Marxist Thought and the City

by Henri Lefebvre, Robert Bononno (Translator)

One of the most influential Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre first published Marxist Thought and the City in French in 1972, marking a pivotal point in his evolution as a thinker and an important precursor to his groundbreaking work of urban sociology, The Production of Space. Marxist Thought and the City— in which he reviews the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for commentary and analysis on the life and growth of the city—now appears in English for the first time.  Rooted in orthodox Marxism’s analyses of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, with extensive quotations from the works of Marx and Engels, this book describes the city’s transition from life under feudalism to modern industrial capitalism. In doing so it highlights the various forces that sought to maintain power in the struggles between the medieval aristocracy and the urban guilds, amid the growth of banking and capital.  Providing vital background and supplementary material to Lefebvre’s other books, including The Urban Revolution and Right to the City, Marxist Thought and the City is indispensable for students and scholars of urbanism, Marxism, social geography, early modern history, and the history of economic thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Cities

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2016

About the author

Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism.

In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme et Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.

Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence:
the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book would be about urbanism, and how capitalism somehow engenders urban misery and so forth (as well as possibilities/opportunities for the lucky ones) but it's really a rather scholarly book, densely written, about Marx and Engels' thought on the city as the center of capitalist production. It's technical and rather dull, I thought I could read it rather quickly (for me - since I'm a slow reader and I prefer to try to get through books quickly if possible to get on to the next biblio-discovery) but that was not the case, alas, and it turned into a godawful slog, unfortunately. No doubt those who have recently studied the works referenced might get more out of it. I did take a few years of political economy in college but that was years ago, and even then, as typical for, who knows how much of the philosophy of Marx really penetrated my thick skull - or if it did, somehow fastened to my consciousness. I certainly didn't flunk these courses, but how much did I really get out of them, other than a vague political consciousness.

Anyway, Mr. Lefebre, who died in around 1991 at the age of 90, was a notable and respected French philosopher. You might say the span of his lifetime coincided with the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks - he would have been 16 at the time of the Revolution - and the dissolution of the USSR in the early '90s. He would have seen it all, observed it all, studied it all -and may be an interesting thinker to further study considering his orientation, and the fact that he seemingly understood or at least had thoroughly studied the ideology and its antecedents, and might have been in a position to explain or comment on the collapse of the ideology in E. Europe and Russia in the early 1990s. An ideology that seemed to explain social relations and that had resulted in development, although at a terrible price, in the pre-war years in Russia, how did the ideology play out in the various E. Bloc countries? It may have been regarded as an experiment - a cutting-edge solution to society's ills. Since all these countries rejected it after after 40 years, perhaps the one size fits all approach didn't work, or was disliked. Certainly, the notion that they had to maintain lockstep alignment with Moscow couldn't have helped. Repeated uprisings in the E. Bloc countries proved that. The insistence that these countries stay in line might be explained (but not justified) by the paranoia that Moscow must have felt as the world polarized post war into two opposing armed camps. The Kremlin viewed the Warsaw Pact states as a buffer zone, but who would want to be kept permanently in this position? What about self-determination, decolonization and so forth? If Moscow was eager to help countries become independent elsewhere, what about the countries of E. Europe - why should they stuff it, to "patriotically" keep Russia safe? Really? Anyway, these contradictions (to say the least) must have been at least part of the reason the USSR and its outer ring of aligned states crumbled. Ideology or no ideology - no doubt the sense of wanting to be free of a dominant power must have caused many of these countries to overthrow the communist leadership in each country. Or at least overthrow it and then let the people decide what they want - even if they should chose communism or socialism (not the same thing) again, it would be their own choice, and not imposed on them, and not part of a larger bloc.

I'm not a scholar so I'm not really in a position to comment on economics or Marx. It seems to me though that Marx probably was responding to the then new social phenomenon of capitalism, which had just taken hold in a handful of countries of Western Europe and North America. The exploitation and misery were real - which led to people searching for a counter-balance to the power of the capitalists, or bourgeoisie. The state too seemed to be on capital's side rather than on that of the masses. On the one hand, you could slowly reform societies ,on the other, you could call for revolution - or, as in the USA, the country nearly fell apart from the contradictions between a system of total exploitation, worse than feudalism, slavery, and burgeoning capitalism. In its own way, the Civil War was revolutionary, since it overthrew one system and allowed the rapid expansion of capitalism throughout the USA (which gave rise to its own Dickensian problems soon enough).

