Reclaiming the City for
Anti-Capitalist Struggle
If urbanization is so crucial in the history of capital accumulation, and if the forces of capital and its innumerable allies must relentlessly mobilize to periodically revolutionize urban life, then class struggles of some sort, no matter whether they are explicitly recognized as such, are inevitably involved. This is so if only because the forces of capital have to struggle mightily to impose their will on an urban process and whole populations that can never, even under the most favorable of circumstances, be under their total control. An important strategic political question then follows: To what degree should anti-capitalist struggles explicitly focus and organize on the broad terrain of the city and the urban? And if they should do so, then how and exactly why?
The history of urban-based class struggles is stunning. The successive revolutionary movements in Paris from 1789 through 1830 and 1848 to the Commune of 1871 constitute the most obvious nineteenth-century example. Later events included the Petrograd Soviet, the Shanghai Communes of 1927 and 1967, the Seattle General Strike of 1919, the role of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, the uprising in Córdoba in 1969, and the more general urban uprisings in the United States in the 1960s, the urban-based movements of 1968 (Paris, Chicago, Mexico City, Bangkok, and others including the so-called “Prague Spring,” and the rise of neighborhood associations in Madrid that fronted the anti-Franco movement in Spain around the same time). And in more recent times we have witnessed echoes of these older struggles in the Seattle anti-globalization protests of 1999 (followed by similar protests in Quebec City, Genoa, and many other cities as part of a widespread alternative globalization movement). Most recently we have seen mass protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, in Madison, Wisconsin, in the Plazas del Sol in Madrid and Catalunya in Barcelona, and in Syntagma Square in Athens, as well as revolutionary movements and rebellions in Oaxaca in Mexico, in Cochabamba (2000 and 2007) and El Alto (2003 and 2005) in Bolivia, along with very different but equally important political eruptions in Buenos Aires in 2001–02, and in Santiago in Chile (2006 and 2011).
And it is not, this history demonstrates, only singular urban centers that are involved. On several occasions the spirit of protest and revolt has spread contagiously through urban networks in remarkable ways. The revolutionary movement of 1848 may have started in Paris, but the spirit of revolt spread to Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Budapest, Frankfurt, and many other European cities. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was accompanied by the formation of worker’s councils and “soviets” in Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Riga, Munich and Turin, just as in 1968 it was Paris, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Bangkok, Chicago, and innumerable other cities that experienced “days of rage,” and in some instances violent repressions. The unfolding urban crisis of the 1960s in the United States affected many cities simultaneously. And in an astonishing but much-underestimated moment in world history, on February 15, 2003, several million people simultaneously appeared on the streets of Rome (with around 3 million, considered the largest anti-war rally ever in human history), Madrid, London, Barcelona, Berlin, and Athens, with lesser but still substantial numbers (though impossible to count because of police repression) in New York and Melbourne, and thousands more in nearly 200 cities in Asia (except China), Africa, and Latin America in a worldwide demonstration against the threat of war with Iraq. Described at the time as perhaps one of the first expressions of global public opinion, the movement quickly faded, but leaves behind the sense that the global urban network is replete with political possibilities that remain untapped by progressive movements. The current wave of youth-led movements throughout the world, from Cairo to Madrid to Santiago—to say nothing of a street revolt in London, followed by an “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began in New York City before spreading to innumerable cities in the US and now around the world—suggests there is something political in the city air struggling to be expressed.1
Two questions derive from this brief account of urban-based political movements. Is the city (or a system of cities) merely a passive site (or pre-existing network)—the place of appearance—where deeper currents of political struggle are expressed? On the surface it might seem so. Yet it is also clear that certain urban environmental characteristics are more conducive to rebellious protests than others—such as the centrality of squares like Tahrir, Tiananmen, and Syntagma, the more easily barricaded streets of Paris compared to London or Los Angeles, or El Alto’s position commanding the main supply routes into La Paz.
Political power therefore often seeks to reorganize urban infrastructures and urban life with an eye to the control of restive populations. This was most famously the case with Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris, which were viewed even at the time as a means of military control of rebellious citizens. This case is not unique. The re-engineering of inner cities in the United States in the wake of the urban uprisings of the 1960s just happened to create major physical highway barriers—moats, in effect—between the citadels of high-value downtown property and impoverished inner-city neighborhoods. The violent struggles that occurred in the drive to subdue oppositional movements in Ramallah on the West Bank (pursued by the Israeli IDF) and Fallujah in Iraq (pursued by the US military) have played a crucial role in forcing a re-think of military strategies to pacify, police, and control urban populations. Oppositional movements like Hezbollah and Hamas, in their turn, increasingly pursue urbanized strategies of revolt. Militarization is not, of course, the only solution (and, as Fallujah demonstrated, it may be far from the best). The planned pacification programs in Rio’s favelas entail an urbanized approach to social and class warfare through the application of a range of different public policies to troubled neighborhoods. For their part, Hezbollah and Hamas both combine military operations from within the dense networks of urban environments with the construction of alternative urban governance structures, incorporating everything from garbage removal to social support payments and neighborhood administrations.
The urban obviously functions, then, as an important site of political action and revolt. The actual site characteristics are important, and the physical and social re-engineering and territorial organization of these sites is a weapon in political struggles. In the same way that, in military operations, the choice and shaping of the terrain of action plays an important role in determining who wins, so it is with popular protests and political movements in urban settings.2
The second major point is that political protests frequently gauge their effectiveness in terms of their ability to disrupt urban economies. In the spring of 2006, for example, widespread agitation developed in the United States within immigrant populations over a proposal before Congress to criminalize undocumented immigrants (some of whom had been in the country for decades). The massive protests amounted to what was in effect an immigrant workers’ strike that effectively closed down economic activity in Los Angeles and Chicago, and had serious impacts on other cities as well. This impressive demonstration of the political and economic power of unorganized immigrants (both legal and illegal) to disrupt the flows of production as well as the flows of goods and services in major urban centers played an important role in stopping the proposed legislation.
The immigrants’ rights movement arose out of nowhere, and was marked by a good deal of spontaneity. But it then fell off rapidly, leaving behind two minor but perhaps significant achievements, in addition to blocking the proposed legislation: the formation of a permanent immigrant workers’ alliance and a new tradition in the United States of celebrating May Day as a day to march in support of the aspirations of labor. While this last achievement appears purely symbolic, it nevertheless reminds the unorganized as well as the organized workers in the United States of their collective potentiality. One of the main barriers to the realization of this potentiality also became clear in the rapid decline of the movement. Largely Hispanic-based, it failed to negotiate effectively with the leadership of the African-American population. This opened the way for an intense barrage of propaganda orchestrated by the right-wing media, which suddenly shed crocodile tears for how African-American jobs were being taken away by illegal Hispanic immigrants.3
The rapidity and volatility with which massive protest movements have risen and fallen over the last few decades calls for some commentary. In addition to the global anti-war demonstration of 2003 and the rise and fall of the immigrant workers’ rights movement in the United States in 2006, there are innumerable examples of the erratic track and uneven geographical expression of oppositional movements; they include the rapidity with which the revolts in the French suburbs in 2005 and the revolutionary bursts in much of Latin America, from Argentina in 2001–02 to Bolivia in 2000–05, were controlled and reabsorbed into dominant capitalist practices. Will the populist protests of the indignados throughout southern Europe in 2011, and the more recent Occupy Wall Street movement, have staying power? Understanding the politics and revolutionary potential of such movements is a serious challenge. The fluctuating history and fortunes of the anti- or alternative globalization movement since the late 1990s also suggests that we are in a very particular and perhaps radically different phase of anti-capitalist struggle. Formalized through the World Social Forum and its regional offshoots, and increasingly ritualized as periodic demonstrations against the World Bank, the IMF, the G7 (now the G20), or at almost any international meeting on any issue (from climate change to racism and gender equality), this movement is hard to pin down because it is “a movement of movements” rather than a single-minded organization.4 It is not that traditional forms of left organizing (left political parties and militant sects, labor unions and militant environmental or social movements such as the Maoists in India or the landless peasants movement in Brazil) have disappeared. But they now all seem to swim within an ocean of more diffuse oppositional movements that lack overall political coherence.
CHANGING LEFT PERSPECTIVES ON ANTI-CAPITALIST STRUGGLES
The bigger question I wish to address here is this: Are the urban manifestations of all these diverse movements anything other than mere side-effects of global, cosmopolitan, or even universal human aspirations that have nothing specifically to do with the particularities of urban life? Or is there something about the urban process and the urban experience —the qualities of daily urban life—under capitalism that, in itself, has the potential to ground anti-capitalist struggles? If so, then what constitutes this grounding and how can it be mobilized and put to use to challenge the dominant political and economic powers of capital, along with its hegemonic ideological practices and its powerful grasp upon political subjectivities (this last point is, in my view, critical)? In other words, should struggles within and over the city, and over the qualities and prospects of urban living, be seen as fundamental to anti-capitalist politics?
