The world market is a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer, and in which labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system.
Fredric Jameson
Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large … and a further assumption is that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random.
Isaac Asimov
In 1968, in The Right to the City, Lefebvre said that the right to the city was a “cry and demand” for city life. Two years on, in The Urban Revolution, he said we should no longer think about cities but about “urban society.” Then two years on again, in La pensée marxiste et la ville, he’s back not only using the term “city” but also using it with a new twist, making the claim we’ve just heard: that the development of science and the application of new technology signal the knell of the city because they’re both predicated on the need to supersede the city. Information technology and automated work enable the urban to come into existence, Lefebvre says, and they enable the urban to expand its planetary domain. Thus, as soon as the urban begins its planetary long march, what we have is a resultant “postemployment” society coupled with more planetary urbanization and more industrial contradictions that are now somehow global-urban contradictions.
The industrial city had to give way to the urban, and this urban society is forever a society marked by relations we could describe as “postwork,” or at least “post-salaried work.” This seems to be Lefebvre’s point, as he tosses ideas out—he loved the “bubbling and fermenting of ideas,” he told us in La somme et le reste—only to leave it up to us to sort and figure these ideas out, to bottle them up in all their effervescence and volatility. Curiously, what Lefebvre says about the city–urban dialectic in La pensée marxiste et la ville chimes with what Fredric Jameson said recently in Representing Capital about Marx’s manufacture–modern industry dialectic: that the passage from the former to the latter necessarily results in the formation of unemployment. Unemployment isn’t so much a symptom of systemic crisis or depression as the “normal” functioning order of the system, something endemic in its everyday operations. As Jameson writes, “Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such.”1 For many people around the world this means that they’ve literally “dropped out of history,” they’re now “officially” dispensable on the world market, and they’re “officially” dispensable in capitalist urban society. We might paraphrase Jameson to express Lefebvre’s own thesis: Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of urbanization and its expansion on a planetary scale, which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such. The claim is again cavalier; we need to explore it in more detail in what follows. We need to bottle it up both analytically and politically: We need to brew our own moonshine from Lefebvrian hops.
One initial difficulty in examining a work like La pensée marxiste et la ville is why Lefebvre should want to revert to the “city” after dissing it in The Urban Revolution. Urban society, he said in that latter text, is built upon the ruins of the city, and the city exists only as a “historical entity.” Therein lies a little clue: it appears Lefebvre wants to write a historical text, a book about ideas of the city, of how the city has been conceptualized within Marx and Engels’s analyses of the capitalist mode of production. Marx and Engels never gave us an explicit “urban mode of production,” Lefebvre says in Pensée, but if we look closely in their oeuvre, in a way they did: the city was itself a developmental force, the seat of modern industry, the division of labor, the reproduction of labor power, and technological innovation. The rise of the industrial city wasn’t only vital for the expansion of the productive forces but crucial politically for an ascendant bourgeoisie asserting itself in the passage from feudalism to capitalism.
The other thing that’s perhaps noteworthy about why Lefebvre should then want to write a text about a body of thought (la pensée marxiste) and the city (la ville) was the relative dominance of Althusser’s thought. In his opening “Aver-tissement,” Lefebvre warns readers what this book is and isn’t; it isn’t, he says, a “symptômale” reading of Marx and Engels. The word “symptômale” is put in inverted commas because it’s a term Althusser made infamous in his “Reading” of Marx’s Capital—in his symptomatic reading of Capital. Lefebvre, on the other hand, says this is no symptomatic reading but a “thematic” reading. He always disliked Althusser’s Marxist formalism, stripping bare of content Marx’s method and epistemology. Thus a “thematic” reading is a reading that beds itself down specifically in content, which is to say, in the city; “the urban problematic within the theoretical framework of historical materialism.”2 What he is hinting at here is something David Harvey would, around the same time, call “historical-geographical materialism,” inserting space and urbanization into Marx and Engels’s theory of history. To a certain extent, one gets the impression that La pensée marxiste et la ville figures for Lefebvre the same way the Grundrisse figured for Marx: as a work of self-clarification, as a notebook for working through one’s theoretical relationship with the subject matter, which in this case is the city–urban dialectic within Marxism.
