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Whose City? Our City?: A Critique of Recent Interpretations of “Dialectical Urbanism.”

By Thomas Smith

Introduction: The Right to the City: Three Interpretations

In his recent work, David Harvey considers “the right to the city.” The intellectual Left

first encountered this slogan in the writing of Henri Lefebvre. Quite independently of Lefebvre’s

influence, popular urban movements have taken it up.1

But the slogan has different connotations, dependent on “who fills it with meaning”2:

There are three:

a. the radical meaning that, according to Harvey, is presented by Lefebvre and these

popular movements;

b. the conservative meaning of the exploitative ruling class;

c. the view of the conformist, professional middle class, at which Harvey hints, but

about which he does not elaborate. This will be the chief concern of this paper.

The Radical View: Harvey writes that the popular, collective right to remake the city “after our

heart’s desire” opposes not only the interests of the ruling class, but to the selfish tendencies of

the middle class intellectuals3 and the professional class in general, as well. As a sop to the

masses, to quote Harvey, these latter champion “a right of individual or group access to the

resources that the [present] city embodies.”4

Lefebvre’s radical view was further envisioned by the 1970s Ecologistes: “a radical

neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city

1 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012), pp. x-xiii.2 Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. xv. 3 Of course, these are just tendencies, not universal qualities, of middle class intellectuals. Lewis Mumford,

Lenin, Trotsky, Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, et alia were also middle class intellectuals who were not overly seduced by such tendencies.

4 Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. 4.

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living … with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and

workshops open to the world, cafes galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank,

community gardens here and there.”5 To get from here to there entails “a right to change … the

city more after our hearts’ desire.” As such, the “right to the city” must be “a collective rather

than an individual right… to claim some kind of shaping power … over the ways in which our

cities are made and remade.”6

I am in sympathy with this radical vision of the right to the city. I am grateful to Harvey

for at least spelling out these political distinctions. However, for one thing, he doesn’t discuss the

middle class position.

Secondly, though the vision of the Ecologists that he presents is attractive, it is almost

inchoate. He presents scant vision of the ultimate goal: “some kind of shaping power” is not very

definite. Harvey does see that an anarchist federalism or “horizontalism” will not work as the

ultimate principle to organize and made decisions within a socialist society: some higher level of

“generality” is required. But as for political strategy, for getting from here to there, the “nested

affiliation of an alliance of associations” celebrated by Sian Lazar, each of which with their

disparate aims arising from their own particular, sectoral, localistic concerns, seem the only way

to go-for Harvey, at least.7 While he briefly discusses the “traditional Left’s” affinity for

“democratic centralism” as a strategy for organization, he just lets the whole matter drop, as if

not even worthwhile considering.8

Can we really separate the two: organizing principle in the here and now, and our vision

of how a socialist society ought to be organized? If, as Harvey himself admits, a higher level of

5 Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. ix. 6 Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. 4.7 Harvey, 147-1528 Harvey, 124-125.

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“generality” than is offered by anarchism is necessary to organize a socialist economy/society,

how much more so is such things as collective discipline and education necessary, rather than a

parochial spontaneism, to organize a revolution against a very well organized global

bourgeoisie?

What—if not the Leninism he brusquely dismisses--is to ensure that this program is

genuinely radical, and will remain so? What prevents the conformist urban program of the

privileged middle class from corrupting the radical vision which recreate the City to serve the

masses?

This aversion to even the mention the need for collective discipline quite naturally leads

to haziness over program itself. This aversion to both, is endemic to the Left urbanists I am about

to discuss. For these thinkers, as we will discuss, it seems that something as vague and mystical

as “the metropolitan spirit,” or “urban space,” is a sufficient substitute for a Leninist vanguard

party of the working class. Or, as Berman and Merrifield imply, merely to be soaked up as

atmosphere, and “enjoyed” in Nietzschean fashion--as a substitute for socialism itself.

What I will examine in this article is the possibility that such hesitancy about discussing a

radical program for the City, and this aversion to a Leninist strategy for achieving it, might itself

be the product of corruption by this middle class conformist position.

The Decentrist Position of Marx

The genuine radical program for the City, before proposing solutions to the problems

posed by the Big City, start by considering the basic needs of the masses that urban society must

fulfill, and the contradictions it must overcome. Marx and Engels themselves argued that the

problems of the City must ultimately be traced to the division of town and country that occurs

early on in history, as both a form of the division of labor, and a means for its further

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intensification. Marx and Engels insisted that a socialist revolution must attempt to heal this

division in all its forms. Thus they promoted a policy of decentralizing the present, hyper-urban

population to smaller urban concentrations in the countryside. They present this program in the

Manifesto of the Communist Party and Engel’s On the Housing Question.

Later radical Decentrists such as Lewis Mumford and his associates in the Regional

Planning Association in the 30s and the Housing Guild in the 40s, alongside Paul and Percival

Goodman in the 50s, further developed such plans for voluntary removal of much of the big city

population to garden cities in the countryside in order to make room for greening the big city:9

Harvey does mention Mumford’s work favorably. Yet, though these past radicals argued

that such Decentrism was vitally important to their radical vision for the City, he never even

mentions such schemes.10

The division of town country is essential to ruling class control and use of the present,

metropolitan-sized city, as Marx and Engels, Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, Lewis

Mumford and the 20th century Decentrists all understood. The “right” insisted upon by the

“financiers and developers”11 is to exploit the over-concentrated people of the big city that their

class created, in the first place. When the urban population becomes enormously concentrated,

competition among workers for jobs and housing intensifies. The result in the big city is lower

wages, higher rents: and both are simultaneously obstacles to, and goads toward, revolutionary

solidarity.12 The result of suburbanization and rural stagnation, which has been the flip side of

9 See The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed.. Donald Miller, (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (Grove Press, 1989).

10 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 138.11 Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. xv.12 See Friederich Engels, Condition of the Working Class of England (1842), at

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/12/25.htm ; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1938), pp. 143-299; and David Gordon, “Marxism and the Metropolis,” in Larry Sawers and William K. Tabb, ed. Marxism and the Metropolis, New Perspectives in Political Economy, Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 25-63. One can also see this view expressed in Herman Melville’s work, particularly the first chapter of Moby Dick, and the later, New York based chapters of Pierre, or the Ambiguities.