I do not claim here that the answer to this question is “obviously yes.” I do claim, however, that this question is inherently worth asking.
For many on the traditional left (by which I mainly mean socialist and communist political parties and most trade unions), the interpretation of the historical geography of urban-based political movements has been dogged by political and tactical a priori assumptions that have led to the underestimation and misunderstanding of the potency of urban-based movements for sparking not only radical but also revolutionary change. Urban social movements are all too often viewed as by definition separate from or ancillary to those class and anti-capitalist struggles that have their roots in the exploitation and alienation of living labor in production. If urban social movements are considered at all, they are typically construed as either mere offshoots or displacements of these more fundamental struggles. Within the Marxist tradition, for example, urban struggles tend to be either ignored or dismissed as devoid of revolutionary potential or significance. Such struggles are construed as being either about issues of reproduction rather than production, or about rights, sovereignty, and citizenship, and therefore not about class. The immigrant workers’ movement of unorganized labor in 2006, the argument goes, was basically about claiming rights and not about revolution.
When a city-wide struggle does acquire an iconic revolutionary status, as in the case of the Paris Commune of 1871, it is claimed (first by Marx, and even more emphatically by Lenin) as a “proletarian uprising”5 rather than as a much more complicated revolutionary movement—animated as much by the desire to reclaim the city itself from its bourgeois appropriation as by the desired liberation of workers from the travails of class oppression in the workplace. I take it as symbolic that the first two acts of the Paris Commune were to abolish night-work in the bakeries (a labor question) and to impose a moratorium on rents (an urban question). Traditional left groups can therefore on occasion take up urban-based struggles, and when they do they can often be successful even as they seek to interpret their struggle from within their traditional workerist perspective. The British Socialist Workers’ Party, for example, led the successful struggle against Thatcher’s poll tax in the 1980s (a reform of local government finance that hit the less affluent very hard). Thatcher’s defeat on the poll tax almost certainly played a significant role in her downfall.
Anti-capitalist struggle, in the formal Marxist sense, is fundamentally and quite properly construed to be about the abolition of that class relation between capital and labor in production that permits the production and appropriation of surplus value by capital. The ultimate aim of anti-capitalist struggle is the abolition of that class relation and all that goes with it, no matter where it occurs. On the surface, this revolutionary aim seems to have nothing to do with urbanization per se. Even when this struggle has to be seen, as it invariably does, through the prisms of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, and even when it unfolds through urban-based inter-ethnic, racialized, and gendered conflicts within the living spaces of the city, the fundamental conception is that an anti-capitalist struggle must ultimately reach deep into the very guts of what a capitalist system is about and wrench out the cancerous tumor of class relations in production.
It would be a truthful caricature to say that working-class movements in general have long privileged the industrial workers of the world as the vanguard agent in this mission. In Marxist revolutionary versions, this vanguard leads the class struggle through the dictatorship of the proletariat to a promised world where state and class wither away. It is also a truthful caricature to say that things have never worked out this way.
Marx argued that the class relation of domination in production had to be displaced by the associated workers controlling their own production processes and protocols. This view parallels a long history of political pursuit of worker control, autogestión (usually translated as “self-management”), worker cooperatives, and the like.6 These struggles did not necessarily arise out of any conscious attempt to follow Marx’s theoretical prescriptions (indeed, the latter almost certainly reflected the former), nor were they necessarily construed in practice as some way-station on the journey to a root-and-branch revolutionary reconstruction of the social order. They more usually arose out of the basic intuition, arrived at in many different places and times by workers themselves, that it would be much fairer, less repressive, and more in accord with their own sense of self-worth and personal dignity to regulate their own social relations and production activities, rather than to submit to the oppressive dictates of an often despotic boss demanding that they give unstintingly of their capacity for alienated labor. But attempts to change the world by worker control and analogous movements—such as community-owned projects, so-called “moral” or “solidarity” economies, local economic trading systems and barter, the creation of autonomous spaces (the most famous of which today would be that of the Zapatistas)—have not so far proved viable as templates for more global anti-capitalist solutions, in spite of the noble efforts and sacrifices that have often kept these efforts going in the face of fierce hostilities and active repressions.7
The main reason for the long-run failure of such initiatives to aggregate into some global alternative to capitalism is simple enough. All enterprises operating in a capitalist economy are subject to “the coercive laws of competition” that undergird the capitalist laws of value production and realization. If somebody makes a similar product to me at a lower cost, then I either go out of business, or adapt my production practices to increase my productivity, or lower my costs of labor, intermediate goods and raw materials. While small and localized enterprises can work under the radar and beyond the reach of the laws of competition (acquiring the status of local monopolies, for example), most cannot. So worker-controlled or cooperative enterprises tend at some point to mimic their capitalistic competitors, and the more they do so the less distinctive their practices become. Indeed, it can all too easily happen that workers end up in a condition of collective self-exploitation that is every bit as repressive as that which capital imposes.
Furthermore, as Marx also shows in the second volume of Capital, the circulation of capital comprises three distinctive circulatory processes, those of money, productive, and commodity capitals.8 No one circulatory process can survive or even exist without the others: they intermingle and co-determine each other. Workers’ control or community collectives in relatively isolated production units can rarely survive—in spite of all the hopeful autonomista, autogestion and anarchist rhetoric—in the face of a hostile financial environment and credit system and the predatory practices of merchant capital. The power of finance capital and of merchant capital (the Wal-Mart phenomenon) has been particularly resurgent in recent years (this is a much-neglected topic in contemporary left theorizing). What to do about these other circulation processes and the class forces that crystallize around them thus becomes a large part of the problem. These are, after all, the primal forces through which the iron law of capitalist value determination operates.
The theoretical conclusion that follows is glaringly obvious. The abolition of the class relation in production is contingent upon the abolition of the powers of the capitalist law of value to dictate conditions of production through free trade on the world market. Anti-capitalist struggle must not only be about organizing and re-organizing within the labor process, fundamental though that is. It must also be about finding a political and social alternative to the operation of the capitalist law of value across the world market. While worker control or communitarian movements can arise out of the concrete intuitions of people collectively engaging in production and consumption, contesting the operations of the capitalist law of value on the world stage requires a theoretical understanding of macroeconomic interrelations along with a different form of technical and organizational sophistication. This poses the difficult problem of developing a political and organizational ability both to mobilize and to control the organization of international divisions of labor and of exchange practices and relations on the world market. De-coupling from these relations, as some now propose, is close to impossible for a variety of reasons. Firstly, de-coupling increases the vulnerability to local famines and social and so-called natural catastrophes. Secondly, effective management and survival almost always depends upon the availability of sophisticated means of production. For example, the ability to coordinate flows throughout a commodity chain to a workers’ collective (from raw materials to finished products) depends on the availability of power sources and technologies, such as electricity, cell phones, computers, and the internet, that are procured from that world in which the capitalist laws of value creation and circulation predominate.
In the face of these obvious difficulties, many forces on the traditional left turned historically to the conquest of state power as their prime objective. Those powers could then be used to regulate and control capital and money flows, to institute non-market (and non-commodified) systems of exchange through rational planning, and to set in place an alternative to the capitalist laws of value determination through organized and consciously planned reconstructions of the international division of labor. Unable to make this system work globally, communist countries from the Russian Revolution onwards chose to isolate themselves from the capitalist world market as much as possible. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and the transformation of China into an economy that fully and victoriously embraced the capitalist law of value has resulted in an across-the-board dismissal of this particular anti-capitalist strategy as a feasible path towards building socialism. The centrally planned and even social-democratic idea that the state could even protect against the forces of the world market through protectionism, import substitution (as in Latin America in the 1960s, for example), fiscal policies, and social welfare arrangements, was abandoned step by step as the neoliberal counter-revolutionary movements gathered steam to dominate state apparatuses from the mid 1970s onwards.9
The rather dismal historical experience of centrally planned Stalinism and communism as it was actually practiced, and the ultimate failure of social-democratic reformism and protectionism to resist the growing power of capital to control the state and to dictate its policies, has led much of the contemporary left to conclude either that the “smashing of the state” is a necessary precursor to revolutionary transformation or that organizing production autonomously from within the state is the only viable path towards revolutionary change. The burden of politics thus shifts back to some form of worker, community, or localized control. The assumption is that the oppressive power of the state can be “withered away” as oppositional movements of various sorts—factory occupations, solidarity economies, collective autonomous movements, agrarian cooperatives, and the like—gather momentum within civil society. This amounts to what one might call a “termite theory” of revolutionary change: eating away at the institutional and material supports of capital until they collapse. This is not a dismissive term. Termites can inflict terrible damage, often hidden from easy detection. The problem is not lack of potential effectiveness; it is that, as soon as the damage wrought becomes too obvious and threatening, then capital is both able and all too willing to call in the exterminators (state powers) to deal with it. The only hope then is that the exterminators will either turn upon their masters (as they have sometimes done in the past) or be defeated—a rather unlikely outcome except in particular circumstances such as those in Afghanistan—in the course of a militarized struggle. There is, alas, no guarantee that the form of society that will then emerge will be less barbaric than that which it replaces.