A key text for Lefebvre is Marx and Engels’s German Ideology in which the city is center stage rather than mere background. Taking leave from Marx and Engels, Lefebvre shows how the closed system of antiquity, with its feudal city as absolute space, became relativized with the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, for Lefebvre—repeating what he said in The Right to the City and in The Urban Revolution— was really an urban revolution, and with the rise of the city came a corresponding rise of the modern state and modern property relations based on finance and speculation, all of which would fuel the further expansion of the city. Lefebvre gives us a great historical overview, with a grand historical sweep, but “the subject of history” here, he says, “is incontestably the city.”3
“The greatest division of material and mental labor,” say Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, “is the separation of town and country.” “The antagonism between the town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to state, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day,” ours included.4 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels trot through the history of the division of labor, including its countryside and town basis, its entrenchment under “the rise of manufacturing,” the development of the state and property relations, and the “forms of intercourse” that took hold within this process of continuous movement and change within the “all-embracing collisions” of history—collisions of various classes, collisions of consciousness, collisions of ideas, collisions of political conflict. Throughout, “the abolition of the antagonism between the town and the countryside is one of the first conditions of communal life, a condition which,” Marx and Engels insist, “depends on a mass of material premises and which cannot be fulfilled by mere will.”5 Huge flows of people flooding into emergent industrial cities—the “rabble,” Dr. Marx calls them, like Singer’s Dr. Fischelson—are at first devoid of power, disunited, detached and desperate, entering as “individuals strange to one another” (70). Yet after a while, and after a few pages further on, Marx and Engels are able to posit Communism somewhere in the midst, somewhere there as a “form of intercourse,” “overturning the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse.” Communism will, they seem to suggest, be urban-based or it won’t be. “Isn’t it evident,” Lefebvre asks, “that the city is at once place, instrument and théâtre dramatique of a gigantic transformation?”6 Isn’t it equally evident, he says, how Marx and Engels, “no more and no less,” announce “the end of the city, amongst other ends.”7
One of the most fascinating parts of La pensée marxiste et la ville comes in the final ten pages of Chapter 2. There, Lefebvre wrestles with Marx and Engels’s German Ideology and with the utopian pages of the Grundrisse. But first he must move through Engels himself, show how, from Engels’s industrial city, emerges “urban society.” Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) spoke at length of cities as places of worker “agglomeration,” of spaces where a “reserve army of laborers” are piled up on top of one another, and how “the capitalist order engenders an urban chaos.” The laboring masses, Engels noted, lived in specifically demarcated areas of “great cities,” in overcrowded hovels where they got ripped off in reproduction, at home, just as they got ripped off at the point of industrial production, at work. The concentration of populations like this, of course, directly accompanied the concentration and exponential accumulation of capital; the two went hand-in-hand, alongside the advance of technology and the spatial and temporal development of modes of production. But the question that preoccupied Engels then, as it did thirty years later in The Housing Question, was: How could you really resolve the ghettoization of workers’ housing without resolving the problem of the capitalist mode of production itself?
But the twist here, the utopian twist for Lefebvre, comes from the “fin du travail,” from the “end of work” (121): “What a paradox,” he says, “for those who have discovered the importance of work and who assume the role of the theoretician of the working class.” “And yet, we know it already, that automation of production permits us to envisage the end of productive work. Theoretical and practical possibility? Incontestably … Utopia certainly, but a concrete utopia” (121–122). “The socialization of the productive forces, the elimination of barriers, perturbations, waste, permits,” Lefebvre says, “henceforth the reduction of work time and the transformation of work.” The phrase could have easily come from André Gorz, who, though unacknowledged by Lefebvre, was writing about work and Marxism in the same vein as Lefebvre wrote about the city and Marxism.8 Yet Lefebvre is more playful with the idea that the end of work correlates positively with growing urbanization, more playful with both its perils and its possibilities.9 What transpires in “urban society” is a “service” economy, he says, as well as a gradual dominance of finance over industrial capital. He spots the germ of all this early on in capitalism’s urban development and assesses whether these circumstances will really expand or gradually undermine the mode of production itself. Lefebvre insists that a service economy does produce surplus value rather than simply realize it, and that an urban constituency as an agent of revolutionary change behooves something more than “the working class.” If anything, it bids its farewell.
