bill Bunge, the American geographer, followed a remarkably similar path, almost in tandem with Harvey, roaming from the highly mathematical Theoretical Geography (1962) to the humanist neo-Marxist Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971). The latter monograph portrayed the mixed fortunes of a poor inner-city neighborhood in Detroit, and represented Bunge’s attempt 199 to realize a “geographical expedition.” This was no exotic, pseudo-imperial­ istic plundering of overseas lands, but a grim voyage to urban America, where a seven-mile round trip between Detroit’s inner core and outer suburbs is a trip halfway around the globe in infant mortality rates. Bunge constructed highly vivid maps of urban spatial and social disparities, emphasizing money and capital flows from the inner city to the rich suburbs, through slumlording, racketeering, redlining, drug money laundering, and tax inequities. He put his amazing geographical imagination to explicitly leftist political ends. Bunge’s idea was that professional geographers should set up “base camp” in the inner city and enter into a productive commerce with poor, marginal and oppressed citizens, many of whom had loads of common sense and intimate geographi­ cal knowledge, but little sense of scale. On the other hand, geographers had lots of scene of scale, but little common sense, little real sense of the plight of the desperate. Thus they could radicalize one another, join hands, and turn into something dangerous. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 18; emphasis in the original; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Bertell Olman, Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 28.

Notea

10. Jean Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 12. 11. David Harvey, “Class-Monopoly Rent, Finance Capital and the Urban Revolution,” in The Urbanization of Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 65. 12. David Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” in The Urban Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 59. 13. Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism,” 83. 14. In The Poverty of Theory (1978), English humanist historian Thompson had defended “experience” in working class history. He’d suggested that Althusser’s highfalutin theory was intrinsically Stalinist because it elbowed out any dia­ logue between “concept” and “evidence.” Althusser, Thompson claimed, indulged in an “orrery of errors,” constructing a mechanized, routinized and vacuous vision of history, devoid of class experience, blind to how working class subjectivity is present, not absent, in macrohistorical change. Ironically, Thompson’s polemic sounded a little too polemical. It intended to purge Althusserianism from Marxism forever, and ended up sounding almost as dog­ matic and narrow-minded as his antihumanist foe. 15. It was years before The Limits to Capital eventually received due recognition in the Marxist fold, and then only because of Fredric Jameson’s discovery and pro­ motion of it. The esteemed and well-connected Marxist literary critic thought Harvey’s magnum opus “magisterial” and convinced the radical publisher Verso to finally admit the text to its Marxist “classics” series, some seventeen years after original publication. See Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,” New Left Review 228 (1998): 25-46. 200 16. Harvey, “Reinventing Geography,” 10. 17. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 369. 18. Harvey wrote two beautifully succinct renderings of the Limits to Capital thesis. The first is a much underrated essay, first published in 1975, called “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation”; the other is “The Geopolitics of Capitalism” (1985). Both have, conveniently, been reprinted in Spaces of Capital 19. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999), xxiv. 20. David Harvey, “Paris, 1850-1870,” in Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 82; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text 21. Adored by the tourists who endure the steep climb up to its base on the Butte Montmartre, the Sacré Coeur possesses a checkered past. Seen as a monument of Catholic fanaticism, symbolizing a Paris atoning for its past “red sins,” the Sacré Coeur was long reviled by the city’s working classes. Harvey’s essay “Monument and Myth” eloquently unearths the Right and Left passions buried within this sacred space, which, because of protracted political and bureau­ cratic shenanigans, didn’t actually get finished until 1912. “The building hides its secrets in sepulchral silence,” Harvey writes. “Only the living, cognizant of this history, who understand the principles of those who struggled for and

Notea

against the embellishment of that spot, can truly disinter the mysteries that lie entombed there and thereby rescue that rich experience from the deathly silence of the tomb.” “Monument and Myth: The Building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart »” in Consaousness and the Urban Experience, 249. 22. Ward, Red Baker, 30-31. 23. Ibid., 64. 24. David Harvey, The Baltimore Book: New Views on Local History, ed, Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 25. Harvey, “Reinventing Geography,” 13. 26. David Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘Postmodernism5 in the American City,” in The Urban Experience, 270. 27. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 286. 28. Harveys formulation of postmodernism largely mimicked Fredric Jameson’s, the other Marxist who similarly tried to “periodize” shifting eco­ nomic and cultural trends within overall capitalist development In a feted essay, first appearing in New Left Review in 1984, Jameson called postmod­ ernism the “cultural logic” of “late capitalism.” Like Harvey, Jameson’s con­ ception of postmodernism was historical rather than just stylistic, the cultural impulse of a newer multinational phase of market penetration, the purest stage of capitalism to date, that blurred once clearer demarcations between culture and the economy. Postmodern culture and multinational economics now coexisted in a confusing dialectic, superseding the simpler determination between modernism and monopoly capitalism. These cir- 201 cumstances required a new kind of contestation, Jameson said, a new form of Marxist cultural politics, typified by a radical “cognitive mapping.” Unlike Harvey, Jameson was adamant that there’s no without, no outside the whale now. Critical distance was no longer tenable in Marxist politics. Instead, progressives had to begin to grasp their positioning as “individual and collective subjects” inside the world space of multinational capital, and “regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial and social confusion.” 29. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 17,233,155, respectively, for above quotations. 30. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience ofModernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 100.