Opinions across the broad spectrum of the left on what will work and how are fiercely held, and equally fiercely defended (oftentimes rigidly and dogmatically). To challenge any one particular way of thinking and acting often provokes vituperative responses. The left as a whole is bedeviled by an all-consuming “fetishism of organizational form.” The traditional left (communist and socialist in orientation) typically espoused and defended some version of democratic centralism (in political parties, trade unions, and the like). Now, however, principles are frequently advanced—such as “horizontality” and “non-hierarchy”—or visions of radical democracy and the governance of the commons, that can work for small groups but are impossible to operationalize at the scale of a metropolitan region, let alone for the 7 billion people who now inhabit planet earth. Programmatic priorities are dogmatically articulated, such as the abolition of the state, as if no alternative form of territorial governance would ever be necessary or valuable. Even the venerable social anarchist and anti-statist Murray Bookchin, with his theory of confederalism, vigorously advocates the need for some territorial governance, without which the Zapatistas, just to take one recent example, would also certainly have met with death and defeat: though often falsely represented as being totally non-hierachical and “horizontalist” in their organizational structure, the Zapatistas do make decisions through democratically selected delegates and officers.10 Other groups focus their efforts on the recuperation of ancient and indigenous notions of the rights of nature, or insist that issues of gender, racism, anti-colonialism, or indigeneity must be prioritized above, if not preclude, the pursuit of an anti-capitalist politics. All of this conflicts with the dominant self-perception within these social movements, which tends to believe that there is no guiding or overarching organizational theory, but simply a set of intuitive and flexible practices that arise “naturally” out of given situations. In this, as we shall see, they are not entirely wrong.
To top it all, there is a conspicuous absence of broadly agreed concrete proposals as to how to reorganize divisions of labor and (monetized?) economic transactions throughout the world to sustain a reasonable standard of living for all. Indeed, this problem is all too often cavalierly evaded. As a leading anarchist thinker, David Graeber, puts it, echoing the reservations of Murray Bookchin set out above:
Temporary bubbles of autonomy must gradually turn into permanent, free communities. However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational relation with everyone around them. They have to have some way to engage with larger economic, social or political systems that surround them. This is the trickiest question because it has proved extremely difficult for those organized on radically democratic lines to so integrate themselves in any meaningful way in larger structures without having to make endless compromises in their founding principles.11
At this point in history, the chaotic processes of capitalist creative destruction have evidently reduced the collective left to a state of energetic but fragmented incoherence, even as periodic eruptions of mass movements of protest and the gnawing threat of “termite politics” suggest that the objective conditions for a more radical break with the capitalist law of value are more than ripe for the taking.
At the heart of all this, however, lies a simple structural dilemma: How can the left fuse the need to actively engage with, but also create an alternative to, the capitalist laws of value determination on the world market, while facilitating the associated laborers’ ability democratically and collectively to manage and decide on what they will produce and how? This is the central dialectical tension that has hitherto escaped the ambitious grasp of anti-capitalist alternative movements.12
ALTERNATIVES
If a viable anti-capitalist movement is to emerge, then past and current anti-capitalist strategies have to be re-evaluated. Not only is it vital to step back and think about what can and must be done, and who is going to do it where. It is also vital to match preferred organizational principles and practices with the nature of the political, social, and technical battles that have to be fought and won. Whatever solutions, formulations, organizational forms, and political agendas are proposed must provide answers to three compelling questions:
1) The first is that of crushing material impoverishment for much of the world’s population, along with the concomitant frustration of the potential for the full development of human capacities and creative powers. Marx was above all a pre-eminent philosopher of human flourishing, but he recognized that this was possible only in “that realm of freedom which begins when the realm of necessity is left behind.” The problems of the global accumulation of poverty cannot be confronted, it should be obvious, without confronting the obscene global accumulation of wealth. Anti-poverty organizations need to commit to an anti-wealth politics and to the construction of alternative social relations to those that dominate within capitalism.
2) The second question derives from the clear and imminent dangers of out-of-control environmental degradations and ecological transformations. This, too, is not only a material but also a spiritual and moral question of changing the human sense of nature, as well as the material relation to it. There is no purely technological fix to this question. There have to be significant lifestyle changes (such as rolling back the political, economic, and environmental impacts of the last seventy years of suburbanization) as well as major shifts in consumerism, productivism, and institutional arrangements.
3) The third set of questions, which underpins the first two, derives from a historical and theoretical understanding of the inevitable trajectory of capitalist growth. For a variety of reasons, compounding growth is an absolute condition for the continuous accumulation and reproduction of capital. This is the socially constructed and historically specific law of endless capital accumulation that has to be challenged and eventually abolished. Compound growth (say, at a minimum of 3 percent forever) is a sheer impossibility. Capital has now arrived at an inflection point (which is different from an impasse) in its long history, where this immanent impossibility is beginning to be realized. Any anti-capitalist alternative has to abolish the power of the capitalist law of value to regulate the world market. This requires the abolition of the dominant class relation that underpins and mandates the perpetual expansion of surplus value production and realization. And it is this class relation that produces the increasingly lopsided distributions of wealth and power, along with the perpetual growth syndrome that exerts such enormous destructive pressure on global social relations and ecosystems.
How, then, can progressive forces organize to solve these problems, and how can the hitherto evasive dialectic between the dual imperatives of localized worker control and global coordinations be managed? It is in this context that I want to return to the foundational question of this inquiry: Can urban-based social movements play a constructive role and make their mark in the anti-capitalist struggle across these three dimensions? The answer depends in part upon some foundational reconceptualizations of the nature of class, and on the redefinition of the terrain of class struggles.
The conception of worker control that has hitherto dominated alternative left political thinking is problematic. The focus of struggle has been on the workshop and the factory as a privileged site of production of surplus value. The industrial working class has traditionally been privileged as the vanguard of the proletariat, its main revolutionary agent. But it was not factory workers who produced the Paris Commune. There is, for this reason, a dissident and influential view of the Commune that says it was not a proletarian uprising or a class-based movement at all, but an urban social movement that was reclaiming citizenship rights and the right to the city. It was not, therefore, anti-capitalist.13
I see no reason why it should not be construed as both a class struggle and a struggle for citizenship rights in the place where working people lived. To begin with, the dynamics of class exploitation are not confined to the workplace. Whole economies of dispossession and of predatory practices, of the sort described in Chapter 2 with respect to housing markets, are a case in point. These secondary forms of exploitation are primarily organized by merchants, landlords, and the financiers; and their effects are primarily felt in the living space, not in the factory. These forms of exploitation are and always have been vital to the overall dynamics of capital accumulation and the perpetuation of class power. Wage concessions to workers can, for example, be stolen back and recuperated for the capitalist class as a whole by merchant capitalists and landlords and, in contemporary conditions, even more viciously by the credit-mongers, the bankers, and the financiers. Practices of accumulation by dispossession, rental appropriations, by money- and profit-gouging, lie at the heart of many of the discontents that attach to the qualities of daily life for the mass of the population. Urban social movements typically mobilize around such questions, and they derive from the way in which the perpetuation of class power is organized around living as well as around working. Urban social movements therefore always have a class content even when they are primarily articulated in terms of rights, citizenship, and the travails of social reproduction.
The fact that these discontents relate to the commodity and monetary rather than the production circuit of capital matters not one wit: indeed, it is a big theoretical advantage to reconceptualize matters thus, because it focuses attention on those aspects of capital circulation that so frequently play the nemesis to attempts at worker control in production. Since it is capital circulation as a whole that matters (rather than merely what happens in the productive circuit), what does it matter to the capitalist class as a whole whether value is extracted from the commodity and money circuits rather than from the productive circuit directly? The gap between where surplus value is produced and where it is realized is as crucial theoretically as it is practically. Value created in production may be recaptured for the capitalist class from the workers by landlords charging high rents on housing.
