Review by Michael Romandel

In this review, I will outline the ways in which Lefebvre’s (2003) classic text, The Urban Revolution, can help us to understand what I call the global urban problematic – or the dialectical relationship between space and spatial arrangements and human society and social relations on a global scale – and how an understanding of this global urban problematic is important for those engaged in revolutionary politics and full-fledged revolutionary movements in the 21st century. I believe that this analysis and use of Lefebvre’s work is in the very spirit of the work itself, which was inherently revolutionary in nature and even partially inspired by the near-revolution of May ’68. Rather than comparing it with other texts or simply analyzing this work in the context of May ’68 and the other historical events occurring at the time it was written, it seems more appropriate to the spirit of the work and Lefebvre himself to use this work to help us understand the current spatial and political conjuncture and how revolutionaries and revolutionary movements can intervene in it in ways that actually help to move us toward socialism and the final goal of communism. While many utilize Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city in a way that turns it into a social-democratic demand or a way to win concessions out of the system by building a militant reformist movement around it, I argue that this usage of Lefebvre’s work does not follow in the spirit of the man himself, who was a consistent revolutionary communist and, despite what some may argue, was also a great admirer of Vladimir Lenin as both a communist revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician. I thus hope to draw out how revolutionary communists can utilize Lefebvre’s (2003) The Urban Revolution to understand the current conjuncture and our present tasks as revolutionaries within it.

In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre (2003) outlines the increasing importance of urbanization to global capitalism in the post-war period while also providing an abstract theoretical analysis of the historical relationship between spatial forms and human social structures. In his analysis, he explains how the historic divide between the traditional city and the countryside that continued to be predominant under feudal society has been surpassed by the increasing dominance of the urban over all spatial relations, particularly in the post-war period of what others called state-monopoly capitalism, and what Lefebvre would later call the state mode of production (SMP)[1]. What Lefebvre meant by the idea that the urban was surpassing the traditional city was that urbanization was not only extending far beyond the bounds of the traditional historic city to dominate much of the landscape, but that the technologies of the urban, such as information technologies as well as industrial production technologies and techniques, were extending out over the entire globe. It is important to note that Lefebvre saw the extension of industrial production techniques and technologies over the entire globe in the post-war period as being linked to the actual empirical growth of the urban beyond the bounds of the traditional city that he observed in the advanced capitalist world. Lefebvre saw this period of tremendous urbanization in the advanced capitalist world and the extension of highly advanced productive forces throughout the world as both an urban and critical phase in the history of human civilization. He believed that it represented a critical phase because he saw it as opening up the possibility for people to shape the world in ways that had not been possible in the previous phases that he characterized as agricultural and industrial. While Lefebvre didn’t really make it clear what he meant by this, it would seem that this is somehow linked to the Marxist theory of the development of the productive forces, both qualitatively and quantitatively, creating the conditions necessary for socialism on a global scale. For Lefebvre, the critical and urban phase that human society was entering opened up new possibilities for the shaping of the entire planet according to human needs and for the co-ordination of production and human social relations on a global scale in accordance with socialist principles. While Lefebvre’s work in The Urban Revolution (2003) represents a great advancement in Marxist urban theory, his work in this text really only provides some general hints and theories that help us to understand what the role of this problematic in global politics and economics today might be, meaning that we must go further to understand how this problematic relates to 21st Century revolutionary movements.

For this, it is necessary to turn to the work of David Harvey (1972; 2008) on urbanization under capitalism, Vladimir Lenin (1973) on imperialism as well as Trotsky’s (1959; 1969) theory of uneven and combined development. To understand the global urban problematic today, it is essential to understand the links between imperialism, urbanization and capitalist crises of both political and economic natures, which can be analyzed by examining Harvey’s (2008) recent work on the right to the city and Lenin’s (1973) classic work on imperialism. In Harvey’s recent work on the right to the city, he explains how the links between the current economic crisis, the housing sector bubble and the United States’ involvement in imperialist wars are similar to the links between three similar issues in France leading up to the Paris Commune of 1871. Haussman’s redevelopment of Paris as well as the failed inter-imperialist war with Prussia that were undertaken by France under Napoleon III are analyzed by Harvey as being reactions to the domestic over-accumulation of capital (e.g. few profitable outlets available for new investment due to domestic stagnation and overproduction),[2] with Haussman’s redevelopment of Paris being built on speculative financial investment and credit borrowing and the inter-imperialist war with Prussia being driven by the general tendency of capitalism towards imperialism as it becomes more developed (Lenin, 1973).

