"Urban Post-Theory, Class and the City"
  Kimberly DeFazio

The modern city, which is the object of my study in this paper, is
the product of capitalism; it is a place of commodification-a place
where workers and machines are placed together in one part of it to
produce wealth which is then appropriated by the owner who lives in
another part.  (Pre-capitalist "cities," for the most part, operate
by the economics of the "country"-they are not spaces of
"commodification"-they are places with markets, not market places)
Both the traditional studies that have focused on the urban aesthetic
and the radical left studies that have dwelled on the city as a
social space, have tried to account for the faultlines of the city by
diverting attention from "class."  My argument is that all other
city-practices (the architecture, the urban planning, . . .) are
secondary to the primary economic function of the city, and that only
the orthodox Marxist theory of the city as a site of class struggle
between those who own the means of production and those who must sell
their labor in order survive can explain the conflicts and
contradictions of the "city" and produce revolutionary praxis for
their transformation.

The left models of analysis have recognized the antagonistic
character of the urban space and traditionally foregrounded such
concepts as the "Dual City" and the "Internal Colony" to emphasize
the "materiality" of urban structures of class and race, thereby
connecting issues of poverty and racism to economic exploitation and
arguing for the necessity of "structural" not local change. In
contrast to these approaches, the contemporary post-al urban theory
has conceptualized the city as a cultural site and thus marginalized
its social antagonisms and the project of social transformation aimed
at building cities of equality.  From the work of Saskia Sassen to
Mike Davis to David Harvey to Arjun Appadurai, post-al theory has
concluded that, as Edward Soja argues, "the contemporary urban social
order can no longer be defined effectively by such conventional and
familiar modes of social stratification as the class-divided Dual
City of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat" (Postmetropolis 265) and
as such what is necessary is to discover the "differences" and
"heterogeneity" within the existing global relations.  What is
posited as the "post-conventional," in other words, is a social
theory which "complicates" class in order to occult the fundamental
divisions of the city and its class antagonisms in the interests of
capital.

This paper will examine some of the dominant assumptions underlying
contemporary urban studies, and their consequences for the struggle
for social equality.  It will argue that in response to the
re-structuring of social relations under globalization, which have
deepened the class divide between the rich and the poor worldwide,
urban theory is in the process of changing its position in the social
relations of production in order to more effectively reconcile the
emerging ("urban") contradictions of global capitalism.  It has done
so through textualizing urban studies-treating cities as fabrics of
different textures, as spaces of heterogeneity and "difference"-and
in doing so has mystified economic structures of inequality by tropes
of diversity, difference and hybridities.

In opposition to the dissimulative "complexities" of urban
post-theory, I will argue for a red urban studies based on orthodox
Marxism, for which their can be no "urban justice" unless the
fundamentally un-just system of capitalism is collectively
transformed.  In making such an argument, it will situate the work of
such writers as Saskia Sassen, Edward Soja, David Harvey, Raymond
Williams, in contestation with the orthodox Marxism of Marx, Engels,
and Teresa Ebert, and argue for the necessity of revolutionary praxis
for transforming the "city" into a society in which "the free
development of each is the condition of the free development of all."