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metropolitanism, has been the erosion of existing or prevention of trade union organization of an

atomized working class.

More recently, their right to the city means to sink their surplus profits into the

development of high priced real estate they sell to corporations, and rent as well as sell to the

upper, professional middle class.13

But what about the conformist middle class and their (conformist) vision? Let’s explore this

in more detail. “The democratic petty bourgeois,” wrote Marx and Engels in 1847, “far from

wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only

aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and

comfortable for themselves as possible.”14 The career of the new professional middle class is in

bureaucratic or educational service to the workers and poor.15 By championing an expansion of

opportunities for the lower classes within the present, metropolitan-capitalist system, they merely

hope to expand and secure such opportunities for themselves. Their real alliance, however, is not

with the working class and poor, but instead, with the capitalist ruling class; and what they want

is not a radical socialist transformation of present-day society, but rather, a present-day society

that is just a little more enlightened. Going beyond Harvey, in order to arm ourselves against it,

we will actually examine this conformist urban position among the middle class—but also

explore how much intellectuals like Harvey, Berman, Merrifield, Castells—and even Lefebvre—

have unfortunately been influenced unduly by it.

13 Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. x, 19, 23, 29, et passim.14 Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League London:

March 1850, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm15 See Nicos Poulantzas, “On Social Classes,” New Left ReviewI/78, March-April 1973, pp. 27-54; Victor

Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 3, The Urban Middle Classes Against the Revolution, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1930/year-one/ch03.htm

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The Effective Alliance of Middle Class, Mid Twentieth Century Centrists with the Rich against

the Radical Left

Shortly after WWII, there arose a school among New Deal liberals and former Socialists

called Centrism. Its intellectual founder was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Against the “extremes” of

Left and Right, “We must defend,” Schlesinger wrote in 1948, “and strengthen free society.”16

Schlesinger implied that present day society is already “free.” By arguing this, Schlesinger

supported the ferocious repression that was being unleashed, by the U.S. imperial ruling class,

upon the Communist Party and its “fellow travelers” by Harry Truman and then Joe McCarthy.

At about the same time, Schlesinger put himself prominently on the roll of intellectuals in

support of the Council for Cultural Freedom: an anti-Communist, CIA front group. In the name

of freedom, Schlesinger thus supported pro-imperialist authoritarianism. Against “extremism,”

the Centrists alleged, extreme measures were necessary.17

The model for this Centrist alliance with the purportedly rational rich, to purportedly

preserve our purported freedom, against the extremes of Left as well as Right, is portrayed

favorably, according to Peter Biskind, in the film Twelve Angry Men, screenplay by Reginald

Rose and film directed by Sidney Lumet in 1957. In the jury room, an alliance is struck between

the middle aged stockbroker (big businessman), played by E.G. Marshall, and the professional

architect (Centrist liberal) played by Henry Fonda, against the racist and anti-youth ravings of

working class right wingers played by Ed Begley Sr. and Lee J. Cobb. This alliance is

instrumental in producing a more rational verdict of “not guilty” for the poor Latino on trial for

murdering his father. The eminently rational middle class alliance with big business rightly

16 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), p. 10.

17 See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 89.

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triumphs over the extremism of the unruly mob spirit that threatens the judicious proceedings

from below.18

Centrism had a strong influence on liberals who focused primarily on the problems of

metropolitan urban life. Both Jane Jacobs and Morton and Lucia White, whose Centrist views we

will discuss presently, were associated with Schlesinger, either professionally, in Jacobs' case,19

or personally, as with the Whites.20 Jane Jacobs built a movement against Robert Moses’ plans to

bulldoze a highway through Washington Square Park. This was a populist movement: but

Jacobs’ populism involved a keen awareness that for such movements to come up with

immediate successes, Saul Alinsky-style, they required the support of the financial

establishment.21 Could this awareness have had just a little to do with Jacobs’ sudden betrayal of

Mumford’s support for the writing of the book—for her turn away from and scathing attack upon

Mumford and Co.’s Decentrism as just as bureaucratic, elitist, and destructive as the work of Le

Corbusier (which was actually despised by Mumford!), in her Introduction to Death and Life of

Great American Cities (1961)? It probably had a lot to do as well with her fiscal conservatism,

which later evolved into support for turning over 10% of the New York City welfare state

finances to financing new entrepreneurs, and then going on to reject, as did the “modernization”

18 Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Fifties. (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 10-20. This section from chapter 1 on Twelve Angry Men can also be found at http://studythepast.com/his597_modernfilm_summer10/readings/12angrymen.pdf

19 Jane Jacobs worked in the same governmental office as Arthur Schlesinger Jr during World War II: the U.S. Office of War Information. See Gert-Jan Hospers, Jane Jacobs: her Life and Work, The Preservation Institute, at http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Jacobsbiox.html, and “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,” The International Who's Who, 1979-1980, 43rd ed. (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1979), p. 1114.

20 Schlesinger and Morton White were editorial partners on the anthology, Paths of American Thought (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1963).

21 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 297-99; which discusses favorably the success of Saul Alinsky’s “Back of the Yards” movement in Chicago from the 30s to the 50s, and the importance of inviting and treating well the local “representatives of the banks and saving and loan associations” to a meeting, on July 2, 1953, of the Back of the Yard movement, to get them to see how many potential depositors could withdraw their deposits if they continued their policy of redlining the districts. It is ironic that this movement Jacobs favors so much is called the “back of the yards” movement, since her (hare-brained) solution in the book is to drive streets through those backyards!

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theorists of the time, any welfare system for third World countries until their economies “took

off’ so that they could become prosperous enough. In this book, we can see such conservatism in

Jacobs’ crude dismissal of all public housing projects, whether humanely run as Mumford and

Catherine Bauer advocated, or the present bureaucratic nightmares—she lumped them all

together--and even large parks because it costs too much to hire park attendants to protect

visitors from crime. We’re better off with tiny parks and streets, where ordinary citizens can look

out for each other on a voluntary basis!