Combining Lenin’s theory of imperialism as being based on the merger between banking capital and industrial capital to form finance capital with Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development as merging the world into a combined economic system that keeps various parts of it under different levels of material and social development (including within individual states) as well as Harvey’s explanation of the relationship between the crisis tendencies of capitalism, urbanization and imperialist war, the global urban problematic at the present can be understood as emerging out of the finance capital formed in the financial centers of global city regions that integrates all states and spaces into a combined system of capitalist production in which capitalists attempt to overcome the problem of over-accumulation through speculative investment and imperialist war that relies upon and reproduces uneven urban development both within and between states. However, this analysis of the global urban problematic still seems very incomplete and one-sided, as it only seems to take account of the role of finance capital and the capitalists who control it without considering the role of class struggle from below by the working class and other oppressed classes. It is thus necessary to analyze how this class struggle from below responds to the workings of finance capital while playing a major role in the particular formation of uneven and combined development through its struggle. While Harvey (1985), Herod (1997) and Poulantzas (1980) have examined how this works within individual capitalist states, it would seem that this limits their analysis of this process to the formation of cross-class growth alliances and particular groups of workers combining together to mark out spaces for themselves within capitalist states. While this provides a definite base of work from which to build, the analysis of how class struggle from below contributes to the global urban problematic can be better understood when analyzed from an international perspective that takes inter-state relations and anti-imperialist struggles into account.

To begin an international analysis of the role that class struggle from below plays in the formation of the global urban problematic, the main question that must first be answered is where to start. Because of the growing importance of self-built slum housing in providing shelter for the worlds’ population, it will be useful to start with Mike Davis’ (2006) analysis of the battles for the ‘right to the city’ by slum dwellers in the global south. In Planet of Slums, Davis (2006) examines the ways in which various people who wind up in urban slums either through displacement from the countryside or other urban areas (including central city areas) end up having to fight for the basic means that will allow them to continue to live in the city, including secure housing tenure and shelter, as well as water and transportation infrastructure. Many of the everyday struggles that Davis documents appear as fights for the simple ability to live in relatively sanitary conditions with some form of security over access to the basic means of subsistence. However, as Davis points out:

Unlike poor peasants’ “Brechtian mode of class struggle and resistance” – famously evoked in studies by James Scott – these struggles of the urban poor are “not merely defensive,” but, according to Bayat, “surreptitiously offensive” as they ceaselessly aim to expand the survival space and rights of the disenfranchised (39).

Davis documents how these physical and political encroachments on the urban are often “synchronized to a favorable opportunity for land occupation, such as a tight election, natural disaster, coup d’etat or revolution (39).” These encroachments can thus not be viewed as entirely random, disorganized events with little relation to the fight for the right to the city in the Lefebvrian (1996) sense of the right to centrality and difference in all their forms through direct democratic control over the urban development process, but must be viewed as progressively leading to this, though many roadblocks and detours are often placed in the way by gangs acting as informal landlords, formal landlords and the state, effectively halting the struggle at a particular stage or pushing it backwards (Davis, 2006). The progression of the struggle of urban slum dwellers to the point where they do begin to fight for the right to the city in the Lefebvrian sense is actually best exemplified in Venezuela, where the Caracazo uprising that erupted out of Caracas’ barrios in 1989, which emerged as a reaction to a doubling of bus fares that was related to a new neo-liberal economic plan developed by newly elected President Carlos Andres Perez, was one of the main factors that pushed Chavez to build towards the coup attempt in 1992 (Gott, 2005; Bruce, 2008; Raby, 2006). Also, Venezuela’s communal councils, or the ‘fifth motor’ of the Bolivarian Revolution, have been particularly important in barrios and rural under-serviced areas due to the fact that they can get funding directly from the national scale and decide on projects themselves (Ciccariello-Maher, 2007). Furthermore, support for Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution mobilized largely out of Venezuela’s urban barrios helped to defeat the coup attempt by the Venezuelan oligarchy in 2002.

