Marxism and the City

To clarify the contribution of Marxism to urban studies and to identify the contours of this theoretical approach, it is necessary to begin with the original work of Marx and Engels, before dealing [Page 487]with the more complex issue of how subsequent developments in urban theory and Marxism have overlapped and intertwined. For Marxists, modern cities are capitalist cities, not merely “cities in a capitalist society,” and they are shaped in key respects by the dynamics of capitalist accumulation.

The most important characteristic of the capitalist production process, Marx argued, is the exclusion of the majority of workers from ownership of the means of production, with the result that workers are compelled to sell their labor power in order to survive. Unlike other commodities, labor power has a number of specific attributes, including its capacity to create new products. Under capitalism, when a worker sells his or her labor power, he or she does not receive the full value of the goods produced, and the resulting surplus is appropriated by the owner of the means of production. This mechanism of economic exploitation lies at the heart of capitalism and is linked to the Marxist analysis of social class and economic crisis.

In contemporary society, the labor process is highly fragmented, involving cognitive and material transformations that are carried out by a large number of workers with different skills and roles, and the complex division of labor that results is associated with changing social and spatial forms. Within this context, Marx confronts the specificity of the capitalist city, arguing that the distinction between city and countryside is a constitutive element of the capitalist division of labor.

The competitive nature of the accumulation process gives rise to a dynamic of continuous investment in the means of production and the transformation of production processes. The specificity of urban areas rests with the ways in which they bring together labor, capital, and land to form a dynamic and spatially uneven configuration of productive resources. The approach developed by Marx and Engels explains the historical development of urban areas by referring to the transformations generated by capitalist relations of production in agriculture and manufacturing. Agriculture is theorized in terms of primitive accumulation—the expropriation and enclosure of common lands—which led to the exclusion of agricultural laborers from the means of agricultural production, while manufacturing entailed a rapid expansion in the demand for labor in the industrial centers.

The concentration of large numbers of laborers in industrial cities gave rise, according to Marx and Engels, to a series of contradictions in the countryside (summarized by the notion of declining soil fertility) and the city (the impoverishment of the working class, segregation, and environmental degradation). In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels emphasizes the spatial form that this assumes, observing that, in each large city, it is possible to find one or more slums where the working class is concentrated. Nevertheless, rapid increases in productivity associated with mechanization and competitive development generated not only poverty, but also fantastic concentrations of wealth, which fed the expansionary logic of capitalism.

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