HARVEY'S ARGUMENT
A central motivation behind Harvey's work is the challenge of illuminating what he calls “the vexing questions that surround the relationship between community conflict and community organizing on the one hand, and industrial conflict and work-based organizing on the other.”[3] Harvey's aim is to explain the emergence of conflict and social protest in the city in terms of the encroachment of the imperatives of the economic system on the everyday life of residents and inhabitants of a given sociospatial milieu. It is important to recognize that the general structural principle behind this idea is drawn from the way Marx linked economic crises to the emergence of working-class identity and collective action. For Marx, economic relations and dynamics, by disturbing the communal substructure and the noninstrumental aspects of everyday cosciousness, usher in resistance and organized protest. In the urban context, this is manifested through the contradiction between the use values embedded in space and local territorial social networks and the commodification of space that treats land and space as pure exchange values. Community-based movements are thus by-products of the subordination of the spaces of everyday life to processes of capitalist exchange.
The most extended illustration of this thesis can be found in Harvey's account of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 in “Paris, 1850–1870,” in Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Harvey weighs in on the side of those, including Marx himself, who have seen the Paris Commune as a predominantly working-class movement and as an expression of proletarian political aspirations, and against those such as Henri Lefebvre and Castells who have interpreted the uprising as a specifically urban, neighborhood-based, and cross-class phenomenon.
Harvey shows how Baron Haussmann's urban reforms of the 1850s were closely linked to the need of French capitalists and the state to deal with macroeconomic crises, as well as to the growth of the land and housing market in Paris. He argues that one of the consequences of the urban renewal projects was the breakup of cross-class artisanal neighborhoods in the center of Paris and the creation of new class-homogeneous neighborhoods outside central Paris. Since the main areas of militant resistance to the Versailles government were located in these working-class neighborhoods, Harvey concludes that the uprising possessed a predominantly
Critics have responded to Harvey's historical and theoretical work with two types of objection, the first rejecting the economistic treatment of the state and government policy and the second finding the empirical case for the class character of collective action during the Paris Commune unpersuasive. (A third line of argument, drawing on feminist writings, argues that Harvey's approach neglects the dimension of gender.[4] I fully endorse this view. However, I postpone a discussion of the gender critique of urban theory until the next chapter.)
The first criticism holds that Harvey's understanding of the role of the state is reductionist and functionalist. Viewing state policy making as derived from the “needs” of capital accumulation and circulation skews our historical interpretation in three main ways.[5] First, the motivations behind state action in transforming urban space were not solely in response to the “needs” of capital. As Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Ira Katznelson, and others have shown, coercion and capital, power and money, have worked hand in hand throughout the history of European state making and urbanization, without a clear causal hierarchy between the two dimensions.[6] Indeed, in many cases, it was state power that determined the historical development of the capitalist sector. Conversely, the development of modern cities, at least in the cases of Europe and North America, cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the way space, territory, and cities figured into the development of state power. To infer that spatial patterns and political institutions can be reduced to economic imperatives from the fact that space and political institutions have in many instances been closely imbricated with economic dynamics is to confuse consequence with motivation. Second, the functionalist view cannot fully capture the fact that the emergence of local politics represents an independent patterning of sites of solidarities that is relatively autonomous from the interests emerging from class stratification and the dynamics of the workplace. This is related to the third shortcoming. Viewing the state as an instrument of capital underestimates the fact that politics—the struggle over institutions of liberal, democratic
The second type of objection to Harvey's Marxian urban interpretation is that the historical evidence supports more strongly the alternative reading of the Paris Commune as predominantly a community-based and urban-based, and not a working-class, movement. This position has recently been forcefully advanced by Roger Gould. Drawing on new data on the social networks of the residents of the new neighborhoods that were important locations of mobilization as well as on the discourse of the insurgents, Gould concludes that the Paris Commune was “more a revolt of city dwellers against the French state than of workers against capitalism.” Although most of the communards were workers, Gould observes that “it was not as workers that they took up arms against the state, and it was not as a defender of capitalism that the state earned their enmity.”[8] This stood in stark contrast to the July Revolutions of 1848, in which the discourse, identity, and demands of the belligerents were organized around clearly economic class issues. For example, in response to high unemployment, a key demand in 1848 was the “right to work.” But despite comparable levels of unemployment two decades later, such economic demands were absent from the Paris Commune. Furthermore, whereas the earlier struggle had been centered on the workplace, in the commune it was the neighborhood assemblies and public meetings that formed the focus of popular mobilization. For Gould, these differences reflect the extent to which the participation identities of those involved in the Paris Commune had become detached from the shop floor conflict between capital and labor since 1848. What had brought about this change? A large part of the answer for Gould, as for Harvey, is the spatial and geographic transformations of everyday life through Haussmann's urban reforms, but they arrive at different conclusions. Gould claims that workers in the new neighborhoods were organized on the basis of neighborhood-based, cross-class social networks and thus saw themselves in territorial, rather than class, terms and in conflict (when it arose) principally with the state, and not with the employer class.
