CONCLUSION
At the core of Marxian theory is a concept of the directionality of social change and the identification of a universal agent to carry out the task of social transformation. Harvey therefore cannot avoid making explicit
To be sure, the commodification and monetarization of everyday life has continued unabated, perhaps with even greater intensity than at any time in the past. But this makes it all the more important to be able to distinguish at an analytical level between this and newer and other sources of pathologies. Harvey overextends the imperatives of one subsystem to account for the totality of modern problems. Class cannot be assumed to be the basis on which a fundamental negation of the contemporary social structure reveals itself because, as Offe has noted, postindustrial societies have experienced a “deepening” and “broadening” of forms of domination and deprivation beyond the experience of labor and outside the space of the workplace. In addition to the increased ability to shift and spread conflict around social sectors, this leads Offe to conclude that the “systemic interchangeability of the scenes of conflict and the dimensions of conflict resolution makes any idea of a ‘primordial’ conflict (such as derived from the Marxian ‘law of value’) obsolete.”[73]
The reproduction of labor power is an economic category of political economy. Just as it is problematic to make assumptions about the actions of “workers” as the personifications of labor power, it is equally erroneous to analyze community-based struggles as being uniquely determined by the “reproduction” of that labor power. The perspective of the lifeworld is not a subjective “filter” of culture that interprets the already constituted facticity of the economy. The lifeworld is the discursive field in which all action scenarios are constituted. To the extent that subjects act and do not act out parts given to them, that is to say, to the extent that social action is meaningful, both strategic and communicative action are constituted within the everyday life of participants. This hermeneutic
It is worth remarking at this point on an interesting aspect of Harvey's position on the relationships between the multiplicity of social actors, urbanism, postmodernism, and the agenda of socialist politics. In 1989, he published a widely acclaimed book, The Condition of Postmodernity. It is a curious book in many ways. It is explicitly designed as a Marxist or historical materialist answer to all those postmodern theorists of contemporary culture who consign Marx to the dustbin of history, along with other Enlightenment thinkers. As I noted at the outset, a central motif of so-called postmodern perspectives is the celebration of the fragment, the local, the irreducibility of difference, and the instability of any fixed meaning or identity. (It is of secondary importance that all these motifs can as readily be associated with modernism.)[74] From our discussion of Harvey's argument it would not be hard to see why he would inveigh against such a perspective. Clearly and correctly, he sees this new sensibility as highly antagonistic to the Marxian political and theoretical project. But his response in this book is disappointing, since one would have hoped that an encounter of an urbanist with the positions that have questioned the holistic aspirations of Marxism would have produced an interesting dialogue. This unfortunately is not the case.
First, as far as defending Marxism is concerned, Harvey's strategy is not to respond to the charges of its critics but simply to reassert a materialist, economistic, and reductive analysis of cultural forms. The chapter entitled “The Crisis of Historical Materialism” is less than three pages long, implying, of course, that there really is no crisis. Considering that Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), the most important challenge to Marxism to appear so far from a poststructuralist perspective, is not even cited in the book, his intervention into the debate must be considered something of a nonstarter. Nor is there serious discussion of any of the so-called new social movements. Furthermore, because the issues of difference, fragmentation, and so on (in our case involving labor and community-based movements), go to the heart of my critique of the Marxian political imaginary, it would be worth simply noting the key difference between a Marxist and a so-called postmodern politics. Whereas a Marxist conception of revolutionary politics
Harvey, like Castells, did not continue the project of developing a Marxian urban theory after the major publications of the mid-1980s, leaving direct engagement with its issues to take up instead ecological concerns and for an ambiguous relationship with the Marxian socialist tradition. Significantly, Harvey's most recent work, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996), acknowledges the limits of Marxian class politics and theory. By acknowledging multiple bases of oppression in addition to economic class exploitation, by conceding that state power and the market economy are two independent sources of alienation and domination, and by rejecting the material base/ideological superstructure model, Harvey, like Castells, has also drawn the conclusion that the impasse of Marxian urban theory is in part internal to Marxian discourse itself.[75] The shortcomings of the Marxian tradition cannot be attributed, as some interpreters have done, solely to the weakness of the working class and the failure to realize the project of a classbased politics in practice.[76]
THE TWO LOGICS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE ANALYSIS
OF URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
The foregoing critique has important implications for the study of class and urban social movements. The foreshortening of the critique of modernity to an economistic critique of instrumental reason modeled on market exchange on which Harvey builds his theory fails to question the model of strategically interacting subjects. As such, such a foundation does not provide an alternative to, and thus cannot escape, the monological orientation of actors that Harvey himself claimed is the negative or pathological effect of the commodification of everyday life. As a consequence, Harvey's analysis affirms the model of action that he wishes to critique, the only difference being that the role of actor is shifted from individuals onto classes. It thus remains within the underlying framework of the interest-group model of politics, that is, as a zero-sum game between (class) actors.
