308
What Can Marxists Tell us about Cities?
A taste of urbane Marxism
Andy Merrifield. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale ofthe City. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002.Richard Harris，A Taste of Urbane Marxism，H-Urban，2003.Jennefer Laidley, Book Review: Metromarxism: AMarxist Tale of the City, Urban Affairs Review, 41(6): 858-859https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087406286439https://networks.h-net.org/node/22277/reviews/22769/harris-merrifield-metromarxism-marxist-tale-city
What can Marxists tell us about cities?In his book, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, Andy Merrifield, an independent scholar, shows us what Marxists can tell us about cities through the words and lives of eight Marxists, beginning with Marx and Engels (fl. 1840s-1880s) themselves, continuing with the German Jew Walter Benjamin (1920s-1930s), the French Catholic sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1930s-1970s) his younger countryman Guy Debord (1960s-1970s), the Spanish-born urban sociologist Manuel Castells (1960s-), and the British geographer David Harvey (1960s-), before concluding with the American urbanist Marshall Berman (1970s-). Each has had a substantial impact on the way that urban scholars have viewed cities. In each case Merrifield tells us as much about their lives as their ideas, and in particular about their responses to the cities in which they lived. For the earlier writers these cities were, disproportionately, Berlin, London and, above all, Paris; later, New York and Baltimore made their presences felt. Merrifield is also careful to point out the sometimes diverse intellectual influences that shaped the thinking of these writers. He notes, for example, the debt that Benjamin owed to Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs, as well as to Marx.Merrifield explains the purpose of the book and the reasons of selecting these 8 Marxists at the beginning of the book: "Thinking about the city from the standpoint of a Marxist, and about Marxism from the standpoint of an urbanist, is fraught with a lot of difficulties. For Marxist urbanists, this double movement runs the danger of tugging one in opposite directions or else having one fall between two stools. The present offering tries to reconcile these two political and intellectual imaginations. It's my hope that what emerges in this book will help sustain (and resuscitate) Marxist theory while enriching our critical understanding of the kind of city most of us inhabit today: the capitalist city. At any rate, the act of reconciling Marxism with urbanism isn't easy. Often the difficulties I've encountered haven't just been my own scholarly failings--evident as they are; for it's equally clear that, historically, Marxism's own relationship to urbanism has been pretty stormy. And urbanism, in turn, as a broad-based social scientific discipline and practice, has frequently eyed Marxism with a fair bit of skepticism. In an odd sense, the thinkers I've selected here, and whom I base each chapter around and give my own take on, have all suffered somehow from these respective pitfalls: their urbanism has been rejected because of its Marxist overtones, or else their Marxism has been 'officially' denounced (or ignored) because of its urban (and spatial) overtones. For me, it's exactly this heterodoxy that makes each chosen thinker not only a better urbanist but also a more imaginative Marxist".