Gorz and Lefebvre tacitly concur that Marx’s Grundrisse is a source of extraordinary intellectual and political sustenance. Maybe Engels had never read Marx’s Grundrisse notebooks; the latter, after all, had kept them under wraps for his own entertainment in gloomy London winter nights, circa 1857–1858. Had Marx’s “general” read these notebooks, he would have likely endorsed Marx’s view that the generalization of automated production, of postindustrial “immaterial” labor—which Marx there theorized—would see off capitalism in the long term. The rise of the so-called general intellect didn’t symbolize the end of history and capitalism’s ultimate victory but its very opposite, the beginnings of its systemic demise. Therein lies the promise of urban society, of planetary urbanization. “Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production,” is how Marx put it.10
In the Grundrisse, Marx says the possibility to release ourselves from work comes about when living labor has materialized itself in machines, when “the technological application of science” conditions the entire productive character of capital. When the world of work is dominated by machines, when we become appendages to machines, to new technology, to informational digitized technology—when technology “suspends” human beings from “the immediate form” of work and when dead labor valorizes living labor—then and seemingly only then are we on the brink of something new and possible. “To the degree that large industry develops,” Marx says, “the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labor-time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of science to production.”11
The degree to which human ingenuity, human imagination, scientific know-how, and the vital powers of the human brain and hand have become objectified in fixed capital—in capital that apparently rules over us—is the degree to which urban society defines our lives. At this point, Marx says, “labor time ceases and must cease to be a measure of value, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.”12 And “with that,” he says, “production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.”13 In the Grundrisse, Marx, the dialectician, seems to think up his own negation: he seems to problematize his own law of value, the theory of value he’d formulated in Capital, positing it as being unhinged with the growth of immaterial labor. High-tech, profit-laden, scientific, knowledge-based activities assume their own, apparently free-floating value dynamics within the overall economy, little of which can be stocked, quantified, formalized, or objectified.
There’s perhaps, then, little reason to doubt Gorz’s words on the matter: “By furnishing services, immaterial labor has become the hegemonic form of work; material labor is displaced to the periphery of the production process, or is summarily externalized. Although it remains indispensable and even dominant from a quantitative standpoint, material labor has become a ‘subaltern moment’ of the process. The heart of value creation is now immaterial labor.”14 As other writers like David Harvey have convincingly shown, expansion and capital accumulation over the past couple of decades has also had a marked penchant for dispossession; it has shown zilch commitment to investing in living labor in actual production. To believe that labor-time is the source of profit nowadays is an absurdity. Profit these days has little to do with companies mass-producing products at lower prices than their competitors. And it has little to do with them necessarily exploiting workers absolutely, prevalent as this still is.15 Invariably, it’s more to do with monopolization, with destroying competition within a given field and, as Žižek says, with privatizing the general intellect, with reappropriating and cashing in on scientific expertise.16 And from this comes a profit in the form of rent, gleaned from such privatization of specialist knowledge. That is the surplus value: its yardstick isn’t the temporal application of labor. The enormous growth in wealth and the rise in productivity in high-tech industries consequently means more and more redundant workers. Their services, their living labor, and their physical presence on the job are rendered defunct and are no longer required: living labor is a species en route to extinction. Instead, there’s automation, computer-aided production, computer-aided design, robotics, and a coterie of human appendages; only a relatively small number of salaried jobs exist for the knowledge-based few. For the masses, Marx described their circumstances thus: “Labor no longer appears so much to be included with the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.… He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labor he himself performs [that counts], nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power.”17
Those rendered superfluous, suspended from the immediate process of production, aren’t, however, just factory workers and industrial minions. They include all categories of workers—white-collar, blue-collar, and no-collar—and in developed as well as developing countries. Is it a blessing or curse to be freed from the relative privilege of salaried exploitation and/or from actual workplace exploitation? No more bosses; no more blue Mondays; no more watching the clock and living for weekends, dreaming of early retirement. Marx plainly saw this as both bad and good news. He sees a world that suspends labor, that revolves around “dead labor,” around the production of social life under the control of the general intellect, as pregnant with its contrary, as a “moving contradiction.” On the one hand, a privileged minority prospers through specialist knowledge; on the other, there’s a huge number of people who are left bereft of a job and a future and who have little recourse other than their own ingenuity, their own practical spirit of self-innovation (therein resides the potential good news). Yet, for them, a reduction in the time of “necessary” salaried labor doesn’t free up more disposable time for their own “self-development”; it frequently spells endless hustle in a sector that was once called “informal.” And there it’s not so much intellectual knowledge that counts, that helps survival, as “vernacular knowledge,” learned on the street, the hard way, graduating in the university of life, which is another way we can construe the general intellect. Once again the question: “Free” working time—blessing or curse? Likely both, because both depend: a millionfold relative surplus population that’s a crucial facet of urban life everywhere; a millionfold relative surplus population that’s equally a latent political constituency in the process of making itself, a Here Comes Everybody, a 99 percent breaking down the gates of the city, remaking it as the urban realm.