Thomas Angotti displays a similar tenderness to the feelings of the wealthy, and a

consequent impulse to pull his, and especially other, more radical critics’ punches. Jane Jacobs

had correctly criticized city governments for terming perfectly well functioning working class

neighborhoods as “slums” and the razing them to make way for unsightly housing projects and

luxury housing. Angotti however goes much further with this, furthering Jacobs’, and as we shall

see, Morton and Lucia Whites’, anti-intellectual authoritarianism. In a so-called “review” (a

better term would be “hatchet job”) of Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, Angotti chastises Davis, a

Marxist scholar who never razed any neighborhoods, for even using the word. Angotti calls upon

Friedrich Engels as his authority for lambasting Davis as an overly harsh, negative critic of the

big city who has no solution for its problems. Yet Engels himself uses this fine old Gaelic word,

meaning “place of desolation,” in his Condition of the Working Class in Manchester. Davis’ real

sin, apparently, is that while he has discussed revolutionary solutions that would certainly

gladden the heart of Engels, such solutions would not appeal to the sort of well-heeled reformist

non-profit organizations favored by Angotti (and perhaps, those which favor Angotti in turn?),

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but whom Davis has the temerity to attack as upholding a destructive bourgeois agenda vis a vis

poor people all over the world.22

The reforms and opportunities proposed by Centrist urbanists never challenge the basic

contours of the big city. Often they will employ various stratagems to avoid confronting those

problems with the big city that can only be resolved, the radical Decentrists would say, by its

supersession.

In her introduction, Jacobs admits that there are “deep and complicated social ills” that

underlie even her problem of choice: crime. She refuses to deal with them however. She argues

that she can help to solve this problem, without addressing these ills. But her solution—more

streets, cut through all the back lots of Manhattan—would, as Mumford revealed in his scathing

review of the book, just make those ills--such as urban congestion--worse.23

Jacobs’ blinkered ignorance went hand in hand with a reactionary, anarcho-mysticism

surrounding the local neighborhood. Otherwise a big admirer of her work, Marshall Berman

notes this “anti-modernist subtext … a sort of undertow of nostalgia for a family and a

neighborhood in which the self could be securely embedded, ein’ feste Burg, a solid refuge

22 Thomas Angotti, “Apocalyptic anti-urbanism: Mike Davis and his planet of slums,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 30.4, December 2006, pp. 961-7; Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (Verso, 1986), pp. 301-314. See also James Petras: “NGOs: In the Service of Imperialism,” at http://www/neue-einheit.com/english/ngos.htm. While Angotti acknowledges that Davis is correct to criticize some of the non-profit organizatoins he attacks, Angotti defends the Wold Social Forum as benevolent in its politics. However an nuimber 35 of the journal Aspects of India’s Economy, titled “Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum,” at http://www.rupe-india.org/35/contents.html, indicates that the WSF was founded by “ATTAC, a French NGO (non-governmental organisation) platform devoted to lobbying international financial institutions to reform and humanise themselves, and by the Brazilian Workers Party, whose leftist image and 'participatory' techniques of government have not prevented it from scrupulously implementing the stipulations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).” as a (bourgeois) response to try to co-opt and vitiate the radicalism of the “anti-globalization movement after Seattle” after “ruling circles” failed in their efforts to suppress this movement initially..

23 Lewis Mumford, “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller, pp. 184-200.

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against all the dangerous currents” of “modernity.”24 Yet what Berman ignores is the fact that

alongside Jacobs’ celebration of family and the complex metropolitan neighborhood, there is an

equal if not greater celebration of free market “dynamism.” Indeed, this “market dynamism” is

the real essence, “the [bourgeois] kernel within the mystical shell,” of Jacobs’, and Berman’s,

notion of an “inner strength” of neighborhoods. But this dynamism, as Lewis Mumford revealed

in his review of Jacobs’ book,25 continually threatens the destruction of these old relationships

and structures. It is not just state planners like Moses who threaten this destruction: it is the free

market itself.

Jacobs’ desire to protect neighborhoods and families from the ravages from modernity is

certainly not reactionary: as Berman charges. It is healthy. Rather what is problematic, what is

right wing, is the dominant theme in her discourse—and, sadly, also in Berman’s--that

neighborhoods, left alone, can survive these ravages, along with her desire to identify with the

market as universally bountiful, against Mumford’s ideal of democratic urban planning that

might perform admirably this job of protection.

Thus, though Jacobs admits that most of the financial power for fighting Moses came from

wealthy contributors from other, wealthier neighborhoods, she feels entitled on this mystical

basis to argue, like her mentor Nathan Glazer, that “town planning is obsolete.” The magical

power of the popular neighborhood can solve all its problems just fine by itself, thank you. And

this is because the problems that are really important—which, for proto-yuppie Jacobs, are

reduced to one problem only: crime—can easily be solved by and in the neighborhood. More

24 Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, pp. 323-26.25 Mumford, “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” The Lewis Mumford Reader. Berman himself discussed this

in his Politics of Authenticity, pp. 163-68, with his favorable gloss toward Rousseau’s language in Emile of protecting the young tree from the highway. Jim Sleeper also discusses it in The Closest of Strangers. (Norton, 1991).

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streets—which Jacobs proposed New York City use its powers of eminent domain to cut through

all the backlots of Manhattan (?!) would put more eyes on the street, which would prevent crime.

(tell that to the ghost of Kitty Genovese!)

Around the same time, Morton White, the 30s Partisan Review writer who had become by

this point a tenured “analytic” philosopher and a liberal of sorts, co-authored a book with his

wife, the psychiatric social worker Lucia, entitled The Intellectual Versus the City (1962). This

was basically a scholarly and extended version of the hatchet job Jacobs had tried to perform

upon Lewis Mumford and his Decentrist views, along with every other American intellectual

who ever cast a critical eye upon the big city.