Marx to me at least, is prophet-like, or millennial in the sense of announcing the end of time, and so forth. Of course he was a thinker, a philosopher, an economist and so forth - but his rallying cry to workers to unite and so forth, echoes Christian trends (the meek shall inherit the earth etc). It is possible to consider Marx as a prophet, of sorts, who sets up the system of greedy capitalism as satanic or evil, which can only be conquered if ownership is transferred to the people and so forth (of course that's reducing his thought to ultra simplistic terms, probably not even very accurate). The people would then run things ("dictatorship of the proletariat") but only temporarily, since soon enough, the State itself would wither away (and presumably mankind would enter a new Golden Age, perhaps a reiteration of the Garden of Eden). This is all an echo of what's said in the New Testament - of giving people hope, building them up, since the doctrine was initially directed to the lowest of the low, in the Biblical days, the disenfranchised, the slaves, and so forth, in the 19th C, the proletariat, who also had (or has) nothing other than the labor-power he sells to the employer.

The rise of capitalism and how Marx and Engels experienced it in England and W. Europe must have been similar in misery for the working class to the misery of the peons or common folk under Rome. A thinker or two tried to rally the masses. On the one hand, Jesus was the founder of a new religion, on the other Marx, Engels and other left wing thinkers similarly were "deified" as the founders of a political-economic ideology. In each case, though, the thinkers or their followers are "selling" hope - that the hereafter (or, in the case of the philosophes, after the revolution) will be better, and that it might be possible to build a "Kingdom of Heaven" or "Peoples' State" on Earth, that will be a sort of Eden or Heaven. These are reformist, moralist, trends - the thinkers/philosophers/religious figures actually all mean well, but society alas has always been resistant to morality, fair play, and so forth. In reality, despite the efforts of reformers or philosophers, greed continues to rule the day. To some extent this was true even in "primitive" or tribal cultures, despite the tribe cooperating and sharing. Unless I'm very much mistaken, even there, communal life had its limits. There were "classes" or social strata, even if wealth itself wasn't the determinant.

But, not to embarrass myself further by exposing my wretched ignorance on philosophical, economic, sociologic, or religious topics, let me turn to the quotes, quite a few of which I've selected from the book under discussion (or rather, which was supposed to be under discussion).

From the Forward by Mr. Elden:

"In 1974, all of [Lefebvre's]...work, urban and rural alike, led to its grand theoretical culmination in "The production of Space," before Lefebvre expanded his horizons still further with the four-volume sprawling "De l'Etat (1976-78), partially translate din "State, Space, World (2009).""

"...one way to understand Lefebvre's work in general terms is as a series of contributions that develop Marxist thought in different and frequently neglected directions: everyday life, the rural, the urban, space, the state, the worldwide."

"As [Lefebvre] ...stresses...in the opening lines of ["The Urban Revolution"]... in the present moment we are experiencing "the complete urbanization of society... a revolutionary process because it transforms both the surface of the globe and society.""

"If you were to ask urban social scientists today about the pressing issues in their work, you would expect that, among others, they would suggest the interrelation of urbanization and industrialization; the extension of the urban behind central agglomerations, and the implications this has for thinking about the urban/rural divide; the question of scarcity in the housing market and the politics of rent, including pricing the working poor out of the places they work; and resources and environmental degradation."

From the book:

"[From Friedrich Engels' 1845 book "The Condition of the Working Class in England":] "The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution.""

"The industrial revolution had completely reduced the workers to the role of machines, [Engels:] "taking from them the last trace of independent activity"... ...industry had dragged the classes, plunged into apathy, through the whirlwind of history."

"The causes of the revolutionary transformation were new technologies...."

"...Engels describes, analyzes, and exposes for the first time he nature of capitalism in a large country."

"[Engels:] "Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly observable here."

"The bourgeoisie holds capital, which is to say, the means of production."

"Centralization increased the power of those thousands of workers a hundredfold..."

"Londoners [Engels:] "have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city.""

"...Engles immediately introduces the theme of the "solitary crowd" and atomization, the problematic of the street."

"[Engels:] "The social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared.""