Chapter Ö 1. Marshall Berman, preface to “Justice/Just Us: Rap and Social Justice in America” in The Urbanization of Injustice, ed. Andy Merrifield and Erik Swyngedouw (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 161. 2. Marshall Berman, “In the Night Kitchen: Review of‘A Lifetime Burning in Every

Notea

Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin,’” The Nation, May 6,1996,12. 3. Cited in Guy Debord, Panegyric (London: Verso, 1991), 19. 4. The precise causes of this dip continue to be hotly debated among criminolo­ gists and sociologists. They variously point to the importance of economic boom, dissipation of the 1980s crack epidemic, quelling of gang warfare (espe­ cially after the Los Angeles “Rodney King riots” of 1992), demographic changes in “criminal-age” male populations, and, more contentiously, “zero tolerance” policing initiatives. While the decline in New York's crime rates is greater than elsewhere, it mirrors a general decline in U.S. urban crime. 5. Marshall Berman, “Ruins and Reform: New York Yesterday and Today,” Dissent, Fall 1987,423. 6. Ibid., 428. 7. Marshall Berman, “Freedom and Fetishism” [1963], reprinted in Adventures in Marxism (New York: Verso, 1999), 37; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 8. Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence ofModem Society (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 163. 9. Berman, The Politics ofAuthenticity, 165. 10. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 77ie Manifesto of the Communist Party (London: Verso), 40. 11. Berman, “All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Marx, Modernism and Modernization,” in Adventures in Marxism, 97. 12. In his perky New York Times review, critic John Leonard wrote that Berman “gives us a Marx impressed by the liberating energies of the new middle-class, a Marx who would enjoy a California be-in, a Marx who winks like Buddha___ 202 [Berman] makes Marx sound like a Dadaist or Cubist or Futurist or Constructivist He ordains the joy of disintegration and renewal. Being modem means forgetting to say you're sorry.” John Leonard, review of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, New York Times, January 8,1982, “Book of the Times.” 13. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 89; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The source of this title should be familiar to us, coming midway through part 1 of the Manifester. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men are at last forced to face with sober senses the real condi­ tions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.” 14. Scully, Simon, and Merrill cited in Ric Bums and James Sanders, eds., New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), 514, 486, 469, respectively. 15. His greatest paternal suffering was the death of Edgar, the Marxes' third-bom child, at the age of eight in 1855. While Marx never really recovered from it, he

N otes

never handed back his entrance ticket to humanity, either. In spite of it all, he wrote to Frederick Engels (April 12,1855): “In all the terrible agonies I’ve expe­ rienced these days, the thought of you and your friendship has always sus­ tained me, and the hope that, together, we may still do something sensible in the world.” We can almost read this as a pocket definition of Marxism itself: doing something sensible in the world! 16. Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party> 37-38. 17. It’s good to note that Berman is suspicious of the utopian solution to this state of affairs—that is to say, to a “sober” working class triumphantly transforming society in one fell swoop. “Some readers may be inclined to take only the criti­ cism and self-criticism to heart” Berman confesses in ЛИ That Is Solidy “and throw out [Marx’s] hopes as Utopian and naïve. But to do this, he points out, “would miss what Marx saw as the essential point of critical thinking.” Criticism, as Marx took it, was meant “to drive and inspire the person criticized to overcome both his critics and himself to propel both parties toward a new synthesis. Thus, to unmask phony claims of transcendence is to demand and fight for real transcendence” (120). 18. Marshall Berman, “Roots, Ruins, Renewals: City Life after Urbicide,” Village Voice, September 4,1984,20. 19. Ibid. 20. Marshall Berman, “Views from the Burning Bridge,” Dissent, summer 1999, 77-37. 21. Amy Waldman, “Rubble to Rebirth: Tales of the Bronx,” New York Times, April 7,1999, B4. 22. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (1984): 80S 101; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text 23. Marshall Berman, “The Signs in the Street: A Response to Anderson, New Left Review 144 (1984): 156. 24. Baudelaire s fine essay, from which Berman has drawn inspiration, is reprinted in his Selected Writings on Art and Literature (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1974). 25. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 143-44. 26. Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds,” in Paris Spleen (New York: New Directions, 1947), 20. 27. Berman, “Signs in the Street,” 167. 28. Ibid., 168. 29. Ibid., 169. 30. Marshall Berman, “Ruins and Reforms: New York Yesterday and Today,” Dissent, Fall 1987,423-24. See also Berman’s “The Lonely Crowd: New York After the War,” in New York: An Illustrated History, ed. Ric Bums and James Sanders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 536-41. This big and lavish text is the accompaniment to a recent PBS documentary on New York City. 31. This idea is one of the more insightful extracts, found in section 1 of Marx’s

