Memo 008

Capitalism 2: Right to the Anti-Capitalist City

Nicholas Chung, 24 September 2023


David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From Right to the City to the Urban Revolution unpacks contemporary urban dynamics as a division between the capitalist and working class, one that can be examined and responded through Henri Lefebvre’s vision of Right to the City. It is a highly theoretical provocation of what cities ought to proliferate through its organization and conceptual underpinnings. This response aims to briefly explain Harvey’s interpretation of the current urban condition and his deployment of right to the city, as well as critique what I would argue is an incomplete portrayal of “rebel cities”. I will conclude by offering a counterpoint/addendum to Harvey’s Right to the City to supplement what I believe is an extremely poignant argument given how all global cities are experiencing urban discontents of varying kinds.

Harvey grounds his entire argument on Henri Lefebvre’s idea of right to the city, which “primarily rises up from the streets, out from the neighborhoods” as a bottom-up response by an “oppressed population”. Similar to earlier social commentators like Engels or Simmel, Harvey entangles urban conditions to urban identities, suggesting that identities that reflect the values of right to the city provide its population with “a right to change and reinvent the city more after our heart’s desire.” He then identifies the current urban zeitgeist as what Karl Marx would describe as “the perpetual search for surplus value”, one driven by the fetishization of capital accumulation and profit. However, the Faustian dilemma, as Harvey puts it, is how that surplus value is translated or exhausted. The text gives a plethora of examples that range from Haussmann’s reconfiguration of Parisian urbanity through displacement to Bloomberg’s recent pro-developer stance in New York city as a form of “reinvestment”. That said, Harvey argues that this form of urbanization overly favours the capital class that perpetually generates more surplus value, thereby creating a class divide on the ownership and control over how cities are “reinvented”. To make matters worse, Harvey notes that institutions that regulate the capital environment like the Federal Reserve or the World Bank lack a neo-liberal lens for they “plainly favour speculative capital over people.” This all culminates into a phenomenon Harvey calls “Disneyfication”, which can be simplified as the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class. That said, this Marxist binary seems to only work when the capitalist class supersedes the entire urban population and is not always directly translatable to non-capitalist urbanities. Harvey does give the example of how China’s centralization of surplus in developing the rural periphery has created a nationally homogenous urban condition that then further contributes to the global capitalist network instead of disrupting it. However, I would argue that this perspective is not representative of all non-capitalist urbanities since smaller or dependent economies like that of Cuba (as discussed in lecture) exchanges inequity and uniformity with the overall health of its population and economy, and are thereby refused participation or ostracized by the dominating global market.

Disregarding that however, given that global urbanization is still capitalism-centric, Harvey argues that right to the city, meaning “the production and enclosure of non-commodified spaces in a ruthlessly commodifying world”, is achieved through the construction of the commons and the resulting social practice “commoning”. Conceptually, this is a response to urbanity itself becoming a predatory practice due to increasing centralization and concentration of capital in “mega-corporations”. This mode of material and social reproduction is what Lefebvre would describe “the perceived oeuvre of the inhabitants, themselves mobile and mobilized for and by” cities as “the site and stake of struggle”. (Lefebvre Writings on Cities) Harvey translates this notion less literally and applies it as an economic proposition against monopolies within neoliberal markets. He notes that the great danger of monopolies, or “the art of rent”, lies in their capacity to decimate cultures in the creation of a globalized urbanity that maximizes profit generation. Although I agree with Harvey that the homogenous commercialization of everything is dangerous, I do not believe that his neoliberal economic argument can meaningfully resolve the class divide he puts forwards as it seems more likely that the creation of the commons – a contentious and volatile environment that encourages change and possible instability – would only further subjugate the working class into the “undercommons”. (Moten and Harney The Undercommons) The reason why this seemingly ideal model of urbanity is still an idea might be because even with the amount of ‘rebel cities’ that have emerged throughout history, there still is not an urban resolution that pragmatically (instead of ideologically) surpasses the status quo. Harvey himself asks “How, then, does one organize a city?” near the end of the book, but can only go as far as “we simply do not know, partly because not enough hard thought has been given to the question, and partly because there is no systematic historic record of evolving political practices on which to base any generalizations.” Right to the city effectively implies that the answer will emerge if humanity iterates through the process of urban reinvention enough times.

Contributing to this effort of iteration, Lefebvre provides a history of anti-capitalist struggles, which all directly or indirectly aim for the abolition of existing class dynamics whilst retaining the ability to produce surplus capital, which is critical to the survival of any society. Harvey arrives at two observations: Decoupling both “is close to impossible” for it “increase vulnerability” and “effective management and survival almost always depend upon the availability of sophisticated means of production”; The alternative of isolating from the capital market has proved to fail through Stalinism. In the absence of a definitive answer, Harvey presents three prerequisites for right to the city to happen: “crushing material impoverishment”, the material and spiritual protection against “imminent dangers of out-of-control environmental degradation and ecological transformations”, and developing “a historical and theoretical understanding of the inevitable trajectory of capitalist growth.” Although what Harvey puts forward is true, I would argue his portrayal of urban struggles only remain within the capital-labour class divide and fails to speculate upon other modes of commoning. As Harvey himself remarks, right to the city “is inclusive not only of construction workers but also of all those who facilitate the reproduction of daily life”. The right to the city is not necessarily an act of dissensus, it can be the everyday enforcement or contestation of how urban environments that by nature offer interpretative use. I believe Harvey’s over-emphasis of commoning, or spatial/functional appropriation, as ‘anti-capitalism’ or ‘Stalinism’ or ‘neo-liberalism', risks ghettoizing this process that is meant to be reiterative into a political tectonic. Its ghettoization and resulting stigmatization are counterproductive for it would ossify the status quo whilst discouraging the “sensible” citizenry from noticing “the demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself”. (Rancière Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics) It stops the cycle of reiteration that Harvey states are necessary for new modes of non-capital-dominant urbanity to emerge. My main critique of Harvey’s analysis of the ‘rebel city’ is therefore a lacking multiplicity and radicalization of ‘right to the city’ beyond the definition of a pure mechanism of equilibrium, of communal decision making and ownership.

In conclusion, I find Harvey’s assessment of the role capitalism has played in totalizing the urban landscape very persuasive and I do also agree with his interpretation of Lefebvre’s ideology. That said, the way he proposes to proactively mobilize it as an anti-capitalist process undermines/undervalues the material potential that commoning could achieve in the bottom-up, everyday contestations that urban inhabitants engage in transforming the built environment, and the resultant image/identity it projects.
 

Sidenotes:






As a self-response to Capitalim 1: I can answer that question - for money, this memo uses David Harvey’s Rebel Cities as a theoretical framework to probe how urban design can proactively respond to instabiltiy and risk.


related:
The Contested Street
Right to the City Compendium



Harvey, David. “Rebel Cities: From Right to the City to the Urban Revolution”. Verso, April 2013.

Lefebvre, Henri. “Writings on Cities”. Wiley-Blackwell, January 1996.

Moten, Fred. Harney, Stefano. “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Studies”. Autonomedia, May 2013.

Rancière, Jacques. “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”. Bloomsbury Academic, July 2015.