Unless the lengthy hatchet job they had presented in the body of their work can be

construed as such, the Whites presented absolutely no evidence in the body of The Intellectual

Versus the City (1962) to support the following “conclusion”: “Who can deny in 1962, then, that

the greatest problem of the American city is to demonstrate … first, that it can solve the problem

of education for the millions of people who are entering its gates, that it can absorb the Negro

and the Puerto Rican, as it has other groups, into its economy and the democratic process…?”26

The Whites go on from this first list of “inclusive” requirements, to list more serious

requirements of the big city: “second, that it can foster individuality, the capacity and the right of

the human being to develop into a rounded personality concerned with more than merely

commercial values; and third, that it can be more than a vast prison of unconnected cells in

which people of different occupations, color, class, or creed fail to understand one another on the

basic human issues of social life, let alone agree with one another.”27 The question they beg here:

is the big city the proper form, is it at all capable of meeting these more serious needs?

26 Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and the M.I.T. Press, 1962), p. 238.

27 Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual vs. The City, p. 238.

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The Whites engage in a kind of legerdemain, a form of mythmaking that Roland Barthes,

called “inoculation,” but which might better be termed “diversion.” They are very good about

presenting these problems of big city life. However, they insinuate, but prove nowhere in the

body of their text, that all of these different problems they mention can be solved by the big city.

For the first order of problems they mention, involving inclusion of minorities, what the

Whites refuse to acknowledge is the possibility that the capitalist economy itself, the historical,

socio-economic basis of the big city—this economy which they support just as strongly as they

do the big city against radicals such as Mumford and co., and which is intrinsically linked with

the big city--is incapable of resolving these problems. And that is because racial discrimination is

also intrinsic, radicals would argue, to capitalism itself, and is too useful as a strategy of divide

and conquer, ever to be abandoned by the capitalist class.28

The second order of problems—anomie, alienation, racial conflict—and problems slyly

ignored here—congestion and stress--are problems that radical critics like Mumford charge the

big city itself with being in large part, along with, once again, capitalism, responsible for

creating, in the first place. By confounding this second set of problems with the first set, the

rootedness of this second set of problems in the very structure and functioning of the big city is

precisely what is obscured.

The father of radical historian Sean Wilentz, Elias B. Wilentz, reviewed the book

contemporaneously for the Nation. They demand that intellectuals such as Mumford “love” the

big city,” that we ought to be “cheering at the top of” our “lungs for” it. Wilentz opines,

accurately, I think, that such pious conformism serves the powers that be. The Whites give carte

blanche to the destruction planned by Harvey’s “financiers and developers” and their urban

planning bureaucrats. In the last, philistine sentence of the book, the Whites declare that “all the

28 See Max Shachtman, Race and Revolution, Verso Press, 2000.

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world’s a city now, and there is no escaping urbanization, not even in outer space.” Wilentz

declares this to be “authoritarian nonsense, disguised as planning.”

The “Radical” Urbanists and their Wavering, neo-Anarchist Ways

I now would like to turn to three of the major “radical urbanists”: Henri Lefebvre, Manuel

Castells, and Marshall Berman. I would say their title as radicals is not quite certain. They seem

instead to more or less equivocate: to walk a tightrope between anarchism and Marxism, between

a revolutionary working class and popular oriented position on the Big City, and the middle class

Centrist position.

Let’s explore now the thought of one of the founders of this school, Henri Lefebvre. Much

of Lefebvre’s work, his concepts of urban space and how the capitalist class and other ruling

classes organize space to further their cultural hegemony are exception, brilliant, and valuable. I

have little problem with it. My problem is that Lefebvre, like the rest, is long on analysis, but

falls far short when it comes to prescription: political organization and program. The latter

involve a conception of time—historical time, in which there still exist possibilities for

disciplined collective proletarian action, party leadership, revolution, and the radical

transformation of society. I have no problem with Lefebvre’s conception of space

complementing such “temporal” possibilities, conceptions, exigencies. But my problem is that he

proposes that “space” has replaced time. This conveniently leaves him off the hook when it

comes to accepting the need for discipline, and program.

The importance of this concept of time had been implicit in Marx and Engel’s commitment

to a new, historical version of materialism, which they derived from Hegel. Instead of eternally

valid principles of social causation, Hegelian Marxism argued that such causation was

fundamentally historical in nature, and thus accessible to human manipulation, which itself was a

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product of historical causation. “Men make their own history,” as I quoted Marx earlier, “but

they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but

under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Thus the need for

revolutionary principles and organization, a process of collective self-education, which transcend

the self-centered consciousness of individuals, buffeted by impressionism, the authority of the

past, self-interest, and the tendency toward opportunism. If one is constrained by circumstances

—certainly not the least important being such temptations—then, to overcome them, one had

better be scientifically and theoretically clear about those circumstances, and those temptations.

“We cannot control impulses,” clinical psychologist Anodea Judith has written in a different, but

related context, “without a concept of time.” Judith is talking about the toddler stage and how a

sense of time arises with the development of language skills. Language enables the parent to

impart and insist upon discipline, which is based upon the knowledge of “cause and effect”

possible through the language. The sense of time thus created enables the toddler to begin to

reign in their impulses.

Since the anarchist theorist doesn’t believe in discipline, I think the quote is relevant: the

analogy, perfect. A knowledge of cause and effect, the experience of this, and thus the historical

lessons the working class must learn, is crystallized in the theoretical and organizational

principles of a socialist party. Just as Judith’s toddler learns through language not to put his hand

on a hot stove, so, too, the workers must come to understand the dangers of reformism. Thus

more lucid (as well as more mature) reasoning might have led Lefebvre to try to encompass

conceptions of the urban and urban struggles within their traditional framework for organizing in

time, with a principle focus upon workers’ exploitation, the need to organize workers in a

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disciplined revolutionary party, but fully incorporating the urban space concerns Lefebvre is

talking about.