"Modern technologies were perfected by the cotton industry in Lancashire: the use of natural forces, the elimination of manual labor by machinery, the division of labor."

"The capitalist order engenders urban chaos."

"The bourgeoisie of this imperially democratic England has succeeded in creating this masterpiece: concealing the sight of poverty it would find offensive."

"The British Empire has collapsed."

"According to Engels, a specific order,that of industrial production managed by the bourgeoisie (within the context of the relations of capitalist production, Marx would explicitly state), engenders a specific disorder, urban disorder."

"The worker freed from serfdom was treated as an object by industry. It enclosed him within walls falling into ruin, for which he was forced to pay a high price. Every inch of space was used."

"The builders and owners, moreover, make few, if any repairs. They don't want to reduce their income."

"The great towns [Engels] ...writes, are inhabited primarily by workers ... who own nothing."

"Capitalism requires a reserve of unemployed workers, except during periods of prosperity and economic growth."

"The great industrial city, for Engels, is effectively a source of immorality and a school of crime, but the moralists who lash out against it deflect attention from the true causes of this situation."

"For Engels, it was natural and inevitable that the situation created by a class, the bourgeoisie (possibly "unconsciously," but that was merely a detail once it began to benefit from the situation), would bring about alcoholism, prostitution, and crime."

"In the urban context, the class struggle, for Engels, cannot be separated from generalized violence, from a war in which everyone is your enemy."

"One fine day, the property holding class is going to be surprised..."

"...one day, for Engels, disorder will sweep away the order of which it is the expression to create a new order. This will be the big surprise."

"Feudal property entails a relationship between the land and human beings. The lord carries the name of the land and the land, along with him, is personalized. The serf is an accessory of the land..."

"The old adage "nulle terre sans seigneur" would give way to the modern saying "money knows no master."

"...the worker believes he receives the price of his labor (salary), the owner withdraws the rent from the ground that belongs to him, and the capitalist the fruit (profit) of his productive capital. Whereas it is simply a question of the redistribution of (global) surplus value!"

"Movable wealth (money, capital) thus supplants natural wealth in land, in the products of the soil."

"...initially, communitarian (tribal) property with the gradual predominance of the family and the quasi-natural division of labor within the family, then communal property, which derives from the confluence of several tribes in a town, whether by contract or conquest."

"Antiquity began with the city while the Middle Ages (European, Western) began in the countryside."

"A two-part class struggle arose in particular the bitter struggle between the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords."

"Ancient society (a mode of production based on slavery) had dwindled without producing another mode of production, another society."

"Following the massive incursion of barbarians, who carried out history's decree against the ancient city and replaced it with a society that was once again tribal and community-based, the medieval town and bourgeoisie had to win the struggle for political supremacy and the ability to economically exploit the countryside, substituting themselves for the landed nobility in drawing off surplus labor (land rent), and in ownership itself (by destroying feudal ownership of the land as part of a long term process already foreseen)."

"...the historical materialism presented by Marx and Engels does not consist of philosophical generalities (although directed against philosophers) but relies on a history that has been neglected until then (and perhaps until today), namely, that of the city?"

"Consciousness... is a (social) product."

"History is introduced wit the division of labor, which assumes its character only wit the appearance of the division of material and intellectual labor."

"For [Marx and Engels]... in [the] pages [of "The German Ideology"] the subject of history is the city."

"...the separation between town and country mutilates and impedes the social totality..."

"...it would appear that the division of labor replaces a simple society with a more complex, more harmonious, more "organic" society, as Durkheim would have it. But Marx says that this is not the case."

"The inequality of the sexes... and their struggle are inherent to the family."

"...where a technical division [of labor] exists, there is unity and solidarity, complexity and complementarity."

"[Marx:] "The great risings of the Middle Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the peasants."

"The (dialectical) conflict between town and country does not exclude a certain unity."

"A guild bore no similarity to a factory floor."

"[Weaving] ...became and remained the principal manufacturing activity, based on extensive commercial relations, intensified demand, and the growing accumulation and mobilization of primitive capital."

"[Marx:] "commercial towns, particularly the maritime towns, became to some extent civilized and acquired the outlook of he big bourgeoisie, but in the factory towns an extreme petty-bourgeois outlook persisted.""