The move away from strategically oriented action requires a perspective wide enough to allow for both monological and dialogical forms of interaction. The debate between methodological individualism
Offe has used the framework of the two logics to analyze the dilemmas of trade-union politics in ways relevant to the present discussion. His primary aim is to contest the liberal-bourgeois theory and practice of treating all associational organizations—in particular, business and employers' organizations and labor unions—as subcases of the interest-group model. The plausibility of this reductive approach is based on certain formal similarities shared by both types of organization.[78] Offe contests this view by showing that the class structure of contemporary society provides capital and labor with distinct sets of problems with which their organizations must contend and that there is an inequality built into their respective positions affecting their ability to solve these problems. This relationship of power is connected with the type of reflexivity and action that a class employs vis-à-vis its “interests.” He concludes that whereas the business class seeks the means of satisfying ends that are by and large fixed and given and that can be unambiguously calculated (that is, profit), this is not true for the class of wage earners. Whereas business organizations, due to their superior resources and ability to satisfy their ends, can afford to remain within a utilitarian mode of action, the inferior position of workers forces them to shift from a search for adequate means to attempting to redefine the ends or values of the collectivity as such. “Those in the inferior power position can increase their potential for change only by overcoming the comparatively higher costs of collective action by changing the standards according to which these costs are subjectively evaluated within the group.” This means that for the relatively powerless, there is a paradoxical condition built into the dynamics of collective action such that “interests can only be met to the extent they are partly redefined.”[79] This paradox is connected with the fact that working-class organizations “simultaneously express and define” the interests of their members. In contrast to the merely monological orientation of business and employers' groups, working-class organizations are faced with the dilemma of needing to rely on both a monological and a dialogical relationship with action, the first to succeed in achieving their goals, the second to survive over time.
This argument relies implicitly on the system/lifeworld distinction. Workers must reassess the costs/benefits of action, as defined by the initial
Nonetheless, Offe's model cannot by itself justify the assumption that class is always the primary identity adopted by workers. To put into doubt and therefore thematize what one wants and why is the same thing as asking “Who are we?” But by virtue of what feature of social life can we predict that the outcome of such a deliberation should necessarily be the subjective recognition of the collectivity as a class defined in Marxian ways? Even if we grant with Harvey and Offe that there is an inherent antagonism between capital and wage labor and thus that the antagonism is an objective one—that is to say, there is an isomorphism between the contradiction of logical categories and the antagonism between flesh-andblood actors—this must still contend with the problem that a collective identity depends in part on the recognition of common interests by a group of individuals.[81] As Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst have argued, this “is to admit that there may be other, non-class, forms of communal action.” However, they continue, to ground the necessity of class outcomes on the “shared experience of collective struggle is equally problematic… since it presupposes what has to be established, namely, that it is class interests that form the basis for communal action.”[82]
Allowing for this contingency does not deny the possibility of systematic constraints and pressures or a differential access to the modes of discourse (the basis of power). What it does deny is that the analysis can be restricted to a narrative of class formation. Once plurality is the starting point of analysis, the force of the argument by which unions could represent all wage workers is weakened. When Adam Przeworski writes that “struggle is a struggle about class before it is struggle among classes,” if classes are the “effects of struggles,” then who are the initial collectivities in struggle?[83]
This surplus of meaning that escapes the ability of any one institutional embodiment to represent all its constituents reflects not an empirical