In his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Georg Lukacs explained how

the alienating capitalist labor process encourages a “contemplative” attitude among the workers,

by transforming “time” into “space”:

Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly

delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified,

mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total

human personality: in short, it becomes space.29

This process of transforming time into space, “temporarily” paralyzing the working class,

as Stanley Aronowitz has pointed out in his False Promises and How Class Works, is

exacerbated by the ruling capitalist class, by its use of various strategies to divide and

disempower the working class. Suburbanization, segregation and discrimination by race,

ghettoization and ghastly housing “projects” for minorities; homeownership for the more

privileged white workers; and separation of workers in factories and offices by pseudo-

occupational “grades”: all are “spacialization” strategies that weaken the unity of the working

class and prevent it from understanding its historical mission.

What thinkers such as Lefebvre do, however, is to attempt to transform this weakness into a

virtue, some kind of achievement, or at least, an excuse from socialist discipline and theory. For

Lefebvre, this process of urban spatialization means that capitalism has transcended its

contradictions, or at least, put them on a whole new plane, a plane inaccessible to traditional

Marxist-Leninist principles of organization and program. Instead, and quite mystically, it has

29 Georg Lukacs, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Conscousness, Merlin Press, 1967. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm

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become accessible to more anarchist, unorganized, spontaneous conceptions. This mystery might

be resolved, however, when we remember that Lefebvre has been “burned” by his experience in

the PCF, away from not just Stalinism, but Leninism, in general, and into a quasi-Marxist, neo-

anarchist stance.30

He writes in the Explosion, his work of May 1968, that the “groupuscules—operating on the

ideologies of Stalinism, Trotskyism, Guevarism…it doesn’t matter which” have a valuable

function to perform in such contemporary mass upheavals. They “cause a ferment, a leavening.”

But beyond that, it is the practice of “free speech” itself among the mass movement that drives

the movement forward: and this alone, in Lefebvre’s view, seems to dissolve the boundary

between workers and students. He praises the movement for not having “leaders,” but merely

“spokesmen” for this “free speech.”31

Lefebvre’s account reminds of the conception of the “mass strike,” developed by Rosa

Luxemburg. In Trotsky’s description of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the workers strike is

similarly described as taking on a life of its own, becoming a very powerful creature.

There is an important difference, however. While Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Lenin all

appreciated the power of the popular movement and of spontaneity—which took place, nota

bene, primarily in the “urban space”—nothing new here!—ideology, program and discipline

were still important as the “spine,’ not just the “leaven,” of this creature.

But in Lefebvre we have the anarchist notion pure and simple, a notion that goes back to

Bakunin, that promotion of “spontaneity” and local autonomy means that the exigency of

organizing ourselves politically in disciplined, Leninist fashion, taking State power away from 30 When asked, in the 1970s, whether he was actually an anarchist, a question that came natural to his

interviewer, Edward Soja, knowledgeable of Lefebvre’s recent work, he replied elusively, “No, I’m a Marxist, of course…so that one day we can all become anarchists!” Soja, Thirdspace (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 3 note 8. Cf. Andy Merrifield, 72.

31 Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval, tr. Alfred Ehrenfeld (Monthly Review Press Classics, 1969), Chapter 13, “Mutation,” pp. 101-125.

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the bourgeoisie and smashing it/creating our own proletarian, commune/soviet State need never

be taken on. All that nasty Statist stuff can just be safely ignored.

The critique of syndicalism by Paul Levi, who upheld the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg

within, and then against, the KPD, is instructive here. This is in his speech, “The Political

Situation,” made in October 1919. Like Lefebvre, the syndicalists of the KAPD, and ultra-left

split, prefer to transform the communist party “from a [disciplined] party of action, …into a

party of propaganda” (which merely provides the “leaven,” in Lefebvre’s phase) The syndicalists

also come under attack from Levi by promoting federalist principles of organization, which

supposedly obviates the need for determined class struggle, magically dissolving it away.

For Levi, the two go hand in hand. The “spatial autonomy” of federalism, as Lefebvre

might favorably term it, will, according to Levi, be the death of the party: and a disaster for the

proletariat. The party’s function is not simply to “leaven” a spontaneous, disorganized urban

mass, while keeping and encouraging it to remain disorganized—but to give it political form, to

enable these masses to unite and to give themselves form, leadership, will to challenge the

bourgeoisie. “only the violent school of revolution”—led by and forming the party, not an

inchoate mass of “anomic groupuscules”—could raise the struggles and victories, the defeats

and bloodshed, the uprising and retreat of the proletariat, to a level of conception of its tasks and

its duties, so that it understands how to seizes power and how to exercise it.” 32

Lefebvre attempts to revive anarchism, passing it off as a more advanced form of Marxism.

This he does by engaging in legerdemain of his own. For Lefebvre, the production of space by

the ruling class, or urbanization, along with the contradictions this creates, has replaced the era

of industrial production. And this “urban specialization” makes the need for a revolutionary party

32 Paul Levi, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings, ed. David Fernbach, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), pp. 60-65.

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obsolete. The “space” of the city itself is sufficient to bind us all that we need to make a

revolution, purportedly.33

But besides the obvious anarcho-mysticism here, Lefebvre’s periodicization of these

purportedly separate eras is very dubious. When was the industrial era ever non-urban? When

exactly did we stop being industrial? When was it that the contradictions in the industrial

capitalist economy that Marx discussed, every stopped working their way toward crisis? Did we

not just have a crisis a few years ago, an economic crisis that we have yet to resolve? Was this a

crisis of urbanization, or one of industrial, corporate capitalism?

