Metromarxism

A Marxist Tale of the City

Andrew Merrifield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135024857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Metromarxism" discusses Marxism's relationship with the city from the 1850s to the present by way of biographical chapters on figures from the Marxist tradition, including Marx, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, and David Harvey. Each chapter combines interesting biographical anecdotes with an accessible analysis of each individual's contribution to an always-transforming Marxist theory of the city. He suggests that the interplay between the city as center of economic and social life and its potential for progressive change generated a major corpus of work. That work has been key in advancing progressive political and social transformations.

1

KARL MARX

COMMODITIES AND CITIES, WITH SOBER SENSES

Life, Thought, Rites of Passage

The man who famously urged us to change the world, not just interpret it, was born in the Rhineland town of Trier in 1818. A precocious schoolboy raised in a fairly well-to-do household (father Heinrich, Jewish and a lawyer), young Karl soon fled the nest, and rather than earn capital he embarked upon a long and dedicated career studying and trying to overthrow it—much to the chagrin of his dear Mother Henriette. At seventeen, he read law at the University of Bonn, blithely ignoring his father's advice about clean living: Karl frequently burned the midnight oil, imbibed cheap ale, puffed away on foul cigars, and once got thrown in the clink for noisy, late-night reveling. No wonder Heinrich was relieved when his son transferred to the University of Berlin to study philosophy and eventually breeze through a thesis on the classical Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. Meanwhile, Karl fell in love with a childhood sweetheart and Trier neighbor, an aristocratic beauty called Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his elder and the daughter of a baron, she was a distant relative of the British Earl of Argyll. Karl and the future Mrs. Marx initially kept their affair secret; neither's parents were amused when the two formally announced their engagement in 1836.

Karl's other burning passion then was G. W. F. Hegel, the great idealist thinker, who'd held a chair at Berlin years before the apprentice socialist arrived. Young Marx even wrote a charming little ditty in Hegel's honor: “He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels. Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom's nourishing nectar.” Marx's deep debt to Hegel, as we'll see in more depth shortly, was the dialectic, the method and thought system he'd later appropriate for himself in Capital, grasping all contradictions and paradoxes, fluxes and flows, theses and antitheses, life and the mind, as some sort of coherent whole. With Hegel, though, everything was in the mind, in the idea, which reached its absolute state in the self-critical, self-conscious individual, free from unhappy consciousness and bad faith. Although Marx would soon turn Hegel right side up, viewing the idea as “nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought,” in Berlin he became the brightest and booziest member of a rowdy crew called the Young Hegelians.

Marx spent the early 1840s grappling with, and trying to transform, Hegel's dialectic and philosophy, seeking to convert it into something more graphic and material, not rejecting it entirely but using immanent critique to tease out the “rational kernel” within Hegel's “mystical shell.” Twenty-odd years on, Marx still acknowledged his debt to the German idealist, openly avowing himself the pupil of that “mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Q Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner.”¹ By then, Marx knew that his inquisitive, expansive mind would never be accepted into the stuffy German academy (a similar fate, of course, would await Walter Benjamin nearly a century later), nor would his uncompromisingly polemical style, which often seemed to wallow in confrontation. He took up radical journalism instead, eking out a measly existence writing brilliant articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. He rallied against press censorship under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, denounced new wood-theft legislation, and flirted with communism. He raised a few friends' eyebrows en route, who marveled at the young man's erudition: “Dr. Marx,” one fellow, Moses Hess, remarked, “will give medieval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce, he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person—I say fused, not juxtaposed—and you have Dr. Marx.”² Alas, said doctor was a little too clever for his own good: the Prussian government closed down the subversive newspaper and gave the newly wed Marx his marching orders.

Paris beckoned. For the honeymooning Marxes, the French capital set the tone of their future destiny: domestic chaos, personal turmoil, economic destitution. By 1844, the Marxes had little idea of what lay ahead; but Marx himself thrived off insecurity and contingency. Somehow, he wrote a lot, and over the next few years served out an apprenticeship that would establish his credentials as one of the key thinkers of modern times. (Nor did he ever lose his sense of irony: “Never,” he once said, “has anybody written about money in general amidst a total lack of money in particular.”) It was in such a state of acute penury, and dogged by censorship and round-the-clock police surveillance, that Marx drafted one of his most enigmatic texts: the Economic and Philqsophical Manuscripts of 1844. The work never made it public in his day, and there's no definite answer why that was so. Nor do we have any idea what the older Marx made of this earlier enterprise. For decades, the “Paris Manuscripts” were buried in a vault somewhere in Moscow; and when they did finally make print in the early 1930s, the long-lost, long-forgotten (long-avoided?) text caused considerable furor within the Marxist fold, especially within the prevailing Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, for they revealed a “subjective” Marx, a romantic existentialist who defined communism as a revolutionary humanism.

