Marx, Dead and Alive by Andy Merrifield

Author:Andy Merrifield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

14.

When Marx formulated his General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, cities were sites for manufacturing valorization. It was in the urban factories where commodities got produced and surplus-value created. The factory system—“Modern Industry,” Marx called it—was the mainstay of capital accumulation, and workers were attracted and repelled from this urban employment. In chapter 25, however, Marx notes how the general law operates outside the factory gates as well, vividly exemplified, he says, in “‘improvements’ of towns which accompany the increase in wealth, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the erection of palaces to house banks, warehouses, etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, [which] obviously drive the poor away into even worse and more crowded corners.”

It’s not a bad description of what still happens in big cities today. Marx’s point here is that “the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding concentration of workers within a given space; and therefore the more quickly capitalist accumulation takes place, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class.” Landlords squeeze workers, ripping them off at home, as tenants, just as industrialists rip them off at work, as wage-laborers. Rents are high precisely because pay is low. Vulnerable workers equate to vulnerable tenants; both feel the force of “property and its rights.”

“Everyone knows,” Marx says, “that the dearness of houses stands in inverse ratio to their quality, and that these mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit and less cost than the mines of Potosi were ever exploited. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and thus of capitalist property-relations in general, is here so evident.” Marx’s adopted hometown of London, one of the world’s richest cities, had the most squalid, overcrowded habitations, “absolutely unfit for human beings.” Marx knew this because he and his family lived in many of these hovels. “Rents have become so heavy,” he cites one government health inspector saying, “that few labouring men can afford more than one room.” (1865 or 2020?)

And yet, in another sense, plenty has changed since Marx’s day. Back then, his focus was on production in the industrial city; a century and a half on, the city itself has become the form of industrialization. In the 1860s, cities were places where commodities got produced; nowadays, cities are themselves commodities, centers of gravity for the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation and for the expansive power of capital. Now, urban space itself is both the subject and object of valorization, the means of production as well as the product this means of production creates. In manufacturing, Marx said, new technology would prompt a change in the “organic composition of capital.” “The growth in the mass of means of production,” he argued, “as compared with the mass of labour-power that vivifies them, is reflected in its value-composition by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent.”

So, too, now is the organic composition of capital in cities rising—quite literally rising.

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