Secondly, urbanization is itself produced. Thousands of workers are engaged in its production, and their work is productive of value and of surplus value. Why not focus, therefore, on the city rather than the factory as the prime site of surplus value production? The Paris Commune can then be reconceptualized as a struggle of that proletariat which produced the city to claim back the right to have and control that which they had produced. This is (and in the Paris Commune case was) a very different kind of proletariat to that which much of the left has typically cast in a vanguard role. It is characterized by insecurity, by episodic, temporary, and spatially diffuse employment, and is very difficult to organize on a workplace basis. But at this point in the history of those parts of the world characterized as advanced capitalism, the conventional factory proletariat has been radically diminished. So we now have a choice: mourn the passing of the possibility of revolution because that proletariat has disappeared, or change our conception of the proletariat to include the hordes of unorganized urbanization producers (of the sort that mobilized in the immigrant rights marches), and explore their distinctive revolutionary capacities and powers.
So who are these workers who produce the city? The city builders, the construction workers in particular, are the most obvious candidate even as they are not the only nor the largest labor force involved. As a political force, the construction workers have in recent times in the United States (and possibly elsewhere) all too often been supportive of the large-scale and class-biased developmentalism that keeps them employed. They do not have to be so. The masons and builders that Haussmann brought to Paris played an important role in the Commune. The “Green Ban” construction union movement in New South Wales in the early 1970s banned working on projects they deemed environmentally unsound, and were successful in much of what they did. They were ultimately destroyed by a combination of concerted state power and their own Maoist national leadership, who considered environmental issues a manifestation of flabby bourgeois sentimentality.14
But there is a seamless connection between those who mine the iron ore that goes into the steel that goes into the construction of the bridges across which the trucks carrying commodities travel to their final destinations of factories and homes for consumption. All of these activities (including spatial movement) are productive of value and of surplus value. If capitalism often recovers from crises, as we saw earlier, by “building houses and filling them with things,” then clearly everyone engaged in that urbanizing activity has a central role to play in the macroeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation. And if maintenance, repairs, and replacements (often difficult to distinguish in practice) are all part of the value-producing stream (as Marx avers), then the vast army of workers involved in these activities in our cities is also contributing to value and surplus value production. In New York City thousands of workers are engaged in erecting scaffolding and taking it down again. They are producing value. If, furthermore, the flow of commodities from place of origin to final destination is productive of value, as Marx also insists, then so are the workers who are employed on the food chain that links rural producers to urban consumers. Thousands of delivery trucks clog the streets of New York City every day. Organized, those workers would have the power to strangle the metabolism of the city. Strikes of transport workers (as, for example, in France over the last twenty years, and now in Shanghai) are extremely effective political weapons (used negatively in Chile in the coup year of 1973). The Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles, and the organization of taxi drivers in New York and LA, are examples of organizing across these dimensions.15 When the rebellious population of El Alto cut the main supply lines into La Paz, forcing the bourgeoisie to live on scraps, they soon gained their political objective. It is in fact in the cities that the wealthy classes are most vulnerable, not necessarily as persons but in terms of the value of the assets they control. It is for this reason that the capitalist state is gearing up for militarized urban struggles as the front line of class struggle in years to come.
Consider the flows not only of food and other consumer goods, but also of energy, water, and other necessities, and their vulnerabilities to disruption too. The production and reproduction of urban life, while some of it can be “dismissed” (an unfortunate word) as “unproductive” in the Marxist canon, is nevertheless socially necessary, part of the “faux frais” of the reproduction of the class relations between capital and labor. Much of this labor has always been temporary, insecure, itinerant, and precarious; and it very often fudges the supposed boundary between production and reproduction (as in the case of street vendors). New forms of organizing are absolutely essential for this labor force that produces and, just as importantly, reproduces the city. This is where newly fledged organizations come in, such as the Excluded Workers Congress in the United Sates, which is an alliance of workers characterized by temporary and insecure conditions of employment, often, as with domestic workers, spatially scattered throughout a metropolitan region.16
The history of conventional labor struggles—and this is my third major point—also needs some rewriting. Most struggles waged by factory-based workers turn out, on inspection, to have had a much broader base. Margaret Kohn complains, for example, how left historians of labor laud the Turin Factory Councils of the early twentieth century while totally ignoring the “Houses of the People” in the community where much of the politics was shaped, and from which strong currents of logistical support flowed.17 E. P. Thompson depicts how the making of the English working class depended as much upon what happened in chapels and in neighborhoods as in the workplace. The local city trades councils have played a much-underestimated role in British political organization, and often anchored the militant base of a nascent Labour Party and other left organizations in particular towns and cities in ways that the national union movement often ignored.18 How successful would the Flint sit-down strike of 1937 have been in the United States had it not been for the masses of the unemployed and the neighborhood organizations outside the gates that unfailingly delivered their support, moral and material?
Organizing the neighborhoods has been just as important in prosecuting labor struggles, as has organizing the workplace. One of the strengths of the factory occupations in Argentina that followed on the collapse of 2001 is that the cooperatively managed factories also turned themselves into neighborhood cultural and educational centers. They built bridges between the community and the workplace. When past owners try to evict the workers or seize back the machinery, the whole populace typically turns out in solidarity with the workers to prevent such action.19 When UNITE HERE sought to mobilize rank-and-file hotel workers around LAX airport in Los Angeles, they relied heavily “on extensive outreach to political, religious and other community allies, building a coalition” that could counter the employers’ repressive strategies.20 But there is, in this, also a cautionary tale: in the British miners’ strikes of the 1970s and 1980s, the miners who lived in diffuse urbanized areas such as Nottingham were the first to cave in, while those in Northumbria, where workplace and living-place politics converged, maintained their solidarity to the end.21 The problem posed by circumstances of this sort will be taken up later.
To the degree that conventional workplaces are disappearing in many parts of the so-called advanced capitalist world (though not, of course, in China or Bangladesh), organizing around not only work but also around conditions in the living space, while building bridges between the two, becomes even more crucial. But it has often been so in the past. Worker-controlled consumer cooperatives offered critical support during the Seattle general strike of 1919, and when the strike collapsed militancy shifted very markedly towards the development of an elaborate and interwoven system of mainly worker-controlled consumer cooperatives.22
As the lens is widened on the social milieu in which struggle is occurring, the sense of who the proletariat might be and what their aspirations and organizational strategies might be is transformed. The gender composition of oppositional politics looks very different when relations outside of the conventional factory (in both workplaces and living spaces) are brought firmly into the picture. The social dynamics of the workplace are not the same as those in the living space. On the latter terrain, distinctions based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and culture are frequently more deeply etched into the social fabric, while issues of social reproduction play a more prominent, even dominant role in the shaping of political subjectivities and consciousness. Conversely, the way capital differentiates and divides populations ethnically, racially, and across gender lines produces marked disparities in the economic dynamics of dispossession in the living space (thanks to the circuits of money and commodity capital). While the median loss of household wealth in the United States for everyone was 28 percent over the period 2005–09, that of Hispanics was 66 percent, and that of blacks 53 percent, while for whites it was 16 percent. The class character of ethnic discriminations in accumulation by dispossession, and the way these discriminations differentially affect neighborhood life, could not be plainer, particularly since most of the losses were due to falling housing values.23 But it is also in neighborhood spaces that profound cultural ties based, for example, in ethnicity, religion, and cultural histories and collective memories can just as often bind as divide, to create the possibility of social and political solidarities in a completely different dimension to that which typically arises within the workplace.
There is a wonderful film that was produced by blacklisted Hollywood writers and directors (the so-called Hollywood Ten) in 1954 called Salt of the Earth. Based on actual events in 1951, it depicts the struggle of highly exploited Mexican-American workers and their families in a zinc mine in New Mexico. The Mexican workers demand equality with white workers, safer work conditions, and to be treated with dignity (a recurring theme in many anti-capitalist struggles). The women are distressed by the repeated failure of the male-dominated union to press home issues like sanitation and running water in the tied accommodations they inhabit. When the workers strike for their demands and are then banned from picketing under the Taft-Hartley Act provisions, the women take over the picket line (overcoming a lot of male opposition in the process). The men have to look after the children, only to learn the hard way how important running water and sanitation are to a reasonable daily life at home. Gender equality and feminist consciousness emerge as crucial weapons in the class struggle. When the sheriffs come to evict the families, popular support from other families (clearly based in cultural solidarities) not only sustains the striking families with food, but also puts them back into their tied housing. The company in the end has to cave in. The awesome power of unity between gender, ethnicity, working, and living is not easy to construct, and the tension in the film between men and women, between Anglo and Mexican workers, and between work-based and daily life perspectives, is just as significant as that between labor and capital. Only when unity and parity are constructed among all the forces of labor, the film says, will you be able to win. The danger this message represented for capital is measured by the fact that this is the only film ever to be systematically banned for political reasons from being shown in any US commercial venue for many years. Most of the actors were not professional; many were drawn from the miner’s union. But the brilliant leading professional actress, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported to Mexico.24
In a recent book, Fletcher and Gapasin argue that the labor movement should pay more attention to geographical rather than sectoral forms of organization—that the US movement should empower the central labor councils in cities in addition to organizing sectorally.
