Whose Rebel City?

In Rebel Cities, David Harvey exhaustively tracks capitalism's turn to real estate speculation and rent extraction, while imagining a reciprocal and reinvigorated urban politics. But his neglect of autonomous urban struggles in '70s Italy and concentration on rights, suggest an adherence to older political forms inadequate to the attack of the social factory – writes Neil Gray

David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2012) draws together some of his key texts on urbanisation, providing an opportunity to make a critical assessment of his work on urbanism, not least his application of ‘the right to the city’ concept first formulated by Henri Lefebvre in 1967; a concept that has long held potential for urban praxis, but which Harvey acknowledges often remains a mere ‘chimera’.¹

Harvey’s argument is strongest when invigorating Lefebvre’s late 1960s ‘urbanisation of capital’ thesis in developed capitalist economies, suggesting a necessary corollary for current modes of organisation arising therefrom:

If the capitalist form of urbanisation is so completely embedded in and foundational for the reproduction of capitalism, then it also follows that alternative forms of urbanization must necessarily become central to any pursuit of a capitalist alternative.²

Implying an enhanced role for social reproductive struggles, this immanent dialectical critique challenges the privileging of the workplace as the exemplary site of revolutionary change. But while Harvey provides empirical weight and a systemic basis for an urban politics, he neglects some of the more interesting forms of radical urban praxis in the recent era: the urban struggles in 1970s Italy, characterised here by Lotta Continua’s ‘Take over the City’ slogan, feminist debates around social reproduction, and Sergio Bologna’s description of ‘territorial community activism’.³

Rebel Cities does, however, suggest the potential for a productive dialogue, via Lefebvre, between the area of autonomy and critical urban theory through an immanent critique of capitalist relations.

The Rent Devours All

One uses space just as one uses machines.⁴

At a time when post-war Marxist analysis saw urban questions as largely derivative and superstructural, Lefebvre countered that industrialisation was increasingly being supplanted by urbanisation. Indeed, the ‘crisis of the Left’ in the early 1970s, he argued, was in part related to a reduction of everyday urban life to ‘a repressive and banal urbanism’ subject to ‘the limitations of national development programs’.⁵ The fundamental question Lefebvre posed in The Survival of Capitalism (1973) remains central today: how does capitalism survive and continue to produce new capitalist spaces? His answer:

we cannot calculate at what price, but we do know the means: by occupying space, by producing a space.⁶

The control of space was no longer just about the control of objects in space; space itself produced, and was now bought and sold as an ‘ultimate object of exchange’:

Space is no longer only an indifferent medium, the sum of places where surplus value is created, realized and distributed. It becomes the product of social labour, the very general object of production, and consequently of the formation of surplus value.⁷

Evaluating space in this way risks underestimating all the other means by which surplus value is generated, but Lefebvre’s total critique of the ‘fragmentary sciences’ was exemplary, and his thesis that capitalism, running out of profitable, productive means of accumulation, found new territory for accumulation in the conquest of space is now writ large in global cities worldwide.⁸ For Lefebvre, the production of space was intimately bound up with capitalist crisis. Real estate speculation functioned, he argued, as a supplementary and complementary territory for exploitation in times of industrial slowdown:

As the percentage of overall surplus value formed and realized by industry begins to decline, the percentage created and realized by real-estate speculation and construction increases. The second circuit supplants the first, becomes essential.⁹

Harvey has done much to expand Lefebvre’s urbanisation thesis via theories of space-time compression, accumulation by dispossession, monopoly rent, and creative destruction of the land. All resurface here, but his theory of the absorption of capital and labour surpluses through urbanisation is given a particularly extended workout.¹⁰ Large-scale urban infrastructural processes, he argues, provide a stabilising ‘spatial fix’ for the surplus capital problem, and attendant surplus labour problem, especially in times of over-accumulation and economic and political crisis. When Baron von Haussmann took charge of Paris’s public works in 1853 after the crisis of 1848, Harvey notes, he understood his mission clearly: creative destruction of the land, and a resolution of the surplus capital and unemployment problem by way of urbanisation.¹¹ To initiate these changes, Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments: a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements. The ‘fury for building’ that Louis-Auguste Blanqui witnessed, had predictable inflationary results: ‘The rent devours all, and they go without meat’, noted a commentator of the time.¹²