Both sets of criticisms—the reduction of the state policy to the needs of the market economy and the misinterpretation of neighborhood-based identities as fundamentally class ones—point to the inadequacy of Harvey's Marxian class interpretation of this historical episode. But they are less successful in articulating an alternative theoretical model into which these two moments—the state and urban identities—could be incorporated. Because these criticisms tend to underestimate and leave untouched
The philosophical anthropology underlying Marx's thought (his praxis philosophy) appears to be compatible with several different empirical historical patterns of causal hierarchy or determination. Engels, for example, distinguished between determinant and dominant social principles, so that, for example, political power could become contingently dominant (such as during feudal societies) but the determinant principle remained the forms of interchange with and transformations of objective material nature, or the social relations of production. Writers such as Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and Maurice Godelier have developed historical explanations along these lines.[9] My point here is not to promote yet another revisionist Marxian position but to suggest that if we want to provide a new conceptual framework at the same level of theoretical elaboration as the Marxian one, it is necessary to engage with these deeper assumptions. It is this task that most critiques of Marxian urbanism fail to take up.
To incorporate the power of the bureaucratic state as a relatively autonomous factor in an account of social structure and to avoid reductionism when confronted by the diversity of urban identities requires a shift in perspective. I have touched upon the question of the polyvalence of identity in the previous chapter and will elaborate on it in the next two chapters. My focus in this chapter is on the problem of a noneconomistic notion of structure. I suggest that we should expand our understanding of the sources that generate conflict from a sole focus on the market and the system of production to a model that includes both the market economy and state power as components of a larger systemic principle that is common to both. To explore this expanded notion of structure, the rest of this chapter examines the theoretical presuppositions of Harvey's Marxian urbanism, for it is here that the assumptions
In the next section, I examine Harvey's interpretation of urban conflict through his theory of urban-based movements as “displaced class struggles.” I argue that by discounting the political and institutional salience of the distinction between workplace and residential community (one dimension of the multiple spaces of the city), Harvey's model has two principal drawbacks. First, by dismissing the historical significance of urban social movements, the model erases the specifically urban dimension of the experience of modernity, which I have referred to as the overdetermination or spacing of identity. Second, to ground an oppositional political agency, Harvey wishes to identify in small-scale urban communities a social logic distinct from and resistant to the functionalist logic of the capitalist market, but his reliance on Marx's production paradigm prevents him from developing such an alternative concept.
But from Harvey's early work it is possible to recover an alternative, nonfunctionalist logic of identity and agency. This alternative requires us to distinguish between what I call (following Habermas) the system and lifeworld dimensions of modern societies, a version of the structure/agency dualism. This distinction can help us avoid the dead ends reached in Harvey's work. The idea of system that emerges from this analysis contributes to answering the second question with which I started, namely, how best to conceive the content of a macrosocial “structure” without narrowing this down to the single dimension of the economy. I conclude the chapter with a consideration of Claus Offe's analysis of the two logics of collective action in the context of the problems of trade-union politics when faced with the expansion and differentiation of their traditional constituencies.