"[Marx:] "[Large-scale industry] ...destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie."

"...[large-scale industry] ...succeeded in dissolving all natural relations and turned them into monetary relations."

"...the town will end but the "urban" will be promoted, or established or restored on a worldwide scale."

"[Marx:] "Three whole centuries have been necessary in Germany to establish the first great division of labor -- that is, the separation of the town from the country.""

"How can the now unbearable division of labor be ended once and for all? By the end of work. By nonwork!"

"The scientific analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws allow work that would once have been carried out by workers to be accomplished automatically. This occurs only when large-scale industry reaches a higher level, when "all the sciences are prisoners of capital" and existing machinery offers great possibilities."

"Total revolution cannot be correctly defined in terms of ethics or aesthetics."

"Nonwork has replaced work."

"...the Marxist conception of revolutionary time as the "reign of ends." This time consists of a schedule of ends: religion, philosophy, ideology, the state, politics, and so on. To this impressive list we can add the end of work and the end of the city."

"...the Marxist critique of the state is not limited to the Hegelian state, the bourgeois state, but extends to democracy, to the so-called democratic and socialist state -- of every state (as a source of power)."

"...for Marx, the dissolution of the feudal mode of production and the transition to capitalism was attributed to and associated with a subject: the city."

"It is economic force that dominates social relationships in bourgeois society."

"To produce does not only imply material production, it comprises the production of law, family structure, a legal system, art, and so on, although not without disparities between these sectors of production."

"Men, in association with one another, constituting a society, dominate nature, modify the earth and its elements, remove the means necessary for their activity, distance themselves from nature, and substitute another reality, their own, even one that is factitious."

"[The city]...is a medium, an intermediary, a mediation, a means, the most extensive, most important of all."

"Great empires...collapse under the blows of conquerors but reconstitute themselves in a way that is analogous to what they were before their fall."

"Western societies, which already have instability, nomadism, and migration as their initial condition, are ...condemned to aggression."

"The "ager publicus" provides collective needs."

"...it is mostly through warfare that the urban community grows in size and wealth."

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my (rather unconventional) introduction to Lefebvre. He is one of those thinkers that has fascinated me ever since I began to take Marxism seriously. I had previously struggled to get into his works, attempting to read Right to the City several times, but since then have been able to explore works like the Grundrisse which aided in my reading of Lefebvre's dense technical writing. Throughout the essays, he stresses the transitory nature of the modern city, focusing on process rather than subject and system. The section on historical materialism applied to the city form was important, where he highlighted the differing forms of the "Asiatic" and ancient cities and how the medieval city was eventually the one that prevailed. Lefebvre provides concrete examples of historical-material phenomenons and how those changes culminate in the modern (contradictory city).

While this text answered many of my questions, it also opened many new ones. The conclusion introduces "the production of space" which is one of Lefebvre's central ideas and the name of his masterpiece.

[sutibah · Rating 5 out of 5]

La segregación espontánea, "inconsciente" quizá, no es menos rigurosa. Marca a la vez la ciudad concreta y la imagen de la ciudad, "construida de modo tan particular que se puede habitar durante años, salir y entrar cotidianamente sin jamás vislumbrar un barrio obrero y hasta encontrarse con obreros... (16)

(...) un aislamiento tan sistemático de la clase obrera, mantenida al margen de las grandes calles, un arte tan delicado de disfrazar todo lo que pueda herir la vista o los nervios de la burguesía [Engels sobre Manchester] (17)

La diferencia entre el individuo "persona" y el individuo como miembro de una clase, sólo aparecerá más tarde: con la competencia y la lucha de los individuos en la sociedad burguesa (43)

(...) - el oro y la plata - salidos de las entrañas de la tierra, imponiéndose de inmediato como encarnación del trabajo humano (98)

Desde que el regimen capitalista se apoderó de la agricultura, la demanda de trabajo disminuye a medida que se acumula allí el capital. "Una parte de la población del campo se encuentra así siempre a punto de convertirse en población urbana". La sobrepoblación latente; en el campo en la ciudad, es uno de los fenoménos característicos del capitalismo. En el campo, esta población excedente es liberada por los progresos técnicos y la inversión del capital en la producción agrícola; en la ciudad, se deja flotante según las necesidades de la industria detentada por los capitalistas y manejada según sus exigencias (101)

La producción capitalista, al utilizar la técnica y la organización del trabajo, agota al mismo tiempo las fuentes de donde brota la riqueza: la tierra y los trabajadores (102)

Lo intercambiable del espacio tiene una importancia creciente en la transformación de las ciudades, de la cual depende aun la arquitectura: la forma de los edificios depende de la parcelación y de la compra del suelo fragmentado en rectángulos de pequeñas dimensiones (116).