Image: A barricade in Paris, 1871

This strategy, Harvey argues, was echoed in the US in the 1940s post-depression era, where the urban planner Robert Moses found a solution to the capital and labour surplus problem through fixed capital production, absorbing huge amounts of capital and potentially politically volatile labour through debt-financed highways, major infrastructural transformations, and large-scale suburbanisation, all lubricated through a transformation of financial and administrative structures and a turn to debt-financing.¹³ As Harvey notes, however, the crisis of 1848 was only deferred by Haussman, giving rise to the events of the Paris Commune in 1870. Meanwhile Moses’ suburbanisation plan hollowed out the fiscal capacity of US inner cities generating the urban crisis of the 1960s, defined politically by ‘white flight’ and the urban revolt of ethnic minorities. As Harvey argues, long-term investments in the built environment are, ‘a kind of last-ditch hope for finding productive uses for rapidly accumulating capital’.¹⁴ Yet ‘capital switching’ from productive capital to real estate has long been seen as an indication of crisis in economic orthodoxy, providing only a temporary solution to the production centred over-accumulation crisis, and becoming instead a crisis of asset values with strong links to property.¹⁵

Given the speculative scale of urban development globally, Harvey suggests a deferral of crisis of staggering proportions. Depending on the particular capital and state conjuncture, these urban developments present uneven scenarios geographically, but Harvey argues they are in principle similar to that of Hausmannisation, with the added caveat that the financialisation/urbanisation nexus has since exploded exponentially.¹⁶ ‘The China Story’ he relates is apposite. In 2011, fixed asset investment (a broad measure of building activity) had risen 25 percent in one year, and real estate investment 37 percent. Urban investments equalled nearly 70 percent of the nation’s GDP, and real estate spending surpassed foreign trade as the biggest contributor to China’s economy, with ‘growth’ fundamentally tied to inflationary spending on real estate and government investment in urban infrastructure.¹⁷ After general housing privatisation in 1998, housing prices had reportedly risen by as much as 800 percent in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai in the preceding five years.¹⁸ In second-tier cities, a typical home was reportedly 25 times the average income of residents. Much of this debt-financed urban speculation is fictitious, what Harvey describes as ‘an infinite regression of fictions built upon fictions’, representing claims to property rights or income based on a projected realisation of future revenue that is never guaranteed.¹⁹ A wave of defaults and the possibility of economic collapse remains ‘very real’, while vast processes of primitive accumulation and the extraction of absolute surplus value from labour mean that social contradictions and class struggle are rife.²⁰

As Harvey noted long ago in The Limits to Capital (1982), class power is increasingly articulated through rental payments, and his work here helps us understand the material basis of the ‘rentier economy’. Economic rent, as Michael Hudson emphasises, can take the form of licensing fees, interest on savings, dividends from stock, or capital gain from selling a property or land, but is primarily drawn from housing and property. This is the profit one earns simply by owning something; an ‘unearned increment’, which to the financier or capitalist is, ‘earned in their sleep’.²¹ As Hudson argues, rental incomes are an unproductive ‘free lunch’ stolen from the economy at large, forcing an ever-higher proportion of income to be spent on rent and basic social subsistence. Writing presciently of the US in 2006, Hudson saw a ‘new road to serfdom’ in an empire of debt: ‘In the odd logic of the real estate bubble, debt has come to equal wealth’.²² Just as the rich, he says, require an abundant supply of the poor, so does the rentier class require an abundant supply of debtors. But this dynamic is fictitious, and inherently unstable, in the sense that the parasitic financial system destroys the host’s ability to pay the debt.

Despite the all too obvious impact of capitalist urbanisation, the organisational forms adequate to challenge this expropriation have yet to fully develop as an expression of common interests.

For A Politics of Space

I repeat that there is a politics of space, because space is political.²³

The Paris Commune of 1871 was an exemplary urban revolt for Lefebvre, and Harvey here argues it was founded on both a labour question (the abolition of night-work in bakeries) and an urban question (a moratorium on rents): production and social reproduction. For the traditional Left, social reproduction has often been considered as ancillary, but where ‘conventional workplaces are disappearing in many parts of the so-called advanced capitalist world’, he argues, the dynamic of class exploitation is now felt increasingly in living space and not in the factory, while wage concessions, if won at all, are routinely stolen back at the level of consumption through inflation and property speculation.²⁴ The externalisation of the costs of basic social reproduction and environmental degradation, then, necessitate an urgent political response on urban terrain.

