Ideology: Ideas, Action and Material Reality

Week 1

1)Marx

A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1943-4)

The German Ideology – Feuerbach. Opposition of The Materialist and Idealist Outlook. Sections A B C D

Week 2

2)Marx

Balibar, Etienne The Philosophy of Marx Chapter 3 Ideology or Fetishism: Power or Subjection Balibar: Fetishism and Ideology

Capital Vol. 1 Chapter 1: The Commodity 4. The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret

Week 3

Lenin

What is to be done?

Week 4

Lukacs History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics Class Consciousness , Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat

Week 5

Gramsci  – Selections from The Prison Notebooks

Week 6

Adorno “The Scheme of Mass Culture” & “Culture Industry Reconsidered”

Week 7

Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Week 8

Debord Society of the Spectacle

Week 9

Lefebrve

The Sociology of Marx Chapter 2 The Marxian Concept of Praxis Chapter 3 Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge

Week 10

Mao “On Practice” & “On Contradiction”

Week 11

Althusser “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” & “Marxism and Humanism”

Week 12

Foucault “Truth and Power” & “Subjectivity and Truth”

Week 13

Deleuze “Many Politics”

Week 14

Irigary “The Sex that is not One” &  “Psychoanalytical Theory: Another Look

Haraway “The Cyborg Manifesto”

Week 15

Zizek  ‘Chapter 1: How did Marx invent the Symptom’ in The Sublime Object of Ideology & “Between Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmic Spectre: Towards a Lacanian Theory of Ideology.

– The Invisible Committee

The most important thing about Copenhagen [was] this: in the lead up to the meeting the Danish government vastly extended police powers, giving the cops the power to break up and intervene against almost all forms of unapproved dissent. This sad fact tells us everything we need to know about the entire mainstream climate change ‘movement’. This crisis is apparently so bad, so dire, that the forces which be must be given more power to counter it.

We are all aware of the gravity of the situation. It is clear that this entire global form-of-life (which includes McMansions and shanty-towns, Google and sweatshops) functions in a manner deeply devastating to the ecological conditions of our planet. But can trying to prevent things getting worse produce a politics that can actually change things? Or do all these various efforts and campaigns simply function to hold capitalism together, despite the destruction it causes?

The debate about emissions targets, forms of cap-and-trade, renewable technology obfuscate the root cause of climate change: global capitalism. Ecological destruction is a direct by-product of capitalism’s endless drive to accumulate more value. Value, a strange beast that finds its form in money, is for Capital the ‘be all and end all’. Capitalism realises (produces) value by manufacturing and selling commodities (material and immaterial) at a greater exchange value than it takes to produce them. It pays labour x, it buys the material and means of production for y and attempts to sell at x+y+z; z being the elusive surplus value, profit. This kernel of Capital’s rationality has compelled it over the last few centuries to massively transform the world and its people. All other forms of society have been demolished and incorporated, all forms of natural abundance and human creativity transformed into commodities and work.

Energy plays a key role in this. Our labour-power, which we sell to Capital to survive, is key to the production and accumulation of value. Labour-power exists in real bodies, ours, and often we have our own dreams and desires which exceed Capital’s plans for us. We can and do rebel. Thus exploitation is an antagonistic relationship, open to contention, the possibility of insurrection, of creating alternate worlds and means of social relations.

Capital constantly searches for new ways to increase the productivity of labour, by intensifying the working day and by utilising new technology for this end, which means consuming more energy. This not only means the energy consumed to move commodities all over the world, but also the energy expelled in the work place so each of us can produce more and more whilst being paid relatively the same.

Post 1970’s Australia, we have been offered a high credit, high consumption, high work – a  deal based on the economic theories often referred to as neoliberalism. This toxic, tedious life-style has reaped untold ecological devastation. Our daily existence has reduced us to stressed-out, drugged-out, exhausted and angry individuals, lost and alone.

This deal has now collapsed. The dual ecological and financial crisis means Capital needs a ‘Green New Deal’, one that can continue if not deepen exploitation, expand even further what is commodified, and reduce the few shreds of existence that remains free and ours. For Capital then ‘climate change’ is essentially a crisis of management, how can it continue exploitation on a global level when one of its basic tools no longer works? Leaving aside the delusions about clean coal and the like, the future green capitalism which gives up on the endless cheap energy of petroleum will try to make up for its loses by increasing exploitation, more work and for less. We already see this with biofuels (a market now a favourite for speculators): the price of basic cereals has risen forcing millions into starvation, and decimated the standard of living for millions more. Indigenous populations in Northern Mexico are evicted from their land to make way for wind-turbines to produce energy for the Californian market. Carbon trading itself is little more than an attempt to privatise air, to enclose one of the last commons.