K otes

often dubious “On the Jewish Question” in which he discusses “the abolition of Judaism” The essay is reprinted in its entirety in his Early Writings (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1974), 211-41. 32. Marshall Berman, “Take It to the Streets: Conflict and Community in Public Space,” Dissent, Fall 1986,476-77; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 33. Berman, “The Lonely Crowd,” 538. 34. Berman, “L.A. Raw,” The Nation, April 1,1991, 418. Berman isn’t the only one to problematize Davis’s gangsta shtick Marxism. The British journalist John Williams notes the following: “I meet Davis and a couple of friends drinking wine and discussing gang warfare.... It’s a strange conversation I’ve walked in on: they’re all talking about gang leaders as other people talk about baseball stars—‘Hey one time I interviewed this guy in San Quentin, killed twenty or thirty dudes before they put him away, now he can quote whole pages of Frantz Fanon’; ‘Yeah, well have you heard about this guy in Cleveland—he’s in for like ninety-nine life sentences and he’s still running the drug trade from his cell. Jesus I’m hoping to talk to him.’ Academics as armchair gangbangers.” John Williams, Into the Badlands; Travels through Urban America (London: Flamingo Books, 1993), 106-7. 35. Berman, “L.A. Raw,” 421. 36. Berman, “Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?” Dissent; winter 2000,31-32. 37. Ibid., 33. 38. Marshall Berman, Adventures in Marxism (New York: Verso, 1999), 219. 39. Not all of these new white-collar proletarians are taking it squarely on the chin. 204 Some are unionizing in unlikely workspaces. With managed care squeezing pay and professional freedom, thousands of U.S. doctors are currently joining, and forming, unions; in New York state, 3,000 psychologists unionized in the year 2000. Nationwide, 10,000 podiatrists followed suit. Even Microsoft’s long-term (benefitless) temporary workers have called for a union. 40. Berman, Adventures in Marxism, 263. 41. Berman is alluding to Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment {1865), in which Svidrigailov is a demented and depraved madman with designs on Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya. Realizing she could never love him, and realizing he’d rather die than let her go, Svidrigailov tells everyone he’s immigrating to America—before he blows his brains out. Unfortunately, the madmen of our world aren’t as easy to spot as raving Raskolnikovs and Svidrigailovs prowling New York’s East Village. More often they’re not on the streets at all, but up in the air, anonymous and mild-mannered, behind mirrored glass, wearing suits and seated at desks, in conference rooms and corporate boardrooms, plotting to take over the world and possess hundreds of thousands of bodies and souls. 42. Berman, “Women and the Metamorphoses of Times Square,” Dissent, Fall 2001,82.

Afterword 1. John Cassidy, uThe Return of КагІ Marx” The New Yorker, October 20-27, 1997,248. 2. Karl Marx, Wages, Price and Profit (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 78. 3. Marx, Wages, Price and Profit, 77. 4. In the 1880s, Frederick W. Taylor was the creator of “scientific management principles.” He helped pioneer tyrannical “time and motion” studies that ensured specific labor processes got executed with the maximum level of “effi­ ciency”; henceforth work wouldn't be flabby or contain pores of unproductive time. Taylor was an archetype of the white-collar managers and industrial strategists that William H. Whyte would later christen “organization men ” Not only did Taylor influence Henry Ford’s industrial production; his reach stretched into architecture and urban design, and even drew admiring gasps from Vladimir Lenin and a rapidly industrializing USSR. 5. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), 4. 6. Ibid., 33-34. 7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (New York: Signet, 1974), 39-40. 8. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 323-24. 9. Ibid., 352; emphasis in the original. 10. Ibid., 354. 11. See Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1991). 205

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INDEX

“A Berlin Chronicler 49 A Defense ofHistory and Gass Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (Lukács)» 56nl0 Abbey of Thélème, 83 absolute dialectical unrest, 75 “Absolute Rent and the Structuring of Space by Financial Institutions”, 141 abstract labor, 90 Accumulation of Capital (Luxemburg), 6 Adorno, Theodor, 8,56,67-68 Adventures in Marxism (Berman), 157,184 Alienation (Oilman), 137,183 Afi That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berman), 10, 53 «6,161,16ІЯІЗ, 163«17 Alonso, William, 140 Alphaville, 81 Althusser, Hélène, 128nl5 Althusser, Louis, 2,128nl5; on idealogy, 115—116; Karl Marx and, 15; Manuel Castell and, 113-118; on structure in dominance, 118; students and, 86 An Essay on the Principle ofPopulation (Malthus), 39 Anderson, Perry, 166-167 “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novas?, 55 Antipode (Journal), 136,141,149 anti urban planning approach, 85 antiurbanism, 2 apparatchik, 2,56 Aquina, Thomas, 73 Aragon, Louis, 61 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 8,62-67, 62n22,183 Arguments, 101 Argyll, British Earl of Aron, Raymond, 74 Artaud, Antonin, 83 Artificial Paradises (Baudelaire), 61 Assassination ofParis, The (Chevalier), 100nl5 Augustinus (Lefebvre), 73 Australia, 181 awareness of contradiction, 75 Babel, Issac, 172 Balibar, Etienne, 125 Baltimore, Maryland, 135,149; Harborplace, 148,150 Bataille, Georges, 62 «22,74 Batista, Fulgencio, 2 Baudelaire, Charles, 8,40«9,64-65,161 Beame, Abraham, 123 Becker-Но, Alice, 110