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, along with other Marx works of that period, tended to be either deeply loathed or dearly loved by Marxists. Somebody like Louis Althusser, for example, epitomizes the former camp, and Henri Lefebvre the latter. We need to come back to both men at a later stage in our discussion in this volume. For now, we should bear in mind that Althusser has been most prominent in accentuating the rift between Marx's early humanism (pre-1845) and his mature political economy (1857 onward). Prior to his supposed “epistemological break,” Althusser argues, Marx's ideas were “ideological,” Hegelian, and hence inferior; afterward, Marx became Karl Marx, the great revolutionary whose analysis opened up a new continent and created a new science: the “science” of history. Althusser's distinction left its imprint on Marxist urban studies during the late 1960s and early '70s. Lefebvre, to my mind, offers the most sensible summation of the matter, noting that “in his early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx had not yet fully developed his thought. It is there, however, germinating, growing, becoming. Certainly, the interpretation of these texts is problematic, but the problems need to be properly formulated. My view is that historical and dialectical materialism developed. It did not come into being abruptly, with an absolute discontinuity, after a break, at x moment, in the works of Marx (and in the history of humanity).” A page later, Lefebvre adds, “The mistake, the false 15 option, which must be avoided, is to overestimate or else to underestimate Marx's early writings The early writings contain riches, but riches still confused, riches half-mined and scarcely exploited.”³

Young Marx's romantic dream, for all its problems, was for a socialism that provided a “new enrichment of human nature.” The “rich human being,” he insisted, is “the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities—the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need? But it isn't material wealth that Marx thought men and women really need. Human beings actually need a “greater wealth”: the need of other human beings.⁴ By Marx's reckoning, people become poorer the more their need for money becomes ever greater, ever more desperate. In short, our “neediness grows as the power of money increases.” And modern capitalist society has one “true need,” a “new potency” and “alien power”—to which everybody is inexorably enslaved. Thus, to make it along the bourgeois road, to obtain gratification, Marx already knew we have to sell everything, including ourselves, prostrating our desires and needs and dreams, to the dizzy power of money. He writes, “The extent of the power of money is the extent to my power. Money's properties are my properties and essential powers—the properties and powers of its possessor…. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly…. I, in my character as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor … money is the real mind of all things and how can its possessor be stupid?” (377; emphasis in the original).

In the section “Estranged Labor,” Marx points out the rational irrationale of capitalism: workers become poorer the more wealth they produce, the more production increases in power and extent. They cheapen themselves as a commodity the more they produce commodities. “The devaluation of the human world,” he notes, “grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things” (323–24; emphasis in the original). Devaluation is existential as well as material: the object workers produce—that is, the commodity itself—stands directly opposed to them; so does the activity of labor and the relationship between one laborer to another. The product and activity both relate to every worker as something alien, as a power independent of the producer, as, in short, an objectification of labor. The more workers exert themselves, the more powerful the alienation, and the poorer their inner world becomes. Consequently, young Marx reasoned, and cleverly, that “if the product of labor is alienation, the production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation” (326).

In work, people lose a little of themselves; they're alienated from what they make and do, from the result and activity of their work—whether it's hard factory graft or seductive office paper pushing. Ultimately, people get cut off from themselves, from their “species beings,” from real human developmental potentialities; for employees, active work becomes “passive power,” “power as impotence,” “procreation as emasculation,” a life of dread directed against the self, a loss of the self 16 for awhile. When at work, people feel outside themselves; at home they can begin to reclaim themselves. The worker “is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.” Marx here views human beings as practically and theoretically making our species: “[F]or what is life,” he asks, “but activity?” Conscious life activity separates us from other animals. Take away that free conscious practical activity—deny it, have it mediated in some way via private property—and something will be lost, a vital force enervated, a human power restricted; full development stunted, undermined. Marx sought the “positive supersession” (351) of these circumstances through the ruthless negation of these circumstances. His yearning was to go beyond all estrangement, working through it and not around it, supplanting it, one day, with what he calls a “real association” (350) in which free and more wholesome human beings live and act out “social life” (emphases in the original).

This theme of practical activity was reiterated in another important early Marx tract, once again produced on the hoof, this time in Brussels: the Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845 yet unpublished in Marx's lifetime. Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1841) had been a best-seller in left-wing circles; the Young Hegelians lapped it up. In August 1844, Marx, the renegade Young Hegelian, sent Feuerbach a rather precocious letter, enclosing his critical article on Hegel's philosophy of law. Marx, apparently, was “pleased to find chance to be able to assure [Feuerbach] of the distinguished respect and—excuse the word—love that I have for you.” He added,”Your Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and Essence of Christianity, despite their limited scope, are, at my rate, of more weight than all present day German literature put together.”⁵ In effect, Feuerbach had inverted Hegel, had put him right side up, on his feet in real world flesh and blood. So, too, had religion been “pulled down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth—what else is this than a societal concept!”⁶ Now, the absolute spirit could be understood as none other than the material world displaced into the netherworld of human imagination: Feuerbach had exposed Hegel as the apologist for Christianity that he really was.