Why do we silently consent to this? Or even worse why do so many of us, who can see through the bullshit of popular campaigns run by TV stars and celebrities, go along with it? Perhaps because the future is grim, because it is so hard to imagine any change but change for the worse, that we go along with anything that attempts to prevent us falling off the precipice. Even so-called ‘Climate Justice’ has less to do with a future worth fighting for than with an equitable division of suffering.

The problem is not humanities relationship with ecology, but rather humanities relationship with itself. Our minds and our bodies are shackled: at work, the family, school, on the dole, in the apparent ‘freedom’ of consumption. Our own creativity exists in forms estranged from us, on the whole we are isolated from each other. It is this prison which is strangling the earth. Until we have control, collective control, over our own creativity, the places we live, our relationships, what we create and dream together, how can we possibly begin to reshape our interrelationship with the non-human sphere and create forms of life that are pleasurable, dignified, just and no longer ecocidal?

Political action is required – but not as we know it. It takes the collective practice of coming together, critiques of the existing social order and envisaging other possibilities. It takes mass disobediences against all the structures of the state and the manifestation of collective forms of self-rule. It will take force and it will take love. This does not mean joining some political sect, but rather cultivating proletarian relations, liberated relations with each other which can replace the stunted, alienating relations forced on us by Capital. Us, the multitude, need to become a we: a social block of rebellion, an archipelago of defiance, the Party of Insurrection. Molotovs are more important than emissions targets, popular assemblies far superior to solar panels and the way that we, us here, relate and organise together more important than any UN meeting.

Everything else has failed…let’s create Communism!

– By some lost children of the metropolis

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence.[i]

Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self -activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others – even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.[ii]

The status of what we could, with reservations, call the “Left” in Australia is one of atrophy, denial, confusion and crass opportunism.[1] The various institutions of social democracy have little of their previous popular character and have been largely integrated into the neo-liberal consensus. The various tendencies of the far-left (though often full of people of good intentions) remain small and marginalised and equipped with deeply outdate ideologies.  Whilst over the last decade there have been some brilliant moments, some decent manifestation and rebellions, there have been few, if any, real victories. There have been stunning defeats.

Broadly speaking revolutionaries in Australia are caught in two traps that are forced on them by the context they live in. One is that due to the intolerable conditions of capital they engage in forms of activity that seem to offer immediate solutions but conform to the general co-ordinates of the society they live in: we must “do something!” Slavoj Zizek likens this to the Amish tradition of rumspringa : apparent rebellions that actually work to solidify the power of society. To quote “all (that) is needed is a light shift in our perspective, and all the activity of ‘resistance,’ of bombarding those in power with impossible ‘subversive’ (ecological feminist, antiracist, anti-globalist…) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding that machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion.”[iii] The other error is to maintain a kind of capital ‘R’ revolutionary purity which means you never get involved in actual struggles but are permanently immobilised waiting for a tomorrow that never comes. The challenge rather is to work out a way to act today that actually breaks with the dominate co-ordinates and thus opens the possibility of emancipation: to have both a foot in this world and to step into one that we want.

It is therefore a great thing for comrades to come together and begin to discuss ways of co-operating that will help us discover and carry out meaningful revolutionary activity. What is the one of the dangers facing such useful co-operation is that comrades will create an ideological group. That is the kind of organisation that builds itself around an abstract and ahistorical set of ideas that it then tries to carry into the word. Such a group sees itself as bringing the radical catalyst to society, and winning people to its position. This is one of the core mistakes of the myriad Leninist groupings – their logic is based on the promotion of their own ideology and ideological organisation irrespective of the general conditions and struggles in society. Success is measured by indicators such as papers sold, members recruited, dominance of slogans etc. An Anarchist Federation which apart from having a formally different ideology and a different internal organisational culture (democratic centralism vs a federation and so on) yet is beholden to a similar ideological logic will probably be as counter-productive as any Leninist group.[2] Despite all the hullaballoo the differences between the two are really not that great.