Bell, Daniel, 131 Bellow, Saul, 74n8 Benjamin, Stephan, 54 Benjamin, Walter, 7-8,155,177-178,183; arcades and, 62-67; Asja Lads and, 56; biog­ raphy of, 50,54; capitalist metropolis and, 52; commodification and, 57-59; Dora Poliak and, 54; Ernst Bloch and, 55-56; Georg Lukács and, 50,56-57; Georg Simmel and, 50-51,53«3; remains of, 68«27; space, thingness and, 49; surrealism and, 59-62 Bergman, Torbem, 55 Berlin, 50 Berlin Akxanderplatz (Döblin), 52-53 Berman, Marshall, 10,53n6,155; biography of, 157-158; Bronx and, 158,163-164; dialectic of modernity and, 163-165; on freedom as an absence of restraint, 160; Marxism and, 168-169,170-172; on Marxist people’s per­ spective, 168-169; on openness, 169-170; on Perry Anderson, 167; theme of authentidty and, 160; on urbicide, 165-166 Berne, Switzerland, 54 Bernstein, Michèle, 94,100 Berry, Brian, 136 Bevond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 165 Bibliothèque Nationale, 62 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste blasé attitude, 51 Bloch, Emst, 8,50,55-56,153 Bloom, Allan, 7 4 «8 Blumenthal, Herbert, 50 Bostons Faneuil Hall, 150 Bottomore, Tom, 183 bourgeoisie, 21-22,24 Brecht, Bertolt, 8,56nl 1,67-68 Breton, André, 60,72 Britain’s Labour Party, 123 Bronx, New York, 158,163; Museum of Art, 166 Buber, Martin, 53 Bunge, Bill, 137«7 Burgess, Ernest, 4 Burlington, Vermont, 125«11 Bums, Lizzie, 32 Bums, Mary, 32 Business Week, 179 Byles, Jeff, 11 Cambridge University, 134 Camus, Albert, 101 Capital (Marx), 10,183-184; Debord, Society of the Spectacle and, 103-104; fetishism of com­ modities in, 7,26-29; law of motion in, 2,25,

Index 208

27; process of capitalist transformation and, 22; process of natural history in, 26 capitalism, 1,88-89 capitalist city, 1 capitalist metropolis, 47,50 capitalist urbanization, 1,4,22,25 Cartesian tradition, 81 Cassidy, John, 175,176 Castells, Manuel, 9,178; biography of, 113-114; in California, 128; collective con­ sumption and, 120-122; on collective repro­ duction of labor-power, 119-120; democratic road to socialism and, 123-125; on idealogical content, 115-116; Louis Althusser and, 113-118; new theory of social movements, 128-131; Nicos Poulantzas and, 125-127; Paris and, 122; urban struggle and, 117-118 Castilla, 128 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 101 Castro, Fidel, 2,101 Catalan Socialist Party, 113 Céline, Lous-Ferdinand, 101,171 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 79,98 Chaplin, Charlie. 83 Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (Benjamin), 183 chartism, 41 Chatterjee, Lata, 141 Chevalier, Louis, 100nl5 Chez Moineau, 101,10ІЯІ6 Chicago School, 116,140 Chinese Revolution, 2 City and the Grassroots, The (Castells), 128-129,184 City, Class and Power (Castells), 123,184 City of Quartz (Davis), 170 City University of New York, 158 city/countryside dilemma, 3 “Class-Mono poly Rent, Finance Capital and the Urban Revolution,” 142 COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam surrealist and design conglom­ erate), 94 Coca-Cola realism, 109 Cohn, Jula, 55 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 86,107 collective consumption, 120 collective reproduction of labor-power, 118 Columbia University, 158 Coming ofPost-Industrial Society (Bell) >131 Comments on the Society ofthe Spectacle (Debord), 9,108-109 commodification, 58 commodity fetishism, 8 communal life, 20 Communards, 85,136 communism, 20 Communist League, 21 Communist Manifesto The (Marx.), 10,177, 183; Guy Debord and, 105-106; proletariat and, 21; universal truth and, 138 Comte de Lautréamont, 93,99 “Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 54 concept of modernity, 52 “Conclusions and Reflections,” 89n32 Condition ofPostmodemity, The (Harvey), 151-153 Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels), 7,20,33,183; collective consump­