The fact that slums have played such an important role in shaping the nature of the Bolivarian revolutionary process, including the grievances and movements that gave rise to it as well as the issues it has had to contend with in its transformation of Venezuelan society, shows that revolutionaries must be able to understand the role of spatial arrangements and their ongoing restructuring in shaping revolutionary movements and shifts in the consciousness, politicization and political alignments of various class segments. As Soja (1989) has pointed out, space and its role in shaping human society and human consciousness has often been purposely overlooked by Marxists due to the fact that Marxists have been scared of falling into a kind of Kantian environmental or spatial determinism, instead focusing on the economy as the main motor of human consciousness and society and viewing space simply as a background upon which the dialectic of history plays out. In Lefebvre’s writings, including The Urban Revolution (2003), and especially in The Production of Space (1991), he presents a more dialectical view of the relationship between space, the economic base and human history that brings out a kind of lost ‘spatial’ element in the Marxist dialectic that is hinted at in several works of Marx and Engels, especially The German Ideology (1970), The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1987) and The Housing Question (1872), though is never fully developed in their work or in the work of the Marxist revolutionaries that would follow them, likely due to the fear mentioned above. While geography has undoubtedly always been important to the Marxist analysis of imperialism, uneven development and even the withering away of the state, I believe that Soja is right in contending that space has still been seen as simply a passive background upon which historical transformations occur, rather than as an active element in these transformations, and that Lefebvre was really the first to put space on an equal plane with history in the Marxist dialectic. However, there was a definite backlash against Lefebvre from the Marxist camp for making this advancement, with many greatly appreciating his work and being heavily influenced by it but still strongly disagreeing with how far he took his argument in regards to the importance of space in the evolution of human society, and some reacting quite harshly to his work and mounting attacks on his entire methodology and political perspective.

One of the harshest criticisms of Lefebvre’s work on the urban came from Manuel Castells. While Castells’ critique is often lambasted by modern scholars as falling into a dogmatic Althusserian structuralism that left no room for the individual or collective subject to actually change society through conscious action, I believe that there are actually aspects of his critique that are valid and that we must actually look into his critique if we are to properly understand how we can make use of Lefebvre’s work for revolutionary purposes today. However, before going into a further analysis of the valid aspects of Castells’ critique of Lefebvre, it must be recognized that there are definitely some serious problems with his analysis. One of the most obvious ones is Castells’ (1977) misunderstanding of Lefebvre’s (2003) conception of the relationship between the different levels of the social structure, which leads Castells to brand Lefebvre’s urban revolutionary theory as being anarchist and libertarian due to his reading of Lefebvre as seeing the private level as being somehow independent of the global and mixed levels.

Contrary to Castells’ (1977) reading of Lefebvre’s (2003) The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre sees the P (private) level as being the level at which individuals experience alienation, with the specific type of alienation that they experience at this level influencing their development of particular anti-capitalist subjectivities, which are then acted out collectively at the (mixed) level of the urban or settlement space, revolutionizing the global (G) level of capital and the state through this mixed level. As Goonewardena (2005) implies, Castells’ (1977) misreading of Lefebvre is likely due to his earlier misreading of Althusser and his blind following of a misunderstood Althusserian structuralism, which leads him to say things like the following about Lefebvre’s concept of the everyday or private level: “such independence of the everyday implies that one refuses to conceive it as the pure expression of general social determinations” (93). This statement shows that Castells (1977) misread Lefebvre’s theorization of the everyday and that he was blindly following an overly formalistic and relatively un-dialectical base-superstructure model in his critique of Lefebvre’s theory of levels that wasn’t even in agreement with the ideas of Althusser (1971; Althusser and Balibar, 1979), though there are still some elements of Castells’ critique of Lefebvre that are valid and important. One of these elements is Castells’ critique of Lefebvre’s (2003) fetishizing of the post-war urban form as being somehow conducive to the achievement of socialism. What is important about this critique is that Castells uncovers the fact that Lefebvre attaches a certain social content called urban society to a historically specific urban form rooted in the transformations and social contradictions of post-war capitalist urbanization, which Castells recognized as using a similar method to the highly problematic studies of the urban by Simmel (1950), Wirth (1938) and various other urban sociologists, including those from the Chicago School, who all believed that specific urban forms were associated with specific urban societies and urban sub-cultures, and that cities could be analyzed on the basis of this assumption. While I argue that this critique of Lefebvre is entirely valid from a political and academic perspective, Lefebvre’s (2003) work in The Urban Revolution was written in such a way that extracting one aspect out of it without an understanding of the larger point that Lefebvre was attempting to make through this work makes it very easy to critique some of his statements as being uninformed, empirically incorrect or politically confused.