In 2009 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggested half of the world’s working population, around 1.8 billion people, engage in employment somehow self-made and irregular, usually undocumented and always self-reliant.18 These activities generate a staggering net worth of $10 trillion, earnings bettered only by the U.S. economy (with its $14 trillion). (Even the industrial might and surging factory labor force in China pales quantitatively alongside the numbers of self-reliant toilers; and the security of Chinese workers may yet be short-lived once it is really tested against the vicissitudes of the world market.) In today’s highly dynamic global economy, the math is simple: as productivity grows its “official” rank and file workforce shrinks; as this “official” workforce shrinks, an even more dynamic, quasi-spontaneous system of self-employment prevails, a cut-and-paste economy whose ranks are swelling as we speak. And its self-generating rate of job creation puts any government to shame; no Walmart or Microsoft, no multinational or supra-international can compete. By 2020 the OECD reckons that two-thirds of workers of the world will be employed in this planetary system now generically known as “Système D.”19
“Système D” is the slang term used in the French Caribbean and Africa for so-called débrouillards (from débrouiller: to sort out, to manage, to figure out), those resourceful peddlers and hustlers, hawkers and street vendors who figure out their lives for themselves, who pit their will and exercise their wits at street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe. Here self-reliance means self-reproduction and survival, and, for a few others, it announces “defiance.” “Système D” has come to replace what everybody used to call the “informal” sector, with its connotations of clandestinity, of shady underworld wheeling and dealing that takes place off the map of respectable economic gain—frequently taken as a problem and brake for a poor nation’s rocky road toward “development.” But, suggests Robert Neuwirth, an almost-resident expert on Système D, a lot of people erroneously see the system as “a kind of bastard ward of the state—a zone that is kept around because it ensures that people will have the minimum income required to survive, and thus will not revolt against the existing order.”20 Système D is so widespread—so tied to the “formal sector,” so First World as well as Third (and Second) World, so crucial as an earner for most nations, and so underground as to be positively above ground—that Neuwirth takes it all differently. Système D is not only a respectable and honest form of employment for billions of people, he says, it can also be scaled up, and it is spreading its low-tech basis everywhere, providing jobs and bringing commerce and entrepreneurialism to neighborhoods that are off the standard economic and political radar. To take it as only self-reproduction, as self-exploitation, Neuwirth argues, as only letting governments of the world off their neoliberal hook, is an absurd denial of human ingenuity and willpower.
Thus, from Los Angeles to Lagos, Guangzhou to Guadalupe, Accra to Akron, from Maxwell Street in Chicago to Rua 25 de Março in São Paulo, from Canal Street to Clignancourt, a hyperkinetic, DIY, open-air economy flourishes, repairing, recycling, and selling, creating an urban space somewhere in-between yet in-between everywhere. Improvised yet organized in its improvisation, it’s an economy populated by workers without any specific nation, “strikingly independent, yet deeply enmeshed in the legal world.” Sometimes Système D even provides public services, like transportation and refuse collection (as in parts of Mexico City).21 “It involves small-scale entrepreneurs but links them to global trading circuits. It is the economic way of the global majority, guided not by corporations or politicians or economists, but by ordinary citizens.”22
Mike Davis isn’t mentioned by name, but we might read all this as Neuwirth’s rejoinder to Planet of Slums, with its dystopian denunciation of the “illusion of self-help.” Davis pretty much dismisses everything Neuwirth affirms; self-help is really petty-bourgeois claptrap, says Davis, an International Monetary Fund and World Bank ruse, an excuse for the withdrawal of the public sector from its obligations toward citizens. You now have the “right” to be a self-managed entrepreneur; you now have the “right to the city,” Davis implies, though not to a city “made of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists” but to one “largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Instead of soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay.”23
All of this, for Davis, is counterrevolutionary, not countervailing; Système D merchants shape up as the veritable inert sack of potatoes that Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, ascribed to the French peasantry of his day, to Lumpenproletarian vagabonds and mountebanks, pickpockets and tricksters, tinkers and beggars, knife-grinders and porters—“in short the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither” onto the world market. But Neuwirth sees it otherwise, making a spirited defense of a demographic constituency that today asserts itself as an economic constituency; and, perhaps one day quite soon, might equally assert itself as a Fanonesque revolutionary constituency. One day, in other words, political power might catch up with global demographics; a latent, lagging political force, a Here Comes Everybody, waits in the wings on world market street, waits to see itself as a global family of eyes. “So here we are in this goddamned Troy without jobs,” Sucus tells his father Clement in Berger’s Lilac and Flag, an old wives’ tale of the megacity. “That’s history, son,” says Clement. “I don’t know. It’s not history,” his son says. “It’s a kind of waiting.” “There aren’t regular jobs anymore. They’ve gone. There’s no way.”24