Here I hope to present some broad ideas about what meaningful activity could actually be. These are limited suggestions and comrades should view them as a just a few sentences in a conversation.

Without Power

Our attempts to challenge capitalism are confounded by our apparent powerlessness. The dominant liberal-democratic ideology has long celebrated the apparent end of history: that the only possible society is this one and any attempt at social transformation leads straight to the Gulag. The narrative capitalism tells us sees history powering forward driven by great acts, states, corporations, politicians and entrepreneurs. Also the spectacle in late-capitalism creates an all encompassing world-view that ascribes any sense of agency to commodities, super-stars and abstract entities such as “market-forces.”[3] The vast masses of people are presented as followers or fodder: those subjected to history not its subjects.

However many on the Left also argue that we have limited agency.  They tell the same story as capitalist ideologies do – they just reverse the moral implications. The most banal versions transform functionaries of capital into grotesque super-villains (take for example anti-“HoWARrd”ism). More sophisticated versions try to unearth the structural logics of capitalist development, technology, civilisation etc. These still largely ascribe to us the role of victim – capitalism is something that happens to the masses. Thus radical theories have to develop some special ‘outside’ where rebellion and agency can come from – human nature, or the correct ideology, the wild, etc.

Plus our daily subjective experience of capitalism is most often one of incapacity: be that the inertia of feeling totally dominated by society or trapped in a hyper-activity that eludes our control. Partly this is due to the way that the ideologies of capitalism entrap our lives, draw us in and structure our reality. Partly it is because our daily activity is one of creating capitalism and investing our individual and collective creativity (labour) in its forms and structures – most notably the commodity.[4] We constantly create and recreate our subordination. Capital is us fetishised against ourselves. This explains our agony: the more we do in capitalism the more we are imprisoned.

The Material Reality of Hope

We are quite ordinary women and men, children and old people, that is, rebellious, non-conformist, uncomfortable, dreamers[iv]

But if we stop at this point we fail to see the radical chains that encase us. Contradictorily it is this last point, that capitalism is the creation of our efforts, which is also the basis for our hope. Simply, since we make capitalism we can stop making it. But to really grasp this we need what the Zapatistas call an “inverted periscope”.[v] We need to grasp that beneath the spectacle that covers our lives and constructs social reality, capital is torn by revolt and antagonism. This perspective sees labour not as something that is encased in capitalism, but actually something constantly in struggle, in rebellion: it is excessive of its bonds. A radical perspective starts with our revolt. It sees the world from the point of view of resistance and creation. As Mario Tronti writes:

We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.[vi]

Of course this is more obvious in moments of great upsurge and struggle. But even in times of apparent social peace right across society there are moments of refusal, rebellion and disobedience. This is what is often called “auto-valorisation” – the acts we do to stop making value for capital and create it for ourselves. Perhaps these gestures are small, even seemingly invisible, but they are the molecules of communism that exist in the tensions and contradictions of capitalism. They are the material reality of hope.  John Holloway describes this condition beautifully:

The theoretical challenge is to be able to look at the person walking next to us in the street or sitting next to us in a bus and see the stifled volcano inside them. Living in capitalist society does not necessarily make us insubordinate, but it does inevitably mean that our existence is torn by the antagonism between subordination and insubordination. Living in capitalism means that we are self-divided, not just that we stand on one side of the antagonism between classes, but that the class antagonism tears each of us apart.[vii]

Thus whilst capitalist society appears to be solid, it is actually torn in multiple lines by antagonism. This is not a clear split between capitalists on one side, proletariat on the other (one in top hats, the other cloth caps) that then run at each other like some class war version of the Somme.  It is mass of lines of flight, contradictions, apparatus of control and capture, molecular rebellions, possible explosions. And here, existing in a complicated and problematic form, is the fact that just as we make capital, we rebel against it, as much as we cooperate for capital we can cooperate against. Rebellion is ordinary and everyday, as is submission and exploitation. Emancipatory politics arises from and in this tension and struggles in a way that transforms the social order.