tion and, 120; social revolution in, 34 Confederation of General Workers, 86,107 Congress of Free Artists, 94 Congress of Modem Architects, 95 Considérations sur ïassassinatde Gerard Lebovki (Debord), 95 w3 contestation, 87 contracted situations, 96 Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, 95 Courbet, Gustave, 146 Cousin Bette (Balzac), 147 Cravan, Arthur, 93 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 172n41 Critique ofEveryday Life (Lefebvre), 79,184 Cross-Bronx Expressway, 158,163 Cuban Revolution, 2,3 Dada, 95 Davis, Mike, 170 de Balzac, Honoré, 21 de Beauvoir, Simone, 101 de Gaulle, Charles, 86 de Gondi, Jean-Francois Paul, 95n3,159 de Maupassant, Guy, 53 Death and Life of the Great American Cities (Jacobs), 6 “Death of God,” 162 Debord, Guy, 8,86,177; biography of, 93-94; Carl von Clausewitz and, 102; at Champot, 110,110n27; cinema and, 95«3; Constant’s city and, 99-100; détournement and, 98-99; Hegelian Marxism and, 101-102,110-111; Henri Lefebvre and, 100; integrated specta­ cle and, 109; Kriegspeil and, 102; March 22 Movement and, 108; naked city and, 98; Paris and, 100-101; situationism and, 96-97; as Society of the Spectacle’s theorist, 102-106 Debray, Régis, 2-3,125 Delacroix, Eugène, 146 Der Volksstaat, 43 dérive, 97—98 Descartes, René, 81 détournement, 9,98-99 dialectic system, 14 Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Stalin), 76 Dialectical Investigations (Oilman), 183 Dialectical Materialism (Lefebvre), 76,183 dialectical narration, 177 Dickens, Charles, 2,168 Dictionary ofMarxist Thought (Bottomore), 183 differential space, 91 dimensions of a city, 116 Dissent, 184 division of labor, Î 8 Döblin, Alfred, 52-53 Dostoevsky. Fyodor, 161,180 Du Rural à L’Urbain (Lefebvre), 84n25 Ducasse, Isidore, 99 Dunkirk, 121,121n8 Early Writings (Marx), 169«31 École des Hautes Études, 74,118 École Normale Supérieure, 114 Economie and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The (Marx), 14-15,77-78,183; Guy Debord and, 104-105; Louis Althusser and, 115 Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte, The (Marx), 6,24

Elective Affinities (von Goethe), 55 embourgeoisement, 9,65 Engels, Frederick, 1,155,177; biography of, 32-33; as bourgeois proletariat, 33-35; characterization of social murder, 40; char­ tism and, 41; division of labor and, 19; Emil Sax and, 45-47; Karl Marx and, 31; Ludwig Feuerbach and, 17; Manchester’s hypocriti­ cal plan and, 33—37; metropolitan dialectic and, 25; overpopulation and housing views, 42-43; proletariat and, 47-48; Proudhonism and, 44-45; unions and, 42; as urban Marxist, 48; view of wage laborers, 38-39 equilibrium wages, 134«2 Ermen and Engels factory, 32-33 Essays on Ideology (Althusser), 114,183 Essen, Holland, 99 Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach), 16-17 eurocommunism, 125,125nll experience of modernity, 166-167 Explanation in Geography (Harvey), 134 Eyes ofthe Poor, 40«9

Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 83 Gastev, Alexei, 179 gemeinschaft culture, 23 General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, 39w7 General Workers’ Union, 121 Genet, Jean,. 101 “Geography of Capitalist Accumulation,” 146л18 “Geopolitics of Capitalism,” 146л 18 German Ideology, The (Engels, Marx), 18-20, 115,177 gesselchaft arrangement, 23 Gift, The (Mauss), 95 Giuliani, Rudolf, 11 Glasgow Rent Strike of 1915,128

Hardy, Thomas, 134 Harvard University, 56,158 Harvey, David, 9,35л5,84л25,178; on Baltimore, 135,148-149; biography of, 133-134; conviction to Marxism, 154-155; created space and, 138; four new Marxism features of, 152-153; ghetto formation and, 139-141; Liberal Formulations of, 137; Marx’s Capital and, 136; operational struc­ turalism and, 137-138; in Paris, 144; post­ modernism and, 149-153; on the Second Empire, 146; social justice and, 139; three cuts theory of, 145-47; twin themes on met­ ropolitan dialectic and, 142-144; urbaniza­ tion and, 148-149 Haubinda School, 50 Haussmann, Georges, Baron, 40л9> 65,163 Hegel, G.W.F., 8,13,72-76 Heidegger, Martin, 50 “Heroism of Modern Life,” 167 Hess, Moses, 14 Hesse, Hermann, 54 Hippolite, Jean, 74 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 8,28, 56 homo fiber, 96 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 96 homo sapiens, 96 Horkheimer, Max, 54 Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union, 42л11 Housing Question, The (Engels), 7,24,183; col­ lective consumption and, 120; overpopula­ tion and, 42-43 How the Other HalfLives (Riis), 37 Howe, Irving, 158 Howlings in Favor ofSade, 95 Huizinga, Johan, 96 Human Communities (Park), 4 Hyatt Hotels, 148 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Altnusser), 118 Illuminations (Benjamin), 183 image of things, 103 Imaginist Bauhaus, 94 Imperialism: The Highest Stage ofCapitalism (Lenin), 88 In Girum Imus Node et Consumimur Igni, 100ЛІ5,109-110 industrial reserve army, 39-40 Information Age, The (Castells), 131—132 intellectualistic mentality, 51 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 124 International Monetary Fund, 182 “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 97 л7 Introduction to Modernity (Lefebvre), 80,184 irrationality of action, 86