Unlike Lefebvre, David Harvey has a good understanding of the way in which urban

investment complements, but does not replace, the traditional dialectics of investment, and crisis,

in industrial capitalism. Thus in the long term, for Harvey, urban reinvestment adds to, rather

than replaces, the contradictions and crises of capitalist industrialism.34

Another of Lefebvre’s heirs, Manuel Castells has done much to further our understanding of

the dynamics of urban social movements as they struggle against both the capitalists and their

front officials in local and national governments. Castells, while not departing at this time in his

career from the Marxist theory of capitalist economic crisis, argues the new importance of

“collective consumption,” which guarantees the reproduction of an increasingly important, albeit

shrinking, sector of “living labor,” now that the organic composition of capital has proceeded

apace.35

This might very well be true. However, on this basis, Castells also dismisses the Leninist

conception of disciplined, unified struggles centered primarily on the working class, organized

33 Lefebvre, The Explosion, pp. 134-135; Writings on the City tr. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Blackwell, 1996), pp. 65-84

34 David Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. 42.35 Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MIT Press,

1977, pp. 454-462)

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by the “revolutionary party,” This is not only doctrinaire, because, allegedly, neither Marx and

Engels never had any room for an understanding of the dynamic of spontaneous social

movements [?!!] but has become obsolete. “Grassroots mobilizations” by diverse groups,

operating within the field of urban space, struggling within the City with state officials and their

capitalist backers over social welfare demands, arming themselves with diverse “urban

meanings” opposed to these officials and backers, are sufficient to the purpose of progressive

social change. 36

Evidence of the effect this aversion to Marxist organization has upon a scarcity of program,

can be seen in Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution. There he shows himself quite cognizant of the

debate that happened a decade earlier between Jacobs and the Whites, on the one hand, and the

radical Decentrists Mumford and Bauer, on the other. In the passages entitled “for the street,”

“against the street,” “for the monument,” and “against the monument,” he outlines both

arguments—but never takes sides with one or the other.37 “Just go talk about it among

yourselves,” seems to be his prescription. Is that Marxist?

In his “Notes on the New Town,” the “sixth prelude” of his Introduction to Modernity,

Lefebvre meditates on the difference between the abstractly planned, bourgeois modern New

Town of Mourenx, and the old “organic” medieval city nearby: Navarrenx. Lefebvre is no

genuine fan of Jacobs’ anti-planning nostalgia here. He acknowledges that we need the

“organicism” and conviviality of the old medieval arrangement—yet we need socialist urban

planning to do it.38 But here, too, he seems averse to making prescriptions about how this would

happen. Why not turn to the rather formidable work of Lewis Mumford: who spent his whole

36 Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots, (University of California Press, 1983). p. 298.37 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, tr. Robert Bononno ;(University of Minnesota Press, 2003).pp. 18-22.38 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, tr. John Moore (Verson, 1995), pp. 116-126.

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career working out this very problem? Or how about the work of the early Soviet architects who

tried to create—with the power of the soviets behind them—a Decentrist urban architecture?

Again, it seems that Lefebvre doesn’t want to take sides, doesn’t want to root himself in any

tradition that might actually give him, and us, some answers—for fear of being seen as dogmatic

and arrogant.

Marshall Berman: From Cultural Radicalism, to the Culture of (Metropolitan) Narcissism

The most recent Left writers on the City seem to have devolved even further from the

agnostic, yet still radical, views of the 1960s, to a purely passive celebration, and enjoyment, of

contemporary urban spectacles and status quo. “Defend the status quo” of, and “Enjouissez

vous” of the purported treasures of contemporary urban experience, would seem to be their

motto.

In his first work, The Politics of Authenticity (1970), Berman wrote quite radical, critical

passages about the big city. He is very critical, at that time, of the way in which people of the big

city manipulate each other, and how repressive and unfulfilling the big city really is. Basing his

views upon his exploration of Rousseau’s critical stance toward the rising metropolis of the

eighteenth century, and the manipulations that its citizens attempt upon each other, Berman

writes of the metropolis as a “repressive box,” from which it is imperative to “break out.”

After that, however, Berman grew quite comfortable with the big city, demanding instead

that we engage in “nursing” it.39 Berman concludes On the Town (2006) by equating “the right to

the city” with an alleged universal human right “to be part of the city spectacle.”40 This right can

39 Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2006), p. xxxvi

40 Berman, On the Town., pp. 224-225.

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be fulfilled on Times Square, Berman argues, if all of us are at least demographically represented

within such spectacles: portrayed there, in all our racial and gender diversity. 41

In the prototype article for On the Town, “Times Square,” Marshall Berman writes that in

order to protect our beloved Times Square, it is our common task on the Left to “fight like hell.”

But then, he writes, we’d better get real, Leftists! We need to shut up after all the negotiations

between the billionaires and corrupt politicians are over, and, like a chorus girl desperate for a

job, to “lie down and spread” before them, after they have remade it in their own corporate

capitalist image in accordance with their, not our, agenda.42

Why the change from radical critic of big-urban life, to its conservator? Perhaps it has to do

with the considerable trauma experienced by urban intellectuals over white flight to the suburbs

in the late 60s and 70s, which decimated the fiscal base of the big cities, the rise of the New

Right, and the vicious, racist attacks by demagogues upon the welfare state and upon city life, in

general. During this time, Berman writes in On the Town, “some said cities were dirty, noisy,

nasty places that people didn’t need at all…”43 Berman gives us a yet more graphic description of

this right wing horror show in his “New York Calling.” During “the near bankruptcy [of NYC]

of 1975–1976,” Berman writes,

One clip featured a congressman from a district that lived totally on federal money,

with a naval base and a shipyard. He asked his constituents, “Should New York live or

die?” They jumped to their feet, grinned obscenely at each other like the people in a classic

lynch mob photo, and screamed “Die! Die! Die! Die!”44

41 Berman, ibid., p. 224. 42 Berman, “Times Square, The Village Voice, July 18, 1995, p. 26.43 Berman, ibid. (xxxvi).44 Marshall Berman, “New York Calling,” dissent, Fall, 2007.

22

This was—and is--clearly a scary time through which to live. But what concerns me is that,

in reaction to this, Berman no longer seeks to claim radical leadership of the vast unwashed

majority, through dialectical critique of the problems with the contemporary metropolis, in order

to turn them away from such right wing demagogues so that they might radically change the

System—and the City. Like the “totalitarians of the Liberal Center” he criticizes at the end of

The Politics of Authenticity,45 Berman now hangs on to existing institutions for dear life against

the threat of the “unruly mob” below him.

In On the Town (2006) Berman attacks the radical Left on behalf of the spectacle culture

of the rich, before whom he salaams. He labels as “puritanical enemies of Times Square” those

who will not follow his advice for prostration, who would critique instead the spectacular nature

of Times Square itself —“people like Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, and Lewis Mumford.”