In “advanced” countries like the United States, Système D continues to gain ground, “boosted by economic refugees—not foreigners but people pushed out of the legal economy after the downturn of 2008 and 2009.”25 Yet a “post–salaried work” society needs to be kept in check politically; How to preserve the stability and legitimacy of a system of work without workers, ensuring that workers (and ex-workers) remain consumers and somehow “embrace” the world of immaterial labor? How to resist the legitimacy of that system? (The Occupy movement has begun to express clues, if not offering a few tentative answers.) Therein reside the threats, the threats that the desire for free time, the yearning to work less (a yearning much of the active workforce now seems to share in both the United States and Europe), is not thrown back in people’s faces or used as a pretext for the neoliberal state to disengage. As Mike Davis spells out for the Majority World, these types of threats may also be used to promote “self-help” strategies as self-reproduction, as self-exploitation, as a form of social control: “we are all entrepreneurs!” The other threat is that joblessness, insecurity around work, part-time jobs, McJobs, temporary contracts, and piece-work tasks, performed casually and for little pay, translate into a never-ending, highly flexible pool of workers that enterprises can tap and turn away at the whim of their business cycles. Here the menace of Marx’s “industrial reserve army” looms: precariousness becomes the watchword for the “relative surplus population” of our day, for the contingent worker progressively produced by the immaterial valorization of capital.26
This relative surplus population boils down to the huge mass of underemployed and subemployed workers likely to be part-time, on-call, self-employed, on temporary contracts or workfare recruits or interns—who all succeed in making the official unemployment statistics look less dire than they actually are. These people are absorbed into an ever-expanding “personal services industry,” rendered even more ruthless and competitive by the burgeoning of temporary help agencies and contracting firms that coordinate the distribution of contingent labor-power whose supply and demand dances to the behest of outsourcing, cost-cutting companies. Temp agencies enable formerly displaced workers to assume new careers that require them to quite literally float between jobs. And not only have the numbers of people temping grown enormously over past decades; the temporary help business is itself a booming industry.
Yet among these threats reside certain possibilities, even revolutionary potentialities. Maybe crises might be blessings rather than calamities? Maybe in times of crises, like the crisis that appears to be lasting forever nowadays, we can relearn how to do without work or really learn how to work the system for ourselves. In the United States, twentysomething NINJAS are learning how to reevaluate their “career” choices, together with the whole notion of career itself; they’re intelligent enough to know that they might not have anything deemed to be a “career” anymore. Since joblessness has lost a lot of its stigma in America, given there are so many people jobless, being in and out of work is no longer seen simply as a personal failing, and it may even be the cue to getting politically active. In fact, there are twentysomethings almost everywhere, especially young men, often young men of color, who live in specific neighborhoods with specific postal codes and who know they’ll never work a salaried job. They know they can never count on either a pension or the “right to work.”
Maybe, during crises, we can hatch alternative programs for survival, other methods through which we cannot so much “earn a living” as live a living. Maybe we can self-downsize, or even refrain from work itself, and at the same time address the paradox of work that goes back at least to Max Weber. Work is revered in our culture, yet at the same time workers are becoming superfluous; you hate your job, your boss, hate the servility of what you do, and how you do it, the pettiness of the tasks involved, and yet you want to keep your job at all costs. Maybe there’s a point at which we can all be pushed over the edge, “set-free” as Marx said, or voluntarily take the jump ourselves, only to discover other aspects of ourselves and other ways to fill in the hole, make a little money, maintain our dignity and pride, and survive off what André Gorz calls a “frugal abundance.” Voici the economic “rationality” of Système D, a streetwise rationality that isn’t taught at any Harvard Business School.
We still hear voices on the Left bawling for full employment, and others are still battling for a return to decent jobs for decent pay and decent benefits. Fredric Jameson makes it clear that Marx never advocated any full employment policy.27 Nowadays, decent jobs are the rare exception, the very rare exception, so exceptional that it’s safer to bet that there is no such thing as decent jobs anymore. If the Left thinks otherwise then it’s backing the wrong horse, channeling its energies in the wrong direction, one that’s going backward and not forward. In a certain sense, the politicization of postwork society is already apace, receiving wider acknowledgment. If capitalists can do without workers, it’s high time for workers to realize that they can do without capitalists, that they can devise work without capitalists, even work without the state. And that they can even build urban spaces for themselves, “occupy” urban spaces, construct and reconstruct not only a post–salaried work culture but a “postcity” culture as well. This, perhaps, is Henri Lefebvre’s most brilliant and enduring insight, seemingly overlooked by all latter-day interpreters and critics: “Work doesn’t end in leisure,” he says at the climactic point of La pensée marxiste et la ville, maybe at the climactic point even of Marxist thinking about the city, “but in non-work. The city doesn’t end up in the countryside but in the simultaneous supersession of the countryside and the city, which leaves a void that the imagination fills, with its theoretical projections and predictions.” “What,” Lefebvre asks, “constitutes non-work and the non-city?” “The urban,” he tells us, defined by “encounters, gatherings, centerings and de-centerings.” The supersession of work and the city has absolutely “nothing in common with what has been formerly voiced.”28