Struggle is also what provides capitalism its dynamism. Capital is reliant on and a product of a force that it exploits but one that in the very processes of exploitation poses the possibility of its destruction. Capital thus tries to flee from labour – but it can never escape without nullifying itself too. It thus constantly tries to develop new arrangements of power and state forms; and works to disarms labour and force it to work harder. As Tronti writes: “The increasing organisation of exploitation, it continual reorganisation at the very highest levels of industry and society are, then, again responses by capital to workers’ refusal to submit to the process.”[viii]

We can understand something like neo-liberalism, for example, not as a product simply of capitalists’ avarice, but rather capital’s response to the struggles and rebellions of the 1960s and 70s.[5] This means at different stages of capitalism’s development a class composition is produced by struggle. We work, fight, are ruled and resist differently at different historical moments. Different regimes of power, race, gender, the body, ideologies and discourses come into play. As the fight heats up we either develop the forms of self-organisation that allow us to overturn capital and radically recreate social life, or capital breaks our power, recuperates our desires and imposes a new matrix of exploitation on us.

There are no guarantees, no certainties; rather there is the material possibility of hope on which we must make a wager.

The Practice of Hope

If the sources of rebellion and the creation of communism exist generally throughout society as a constant, living potential how then are we to make the next step, to crystallise, fuse, grow and/or weave the many multiple rebellions into forms of activity that can create lives with dignity? At a certain level we don’t know. Our history is sadly one of defeat and failure: there are no clear models from the past. Historically mass revolts have always surprised the revolutionaries: they are an event that whilst arises from the material reality, and turn everything upside down – including the most radical of ideologies. From where we stand now we don’t know what the next wave of emancipatory politics will look like, or what revolution really means today. There is probably not one answer. Across the globe the multitude will struggle under a number of flags, with different names and different tactics. Each politic process will undoubtedly be contradictory – for our condition is contradictory. Even out right rebellions always contain in them elements that point to freedom and communism and practices that stitch us pack into the world of capital.

But still I would like to posit that radical, anti-capitalist, communist activity is neither activism within the coordinates of liberal-capitalism, nor simply propagandising for a better world tomorrow. (Though sometimes we might do both) Rather it is, within very concrete and specific sites, struggles that form a collectivity out of our already existing antagonisms in a way that makes social life other. It is literally the construction of the future in the present; it is the practice of freedom today. As the Malgré Tout Collective write: “…freedom is not a state that can be reached, but rather an act that it is necessary to incarnate”.[ix]

And since communism already exists as a potential in our ordinary everyday lives, the efforts of struggle, of coming together creating and rebelling, are the tasks of the multitude on a whole. We can reject the idea that a special revolutionary group is necessary to overturn capitalism. As such militant organisations can behave in ways to aid the creation of the conditions of their own dissolution. Both in a general sense: we seek to abolish capitalism, and when capitalism is over there is no need for revolutionary groups – also that we don’t not only want to free ourselves from capital, eventually we will need to free ourselves from the struggle against capital (the negation of negation). But also in a more precise sense: we seek to help create practices, cultures and structures of co-operation and self-rule amongst the multitude – thus the existence of small militant groups will be irrelevant. In the here and now, this should also be our aim. If militants form a group so they have a political collectivity that helps them struggle – because otherwise they would be isolated and miserable – in the actually struggles these groups involve themselves in they can constantly try to abolish themselves. In countless small and informal ways bonds of trust and understanding should be formed with others (at the same time we are unbinding ourselves from the roles capital has produced for us) – comradely relations – that break down divisions. But also militants can argue for more horizontal structures, more participation, more spaces of debate, more democracy, more power from the ground up to reshape our lives: in short to deepen internal class organisation. Into this strange brew militant organisations should melt away, and whilst maintaining our friendships and love, we can open ourselves to being seized by the unpredictable adventures of struggle. We come together and act to work to create the space so others can come together and act – as equals. We can see this in Zapatista practice – the existing leadership acts in ways to aid self-organisation, to make themselves less and less a leadership. This is what French Maoists used to call building “a stage for the masses”: we (revolutionaries) are not the main act – we (the multitude) is.[x]

But are there more concrete practises we can engage in to aid the general recomposition of the rebellious collectivity and power of the multitude? The Zapatista maxim of preguntando caminamos (walking we ask questions) is not just a suggestion for political plurality. Rather it is a way of relating to the world. Its instruction is that those who would define themselves as revolutionaries do not enter struggle with a preformed programme but rather become porous to the contradictions and creativity of rebellion; to grasp praxis as praxis, as the constant interplay of thought and action. Thus revolution, the eruption of our ordinary rebelliousness is fecund: we constantly generate more thought, more questions, more desires, more insights and more doubts. The question is also aimed outwards. To rebel one does not try to win others to a solid position but rather works to produce moments of collective questioning. As Holloway writes “The problem is not to bring consciousness from outside, but to draw out the knowledge that is already present, albeit in repressed and contradictory form.”[xi] Thus we can work together in ways that try to generate practices and spaces of collective questioning.