To the extent that labor speaks about matters of class, it should not see itself as separate from the community. The term labor should denote forms of organization with roots in the working class and with agendas that explicitly advance the class demands of the working class. In that sense, a community-based organization rooted in the working class (such as a worker’s center) that addresses class-specific issues is a labor organization in the same way that a trade union is. To push the envelope a bit more, a trade union that addresses the interests of only one section of the working class (such as a white supremacist craft union) deserves the label labor organization less than does a community-based organization that assists the unemployed or the homeless.25
They therefore propose a new approach to labor organizing that
essentially defies current trade union practices in forming alliances and taking political action. Indeed, it has the following central premise: if class struggle is not restricted to the workplace, then neither should unions be. The strategic conclusion is that unions must think in terms of organizing cities rather than simply organizing workplaces (or industries). And organizing cities is possible only if unions work with allies in metropolitan social blocks.26
“How then,” they go on to ask “does one organize a city?” This, it seems to me, is one of the key questions that the left will have to answer if anti-capitalist struggle is to be revitalized in the years to come. Such struggles, as we have seen, have a distinguished history. The inspiration drawn from “Red Bologna” in the 1970s is a case in point. There has in fact been a long and distinguished history of “municipal socialism,” and even whole phases of radical urban reform, such as that which occurred in “Red Vienna” or through the local radical municipal councils in Britain in the 1920s, which need to be recuperated as central to the history both of left reformism and of more revolutionary movements.27 And it is one of those curious ironies of history that the French Communist Party distinguished itself far more in municipal administration (in part because it had no dogmatic theory or instructions from Moscow to guide it) than it did in other arenas of political life, from the 1960s even up to the present day. The British trade union councils likewise played a crucial role in urban politics, and rooted the militant power of local left parties. This tradition continued in the struggle by the municipalities in Britain against Thatcherism in the early 1980s. These were not only rearguard actions but, as in the case of the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s, potentially innovative, until Margaret Thatcher, recognizing the threat this urban-based opposition posed, abolished that whole layer of governance. Even in the United States, Milwaukee for many years had a socialist administration, and it is worth remarking that the only socialist ever elected to the US Senate began his career and earned the people’s trust as mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY AS A POLITICAL CLASS-BASED DEMAND
If the participants in the Paris Commune were reclaiming their right to the city they had collectively helped produce, then why cannot “the right to the city” become a key mobilizing slogan for anti-capitalist struggle? The right to the city is, as was noted at the outset, an empty signifier full of immanent but not transcendent possibilities. This does not mean it is irrelevant or politically impotent; everything depends on who gets to fill the signifier with revolutionary as opposed to reformist immanent meaning.
It is not always easy to distinguish between reformist and revolutionary initiatives in urban settings. Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, ecologically sensitive programs in Curitiba, or living-wage campaigns in many US cities appear reformist (and rather marginal at that). The Chongqing initiative, described in Chapter 2, sounds on the surface more like an authoritarian version of Nordic paternalistic socialism rather than a revolutionary movement. But as their influence spreads, so initiatives of this sort reveal deeper layers of possibility for more radical conceptions and actions at the metropolitan scale. A spreading, revitalized rhetoric (originating in Brazil in the 1990s, but then moving from Zagreb to Hamburg to Los Angeles) over the right to the city, for example, seems to suggest something more revolutionary might be in prospect.28 The measure of that possibility appears in the desperate attempts of existing political powers (for example, the NGOs and international institutions, including the World Bank, assembled at the Rio World Urban Forum in 2010) to co-opt that language to their own purposes.29 In the same way that Marx depicted restrictions on the length of the working day as a first step down a revolutionary path, so claiming back the right for everyone to live in a decent house in a decent living environment can be seen as the first step towards a more comprehensive revolutionary movement.
There is no point in complaining at the attempt to co-opt. The left should take it as a compliment and battle to sustain its own distinctive immanent meaning: all those whose labors are engaged in producing and reproducing the city have a collective right not only to that which they produce, but also to decide what kind of urbanism is to be produced where, and how. Alternative democratic vehicles (other than the existing democracy of money power) such as popular assemblies need to be constructed if urban life is to be revitalized and reconstructed outside of dominant class relations.
The right to the city is not an exclusive individual right, but a focused collective right. It is inclusive not only of construction workers but also of all those who facilitate the reproduction of daily life: the caregivers and teachers, the sewer and subway repair men, the plumbers and electricians, the scaffold erectors and crane operators, the hospital workers and the truck, bus, and taxi drivers, the restaurant workers and the entertainers, the bank clerks and the city administrators. It seeks a unity from within an incredible diversity of fragmented social spaces and locations within innumerable divisions of labor. And there are many putative forms of organization—from workers’ centers and regional workers’ assemblies (such as that of Toronto) to alliances (such as the Right to the City alliances and the Excluded Workers Congress and other forms of organization of precarious labor) that have this objective upon their political radar.
But, for obvious reasons, it is a complicated right partly by virtue of the contemporary conditions of capitalist urbanization, as well as because of the nature of the populations that might actively pursue such a right. Murray Bookchin, for example, took the plausible view (also attributable to Lewis Mumford and many others influenced by the social anarchist tradition of thinking) that capitalist processes of urbanization have destroyed the city as a functioning body politic upon which a civilized anti-capitalist alternative might be built.30 In a way, Lefebvre agrees, though in his case far more emphasis is placed on the rationalizations of urban space by state bureaucrats and technocrats to facilitate the reproduction of capital accumulation and of dominant class relations. The right to the contemporary suburb is hardly a viable anti-capitalist slogan.
It is for this reason that the right to the city has to be construed not as a right to that which already exists, but as a right to rebuild and re-create the city as a socialist body politic in a completely different image—one that eradicates poverty and social inequality, and one that heals the wounds of disastrous environmental degradation. For this to happen, the production of the destructive forms of urbanization that facilitate perpetual capital accumulation has to be stopped.
This was the sort of thing that Murray Bookchin argued for in pushing to create what he called a “municipal libertarianism” embedded in a bioregional conception of associated municipal assemblies rationally regulating their interchanges with each other, as well as with nature. It is at this point that the world of practical politics fruitfully intersects with the long history of largely anarchist-inspired utopian thinking and writing about the city.31
TOWARDS URBAN REVOLUTION
Three theses emerge from this history. First, work-based struggles, from strikes to factory takeovers, are far more likely to succeed when there is strong and vibrant support from popular forces assembled at the surrounding neighborhood or community level (including support from influential local leaders and their political organizations). This presumes that strong links between workers and local populations already exist or can be quickly constructed. Such links can arise “naturally” out of the simple fact that the workers’ families constitute the community (as in the case of many mining communities of the sort portrayed in Salt of the Earth). But in more diffuse urban settings, there has to be a conscious political attempt to construct, maintain and strengthen such links. Where those links do not exist, as happened with the Nottinghamshire coal miners in the strikes of the 1980s in Britain, they have to be created. Otherwise such movements are far more likely to fail.
Secondly, the concept of work has to shift from a narrow definition attaching to industrial forms of labor to the far broader terrain of the work entailed in the production and reproduction of an increasingly urbanized daily life. Distinctions between work-based and community-based struggles start to fade away, as indeed does the idea that class and work are defined in a place of production in isolation from the site of social reproduction in the household.32 Those who bring running water to our homes are just as important in the struggle for a better quality of life as those who make the pipes and the faucets in the factory. Those who deliver the food to the city (including the street vendors) are just as significant as those who grow it. Those who cook the food before it is eaten (the roasted-corn or hot-dog vendors on the streets, or those who slave away over the stoves in the household kitchens or over open fires) likewise add value to that food before it is digested. The collective labor involved in the production and reproduction of urban life must therefore become more tightly folded into left thinking and organizing. Earlier distinctions that made sense—between the urban and the rural, the city and the country—have in recent times also become moot. The chain of supply both into and out of the cities entails a continuous movement, and does not entail a break. Above all, the concepts of work and of class have to be fundamentally reformulated. The struggle for collective citizens’ rights (such as those of immigrant workers) has to be seen as integral to anti-capitalist class struggle.