[Behrang · Rating 3 out of 5]

«فضا فاش‌کننده ذات جامعه است»، همین جمله از لوفور نشان از اهمیت شهر در دنیا و تفکر مارکس و انگلس می‌دهد. کتاب اندیشه‌های مارکسیستی و شهر، نیز همین موضوع را واکاوی می‌کند: خوانشی دقیق از اندیشه‌های شهری عمدتا پراکنده در آثار کارل مارکس و فردریک انگلس.
در آثار مارکس و انگلس ارجاعاتی به شهر و مسائل شهری وجود دارد، اما این ارجاعات هرگز توسط بنیانگذاران سوسیالیسم علمی نظم‌دهی نشدند و لوفور به عنوان متفکری پیشرو دست به نظم‌دهی این آثار می‌زند تا نشان دهد، چگونه مارکس و انگلس معتقدند «فضای شهری و تضادهایش، آزادی‌ها و مصیبت‌هایش، فضایی سرکوبگر برای طبقه پرولتاریا است» و این سرکوبگری تا جایی پیش رفت که انسان بار دیگر به زندگی در غار(دخمه‌های کارگری) برگشت و این غار به‌وسیله نفس متعفن و طاعونی تمدن سرمایه‌داری آلوده شد.
این کتاب، گستره وسیعی از آثار مارکس و انگلس را مورد کاوش قرار می‌دهد، از دست‌نوشته‌های ۱۸۴۴، گروندریسه، سرمایه و نظریات ارزش اضافی مارکس تا آثار انگلس از جمله آنتی دورینگ، وضع طبقه کارگر و مسئله مسکن.
لوفور در این کتاب با کمک آثار مارکس و انگلس، تاریخ روابط در حال تحول بین شهر و روستا و اینکه چگونه این روابط به ظهور سرمایه‌دار کمک کرده، می‌پردازد. همان‌طور که استوارت الدن گفته است« لوفور با بهره‌گیری از شهر به عنوان لنز، دیدی کلی را از سویه‌های کلیدی نقد اقتصادسیاسی به دست می‌دهد».
هدف از نگارش این کتاب همان‌طور که خود لوفور بیان کرده، صرفا گزیده‌ای از متون مرتبط نیست بلکه خوانشی موضوعی است، این خوانش برای هدفی در اکنون و برای آینده است: از اینکه زندگی شهری را در متن جغرافیای تاریخی سرمایه‌داری در حال تغییر قرار دهد.

[Salvador Ramírez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esta obra de Lefebvre se trata de una interpretación de lo que Marx y Engels escribieron sobre las ciudades, lo cual sitúa dentro del materialismo histórico. El libro esta dividido en 5 secciones.

En la primera sección, discute brevemente "La situación de la clase obrera en Inglaterra" de Engels. En la segunda sección, recupera diversos textos de Marx que hacen referencia a la división del trabajo y cómo esta genera tanto el surgimiento de la ciudad, cómo su dinámica dentro del capitalismo. La tercera sección, establece que la ciudad fue fundamental para la transición del feudalismo a la sociedad capitalista. El la cuarta sección, trata el papel de la ciudad en diversos momentos del proceso de acumulación capitalista, así como el papel de la renta en la propiedad del suelo urbano. La quinta sección enuncia 10 conclusiones aplicadas a a las ciudades contemporáneas de Lefebvre.

Es un libro breve, con amplias referencias al pensamiento marxista y abstracto. Es recomendable para los interesados en conocer los fundamentos del pensamiento de Lefebvre.

[Nan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an interesting book. So different from what I'm used to read but I understood how capitalism has shaped our way of living, our cities, our schools, our jobs, our families... But also our problems, our criminality, our poverty, our precarious situation. And it's in the city where we can see all this.

[Brian Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book but translation makes such complex arguments even harder work.