Index

Fassbinder, Werner, 52 Federal Highway Administration, 164 fetishism of commodities, 7,63 fetishism of freedom, 159 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 16-17 First International Working Men’s Association (FIWMA), 44,44nl3 Fitzgerald: Geography ofa Revolution (Bunge), 137w7 flânerie, 64 “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘Postmodernism’ in the American City,” 149-150 For Marx (Althusser), 9,114,183 Ford, Gerald, 123 Ford, Henry, I79n4 France Aix-en-Provence, 72 Marseilles, 71 Mourenx, 80 Navarrenx, 72 Paris, 62-65,122 Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, 54 free conscious activity, 84 Free Students Association, 53 “Freedom and Individuality in the Thought of Karl Marx,” 159 French Communist Party (PCF), 86,107, 125nll French National Guard, 85 Freud, Sigmund, 51 Friedrich Wilhelm IV (king), 14

Godard, Jean-Luc, 81,94 лЗ Goodman, Paul, 158 Goya, Francisco, 5 Gramsci, Antonio, 3,158 Grand Concourse, 163 grands ensembles, 121 grands magasins, 63 Great Britain, 125л11 Grundrisse (Marx), 25 Guevara, Che, 2

209

Isou, Isadore, 94 Italian Communist Party (PCI), 3,125 лі 1

Index

Jacobs, Jane, 6,97 Jameson, Fredric, 144л15,152n28 Jansen, Cornelius, 73 jansenism, 73л2 Jencks, Charles, 150 Jöel, Ernst, 60 John Hopkins University, 135 Jom, Asger, 94 Joyce, James, 164 Joyous Science (Nietzsche), 111 juglar cycles, 147 Justice, Nature and the Geography ofDifference (Harvey), 153

гю

Kafka, Frank, 7 Kaiser Friedrich Schule, 50 Karavan, Dani, 68«27 Kazin, Alfred, 158 Kent, England, 133 King, Martin Luther, 135 Klee, Paul, 54 Koftnan, Eleonore, 84n25 Kojève, Alexandre, 74—76 Kondratieff cycles, 147 Korsch, Karl, 63 Kotânyi, Attila, 98 Koyré, Alexandre, 74-76 Kropotkin, Peter, 136 Kuznet cycles, 147 La Conscience Mystifie (Lefebvre, Guterman), 71 La Curee (Saccard), 147 La Pensée Marxiste et la Ville (Lefebvre), 84n25 La Proclamation de la Commune (Lefebvre), 85 "L.A.Rawri71n34 Lacan, Jacques, 74 Lacis, Asja, 56,56 nil land-use theory, 140 laws of its species, 82 laws of motion, 2,25,27 Le Droit à la Ville (Lefebvre), 84л25 Le Voyage (Baudelaire), 65 Leavis, F.R., 134 Lebas, Elizabeth, 84 «25 Lefebvre, Henri, 100,177; biography of, 71-73; as a communist, 74n7; on consciousness, 76-77; on dialectical materialism, 77; Frederick Engel and, 71; G.W.F. Hegel and, 72—76; Karl Marx and, 15,77-79; May Days of 1968 and, 86-87; Navarennx and, 81—83; production of space and, 28,88-89; repre­ sentation of space and, 89-90; student radi­ cals and, 86; surplus value and, 89,89n32; surrealism and, 73; urban revolution and, 88,116-117; urbanity and, 84-85 Lefebvre, Jeanne, 73 Lefebvre, René, 73 Lenin, Vladimir, 83«24,179«4 Leninism, 87,127 Leninism or Marxism (Luxemburg), 83«24 Leonard, John, 161 «12 Les Enfants de Marx and Coca-Cola, 95яЗ Lettrist International, 94,95 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 114 L'Homme et La Terre (Reclus), 136 Liberal Formulations, 137 Limits to Capital, The (Harvey), 144-147, 144«15,184