This moves us usefully beyond reified conceptions of ‘the working class’, and sectional interests within and between organised trade unions. Harvey uses numerous examples of urban organisation, from the Paris Commune, ‘Red Vienna’ and the ‘Houses of the People’ in Italy, to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Yet, the emphasis on social reproduction, composition, and community organising that Harvey sees in his description of El Alto in Bolivia, his major example of urban organising in Rebel Cities, or in his treatment of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ film, Salt of the Earth (1954), only serves to highlight the elisions as much as the inclusions in his analysis.²⁵

Image: A 'nail house' whose owner would not permit demolition in Wenling, China 2012

Lefebvre, yes, but no Situationist International? No dérive, no psychogeography? Harvey suggests there are no examples of how one might organise a city (presumably at government level), ‘because there is no systematic historical record of evolving political practices on which to base any generalisations’.²⁶ But surely there are outliers? The reformulation of the concepts of work and class that Harvey extols, for instance, were widely developed through the concept of the ‘social factory’ and class composition within autonomous Marxist currents in 1960s and 1970s Italy. Major struggles against the recuperation of wages in the reproductive sphere were widespread in the ‘self-reduction’ movement, Wages for and against Housework campaigns, and the rent strikes, squats and occupations around housing that set off a series of struggles in the areas of social reproduction including transportation, health and prices.²⁷

This aporia, moreover, undermines Harvey’s attempt to accurately describe the relation between the workplace and the social reproductive sphere. Arguing, for instance, that ‘Red Bologna’ in 1970s Italy serves as a model for contemporary urban struggles disavows the reformist nature of the controlling Italian Communist Party (PCI), and the brutal state power that underpinned it.²⁸ As ‘Bifo’ Berardi has noted, Bologna was the city of ‘capitalist-communist power’, where the productivist PCI pitted regular workers against ‘irregular, unemployed, precarious, underpaid young proletarians’, conservatively retrenching the classical worker rather than recomposing class struggle in ways adequate to contemporary conditions.²⁹ ‘The Historic Compromise’ of 1973, between the PCI and the conservative Christian Democrats, saw the PCI and unions committed to sacrificing the workers on the pyramids of accumulation, explicitly assuming the task of forcing the working class to accept a policy of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘austerity’ after the economic crisis of 1973, in the name of ‘national unity’.³⁰

Autonomy, in this context, represented forms of organisation which, ‘no longer accepted the union as mediating agent, no longer accepted the line of the PCI and its strategy of compromise and acquiescence’.³¹ The Italian autonomous currents of the 1970s are the elephant in the sitting room of Harvey’s discussion.³² The caricatured account of ‘autonomy’ he offers – flattening out important differences between anarchism, autonomism, autogestion (self-management), worker co-operatives, moral and solidarity economies and community collectives – only serves to undermine his often valid critiques of horizontalist organisational fetishism, state disavowal, and small-scale ‘alternative’ production that remains under capitalist relations.³³ ‘Autonomy’, however, might be seen more productively as an attempt to abandon idealised transhistorical theoretical frameworks in order to find a theoretical apparatus adequate to the contemporary situation.³⁴ Crucially, this has entailed struggles within struggles on the Left, something which Harvey’s rather programmatic analysis and calls for ‘organizational coherence’ tend to neglect. As Selma James put it in her seminal Sex, Race and Class (1973), ‘nothing unified and revolutionary will ever be formed until each section of the exploited will have made its own autonomous power felt’.³⁵ The limits of a ‘unity’ proposed by the ‘white male blinkered Left’ are still the limits autonomous movements face today.