Marx himself said less about the character and significance of cities than we might expect, given that the rapid growth of industrial cities was the most striking features of nineteenth century capitalism, and that they were also the notable centers of political resistance, notably in the Paris Commune. Engels said more, but even his comments are suggestive rather than comprehensive. It was not until a century later that Harvey articulated a theory of capitalist urbanization that extends the largely non-spatial language of Marx's masterpiece, Capital. Merrifield has great respect for Harvey's achievement, and it is perhaps because Harvey's work is so obviously central to the modern Marxist urban tradition that he plays up the writings of those writers who drew more extensively on non-Marxist intellectual traditions, who were fascinated by the culture of cities, and who responded unpredictably and sometimes poetically to the urban scene. His eloquent discussions of Benjamen, Lefebvre, and Debord show a Marxist urban tradition that will be new to many, and which are apparently intended to leaven the still-popular image of Marxism as stolid, narrow, and doctrinaire.Merrifield grounds each thinker’s ideas in their particular intellectual and social milieus, teasing out the various strands of Marxism taken up by each author and building one on the other through each successive chapter to ultimately reveal the foundations of the various Marxist urbanisms being debated and explored today. Indeed, within each chapter Merrifield succeeds in highlighting both the historicity of Marxist thought on the city as well as the dialogic and contextual nature of each author’s apprehension of the metropolitan dialectic.Marx’s dialectical understanding of the city is examined in the book’s first chapter, which follows a short but comprehensive introduction outlining the history of the sometimes difficult union of urbanism and Marxism. While Marx’s writings on the city were admittedly rare, Merrifield explains, he nonetheless demonstrated an understanding of the industrial city as the site wherein the mass of workers, being not only drawn into but also created by the city, are able to "coalesce, organize into a class, radicalize and catalyze". As such, Marx clearly portrayed the urban—the place of bourgeois power—as a Faustian bargain that holds within it not only the inhumanity of worker alienation but also the promise of proletarian revolution. This is Marx’s metropolitan dialectic. The chapter also outlines the thinking of both the young and the mature Marx and provides a helpful primer on the dialectic itself, which is both a theory and a methodology, the very foundation of Marxist urbanism. Indeed, it is Marx’s concentration on the dialectic as method, Merrifield reveals, which gives Marxism its liveliness and enduring applicability to contemporary urban thought.In the second chapter, Merrifield gives Engels the distinction of being the first urban Marxist, reminding us not only of his understanding of the revolutionary potential embodied in the metropolitan dialectic, but also of his exposés of working-class housing conditions. In doing so, Merrifield affirms the applicability of Engels’s thought to today’s urban circumstances. Indeed, Engels’s treatment of the spatial consequences of Manchester’s capitalist development constitutes an eerie foreshadowing of the "creative class" gentrification currently exacting its revanchist urban toll. Even so, Merrifield affirms that Engels, like Marx, never truly embraced the city’s everydayness, never reveled in the contradictory urban culture of the new industrial city.Merrifield assigns that perspective to Walter Benjamin, who, in the following chapter, is described as "the first Marxist to appreciate the capitalist city as a profane illumination". In this chapter the author explores Benjamin’s dreamy surrealist Marxism, his preoccupation with commodity fetishism in the Paris arcades, and his penchant for Baudelairean flânerie.Succeeding chapters are equally multivocal and provide contextualized under- standings of the following: the sensuous yet radical perspective embodied in Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life and his insight into capitalism’s ability to dominate through its production of (urban) space; the strategic deployment of a living critique of capitalist urbanism in Debord’s Situationist International; Castells’s engagement with Althusser and his examination of the urban as bound up in collective consumption; Harvey’s understanding of the city as both the spatial fix for the internal contradictions of capitalism and as the contested terrain where capital accumulation and class struggle are played out in coconstitution; and the ephemerality and vitality of Berman’s ordinary urban modernism.It seems Merrifield’s intent is not to adjudicate Marxist orthodoxy but instead to present the wide variety of streams of urban thought stemming from Marx’s work. The book is thus a must read for Marxist urban scholars, for whom it will serve as a reminder of the lively variety of ideas for which Marx can ultimately be credited. It can also serve as a serious yet approachable introduction for other Marxist researchers and other urban scholars of the integral relation between the urban and Marxist thought.Perhaps most important, Merrifield’s book and the Marxist writers he discusses demonstrate "how Marxism can brim with adventure and life, not be burdened with dread and death" (p. 176). Marxist thought is shown to provide fertile ground for understanding, embracing and transforming the internal contradictions and perversions of the city under late capitalism. As capital’s voracious appetite increasingly urbanizes the world and as the economy becomes increasingly political, it is clear that "the Marxist message is a message about modern times and not just a Dickensian tale of nineteenth-century hard times" (p. 183). Indeed, Merrifield’s own position reveals just this as his book dances with vigor and life as much to the strains of today’s urban everyday as to those of the urban revolution.
CityReads ∣Notes On Cities"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
posts our notes on city reads weekly.
Please follow us by searching "CityReads"