The Urban Revolution cannot be read as the kind of serious document for socialist political practice of the kind written by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, or even as the kind of well-referenced academic work that geographers like Harvey (1972; 1973; 1974) and Soja (1968; 1971) were producing during the same period, but is instead an attempt to show the centrality of the developing global urban problematic to the achievement of a socialist and culturally progressive society, with a particular focus on the possibilities and obstacles involved in this problematic. In this respect, Lefebvre made a definite contribution through his work in The Urban Revolution. However, the main problem in his work of associating the post-war urban form and the problems inherent in it with a particular social content, which Castells identified as a commonality between Lefebvre’s work and urban research that Lefebvre himself would have been critical of on somewhat similar grounds, ended up having a negative effect on the work of David Harvey. This fetishizing of the post-war urban conjuncture by Lefebvre has unfortunately led Harvey to sometimes overestimate the necessity of an explicit focus on the urban in revolutionary organizing, with Harvey (2008) even making the following statement in the final paragraph of his recent New Left Review article in regards to unifying various anti-capitalist and anti-neo-liberal movements:

One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use (40).

The main problem with this statement is that it is actually very unclear what Harvey is exactly calling for by saying this. Is Harvey trying to start a new vanguardist international movement around this idea of the right to the city as the right to the surplus? While such a conclusion might sound absurd, this would seem entirely logical based on the actual tone of Harvey’s article, which tends to privilege those movements forming around the question of the right to the city, or at least engaging with it directly, as the ‘correct’ vanguard in the fight for socialism. In writing this article, it would seem as if Harvey is trying to somehow advance the viability of his geographical ‘discipline’[3] in the sphere of political practice rather than actually examining how the current right to the city movements and other related built-environment or space-based movements relate to workers’ struggles and socialist movements focused on the traditional battlegrounds of the sphere of production (the workplace) and the state[4].

While all revolutionary communists definitely owe a debt to Harvey for his great work in elucidating the urban problematic and applying the concept of the right to the city to present day political movements and material realities, I contend that we must not fall into the same traps as Harvey has by privileging those movements that focus explicitly on what can be conceived as space-based struggles. However, this does not mean that we should entirely ignore such movements either, as a purely ‘workerist’ focus on organizing workers in trade unions and at the point of production and putting together our propaganda and agitation solely around the demands stemming directly from the struggles in these spheres would limit our ability to organize for revolutionary change in unnecessary ways. History has shown that struggles in working class communities, especially those consisting of one or various oppressed nationalities, against police brutality, gentrification and cutbacks to public services have been just as important as struggles by workers at the point of production. One of the most interesting aspects of these community-based struggles, in both cities and rural areas and in the imperialist centre states and peripheral states, is how they relate to the national question and the role that space plays in the national question. This was often a very contentious issue in the communist movement in the United States, with the thesis that there were oppressed Black and Chicano nations within the United States with particular homelands in certain parts of the country where these nationalities were in the highest concentrations becoming a very divisive and complex issue that all movement groups were forced to take a position on. This debate was particularly important during the post-World War II period, when the civil rights movement and revolutionary nationalist movements became two of the most prominent elements of the political upheavals occurring at the time. Much of the debate at that time actually centered around how much the black population had moved from the countryside of the south to the cities of the north and whether or not the black belt in the south still served as a type of homeland for an American black nation. Some groups adhered to this theory as it was developed by Harry Haywood, a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member, who developed this theory in the 1930s based on the theoretical documents produced by Lenin and Stalin, seeing it as the definitive analysis of the ‘black question’ in the United States, and saw all groups that challenged this thesis based on the urbanization or dispersion argument as white chauvinist racist organizations in the communist movement (Elbaum, 2002; Baraka, 1981).