If, as Harvey argues, history needs to be rewritten to include urban struggles over social reproduction, and crucially gender composition, then ‘Laboratory Italy’ deserves closer attention, particularly as the response of autonomous Marxist currents to de-industrialisation and class decomposition was more critical and sustained than other European countries.³⁶ As industry was restructured in the 1970s, on the back of fiscal crisis and an all too familiar austerity program, struggles rapidly moved on from the factory desert to the wider community. The feminist movement, largely excluded from the workplace, provided a major, if often under-acknowledged, inspiration. With the home reconfigured as the centre of social subversion, new perspectives for organisation were opened up. When feminists raised the question of housework, the trade unions were forced to acknowledge that as organisations, they dealt:

(a) only with the factory; (b) only with a measured and ‘paid’ work day; (c) only with that side of wages which is given to us and not with the side of wages which is taken back, that is inflation.³⁷

While unions fought to retain a sense of working-class identity in the factory desert, as the feminist group Acqua in Gabbia (‘Water in Cage’) noted, these were increasingly regressive and conservative solutions to the problems facing the working class as a whole – a defensive solution to a disappearing reality.³⁸ With de-industrialisation, political re-composition was no longer occurring through the base of the unified mass worker, but across the whole social terrain. In Take Over the City – Community Struggle in Italy, (1973), Lotta Continua documented multiple forms of struggle beyond the factory walls including rent strikes, mass occupations and mass squatting in ‘a direct response to the tyranny of rent’.³⁹ Rent strikes and occupations were combined, and a discourse of rights was directly linked to appropriation as in the popular slogans: ‘The only fair rent is no rent!’, and, ‘Housing is a right. Why pay rent!’⁴⁰ Class conflict was extended directly over the entirety of social consumption and was understood as, ‘a struggle for the re-appropriation of social wealth produced by the working class but unpaid by capital’.⁴¹

Image: Lotta Feminista, Italy, early 1970s

Describing the ‘new social subjects’ of 1977, Sergio Bologna argued that groups like Lotta Continua were reacting to city planning as a space of intervention in class dynamics.⁴² As he noted, there was a specific relation between the property market and the monetary crisis: with declining profits from industry, speculation in property and land took up an increasingly important role in investment. In this context, the dominant forms of struggle for these subjects, became a project of ‘conquering and managing’ their own spaces in a process of ‘territorial community activism’.⁴³ Bologna’s understanding of shifts from industrialisation to urbanisation foreshadow Michael Hudson’s by thirty years, but Bologna analyses the subjective, political side of class composition, not just its technical side (capital’s plans). Caught between a workerist analysis of the factory-based ‘mass worker’ and post-autonomous readings of ‘immaterial’ or ‘affective’ labour, autonomous urban struggles in Italy have often been neglected, even within the autonomist milieu. However, beyond the Jeffersonian moral abstractions that Harvey offers in his concluding analysis of OWS – where ‘the people of the United States’ are proud of ‘their democracy’, and where another revolution might be based on ‘social justice, equality’ – the Italian example offers a deeply material analysis based on autonomous class behavior and a sharp attention to the changing nature and potentialities of class composition.

From the Right to the City to Take Over the City?

Beyond an abstract rights claim, what radical utility does the concept of the ‘right to the city’ have for the present era, and how might it become, as Harvey suggests it could, ‘both working slogan and political ideal’ for a new urban politics? Harvey is well aware of the problem with ‘rights’ discourse in a context where private property rights and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. He also well understands the role of violence in enforcing private property, often citing Marx’s critical injunction on rights discourse: ‘between equal rights force decides’.⁴⁴

What he suggests is the right to the city concept as a focused collective right, a political class-based demand filled with ‘immanent but not transcendent possibilities’ – not a right to what already exists, but a right to rebuild and re-create the city in a totally different image.⁴⁵ However, the very idea of rights tends to emphasise distribution rather than production – the potential of a ‘fair’ distribution of the products of labour through ‘equal rights’ – thereby disavowing the exploitative mode of production itself and falling prey to the separation of political and economic spheres.

As Silvia Federici argued in Wages Against Housework, it is one thing to organise communally and then demand that the state pay for it, and another to ask the state to organise communal production: ‘In one case we regain some control over our lives, in the other we extend the State’s control over us.’⁴⁶ The reality is that reformist struggles over rights will continue to constitute part of the field of struggle, and Harvey is right to suggest they may open up the possibility for more radical conceptions. However more radical praxis, providing a genuine threat to stability, has to be generated in the first place. With social reproduction becoming at once the site and the content of struggle, ‘take over the city’, suggests a politics that places the direct appropriation of social resources on the immediate horizon without waiting for permission from a state that would dispense this as a ‘right’.

Neil Gray <neilgray00AThotmail.com> is a writer, and occasional filmmaker based in Glasgow. He is currently doing a PhD on the urbanisation of capital, class composition, and the politics of space.

Footnotes