There’s something daringly radical and futuristic about this vision adapted from Marx, from his journeyman postulations with Frederick Engels in The German Ideology to his maturity in thoughts on the supersession of capitalism in the Grundrisse. Whatever way you look at things, there’s no looking back now, even if, glancing over your shoulder, you feel the tug of what came before trying to harness you, trying to lull you backward, trying to entice your return through nostalgia. The supersession of capitalism, Marx insists, comes about through capitalism, by running through its corridor of flames; any postcapitalist society has to mobilize the heat and energy of capitalism and maximize and muster up all the generalized possibility of its development of science and technology. Postcapitalist society will somehow resemble, in form and content, what capitalism has bequeathed us, what remains solid in the transition, even if all aspects of ownership, control, and functioning would be different after the transition. Those gigantic urban forms we have today would still be ours in the future. Here, again, there’s no turning back, no breaking anything down, no reversion to quaint, archaic times when cities were like villages and less intimidating—both conceptually and existentially. The same leap of the imagination Marx makes with technology and generalized fixed capital, outlined in a dozen-or-so pages of the Grundrisse (699–713), becomes grist to Lefebvre in a daring leap of his urban imagination. The same forces that generalize the intellect also generalize the city; they generalize it so much, in fact, that the city is transformed into something postcity, just as the development of the productive forces are destined to eventually see off the concept of work itself. If Capital, as Jameson suggests, is really Marx’s manifesto of unemployment, then it’s also a manifesto of a society of unemployment that generalizes urbanization. To clarify the stake, we can again paraphrase Jameson: to think of all this in terms of a kind of global unemployment and urbanization rather than to see it as tragic pathos is, I believe, to be recommitted to the invention of a new kind of transformatory politics on a global scale.
Mike Davis is right about one thing: a good deal of the urbanization of the future will be constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood; and, for the moment at least, this urban form will continue to coexist alongside glass and steel and spectacle architectural forms. The latter, if not physically flimsy, are just as figuratively flimsy, especially when they have to withstand the economic tsunamis periodically sweeping through the global economy. Together, glass and steel, as well as prefabricated breeze-block, comprise the secondary circuit of capital; those Pollockesque skeins that we have perceived within our different way of seeing urbanization flow with the charged energy of Système D workers and their burgeoning habitats. These workers are literally building their urban society, both economically and physically, producing space, as Lefebvre would say, implicating themselves not by conceiving space in glass and steel but by practicing space as a life-and-death lived experience.
While it would be dangerously irresponsible to push too far the limits of Système D at work, and bidonvilles at home, makeshift work and makeshift homes nonetheless have a handy way of becoming more solid communities; lacking services one day only to find adaptive and inventive ways to install services another day; creating from a “slum” life-form a “normal,” everyday life-form. Out of an ostensible disorderly “rabble” emerges an orderly neighborhood that somehow works for its denizens. The same vitality at work gets translated into the vitality of nonwork, of neighborhood building, of vernacular knowledge in the face of general intellectual knowledge. The seemingly most “primitive” precapitalist construction techniques reside within an overabundance of the most advanced capitalist construction and work techniques; never, apparently, the twain shall meet. Should they ever meet—should the fault line ever get reconciled between the internationalization of the economy, on the one hand, and the marginalization of everyday life tearing apart the urban fabric, on the other—we’ll know that some sort of political encounter has occurred, that some seismic tremor or volcanic eruption has “taken hold.” The terrain of its taking hold, of its taking shape, will be the urban scale; all “swerving” will doubtless depend, depend on numerous factors and conjunctures, on affections finding affinities, on a Here Comes Everybody congealing and gelling at a felicitous moment, on bodies coming together here as well as there simultaneously or almost simultaneously. At that imaginary point, economic self-empowerment would encounter political collective-empowerment, and the favelas as well as Wall Street, the malls as well as main streets, will all get occupied and democratized by an inexorable and an insatiable swarming, by a sheer numbers-game asserting the generalized force of a political subjects–game, channeling itself virtually, connecting itself really, a giant planetary web of communication and just-in-time self-organization.