The groups that did utilize the urbanization or dispersion argument to challenge the black nation thesis simply saw black people as a specifically oppressed minority within the US working class, but not as a distinct black nation with a specific territorial homeland in the black belt south and the right to self-determination within this territorial homeland. Looking back on these arguments today, it would seem that both of them were overly abstract in their analysis, relying too heavily on theoretical writings about the national question and population measures rather than the demands actually coming from black revolutionaries involved in the Black Panthers and other revolutionary nationalist organizations, who did not seem to see the need for a specific territorial homeland in the black belt south to argue for the right to self-determination in their communities wherever they were in the country. It was this demand of the most revolutionary wing of the movement of black people in the United States that should have been taken as the starting point for any Marxist analysis of the relationship between space and the black national question in the US during that period, though this unfortunately did not occur due to the communist movement’s over-reliance on old theoretical formulas derived from early 20th century writings on the national question. While it is obviously important for Marxists to understand the theories that have been developed in the past to understand how we can take positions today that will help to advance the revolutionary struggle, this doesn’t mean that we have to adhere completely to theories that were developed in a very different time to analyze very different objective situations. In Max Elbaum’s (2002) account of the history of the New Communist Movement, he was actually extremely critical of the movement’s seemingly dogmatic adherence to traditional Marxist theories and formulas and their belief that they didn’t need to develop any new theories to deal with the conditions facing them in the 1960s and 1970s despite the fact that the theories they were utilizing regarding the national question came from the 1930s or earlier and were developed in the context of very different material conditions.

Today, one of the issues that many communist have not paid an appropriate amount of attention to are the pitched battles over gentrification in communities dominated by particular national minorities who have been historically oppressed by imperialism and many of whom continue to be due to national power alignments in the global capitalist system. In the Asian American Movement (AAM), which developed in the 1960s in response to the Vietnam War and continues to this day, battles over the gentrification of traditional downtown ethnic enclaves (eg. Chinatowns), many of which have remained predominantly working class, persists as an important issue that seems to be intertwined with the issue of national oppression and is linked by AAM movement activists to the broader struggle against corporate control and even the capitalist system itself. In this example, we can see a definite demand for national self-determination on a revolutionary basis emerging from the most militant and theoretically advanced movement activists. From my perspective, such a demand must be taken seriously by all communists and form the basis of our programs on the national question as well as inform our day-to-day activist work. However, it would be a mistake to always apply such a right to self-determination on a rigid basis, especially where the most militant activists in an ethnic enclave of an oppressed nationality threatened with gentrification don’t frame their struggle in this fashion but instead frame it on a purely class basis, which will be more likely to occur in ethnic enclaves that are less ethnically homogenous. In this respect, I think communists have something to learn regarding the relationship between the urban and the national question from the Lefebvre-inspired work of Goonewardena and Kipfer (2005) on the relationship between the urban and the ‘right to difference’. While communists may disagree on the role that various classes within a structurally oppressed minority group can play in their struggle, I believe that we must all take struggles over urban space more seriously than some of us have in the past and examine the relationship between these battles, the national question and the right to self-determination.

I also think that one of the general ideas that we can extract out of the above analysis is that the urban problematic is becoming increasingly important to an understanding of the national question as it emerges today and should not be separated from it in favor of a reliance on old texts that deal with very different objective conditions and also fail to properly examine the role played by urbanization in the changing nature of the national question, hinting at the correctness of Soja’s thesis that Marxists have given far too little importance to space and spatial questions. Some researchers are already beginning to highlight the importance of indigenous urbanization to the changing nature of what the right to self-determination really means today for indigenous people and how it might be exercised (Tomiak, forthcoming), which is an important issue that Marxist activists still largely overlook in favor of a reliance on old formulas from old texts. One of the main things that this problem brings into focus is the fact that to be effective revolutionaries we can not accept past theories dogmatically, but must analyze how we can use them today in light of our present circumstances while also looking at some of the limitations in their original formulation so that we can develop new theory that actually helps us in our day-to-day work.