lived time, 105 Logic (Hegel), 73 London Congress, 21 London’s Highgate Cemetery, 175 Los Angeles “Rodney King” riots, 159л4 Louis-Philippe, King, 20 Lovett, William, 41 Ludd, Ned, 41 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End ofClassical Philosophy (Engels), 17 Lukács, Georg, 8,56 л8; concept of reification, 28,56-57; problem of totality and, 57; Walter Benjamin and, 50 Luxemburg, Rosa, 6, 83«24,87 Lyotard, Jean- François, 151 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 102 Madison Square Garden, 162 Mailer, Norman, 158 Maldoror (Comte de Lautréamont), 99 Malthus, Thomas, 39-40 Managua, Nicaragua, 2 Manchester, England, 32-34 Frederick Engels and, 35-37; history of prole­ tariat in, 35-36 Mann, Heinrich, 54 March 22 Movement, 107-108 Marx, Edgar, 162«15 Marx, Heinrich, 13 Marx, Henriette, 13 Marx, Karl, 1,7; of 1844,77-80; biography of, 13,162 л 15,175; bourgeoisie and, 21-22; capitalist urbanization and, 22,25-29; on characteristics of a socialist society, 24; con­ crete totality and, 26; on Departments 1 and 2,119; division of labor ana, 18; General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, 39«7; G.W.F. Hegels and, 14; law of motion, 25, 27; materialism and, 17; metropolitan dialectic and, 14,25; new enrichment of human nature and, 15; objectification of labor and, 16; paradox of modernity and, 161 ; in Paris, 14; power of capitalists and, 176; on practical energy of man, 181; prole­ tariat and, 21-22; Proudhonism and, 44-45; real association and, 16; science of history and, 15; Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Párty, 5л4; truth and, 18; universal competition and, 20; on world literature, 23 Marxism, 1,11; in the 1960’s, 5; as a concept of the future, 183; fetishism of commodities and, 7; Great Town and, 2; urban, 1,42-45 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 183 Marxism and Philosophy (Korsch), 63 Maryland Science Center, 148 Masculin/Feminin (Godard), 85«3 mass of material premises, 20 materialism, 17 Mauss, Marcel, 95 May Days of 1968,86 McKenzie, Roderick, 4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 74 Merrill, James, 162 metro marxism, 5-6-7,25 “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 51 Mitterrand, François, 2,125 nil MonopohHUe: Venterprise, Yétat, Yurbain (Castells,Godard), 121 л8 “Monument and Myth,” 147,147«21 Moses, Robert, 68,158,163-164 Mülberger, A., 43 Mumford, Louis, 4

Nadja (Breton), 61-62 Nation, The, 184 National Aquarium, 148 National Union of French Students (UNEF), 106-107 necropolis, 4 New Directions Caucus, 11 new humanism, 85 New Left Review, 152n28, ¡66 New School for Social Research, 68 New Towns, 80-81 New York, 159, 159«4,167 New York Times, 11,161«12 New Yorker, 175 Newman, Randy, 135 Niemeyer, Oscar, 95 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51,162 Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 94 Noir et Rouge (magazine), 107 nonowners, 124 North America, 181 North American Free Trade Agreement, 182 “Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside,” 73 nouveauté, 65 Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne, 107

Pahl, Ray, 124 Paley, Grace, 158 Panegyric (Debord), 9,93,110«27 “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 183 Paris Commune, 44,65-66,85-86,128 “Paris Diary,” 53 Paris Manuscripts. See Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Paris Peasant (Aragon), 61-62 Park, Robert, 4,51 Penn Station, 162 Pennsylvania Railroad, 162 People’s Charter, 41 permanent persuaden, 4 petit bourgeois socialists, 42 Phenomenology ofSpirit (Hegel), 74-75 Philosophies (journal), 72 Philosophy ofMoney (Simmel), 50 Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2 Piaget, Jean, 137 Piano, Renzo, 84 Pickvance, Chris, 124 Poésies (Debord), 99 Politics ofAuthenticity, The (Berman), 160 Poliak, Dora, 54,55 Poor Law legislation, 40 porosity in culture, 58 post-Marxist, 9 Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 151

Quebec City, 182 Queneau, Raymond, 74,74«8 Rabelais, 83-84 rationality of theory, 86 Ravelstein (Bellow), 74«8 Rawls, John, 10,138-139 Reading Capital (Althusser), 114 real association, 16 Reclus, Elisée, 136 reel life, 104 Reflections (Benjamin), 183 reification, 56,103 Renault, 86,107 representation of space, 89-90 “Reproduction Schemas,” 119 Resources ofHope (Williams), 153 Revolution in the Rewlution (Debray), 2 “Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation ”139 Rheinische Zeitung, 14,32 Rickert, Heinrich, 50 Right to the City, The (Lefebvre), 84«25 Riis, Jacob, 37 Roger, Richard, 84 Rosenberg, Harold, 158 Roth, Henry, 158 Rouse, James, 148 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 52,160-161 Rover auto plant, 153 Royal Friedlich Wilhelm University, 50 Rumney, Ralph, 94 Ruskin, John, 52 Sacré Coeur, 147,147n21 Sanders, Bernie, 125«11 Sandinistas, 2 Santa Monica, California, 125nl 1 sarcellitis, 121 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 96 Saunders, Peter, 124,130 Sax, Emil, 45-47 Scholem, Gershom, 50,54 Scully, Vincent, 162 Selections from Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 3 Sendak, Maurice, 158 separation, 103 Service Employees’ International Union, 42«11 Shaefer, William Donald, 148 Shakespeare, William, 162