This revitalized conception of the proletariat embraces and includes the now massive informal sectors characterized by temporary, insecure, and unorganized labor. Groups in the population of this sort, it turns out, have historically played an important role in urban rebellions and revolts. Their action has not always been of a left character (but then neither can craft unions always claim that). They have often been susceptible to the blandishments of unstable or authoritarian charismatic leadership, secular or religious. For this reason the politics of such disorganized groups have often wrongly been dismissed by the conventional left as those of the “urban mob” (or, even more unfortunately, in Marxist lore as a “lumpenproletariat”), as much to be feared as embraced. It is imperative that these populations now be embraced as crucial to, rather than excluded from, anti-capitalist politics.
Finally, while the exploitation of living labor in production (in the broader sense already defined) must remain central to the conception of any anti-capitalist movement, struggles against the recuperation and realization of surplus value from workers in their living spaces have to be given equal status to struggles at the various points of production of the city. As in the case of temporary and insecure workers, the extension of class action in this direction poses organizational problems. But, as we shall see, it also holds out innumerable possibilities.
“HOW, THEN, DOES ONE ORGANIZE A CITY?”
The honest answer to Fletcher and Gapasin’s question is: we simply do not know, partly because not enough hard thought has been given to the question, and partly because there is no systematic historical record of evolving political practices on which to base any generalizations. There have, of course, been brief periods of experimentation with “gas and water” socialist administration, or more adventurous urban utopianism, as in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.33 But much of this easily faded into reformist socialist realism or paternalistic socialist/communist modernism (of which we see many touching relics in Eastern Europe). Most of what we now know about urban organization comes from conventional theories and studies of urban governance and administration within the context of bureaucratic capitalist governmentality (against which Lefebvre quite rightly endlessly railed), all of which is a far cry from the organization of an anti-capitalist politics. The best we have is a theory of the city as a corporate form, with all that this implies in terms of the possibilities of corporatist decision-making (which can, on occasion, when taken over by progressive forces, contest the more rabid forms of capitalist development and begin to address the questions of crippling and glaring social inequality and environmental degradations, at least at the local level, as happened in Porto Alegre and as was attempted in Ken Livingstone’s GLC). Alongside this, there is an extensive literature (usually in these times laudatory rather than critical) on the virtues of competitive urban entrepreneurialism, in which city administrations use a wide variety of incentives to attract (in other words, subsidize) investment.34
So how can we even begin to answer Fletcher and Gapasin’s question? One way is to examine singular examples of urban political practices in revolutionary situations. So I close with a summary look at recent events in Bolivia, in the search for clues as to how urban rebellions might relate to anti-capitalist movements.
It was in the streets and squares of Cochabamba that a rebellion against neoliberal privatization was fought out in the famous “Water Wars” of 2000. Government policies were rebuffed, and two major international corporations—Bechtel and Suez—were forced out. And it was from El Alto, a teeming city on the plateau above La Paz, that rebellious movements arose to force the resignation of the pro-neoliberal president, Sánchez de Lozada, in October 2003, and to do the same to his successor, Carlos Mesa, in 2005. All of this paved the way for the national electoral victory of the progressive Evo Morales in December 2005. It was in Cochabamba also that an attempted counter-revolution by conservative elites against the presidency of Evo Morales was thwarted in 2007, as the conservative city administration fled the town in the face of the wrath of indigenous peoples who occupied it.
The difficulty, as always, is to understand the distinctive role local conditions played in these singular events, and to assess what universal principles (if any) we might derive from a study of them. This problem has bedeviled conflicting interpretations of the universal lessons that might be drawn from the Paris Commune of 1871. The advantage of a focus on contemporary El Alto, however, is that this is an ongoing struggle, and therefore open to continuous political interrogation and analysis. There already exist some excellent contemporary studies upon which to base interim conclusions.
Jeffrey Webber, for example, provides a compelling interpretation of events in Bolivia over the last decade or so.35 He views the years 2000–05 as a genuinely revolutionary epoch in a situation of deep cleavage between elite and popular classes. Popular rejection of neoliberal policies with respect to the use of treasured natural resources on the part of a state ruled by a traditional elite (and backed by the forces of international capital) fused with a long-standing struggle for liberation from racial repression by an indigenous, largely peasant population. The violence of the neoliberal regime provoked uprisings that led to Morales’s election in 2005. The entrenched elites (particularly concentrated in the city of Santa Cruz) subsequently launched a counter-revolutionary movement against the Morales government by demanding regional and local autonomy. This was an interesting move, because ideals of “local autonomy” have more often than not been embraced by the left in Latin America as central to its liberation struggles. It was often a demand of indigenous populations in Bolivia, and sympathetic academic theorists like Arturo Escobar tend to view such a demand as inherently progressive, if not a necessary precondition for anti-capitalist movements.36 But the Bolivian case demonstrates that local or regional autonomy can be used by whatever party stands to benefit from shifting the locus of political and state decision-making to the particular scale that favors its own interests. This was what led Margaret Thatcher, for example, to abolish the Greater London Council, because it was a center of opposition to her policies. This is what animated Bolivian elites to seek the autonomy of Santa Cruz against the Morales government, which they saw as hostile to their interests. Having lost the national space, they sought to declare their local space autonomous.
While Morales’ political strategy after his election has helped to consolidate the power of the indigenous movements, according to Webber he effectively abandoned the class-based revolutionary perspective that emerged in 2000–05 in favor of a negotiated and constitutional compromise with landed and capitalist elites (as well as accommodation to outside imperial pressures). The result, Webber argues, has been a “reconstituted neoliberalism” (with “Andean characteristics”) after 2005, rather than any movement towards an anti-capitalist transition. The idea of a socialist transition has been postponed many years into the future. Morales has, however, taken a global leadership role on environmental issues by embracing the favored indigenous conception of “the rights of mother nature” in the Cochabamba declaration of 2010, and by incorporating this idea into the Bolivian constitution.
Webber’s views have been vigorously contested, as might be expected, by supporters of the Morales regime.37 I am not in a position to judge whether Morales’ undoubtedly reformist and constitutional turn at the national level is a matter of political choice, expediency, or a necessity imposed by the configuration of class forces prevailing in Bolivia, backed by strong external imperialist pressures. Even Webber concedes that in the Cochabamba peasant-led uprising against a right-wing autonomist administration in 2007, it would have been disastrous adventurism for the radical initiative to go against the constitutionalism of the Morales government by permanently replacing the elected conservative government officials who had fled the city by a popular assembly form of government.38
What role has urban organization played in these struggles? This is an obvious question, given the key roles of Cochabamba and El Alto as centers of repeated rebellions and the role of Santa Cruz as the center of the counter-revolutionary movement. In Webber’s account, El Alto, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz all appear as mere sites where the forces of class opposition and populist indigenous movements happened to play out. He does at one point note, however, that “the 80-percent-indigenous, informal proletarian city of El Alto—with its rich insurrectionary traditions of revolutionary Marxism from ‘relocated’ ex-miners, and indigenous radicalism from the Aymara, Quechua, and other indigenous rural-to-urban migrants—played the most important role at the height of sometimes bloody confrontations with the state.” He also notes that
the rebellions, in their best moments, were characterized by assembly-style, democratic, and mass-based mobilization from below, drawing upon the organizational patterns of the Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalist tin miners—the vanguard of the Bolivian left for much of the twentieth century—and variations of the indigenous ayllus—traditional communitarian structures—adapted to new rural and urban contexts.39
But we know little more than this from Webber’s account. The particular conditions pertaining at the different sites of struggle are largely ignored (even when he provides a blow-by-blow account of the 2007 rebellion in Cochabamba) in favor of an account of the class and populist forces in motion within Bolivia in general, against the background of external imperialist pressures. It is therefore interesting to turn to the studies of the anthropologists Leslie Gill and Sian Lazar, both of whom provide in-depth portrayals of conditions, social relations, and putative organizational forms prevailing in El Alto at different historical moments. Gill’s study, Teetering on the Rim, published in 2000, detailed conditions prevailing in the 1990s, while Lazar’s study, El Alto, Rebel City, published in 2010, was based on field work in El Alto both before and after the rebellion of 2003.40 Neither Gill nor Lazar anticipated the possibility of rebellion before it happened. While Gill recorded plenty of politics occurring on the ground in the 1990s, the movements were so fragmented and confused (particularly given the negative role of the NGOs that had displaced the state as the main providers of social services) as to seem to preclude any coherent mass movement, even though the schoolteachers’ strike that occurred during her field-work was fiercely fought out in explicitly class-conscious terms. Lazar was also taken by surprise by the rebellion of October 2003, and returned to El Alto after it occurred to try to reconstruct the circumstances that had given rise to it.