In Magical Marxism, near the end, I suggested this swarming, this Here Comes Everywhere, would be an encounter in the city, a collective spirit expressive of the Right to the City. I thought the formula might be thus: HCE=RTTC; a global protest movement of the future would fight for its Right to the City, do so as a “cry and demand,” exactly as Lefebvre identified. Now, I no longer think the Right to the City is, or should be, the banner under which a universal dreaming collective might assemble. Now, I think its unfolding, its coming together, its expressive collective desire, needs to be more open and expansive, reclaiming nothing other than its own impulse toward democracy, pushing outward onto the world, into a world without nation and without borders; into another way of seeing, of perceiving a mongrel world with a mongrel politics. One of the many interesting things that emerges from Neuwirth’s Stealth of Nations is how this mongrel quality marks today’s workers of the world. Even in China, pace Mike Davis, a mongrelization is in motion; about 300,000 Africans now live full-time in Guangzhou alone. Near its central station, in the Sanyuanli neighborhood, there are so many Africans that the district has become known as “Chocolate City”; elsewhere in Guangzhou, Arabs, Argentinians, Turks, and Filipinos have all come to hustle as Système D workers, a bottom-up globalization that’s never included in official statistics because it all takes place off the record.
The cross-border global flows of Système D migrants and immigrants is now a “global back channel” (Neuwirth’s term), meaning urban streets are, by definition, world market streets, streets that open themselves onto the world and along which the world comes to them. Down these streets, at these global bazaars, “the world” and “the city” meet one another in a passionate embrace; where “the city” ends and “the world” begins is anybody’s guess. Everything is so integrated that what is the world and the city no longer makes any definitional sense: there’s no “in” and “out” anymore. New York Times flat-earther columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote about the mismatch between a CEO’s vision of the world and a politician’s; the article is surprisingly suggestive for leftists. “Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies,” says Friedman, “and they see their jobs as maximizing the economic voters in their geography. Many CEOS, though, see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere and sold everywhere.… In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more and more their products today as ‘Made in the World’ not ‘Made in America.’ Therein lies the tension. So many of ‘our’ companies actually see themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the United States.”29
Can people on world market street adopt the same kind of global perspective as a CEO, as a citizen of the world, rather than, say, a Chinese worker? Can they, we, develop common notions based on a shared global existence? Is it possible to see oneself as a little cog in a great big expansive universe, yet see this great big expansive universe as clearly as the little cogs?; or to imagine oneself in the whole world, not just in one bitty corner of the world? (Thomas Friedman says that one day there’ll be no more “developed” and “developing” countries, only HIES—High-Imagination-Enabling Countries—and LIES—Low-Imagination-Enabling Countries. Maybe this vision might one day work for people rather than just for capital?) To encounter others doing likewise, seeing oneself likewise, seeing the world likewise? To literally “make” oneself as the world? From such a standpoint, the terrain for any postwork politics, or even for any global citizenship, would be somewhere beyond the factory gates, beyond the old city limits, somewhere within global everyday life, inevitably along world market street, in urban society. To be sure, the “cry and demand” of a postwork, post-city politics won’t likely be any cry and demand at all, since “words” as such are unlikely to be expressed. Rather than words giving rise to any encounter, what would get expressed would depend on the encounter itself.
Lefebvre says capitalism, from its very inception, “announced the complete urbanization of society.”30 It was, still is, a revolutionary process, expelling from the immediate activity of production millions and millions of people, transforming the countryside, disrupting agrarian life, forcing people to flood into cities. But that is history—the use and abuse of history. Now, not only those involved in immediate production have been “set free” from capitalist work but white-collar service workers, too, have been set free, including former salaried workers. Now everybody has somehow been set free from the city: they’ve been “liberated,” as it were, by urban society. The meeting of downsized workers and upsizing cities has fueled itself, fed off itself. The conjoining of both has resulted in the creation of a thoroughly urban society: a nonwork and postcity society. Now a contingent, itinerant, surplus population, a “butterfly” population, a “floating” population (after Marx), flits between work, flits between places, floats in and out of spaces of marginality, avoiding clear flight paths and steady linear movement. Indeed, the whole trajectory of this butterfly population can’t be accounted for within conventional steady-state aerodynamics, let alone within conventional steady-state economics.
With planetary urbanization, a planet-full of people can no longer find steady work or steady homes, and a huge unwieldy inertia persists, an inertia based on a sort of hypertrophy. It’s not that urban regions are too big, or that there are too many people, but more that within current modes of societal organization we have a society that overreaches itself—not so much through technology as technocracy, not so much through overpopulation as overbureaucratization, a “double dependence,” we’ve heard Lefebvre call it, between technocracy and bureaucracy, between corporate and financial monopolization of bureaucratic techniques and bureaucratic monopolization of financial and corporate techniques. For society to change, a collective force possessing a similar inertia must be mustered up: either huge numbers of people have to be concerned or, if the numbers are relatively small, enormous time for incremental change must be allowed.