This is because, Berman alleges, they “wanted the masses to be radical and militant and to

struggle for their rights, and who believed that commercial mass culture was corrupting their

minds.”46

This is a grotesque caricature of the thought at least of Lewis Mumford. What I wish the

reader to note is Berman’s expression of the alliances and animi of the Neo-Centrist: with the

rich, against the radical Left.

In 1970, Marshall Berman would have been branded an “anti-urban” radical intellectual for

his very critical, very radical portrayal of the “manipulation” and “repression” endemic to “the

city” at the end of his first work, The Politics of Authenticity. By the time he writes his second

book, The Politics of Authenticity (1982), he is full of praise for Jane Jacobs, and for the “chaos”

created in our lives by the big city. His concluding proposal for solving the problems of the

45 Berman, Poliics of Authenticity, p. 321.46 Berman, On the Town, p. 111.

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Bronx after Robert Moses wrecked it: let’s paint communal murals on the Bronx Expressway47

By the writing of his most recent On the Town (2006), Berman scorns all notion of criticizing the

big city and its spectacles, from the vantage point of nostalgia for the more humane past, as

“sucking the life out of the present.” He argues here that the task of intellectuals is not to criticize

the problems of the big city, but to “nurse” it.48

Let us now go on to discuss Berman’s notion that modern urban chaos is the proper ground

for individual freedom. Berman praises Jacobs for arguing that “we must strive to keep this ‘old’

[metro-urban] environment alive, because it is uniquely capable of nourishing modern

experiences and values: the freedom of the city, an order that exists in a state of perpetual motion

and change…”49And it is in this vein that Berman rejects the Soviet Decentrist proposals, of

architects gathered in or around the journal Sovremennayaarkjitektura: such as El Lissitsky,

Moisei Ginzburg, Nikolay Milyutin, and Leonid Sabsovich.

Berman never critically engages the practical arguments made for Decentrism by these

Soviet architectural thinkers. He simply charges that these thinkers did not wish “to go through a

life of turbulent urbanism”50—as if this were some kind of personal shortcoming, a failure of

nerve, a maladjustment: like the kind of problems that Lucia White dealt with in her juvenile

delinquents—and Mumford and Co.. For Berman, the Soviet Decentrist architects harbor that

“mediocre” unwillingness “to live at all” that Nietzsche found in the “slave morality” of socialist

revolutionaries like—Marx and Engels.

How far do we want to take this illogic? Would the survivors of the Russian Civil War, or

the Nazi death camps, seek as a legacy to future generations the “chaos” that they faced?! The

47 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (New York: Penguin, 1988), pp. 314-18, 341-43.

48 Berman, On the Town, 217.49Beman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 317-1850 Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 245.

24

more thoughtful response would be to say that those of who have been through the turbulence of

the city, would be the first to understand why we need a different urban form, that is not quite so

“turbulent”!

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche wrote “Glaubt es mir! – das Geheimnis, um die größte

Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heißt: gefährlich leben! (For

believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest

enjoyment is: to live dangerously!)”51 There might be some truth to this notion. And Berman

might have used it to justify his pro-metropolitan views. But is it really “living dangerously” to

preserve the big city the way it is? Would Nietzsche, who excoriated the “flies in the

marketplace” in Zarathustra approve of this status quo conservatism? As he writes, in strikingly

pastoralist terms way beyond anything Mumford wrote:

Flee, my friend, into thy solitude! I see thee deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.Admirably do forest and rock know how to be silent with thee. Resemble again the tree which thou lovest, the broad-branched one- silently and attentively it o'erhangeth the sea.52

Wouldn’t Marx argue that to really live dangerously means to collectively critique and

supersede the City, via proletarian revolution, rather than supporting the status quo?

Will the Gay Science please stand up?:

Lewis Mumford was influenced profoundly by Nietzsche’s brilliant critique of modern

culture and the State as new forms of idolatry. This critique is best expressed in the chapter

entitled “The New Idol,” in Also Sprach Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche says that the modern

State “lies coldly” when it claims, "I, the state, am the people." The State lies that it can fulfill

the people’s needs, but in fact creates “cravings”—false needs—in the people instead. A similar

51 The Gay Science, 1882, section 283.52 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathusra Chapter 12, at http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/12

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analysis of modern State idolatry can be found in Marx’s On the Jewish Question, where he says

that the State exists to reinforce the divisions and intense exploitations of capitalist civil society.

But because it monopolizes for itself all political power, ordinary people look to it for salvation

from these very same socio-economic contradictions.

It is from these sources that Randolph Bourne wrote his unfinished essay, “The State”

(1918). Thence comes Mumford’s critique of the various other false idols and spectacles of

modern life in The Story of Utopias (1922): “The Country House,” foundation of suburbia (this

should have put the lie to the Whites’ and Jacobs’ “Pro-suburban” label in its proverbial cradle),

industrial “Coketown,” and the “Metropolis.”53

Around the same time, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School Critical Theorist, wrote in

similar, dialectical, critical terms. As Graeme Gilloch sums up his thought on the City, “the

edifices and the objects of the metropolis are utopian wish-images, frozen representations or

objectifications of genuine wants and aspirations that remain unfulfilled or thwarted. The utopian

impulses of long-dead generations lie embedded in the latest products and innovations of

capitalist society…” Quoting Menninghaus, .Benjamin recognizes the realms of mythological

images and dreams as a duality of “utopian” and “cynical elements.”54

In his landmark essay, “Dinosaur Cities,” (1925), Mumford’s fellow Decentrist and radical

architect Clarence Stein explores the social psychology of this urban idolatry. It is a brilliant

analysis of the false, middle class version of the Right to the City that advertises the

“opportunities” offered by the current, big city. What is the appeal here? Is it real—or is it false,

magical, wishful thinking, borne of deprivation?

