The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization by Andy Merrifield

Author:Andy Merrifield [Merrifield, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Political Science, Globalization, Sociology, Urban, History and Surveys of Philosophy
ISBN: 9780820345291
Google: ux2NGf5i8rUC
Goodreads: 16171388
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2013-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

II. The Urbanization of the “General Intellect”

One of the most fascinating parts of La pensée marxiste et la ville comes in the final ten pages of Chapter 2. There, Lefebvre wrestles with Marx and Engels’s German Ideology and with the utopian pages of the Grundrisse. But first he must move through Engels himself, show how, from Engels’s industrial city, emerges “urban society.” Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) spoke at length of cities as places of worker “agglomeration,” of spaces where a “reserve army of laborers” are piled up on top of one another, and how “the capitalist order engenders an urban chaos.” The laboring masses, Engels noted, lived in specifically demarcated areas of “great cities,” in overcrowded hovels where they got ripped off in reproduction, at home, just as they got ripped off at the point of industrial production, at work. The concentration of populations like this, of course, directly accompanied the concentration and exponential accumulation of capital; the two went hand-in-hand, alongside the advance of technology and the spatial and temporal development of modes of production. But the question that preoccupied Engels then, as it did thirty years later in The Housing Question, was: How could you really resolve the ghettoization of workers’ housing without resolving the problem of the capitalist mode of production itself?

But the twist here, the utopian twist for Lefebvre, comes from the “fin du travail,” from the “end of work” (121): “What a paradox,” he says, “for those who have discovered the importance of work and who assume the role of the theoretician of the working class.” “And yet, we know it already, that automation of production permits us to envisage the end of productive work. Theoretical and practical possibility? Incontestably … Utopia certainly, but a concrete utopia” (121–122). “The socialization of the productive forces, the elimination of barriers, perturbations, waste, permits,” Lefebvre says, “henceforth the reduction of work time and the transformation of work.” The phrase could have easily come from André Gorz, who, though unacknowledged by Lefebvre, was writing about work and Marxism in the same vein as Lefebvre wrote about the city and Marxism.8 Yet Lefebvre is more playful with the idea that the end of work correlates positively with growing urbanization, more playful with both its perils and its possibilities.9 What transpires in “urban society” is a “service” economy, he says, as well as a gradual dominance of finance over industrial capital. He spots the germ of all this early on in capitalism’s urban development and assesses whether these circumstances will really expand or gradually undermine the mode of production itself. Lefebvre insists that a service economy does produce surplus value rather than simply realize it, and that an urban constituency as an agent of revolutionary change behooves something more than “the working class.” If anything, it bids its farewell.

Gorz and Lefebvre tacitly concur that Marx’s Grundrisse is a source of extraordinary intellectual and political sustenance. Maybe Engels had never read Marx’s Grundrisse notebooks; the latter, after

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