Acknowledging the hegemonic basis of trade-union organization, Offe observes that “the crucial problem for union policy is whether and how the unity of interests of all ‘employees’ (a unity that can no longer be taken for granted in developed, capitalist countries) can possibly be restored, or at least prevented from further disintegration, by tradeunion organization.”[84] The discursive nature of trade-union hegemony implies that labor movements must articulate a diversity of elements— be they economic, political, cultural, or personal—into a totality, or what I have referred to as an experiential unity: “The fundamental assumption of the labor movement is that, compared with the common interests that are held to arise from this socio-economic situation, special interests—such as those arising from the occupation, economic sector, gender, or nationality of the individual employee—play only a subordinate role.”[85]
The implications of these observations are that we should shift our analytical perspective from the point of view of one organization organizing one identity (e.g., from trade unions organizing the working class) to a conception of organizations as arenas in which overdetermined identities are hegemonized, which means that no one identity can be fully represented by a unique, finite organization. This is not because the means of representation are inefficient, as might be claimed if false consciousness or trade-union corruption were the type of explanation being advanced. It is because an “outside” is necessary to the constitution of the inside. Offe, like Harvey, by contrast, retains the notion that a full identity is possible under certain empirical conditions. The problem of the surplus of meaning within any local heterogeneity—which he identifies as the chief organizing obstacle encountered by unions—can be overcome, he writes, “under the somewhat paradoxical condition that
Several problems raised by Offe's work thus are similar to those found in Harvey's. First, what would a trade union be if it accorded equal weight to the identity of racial or sexual minorities that it did to their identity as employees? Offe employs the term “paradoxical” to express the tension inherent in this impossible situation. Second, we are again faced with the unstated axiom that employees or workers are such a priori, even outside the institutional matrix with(in) which we identity them in the first place, the wage labor relation. This sits uncomfortably with the previous acknowledgment—perhaps unwitting—of the hegemonic and not expressive character of unions vis-à-vis working-class identity. Third, the above passage hints at the fact that the “lumpiness” or structuration of collective identities should in part be sought in the institutional patterning of power and everyday life. The fact that the state has taken over institutions that relate to subjects as consumers of urban space, for example, or as clients of municipal bureaucracies, implies that the capacity of unions to hegemonize collective identities structured through these networks—such as community-based movements for better housing, to take one example—is inherently problematic. If there is an asymmetry between the identity as employee and any other identity from the perspective of union organization, this is a constituent feature of trade unions as such: it is not a contingent characteristic.
It might be objected that consumers and occupiers of housing are also wage earners. This is true, but it misses the point: subjects are none of these, not all of them. To adopt the latter position would lead directly to a merely empiricist version of pluralism. It would presuppose, furthermore, that the empirically detectable diversity of institutions, such as the increasing complexity of the labor market, is nothing more than a subjective illusion generated by bourgeois social relations. Indeed, we saw Harvey present the case in precisely these terms. The former alternative would lead, by contrast, beyond the paradigm of objective identity and toward the conception of all collective identities as so-called
Trade unions cannot represent the totality of differences with which they are faced, and this accounts for their paradoxical situation. If they could do so, as envisaged by Marxism, they would eliminate in an apolitical utopia the very basis on which social identities are based, their reciprocal relation with nonidentity, that is, difference. The agenda of a Marxian socialist labor movement and its theoretical basis in the work considered here live to pursue this dream. But in practice, unions have always been particular institutions, defining as well as representing what it means to be a worker. The limited and finite nature of trade unions (and all other organizations) need not be interpreted as marking the loss of a progressive potential for progressive reform, however. In fact, it implies that a socialist agenda can be built only through the linking of surplus identities across a network of organizations, demands, and identities within an overall framework of democracy, freedom, and equality.