But Marx knew that Feuerbach wasn't quite there yet, either. So he began to figure out how Feuerbach's human abstraction might be converted into a more dynamic material force. Alas, while Marx went about this dilemma, he found big trouble over two anti-Prussian articles he'd written for the Parisian newspaper Vorwärts. Prussian powers that be intervened, grumbled to the French government, and Marx received his marching orders from France. In February 1845, he, Jenny, and firstborn daughter Jenny, moved to 4 Rue d'Alliance, Brussels, which became home for the next year or so. They'd move three more times over the forthcoming eighteen months. During that first Brussels spring, Marx had a major breakthrough with Feuerbach. He made headway with a series of eleven idiosyncratic aphorisms that Frederick Engels, Marx's then new friend (since 1842) and loyal comrade to be only discovered much later, in the late 1880s, after leafing through Marx's old notebooks.

Engels would later publish the Theses on Feuerbach as an appendix to his own 1888 essay, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy. In the foreword he called the text of his late friend “notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new-world outlook.” This brilliant germ of this outlook bore a curious label: “revolutionary practice.” The Brussels text evinced Marx growing up—a radical coming of age—developing as a special kind of socialist and materialist, as a philosopher with attitude, somebody destined to educate the educators. Everything lay ahead now for Marx. There was no looking back, even as the Belgium secret police patrolled his every move.

Leaving Philosophy Aside

“The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included,” proclaims Marx in his first thesis, “is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice.” Yes, Feuerbach certainly affirms sensuous objects, objects of touch and smell, sight and taste, phenomena really distinct from thought objects, from Hegelian idealist constructs. But he “does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.” His materialism, in other words, remains curiously idealist. His “genuinely human attitude” remains, according to Marx, a “theoretical attitude.”⁷ Feuerbach deemed practice as something external to human contemplation: on the one hand, we have a contemplative human being, self-aware, naturally rooted on planet earth; on the other hand, we have a human being who can practically engage with the sensuous world. Yet Feuerbach had little inkling of how these realms hang together. He couldn't grasp how “practical-critical activity” changes both sensuous objects and the act of contemplation itself. Thus, by acting on the external world, by changing external nature, practice changes internal nature as well. The two worlds become one world for Marx, connected dynamically, not passively. His subject and object are mediated by practice, by revolutionary practice.

The question of what objective truth is, accordingly, becomes a “practical question.” There's never any abstract solution: Truth is forever concrete. This is the nub of Marx's famous second thesis. Now, humans “must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of [Feuerbach's] thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (422; emphasis in the original). Philosophers can argue about truth till they're blue in the face. But they'll never find real truth in hallowed university debating rooms. Abstract thinking can be tested out only by being put through its paces, by making it right because it has been made to work. It's only by working through a problem that humans will create answers: truth comes out the other side. It's not knowable in advance: its focus becomes clearer meanwhile and afterward. Consequently, no blueprints, no abstract schemas, no prefigurative plans, none of these will ever replace practical steady work. That's what Marx means about truth, and it's also how he defines right and wrong.

But in the third thesis he distances himself from “vulgar” materialism. He reminds everybody that humans alter themselves; we're not just responsive to changes in external circumstances but can be the initiators of change—only, though, if we change ourselves first. Thus, revolutionizing practice means changing people, ideas, and ideas about ideas: “[I]t is essential,” Marx notes, “to educate the educator himself” (422). Somehow, revolutionary practice must intervene in the pro-duction of ideas. Ideas developed in academe, in the workplace, in the street and bars; ideas that circulate publicly in newspapers, pamphlets, and books—all should be fair game for socialist infiltration. Evidently, Marx's materialism has an idealist moment. It's a self-reflexive, self-critical kind of materialism. He knows that ideas matter, and it's important, he insists, that the right ideas are made to matter most. He suggests that practice alters both ideas and circumstances; changing the circumstances usually unleashes changing ideas. But new ideas can equally change circumstances. Revolutionizing practice, meanwhile, provides the gel, makes truth cohere.

In reality, this necessitated “leaving philosophy aside,” an outlook most definitively expressed in a 700-page tome, The German Ideology, that Marx penned with Engels, mostly in Brussels, between September 1845 and the summer of 1846. “One has to leap out of it [philosophy],” they note, “and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown, of course, to the philosoph...