In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi imaginary Foundation, there’s a back flow in the historical geography of his galactic urban empire, Trantor; Lefebvre hints at it in The Right to the City but doesn’t elaborate.31 So here’s my take on it: The back flow for Asimov, the necessary inertia, comes with so-called psychohistory, the brainchild of his central protagonist, mathematician Hari Seldon, who formulated psychohistory to predict the future in statistical fashion. Trantor’s rulers became very interested in Seldon because they felt he could help them predict the future, intervene in the future, make the future theirs. Seldon soon became one of the most important men in the galaxy and assumed the role of First Minister under Emperor Cleon I’s rule. For the scientist Asimov (he had a Ph.D. in chemistry), psychohistory was modeled off the kinetic theory of gases: molecules making up gases move about in absolutely random fashion, in any direction, in three dimensions and at a wide range of speeds. Nobody can predict the behavior of a single molecule. Yet as a mass of molecules, as gases, you can somehow describe what the motions would be on average, and from there work out the gas laws with an enormous degree of predictability.
Asimov applied this notion to human beings. (In Asimov’s Foundation saga, there’s no alien presence, no nonhuman life, save humanly made robots: his vision of the universe is all the more interesting because it is all-too-human.) All of us have free will, all of us as individuals exhibit behavior and act in ways that defy predictability. Still, for vast numbers of people, for diverse societies, for mobs of people, Asimov’s Seldon suggests some sort of predictability is possible, like it is for gases. Thus psychohistory is “mob analysis,” predicting mob behavior as intruding, intervening in historical contingency. The politics of mobs, then, is like the kinetic theory of gases; and the idea has considerable salience not least because it reveals something about the prospect of group encounters intervening in the historical-geographical logic of urbanization, intervening in a world without work or cities. Although here, maybe it’s not so much psychohistory as psychogeography that resembles mob analysis, implying any densifying of human behavior, any human agglomeration (like urbanization), will likely create at a certain time and in a certain space a gathering of people that resembles a gathering of gases, a certain coming together of movement and stasis, of particle and wave. And this encounter will possess its own kinetic energy; sometimes negative energy, like indiscriminate rioting (British urban areas witnessed this not so long ago), but also positive energy, its own Brownian motion, perhaps generating an energy that’s enough to alter the course of history (and geography).
In Gold, Asimov’s final collection of fiction and nonfiction writings, the aging sci-fi godfather ruminates on the genre and futuristic world he’d created. He gives us a little more background to his concept of “psychohistory.” Readers now have a clearer insight into what he had in mind. There were two conditions, Asimov says, “that I had to set up in order to make psychohistory work, and they were not chosen carelessly. I picked them in order to make it more like kinetic theory.”32 “First,” he says, “I had to deal with a large number of human beings, as kinetic theory worked with a large number of molecules.” It had to be a Galactic Empire, a big, complex world, a huge world, with a huge population, like a universe in which planetary urbanization has taken shape. Second, “I had to retain the ‘randomness’ factor. I couldn’t expect human beings to behave as randomly as molecules,” Asimov says, “but they might approach such behavior if they had no idea as to what was expected of them. So it was necessary to suppose that human beings in general did not know what the predictions of psychohistory were and therefore would not tailor their activities to suit.”33
Yet as time went on, with fifty-odd years’ hindsight, weird things happened in the field of science and society, Asimov says. Mathematicians began to get interested in a branch of science we now call “chaos” theory, where randomness meets underlying order, and where order unleashes a certain kind of randomness. “Imagine, then,” Asimov notes, “how exciting it is for me to see that scientists are increasingly interested in my psychohistory, even though they may not be aware that that’s what the study is called and may never have read any of my Foundation novels.” Meanwhile, within the human world, one Asimov fan sends the great writer a clipping from the journal Machine Design (April 23, 1987), relaying the following info:
A computer model originally intended to stimulate liquid turbulence has been used to model group behavior. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratories have found that there is a similarity between group behavior and certain physical phenomena. To do the analysis, they assigned certain physical characteristics such as level of excitement, fear, and size of the crowd to model parameters. The interaction of the crowd closely paralleled the turbulent flow equations. Although analysis cannot predict exactly what a group will do, it reportedly does help determine the most probable consequence of a given event.34
Asimov’s Hari Seldon had hoped psychohistory might be developed in the next century, and that was already 22,000 years into the future. “Is this,” wonders Asimov, “going to be another case of my science-fictional imagination falling ludicrously short?”35 Maybe we no longer need turbulent flow equations to tell us about the kinetic energy of the crowd, about its fears and level of excitement, about its size and politics. Maybe the combustible energy of the crowd, of this mob, expresses a radical eruption, not a random explosion, a volcanic happening rather than unannounced anarchy; since here, somehow and somewhere, we have underlying regularity, a gaseous encounter with inner structuring order.