In terms of revolutionary movements happening today, the revolutionary movement currently underway in Nepal and the theoretical and practical work of the comrades in the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) UCPN(M) who are at the head of this movement can teach us some important lessons about the need for revolutionary communists to be creative rather than dogmatically following old theories and ideas that were developed for the purpose of working in very different material conditions than the ones we face today. While some in the international communist movement have critiqued the UCPN(M) for entering into a bourgeois parliament and putting forth bourgeois-democratic demands, what they have failed to recognize is that this work was necessary to advance the revolutionary struggle in a country that was under the political rule of a monarchy until 2006. This monarchy was only defeated due to the protracted people’s war that the Maoists engaged in from 1996 until 2005 and their subsequent leadership of the legal battle to establish the supremacy of the parliament, with the Maoists dragging all the other ‘democratic’ forces of the country, including its bourgeoisie, behind them in the struggle for basic liberal-democratic rights and freedoms for Nepal’s people, many of which have yet to be fully achieved. After entering the parliament in 2008, they actually resigned from parliament in May 2009 over President Yadav’s reversal of Prachanda’s decision to discharge General Kawatal from the leadership of the Royal Nepal Army because this general would not agree to merge the Royal Nepal Army with the People’s Liberation Army, which was one of the important elements of the Comprehensive Peace Accord that the Maoists had signed with the Government of Nepal in November of 2006. Since leaving the parliament, the Nepali Maoists have organized protests against the government, strengthened their presence in the cities and towns, as well as taken physical control of the state capital of Katmandu and declared it an autonomous zone. In addition, party Vice-Chairman and major theoretician, Baburam Bhattarai, has put forth ideas that challenge traditional Stalinist orthodoxies, including the necessity of single-party rule under the dictatorship of the proletariat, an undemocratic conceptualization of democratic centralism that involves very little actual democracy and the theory of socialism in one country (World People’s Resistance Movement – Britain, 2009). However, despite the fact that the Maoists have been able to make significant gains in Nepal and have been able to use the history of past revolutions to understand their present struggle without viewing the revolutionary process in a dogmatic way based on these past revolutions or a rigid reading of Marxist revolutionary theory, it remains to be seen whether the party will actually be willing to use the forces it is building up in the cities to go forward in making a socialist revolution in Nepal based on the alliance of workers and peasants that will thoroughly destroy the old structures of the capitalist state and the oligarchic system of capitalist ownership that still dominates this small, underdeveloped country. In the past, critics on the revolutionary Left have questioned the intentions of the Maoists in ending their armed struggle and entering into the bourgeois parliament after the significant anti-monarchy uprisings of April 2006, which some observers believed put them in a position to actually seize power. If this was really the case, then their actions could be considered to be traitorous and counter-revolutionary regardless of what kind of two-stage theory they may have been based on, though it seems that Bhattarai really didn’t believe that they actually had enough control over the movement, especially in the cities, to challenge for the total seizure of power at that time, and used the elections and their subsequent work in the parliament as a way to gauge where the masses were at and hold off the forces of reaction so that they could continue to expand their influence, particularly in the cities, which would be necessary for actually making a socialist workers’ revolution based on a real dictatorship of the proletariat.

Regardless of what position one has on the UCPN(M) and their actions, the revolution in Nepal is undoubtedly having an effect on the global urban problematic and the balance of forces in South Asia. In addition, of the main things that we can learn from the struggle of the Nepali Maoists about our approach to the urban and urban issues as revolutionary communists is that we should use the experience of the past to orient ourselves for our present struggles, but should move away from attempting to dogmatically adhere to revolutionary strategies of the past or past theoretical analyses. Instead, we should attempt to act in the spirit of those who made the analyses and strategic decisions that allowed for the success of revolutionary movements in the past so that we can be successful again today, with the achievement of this success requiring us to re-evaluate revolutionary theory to serve our present needs. As Lenin (1902) said in What Is To Be Done?: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”. This principle still holds true today, which is why we must develop the theories that will allow us to succeed in today’s conditions while also overcoming the obstacles that revolutionary movements of the past faced at various points in their development, including and especially after the seizure of power. It is my belief that the multifaceted and non-traditional Marxist work of Henri Lefebvre, including his work in The Urban Revolution, can aid us in this task.