El Alto is a special kind of place, and it is important to lay out the particularities.41 It is a relatively new city (only incorporated in 1988) of immigrants on the inhospitable Altiplano, high up above La Paz, largely populated by rural peasants driven off the land—by the gradual commercialization of agricultural production; by displaced industrial workers (particularly those from the tin mines that had been rationalized, privatized, and in some instances closed down from the mid 1980s onwards); and by low-income refugees from La Paz, where high land and housing costs had for some years been pushing poorer people to look for living space elsewhere. There was not, therefore, a strongly entrenched bourgeoisie in El Alto, as there was in La Paz and Santa Cruz. It was, as Gill puts it, a city “where many victims of Bolivia’s ongoing experiment with free-market reform teeter on the edge of survival.” The steady withdrawal of the state, from the mid 1980s, from administration and service-provision under neoliberal privatization meant that local state controls were relatively weak. Populations had to hustle and self-organize to survive, or rely on the dubious help of NGOs supplemented by donations and favors extracted from political parties in return for support at election times. But three of the four main supply routes into La Paz pass through El Alto, and the power to choke them off became important in the struggles that occurred. The urban-rural continuum (with the rural dominated largely by indigenous peasant populations with distinctive cultural traditions and forms of social organization, like the ayllus that Webber mentions) was an important feature to the metabolism of the city. The city mediated between the urbanity of La Paz and the rurality of the region, both geographically and ethno-culturally. Flows of people and of goods throughout the region circulated around and through El Alto, while the daily commute from El Alto into La Paz rendered the latter city dependent on El Alto for much of its low-wage labor force.
Older forms of collective organization of labor in Bolivia had been disrupted in the 1980s with the closure of the tin mines, but had earlier constituted “one of the most militant working classes in Latin America.”42 The miners had played a key role in the revolution of 1952, which led to the nationalization of the tin mines, and had likewise led the way in bringing down the repressive Hugo Banzer regime in 1978. Many of the displaced miners ended up in El Alto after 1985 and, by Gill’s account, experienced great difficulty in adjusting to their new situation. But it would later become clear that their political class consciousness, animated by Trotskyism and anarcho-syndicalism, did not entirely disappear. It was to become an important resource (though how important is a matter of dispute) in subsequent struggles, beginning with the 1995 teachers’ strike that Gill studied in detail. But their politics shifted in important ways. With no choice “but to participate in the poorly paid and insecure work that engaged the vast majority of El Alto’s residents,” the miners went from a situation in which the class enemy and their own solidarity was clear, to one in which they had to answer a different and far more difficult strategic question: “[H]ow can they construct a form of solidarity in El Alto from an ethnically diverse social constituency characterized by widely different individual histories, a mosaic of work relations, and intense internal competitiveness?”43
This transition, forced upon the miners through neoliberalization, is by no means unique to Bolivia or El Alto. It poses the same dilemma that hits displaced steel workers in Sheffield, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. In fact it is a pretty universal dilemma wherever the vast wave of deindustrialization and privatization unleashed since the mid 1970s or so has hit home. How it was confronted in Bolivia is therefore of more than passing interest.
“New kinds of trade union structures have emerged,” writes Lazar,
especially those of the peasants and the informal sector workers in the cities … They are based upon coalitions of smallholders, even microcapitalists, who do not work for one boss in one place, where they can be easily targeted by the army. Their household model of production allows for fluidity of associational life, but has also allowed them to form alliances and organizations based upon territorial location; the street where they sell, the village or region where they live and farm, and, with the addition of the vecino organizational structures in the cities, their zone.
In this, the association between people and places becomes extremely important as the source of common bonds. While these bonds can just as often be agonistic as harmonious, the face-to-face contacts are frequent and therefore incipiently strong.
Trade unions are flourishing in the informal economy of El Alto and form a crucial part of the structure of civic organization that is parallel to the state and that shapes multi-tiered citizenship in the city. They do so in a context where economic competition between individuals is painfully exaggerated and where one would therefore expect political collaboration to be difficult if not downright impossible.
While the social movements often fall prey to severe factionalism and infighting, they “are beginning to build a more coherent ideology out of the particularity of the different sectoral demands.”44 The residual collective class consciousness and organizational experience of the displaced tin miners thereby became a critical resource. When coupled with practices of local democracy resting on indigenous traditions of local and popular decision-making assemblies (the ayllus), the subjective conditions for creating alternative political associations were partially realized. As a result, “the working class in Bolivia is reconstituting itself as a political subject, albeit not in its traditional form.”45
Hardt and Negri also take up this point in their own appropriation of the Bolivian struggle in support of their theory of multitude.
All relations of hegemony and representation within the working class are thus thrown into question. It is not even possible for the traditional unions to represent adequately the complex multiplicity of class subjects and experiences. This shift, however, signals no farewell to the working class or even a decline of worker struggle but rather an increasing multiplicity of the proletariat and a new physiognomy of struggles.46
Lazar partially concurs with this theoretical reformulation, but provides much more fine-grained detail on how the working-class movement comes to be constituted. As she sees it, “the nested affiliation of an alliance of associations, each one with local forms of accountability, is one of the sources of the social movements’ strength in Bolivia.” These organizations were often hierarchical, and sometimes authoritarian rather than democratic. But “if we view democracy as the will of the people, the corporatist side of Bolivian politics makes sense as one of its most important democratic (albeit not necessarily egalitarian) traditions.” The anti-capitalist victories of the sort that saw off major corporate enemies such as Bechtel and Suez “would not have been possible without the mundane experiences of collective democracy that are part of alteños’ day-to-day lives.”47
Democracy is organized in El Alto, according to Lazar, along three distinctive lines. The neighborhood associations are place-bound organizations that exist not only to provide collective local goods but also to mediate the many conflicts that arise between residents. The overarching Association of Neighborhood Associations largely exists as a forum for resolving conflicts between neighborhoods. This is a classic “nested hierarchical” form, but one in which all sorts of mechanisms exist, which Lazar examines in detail, to ensure that leaders either rotate or stay faithful to their base (a principle which, until the Tea Party came along, would be anathema in US politics).
The second pinion comprises the sectoral associations of various groups in the population, such as street vendors, transport workers, and the like. And again, much of the work of these associations is devoted to mediating conflicts (for example, between individual street vendors). But it is in this way that precarious workers in the so-called informal sector are organized (a lesson to be learned by the “Excluded Workers” movement in the United States). This form of organization possesses tentacles reaching far back down the supply chain of, for example, fish and foodstuffs from the surrounding areas. Through these links it is capable of easily and instantaneously mobilizing the insurrectionary capacities of surrounding peasant and rural populations—or, conversely, of organizing immediate responses in the city to rural massacres and repressions. These geographical ties were strong, and overlapped with those of the neighborhood associations to which many peasant migrant families belonged, while maintaining links back to their villages of origin.
Thirdly, there were more conventional unions, the most important of which was that of the schoolteachers who, ever since the strike of 1995, had been in the forefront of militancy (as was also the case in Oaxaca in Mexico). The trade unions had a local, regional, and national organizational structure that continued to function in negotiations with the state, even though they had been much weakened by the neoliberal assault upon regular employment and traditional forms of trade union organization over the preceding thirty years.
But there is something else at work in El Alto that Lazar is at great pains to integrate into her account. Underlying values and ideals are particularly strong, and are often upheld and articulated through popular cultural events and activities—fiestas, religious festivals, dance events—as well as through more direct forms of collective participation, such as the popular assemblies (in the neighborhoods and within the formal and informal trade unions). These cultural solidarities and collective memories enable unions to overcome tensions “and promote a collective sense of self, which in turn enables them to be effective political subjects.”48 The greatest of these tensions is that between leadership and the base. Both place-based and sectoral forms of organization exhibit similar characteristics, in which popular bases “attempt to assert collective values in the face of leaders’ perceived individualism.” The mechanisms are complex, but in Lazar’s account there seem to be multiple informal means by which issues of collectivism and individualism, solidarity and factionalism, are worked out. Furthermore, the “trade union” and the “communitarian” forms of organization are not distinct traditions, but frequently fuse culturally through the “syncretic appropriation of political traditions, drawing on trade unionisms, populism, and indigenous democratic values and practices. It is the creative mixing of these different threads that has enabled El Alto to overcome its political marginalization at the national level and take center stage.”49 These were the sorts of bonds “that coalesce at particular moments, such as Cochabamba in 2000, the peasant blockades of the altiplano of April and September 2000, February and October of 2003 in El Alto and La Paz and January–March 2005 in El Alto.”