53 Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias, (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), chapter 10, pp. 193-234.54 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and the Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Polity Press, 1997), p. 105,

quoting Winfried Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde: Walter Benjamins Passage des Mythos (Edition Surkamp), 1986, pp. 18-19)

26

Stein writes that “most of us . . . see the great city as in a dream” only, and confuse this

dream with the reality. On the surface, the metropolis, according to Stein, is

the sum of all our possible aspirations. A picturesque skyline, massive towers, romantic

beauty! Crowds swaying through the lighted streets in pursuit of pleasure; flashing

lights, . . . successful lawyers, engineers, advertising men. . . the city of great opportunities!

But when the “bubble” bursts, Stein writes, we discover that, if we do not have the good

fortune to be wealthy, “many of the real opportunities of living have slipped through our hands.”

The problems involved with the modern metropolis are so enormous as to belie the dream. Stein

mentions the “turbid mass of traffic blocking the streets and avenues, ... the dingy slums” there,

and asks, “What part does art, literature, culture, or financial opportunity play in the lives of the

millions of men and women who go through the daily routine of life in our great urban districts?”

After this sobering view of the dark underside of the modern metropolis for the majority of its

inhabitants, Stein asks, “Is the great city still the goal of our legitimate desires, or is it a

monstrosity, a bloated spider that lures us into its web only to devour us?”55

In his contribution, entitled “The City,” to the 1922 symposium, Civilization in the

United States, Mumford writes, in Freudian fashion, that the “dazzle of white lights, the colour

of electric signs, the alabaster architecture of the moving-picture palaces, the aesthetic appeals of

the shop windows” found on Broadway “compensates” us for the “drab perspectives of the

industrial city.” Mumford laments: “The principal institutions of the American city are merely

distractions that take our eyes off the environment, instead of instruments which would help us to

mould it creatively a little nearer to humane hopes and desires.”56

55 Clarence Stein, “Dinosaur Cities,” in Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration, pp. 65-66; originally published in Survey Graphic 7 (May 1925), pp. 134-38.

56 Mumford, “The City,” Civilization in the United States, ed. Harold E. Stearns (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), p. 9.

27

In Mumford’s actual view, Broadway is problematic, because its spectacular nature distracts

us from real life, and from creating a more creative culture that is more in touch with life, and

our human needs. Mumford, like Addams and Lippmann, was no enemy of Times Square or the

people in them; but merely the spectacles that distract and distort the lives of the people who get

taken in by them.

Berman admits at the end of On the Town that metropolitan spectacles like “the Roman

Circuses” and the “Nuremburg rallies” have been used by totalitarian regimes of the past “to give

their spectators a thrill and reduce them to docility.” Yet metro-urban spectacles make us feel

“more alive”—thus they are good for us.

Guy Debord, however, would have big problems with such mass delusions. And Mumford

termed this feeling of “aliveness” via modern mega-urban spectacle, a “vicarious vitality” that is

in actuality “poison.”

This is the title of section 12 in chapter VI, “The Metropolis: The Rise and Fall of

Megalopolis,” of The Culture of Cities (1938): “The Poison of Vicarious Vitality.” Here

Mumford uncovers the roots of the compulsion, such as Berman’s, to celebrate and participate in

urban spectacles, in precisely the over-congestion of big city life.57 In the passage quoted above

from the German Ideology Marx and Engels talk about the “restricted town-animal” created by

the division of labor between town and country. In a similar vein, the cramped quarters, and

relative artificiality, of the modern city, Mumford writes, frustrates the basic needs of its citizens

for privacy, intimate sexuality and communication, the need to feel a general sense of security

that comes with a familiar community, the needs for frequent physical exercise, and aesthetic and

direct sensual pleasures.

57 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 269.

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Against Berman’s insistence that metropolitan spectacles are morally and politically neutral,

Mumford notes a sinister, intrinsic connection between this false feeling of aliveness in

spectacles, and their potential for mass sadism. Both are rooted in the frustration of our basic

needs in the overcrowded big city. Mumford writes the “residual sociality” of the mass

“spectacle” compensates us for these frustrated needs. The most common, and perhaps the most

innocuous, of such spectacles are organized sports such as baseball and horse racing. Violent

spectacles, according to Mumford, may also offer a perverse compensation for the general sense

of vitiation that obtains in the insecure, lonely, polluted, crowded, artificial metropolitan

environment. These include such sports as motor races and rodeo, for example, (I might add

boxing to this list) or the gladiatorial fights and Christian persecutions of the Roman period. But

“If games do not provide” the frustrated spectator of the metropolis with the “bloodier

satisfactions” he “demands,” “he will manufacture occasions: note the zestful terrorism practiced

by the bourgeoisie under the guise of restoring law and order in a labor conflict: note the prompt

effort on the part of police to turn peaceful struggles for power into occasions of violence.” In the

“sadism” usually involved with such “spectacular performances,” “an inverted sense of life is

promoted through the presence of fear and the nearness to death. . . .The tameness of the

metropolitan routine must have its compensatory mobilizations of ferocity.58

Conclusion: Green the Big Cities, and Voluntarily Decentralize their Over-congested!

Populations

The reforms that Centrists from Morton and Lucia White at the end of The Intellectual

Versus the City, to Thomas Angotti at the end of his New York for Sale, do not extend beyond the

borders of the outer boroughs of New York City. But that is not enough, because the essential

58 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, p. 269.

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problem with New York is that there are too many people now living there to reconstruct the city

in order to truly engage in a program of popular “urban renewal.”

The Decentrist program should be part of a genuine transitional program for urban renewal:

placed on the banner of whatever vanguard proletarian party finally arises in the United States. If

it was good for the program of Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, and

for the Bolsheviks and their architects, then why not for us? The “MetroMarxists” ignore or even

celebrate the “nihilism” and the misery of inner city conditions, and celebrate the “spontaneous”

resistance that occasionally occurs. But a genuinely dialectical urbanism would fight for this

program of Decentrism, to point the way out of their misery to the masses of the inner city

ghettos, as well as the slightly better off, “whiter” workers in the urban slums and stultifying

surrounding suburbs. It is a program in which we ought to develop a keen interest. What would

be truly “odd” and “anti-urban” is if, out of a nostalgic, misguided fealty to the bourgeois urban

forms of the past, to the abstractions and idols of “modernity” and “chaos,” we failed to do so.