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[1] Lefebvre (1979) best defines the state mode of production in the following passages:

“But the essential features of the state mode of production are as follows. By various means, the State appropriates some portion, or even the entirety, of the social surplus – without taking into consideration Marx’s remarks in his notes on the Gotha program. Such a State raises itself above society and penetrates it to its depths, all the way into everyday life and behavior. It has several dimensions: a) managerial (gestionnaire) and administrative; b) the power to secure; c) the power to kill – by means of repression, the monopoly of violence, the army and military spending, strategies implying the possibility of war, and so forth” (129).

“The state unifies all forms, that of exchange and of the commodity, that of contracts, that of laws. Homogenizing, identitarian, the State crushes that which resists; it makes differences disappear. Agents of the State (le gens de l’Etat) invent new instruments, for example a space which is at one and the same time quantified, homogenized and controlled – crumbled and broken – hierarchized into ‘strata’ that cover and mask social classes. The middle classes? They represent at once the reason for the social base of and the product of such a State. It engenders them as much as it is their result. Once constituted, this State functions as a system. It reproduces itself in reproducing the relations of domination; it has at its disposal an unlimited power to constrain its citizens; it can therefore paralyze all their initiatives” (130).

[2] Both stagnation and over-production have been theoretically linked by Karl Marx (1967) and David Harvey (1982; 1990) to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, with Robert Brenner (2002; 2006) actually making a causal link between the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and stagnation and overproduction in his analysis of the US economy between the end of World War II and the early 2000s. This tendency of the rate of profit to fall is in-turn caused by the tendency for the value composition of capital (the ratio of constant capital (machines) to variable capital (labour) to increase over time due to the competitive drive of capitalists to outdo or simply keep up with their competitors in terms of productivity per unit of labour time. According to Marx’s (1976) re-conceptualization of the labour theory of value, the growth in the value composition of capital results in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time due to the fact that the labour of workers is the sole means by which surplus value is produced, with profits equaling surplus value divided by total capital (constant and variable capital combined). However, it must be recognized that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall can be counteracted by capitalists in various ways, many of which are destructive for workers, though these actions to counteract this tendency may not be able to prevent it in the long term. One example of this is the failure of neo-liberal attacks on the real wages of workers (including attacks on the welfare state), the move towards a more service-based economy in imperialist ‘core’ states, and the increased reliance on consumer credit and speculative bubbles to counteract the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Brenner, 2002; 2006).

[3] The ironic thing about Harvey trying to advance the viability of geography as a discipline through his championing of the importance of this idea of the ‘right to the city’ in revolutionary social practice is the fact that he claims to be a Marxist, and that Marxism is supposed to be deeply opposed to the fragmentation of knowledge into the bourgeois academic disciplines (Sayer, 1999; Brenner, 2004; Marx, 1976)). Harvey also seems to attempt to advance his geographical discipline in his new book on re-claiming cosmopolitanism for the Left (Harvey, 2009). What this shows is that despite all the praise given to Harvey on the Left, he sometimes puts his credibility as an academic geographer ahead of his Marxism. However, he has been one of the most stalwart defenders and promoters of the basics of Marxism in academia, and the fact that he makes his lectures on Volume One of Capital available for free online is a great resource for the Left. Overall, it would thus seem that Harvey is only really constricted by his desire to be a successful academic who is accepted by the social-democratic Left, which sometimes gets in the way of his commitment to Marxism and socialism, and is a problem faced by most revolutionary socialist academics.

[4] While Harvey has done this indirectly in some of his other works, including Spaces of Hope (2000), The Factory and the City (1994) (which he co-authored with Teresa Hayter) and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), he has yet to really make this issue into an important element of his academic work. Due to the fact that Harvey neglects this important issue, some of his work tends to fetishize movements of the working class and marginalized that he believes are urban-oriented while failing to properly analyze how these movements relate to broader workers’ struggles and socialist movements, especially those focused on transforming the capitalist state itself. Though Harvey did champion living-wage campaigns in Spaces of Hope, focusing on the sphere of production, he again failed to link these campaigns to the broader fight for socialism focused on the seizure of state power (for Marxists) and the transformation of the state that results in its eventual withering away (for both Marxists and anarchists).