As I’ve spent the last couple of days
watching the state’s response to the Carnival against Capitalism in London,
formed as to the looming G8 summit and recognising London’s pivotal role in
supporting the architecture of global capitalism, it has reminded me of the
central thrust of David Harvey’s critically important 2012 publication Rebel Cities.
Here, Harvey partly laments the decline
of the urban space as the site of and location for anti-capitalist resistance
and explores this through an examination of cities from South Africa to India.
In doing so though he critically navigates something vital to understanding the
context of the on-going Carnival battles in London.
Harvey predicates the first part of his
work on the work of the French philosopher, Henry Lefebvre, and his ‘right to
the city’ thesis. Lefebvre’s approach to an understanding of the role of the
city as a site of resistance is made all the more important with his analysis
of the ‘urbanisation of capital’ and that in the post-war era urbanisation was
replacing industrialisation as a means of survival for capitalism.
Crucially, Lefebvre argues, the
occupation and control of space (through property ownership and the use/abuse
of rent) – and in particular sites of strategic economic and and political
importance becomes, from a Marxist perspective, a new means of understanding
the strategy of capitalist accumulation. In this new analysis of space however Lefebvre
contends that as capitalism witnesses a reduction in the means by which
production offers a route to accumulation, space and property provide a
politically and financially profitable means via which to maintain predominance
as an economic theory.
Harvey is worth reading for much more
than a revisiting of Lefebvre, not least in understanding how urban spaces can provide
an important location for the generation and propagation of anti-capitalist
activity, but in this ultimate urban call to arms it is important that we do
not lose sight or understanding of why the state would invest so much time and
energy in defending the City of London whilst so much of the UK remains in
neglect.
In Solidarity
Ian