Index

objectification of labor, 16 objective activity, 17,78 objective disposition, 51 Oilman, Bertell, 137 On War (Clausewitz), 102 One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward (Lenin), 83 п24 One-Way Street (Benjamin), 56 organic intellectuals, 4 Orlan, Ріегте-Мас, 101 Ortega, Daniel, 2 overpopulation, 42 Oxford University, 153,158

Pot, Pol, 2 Potlatch, 95 Poulantzas, Nicos, 125—127,128«15 Poverty ofPhilosophy, The (Mane), 44 Poverty of Theory, The (Thompson), 144«14 practical-critical activity, 18,160 Principle ofHope, The (Bloch), 56 privatgelehrter, 54 problem of totality, 57 production of space, 88-89 Production of Space, The (Lefebve), 89 profane illumination, 60 Progressive Action Center, 136 proletariat, 21-24; competition and, 38; Federick Engels’ definition of, 35; as wage laborers, 38-39 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 42,44 Proudhonism, 43-44 Psychogeographical Association, 94

2 XX

хартіі

Silicon Valley, 128 Simmel, Georg, 8,116 Simon, Kate, 158,162 site of class struggle, 142 Situationist International (SI), 95; ambience and, 97; détournement and, 9¿-99; Society of the Spectacle and, 102-106; sum of possi­ bilities and, 96 Soáai Justice and the City (Harvey), 9-10, 35 n5,84n25,184; ghetto formations in, 139-141; Liberal Formulations of, 137 Social Theory and the Urban Question (Saunders), 130 socialism, 41,43,72 socialist ideal, 78 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord), 8,9, 102-106 Soja, Edward, 72 n\ Sorbonne University, 73 Southeast Asia, 181 Spaces ofHope (Harvey), 153,184 Spanish Communist Party (PCE), 125nil spatial practices, 89,90 spectacular capitalism, 181 Spengler, Oswald, 116 Spirit of Utopia (Bloch), 56 St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, 150 stagflation, 122-123 Stalin, Joseph, 76 Stalinism, 72 Steppenwolf(Hesse), 60 strategic embellishment, 65 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 158 Summa Theologiae (Acquina), 73 surplus population, 39-40 surrealism, 59-60 “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia'’ Svendborg, Denmark, 67

212 Taylor, Frederick W., 179n4 Taylorist perpetual motion techniques, 179-180,179n4 Tel Quel (journal), 114 Thatcher, Margaret, 43 The Explosion (Lefebvre), 86 “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” 54и8 “The Task of the Translator,” 55 Theoretical Geography (Bunge), 137«7 Theory ofJustice, A (Rawls), 138 theory of overpopulation, 39 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 16,17 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 54 Thompson, Edward, 144 “Threepenny Novel,” 68 Thucydides, 102 Time, 148 Tolstoy, Leo, 102 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 116 total social process, 67 Touraine, Alain, 113 traditional intellectuals, 4 Transport Workers Union, 11 Trilling, Lionel, 158 Trojan Women, The (Euripides), 165 Trotsky, Leon, 88

Tzara, Tristan, 72 Tai,Sun, 102 Ulysses (Joyce), 164 unit of capital accumulation, 142-143 United States, 179 universal competition, 20 universal history, 775 University of Berlin, 13,32 University of Bristol, 134 University of California-Berkeley (UCB), 128 University of Freiburg, 50 University of Strasbourg, 84 urban culture/society, 115 Urban Development Action Grant, 148 Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented since the 1960s, 166 Urban Question, The (Castell), 9,91-92, 113-118,184 urban revolution, 84n25,88 urbanism, 1,85,98,148-149 urbanistic theorization of the Marxist prob­ lematic, 91-92 urbidde, 165^166 van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies, 150 Vaneigem, Raoul, 98 Venturi, Robert, 150 Village Voice, 11 Villon, François, 101 vocabulary of opposition, 164 von Clausewitz, Carl, 8,102 von Goethe, J.W., 55,161 von Thiinen, Johann, 134,134«2 von Westphalen, Jenny, 13 Vorwärts (newspaper), 17 Wahl, Jean, 74 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 102 Ward, Robert, 135,148 Weber, Max, 116,124 “What Geography Ought to Be,” 136 What is Property? (Proudhon), 44 white-collar proletarians, 172rc39 Whitman, Walt, 34-35,171 Whyte, William H., 179n4 Williams, Raymond, 153,183 Wirth, Louis, 116 Wolman, Guy, 94 World Bank, 182 world literature, 23 World Trade Organization, 11,181 World War II, 177 Writing on Cities: Henri Lefebvre (Kofman, Lebas), 84n25,183 Wyneken, Gustav, 50 Young Hegelians, 14 Youth Movement, 60 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 179-180 Zedong, Mao, 102 Zhdanov, Andrei, 78 Zola, Emile, 146-147