El Alto has become such an important focus for this new politics, Lazar maintains, largely because of the ways in which the sense of citizenship has been constituted in the city. This is an important issue because it presages the possibility of class and indigenous rebellion being organized through solidarities based in common citizenship. Historically, of course, this has always been a central feature of the French revolutionary tradition. In El Alto this sense of belonging and solidarity is
constituted as a mediated relationship between citizen and state that is shaped by the structure of collective civic organization parallel to the state at zone, citywide and national levels. In 1999, the political party … lost its hold over these organizations and over the city in general, enabling a more oppositional stance to emerge; this coincided with the fact that alteños have been radicalized by increasing economic hardship. The protests of September and October 2003 and subsequent years derive their strength from the domination of these particular political circumstances with much more long-standing processes of identification with the countryside and the construction of a collective sense of self.
Lazar goes on to conclude that
citizenship in the indigenous city of El Alto involves a mix of urban and rural, collectivism and individualism, egalitarianism and hierarchy. The alternative visions of democracy that are being produced have reinvigorated national and regional indigenous movements by the ways that they combine class-based and nationalist concerns with identity politics, through the contestation over the ownership of the means of social reproduction and the nature of the state.
The two communities that were most salient for her in all of this “are based on residence at zonal and city levels, and on occupation at the city level.”50 It is through the idea of citizenship that agonistic relations in both the workplace and the living space are converted into a powerful form of social solidarity.
These diverse social processes (which Lazar is at pains not to romanticize in ways that so much of the academic left does) had a singular effect on how the city itself came to be regarded. “It is pertinent to ask,” she writes,
what is it that makes El Alto a city rather than a slum, a suburb, a market-place, or a transport hub. My answer is that different actors, in both the state system and in nonstate places, are in the process of making a distinctive and separate identity for El Alto. That identity is of course not singular, but is becoming increasingly bound up with political radicalism and indigeneity.
And it was “the conversion of that identity and its emergent political consciousness into political action” in 2003 and 2005 that brought El Alto to not only national but international attention as a “rebel city.”51
The lesson to be learned from Lazar’s account is that it is indeed possible to build a political city out of the debilitating processes of neoliberal urbanization, and thereby reclaim the city for anti-capitalist struggle. While the events of October 2003 should be understood as “a highly contingent coming together of different sectoral interests that exploded into something much more when the government ordered the army to kill the demonstrators,” the preceding years of organizing those sectoral interests and the building of a sense of the city as “a center of radicalism and indigeneity” cannot be ignored.52 The organization of informal laborers along traditional union lines, the pulling together of the Federation of neighborhood associations, the politicization of urban-rural relations, the creation of nested hierarchies and of leadership structures alongside egalitarian assemblies, the mobilization of the forces of culture and of collective memories—all provide models for thinking about what might consciously be done to reclaim cities for anti-capitalist struggle. The forms of organization that came together in El Alto in fact bear a strong resemblance to some of the forms that came together in the Paris Commune (the arrondissements, the unions, the political factions, and the strong sense of citizenship in and loyalty to the city).
FUTURE MOVES
While, in the case of El Alto, all of this can be seen as an outcome of contingent circumstances that just happened to come together, why cannot we imagine consciously building a city-wide anti-capitalist movement along such lines? Imagine in New York City, for example, the revival of the now largely somnolent community boards as neighborhood assemblies with budget-allocation powers, along with a merged Right to the City Alliance and Excluded Workers Congress agitating for greater equality in incomes and access to health care and housing provision, all coupled with a revitalized local Labor Council to try to rebuild the city and the sense of citizenship and social and environmental justice out of the wreckage being wrought by neoliberal corporatist urbanization. What the story of El Alto suggests is that such a coalition will work only if the forces of culture and of a politically radical tradition (which most certainly exists in New York, as it also does in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) can be mobilized in such a way as to animate citizen-subjects (however fractious, as indeed is always the case in New York) behind a radically different project of urbanization to that dominated by the class interests of developers and financiers determined to “build like Robert Moses with Jane Jacobs in mind.”
But there is one hugely important jester in this otherwise rosy-looking scenario for the development of anti-capitalist struggle. For what the Bolivian case also demonstrates, if Webber is only half right, is that any anti-capitalist drive mobilized through successive urban rebellions has to be consolidated at some point at a far higher scale of generality, lest it all lapse back at the state level into parliamentary and constitutional reformism that can do little more than reconstitute neoliberalism within the interstices of continuing imperial domination. This poses more general questions not only of the state and state institutional arrangements of law, policing, and administration, but of the state system within which all states are embedded. Much of the contemporary left, unfortunately, is reluctant to pose these questions even as it struggles from time to time to come up with some form of macro-organization, such as Murray Bookchin’s radical “confederalism” or Elinor Ostrom’s mildly reformist “polycentric governance,” which looks suspiciously like a state system, sounds like a state system, and will almost surely act like a state system no matter what the intent of its proponents might be.53 It is either that, or lapse into the kind of incoherence that has Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth smash the state on page 361 only to resurrect it on page 380 as the guarantor of a universal minimum standard of living, as well as of universal health care and education.54
But it is precisely here that the question of how one organizes a whole city becomes so crucial. It liberates progressive forces from being organizationally locked into the micro-level of struggling worker collectives and solidarity economies (important those these may be), and forces upon us a completely different way of both theorizing and practicing an anti-capitalist politics. From a critical perspective it is possible to see precisely why Ostrom’s preference for “polycentric government” must fail, along with Bookchin’s “confederal” municipal libertarianism. “If the whole society were to be organized as a confederation of autonomous municipalities,” writes Iris Young, “then what would prevent the development of large-scale inequality and injustice among communities [of the sort described in Chapter 3] and thereby the oppression of individuals who do not live in the more privileged and more powerful communities?”55 The only way to avoid such outcomes is for some higher authority both to mandate and enforce those cross-municipality transfers that would roughly equalize at least opportunities, and perhaps outcomes as well. This is what Murray Bookchin’s confederal system of autonomous municipalities would almost certainly be unable to achieve, to the degree that this level of governance is barred from making policy and firmly restricted to the administration and governance of things, and effectively barred from the governance of people. The only way that general rules of, say, redistribution of wealth between municipalities can be established is either by democratic consensus (which, we know from historical experience, is unlikely to be voluntarily and informally arrived at) or by citizens as democratic subjects with powers of decision at different levels within a structure of hierarchical governance. To be sure, there is no reason why all power should flow downwards in such a hierarchy, and mechanisms can surely be devised to prevent dictatorship or authoritarianism. But the plain fact is that certain problems of, for example, the common wealth, only become visible at particular scales, and it is only appropriate that democratic decisions be made at those scales.
From this standpoint the movement in Bolivia might want to look southwards for inspiration, at how the movement initially concentrated in Santiago in Chile has morphed from students demanding from the state free and egalitarian educational provision into an anti-neoliberal alliance of movements demanding of the state constitutional reform, improved pension provision, new labor laws, and a progressive personal and corporate tax system to begin to reverse the slide into ever greater social inequality in Chilean civil society. The question of the state, and in particular what kind of state (or non-capitalist equivalent), cannot be avoided even in the midst of immense contemporary skepticism, on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, of the viability or desirability of such a form of institutionalization.
The world of citizenship and rights, within some body-politic of a higher order, is not necessarily opposed to that of class and struggle. Citizen and comrade can march together in anti-capitalist struggle, albeit often working at different scales. But this can occur only if we become, as Park long ago urged, more “conscious of the nature of our task,” which is collectively to build the socialist city on the ruins of destructive capitalist urbanization. That is the city air that can make people truly free. But this entails a revolution in anti-capitalist thinking and practices. Progressive anti-capitalist forces can more easily mobilize to leap forward into global coordinations via urban networks that may be hierarchical but not monocentric, corporatist but nevertheless democratic, egalitarian and horizontal, systemically nested and federated (imagine a league of socialist cities much as the Hanseatic League of old became the network that nourished the powers of merchant capitalism), internally discordant and contested, but solidarious against capitalist class power—and, above all, deeply engaged in the struggle to undermine and eventually overthrow the power of the capitalist laws of value on the world market to dictate the social relations under which we work and live. Such a movement must open the way for universal human flourishing beyond the constraints of class domination and commodified market determinations. The world of true freedom begins, as Marx insisted, only when such material constraints are left behind. Reclaiming and organizing cities for anti-capitalist struggles is a great place to begin.