If the composition of class and struggle changes, if it is dynamic, then organisational strategies must change too. The debates over organisation are often viewed ahistorically – the party, the affinity group, the spokes council – are often seen as suggestions for all seasons. Rather when such tactics do work it is because they correspond to a certain material reality. Part of the failure of revolutionary activity in Australia is the constant importing of forms that may seem ideologically pleasant but do not correspond to the actual substance of our lives. I think a process of militant research is needed.  Rather than constructing models in the ether we could rather try look at actually what is going on around us. How does work and power function in contemporary capitalism, how is the social factory organised? What is the deployment of hierarchy and division? And what are the forms of rebellion that are going on. How are our own daily lives torn? And from a process of questioning with each other we could perhaps begin to see a few threads of possibility that we can then experiment with to see what works and what fails, and then share this knowledge with the multitude on a whole. Such research is not just the research into the idea of organisation – it is actually organising in and of itself. This is how we can “encounter” each other, the conditions we live in and the possibilities they hold.[6]

This could be complimented by trying to circulate the experiences of struggle. We are held back by the isolation and invisibility of struggles. Such struggles could be overtly political protests, sabotage, cultural rebellions, daily insubordinations, moments of creativity and escape and so on.  It would useful activity to spread the experiences of these struggles; to communicate the methods and aims and open up the debates going on within them. The point is not to reduce the diversity of struggle, but rather to increase the collective experience and knowledge of rebellion. And, again, this open ended sharing of experiences is part of how the multitude organises itself.

And if we reject ideology that does not mean we reject ideas. In fact the refusal of all dogma allows us to open up the space of ideas.  There exists very few space of collective self education. Revolutionary groups can try to open up spaces of radical education that allow a diversity of thought and debate. A proliferation of websites, newspapers meetings, conference, graffiti, etc  whose motivation is not to win converts or establish a hegemony but rather to help a kind of rebellious intellectual culture develop.

This is a vision of an organisation (are maybe more than one?) that sees itself as a set of interlinked practices and spaces that tries to open up more explicit room for discussion, reflection and co-ordination. Our enthusiasm and hope lies in the immanent possibilities of emancipatory politics that is the work of the multitude generally. It is because we are ordinary that we are special. Such an organisation would be characterised by openness, humility, good humour and love – as well as determination and commitment. If would full of life, for it is in our lives that communism lives. I understand that this vision of revolutionary and/or militant organisation is limited. It sees it as a useful aid to the processes of class recomposition. It is not the total group that drives the struggle; it is not the carrier of liberation. Rather it is but a set of practices some of us may chose to carry out that may compliment struggles that are much bigger and greater.  And this, I think, is a good thing.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London & New York: Verso, 2002.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press.

El Kilombo Intergaláctico. Beyond Resistance: Everything. An Interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. Durham,North Carolina: Paperboat Press, 2007.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban & the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brookyln, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.

Fortunati, Leopoldina. The Arcane of Reproduction : Housework, Prostitution, Labour and Capital Translated by H Creek. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England  Harvard University Press, 2000.

———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Holloway, John. Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

———. 2005. “Ordinary People, That Is, Rebels”.   https://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=05/03/25/1319243 (accessed 2nd February, 2006).

Malgré Tout Collective. 1995. “Manifesto of the Malgré Tout Collective”. Global Telelanguage Resources Translated by Pablo Mendez and Sebastian Touza   https://www.gtrlabs.com/node/106. (accessed March 8th, 2008).

Marx, Karl , and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology Part One. 3rd ed. New York: International Publishers, 1973.

Midnight Notes Collective. “Introduction to the New Enclosures.” Midnight Notes, no. # 10 The New Enclosures ( Fall 1990): 1 – 9.

Precarias a la Deriva. “A Very Careful Strike- Four Hypotheses ” The Commoner: A Web Journal For Other Values, no. 11 Spring (2006): 33 – 45. www.thecommoner.org.uk

Retort, Ian Boa, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Micheal Watts. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War London & New York: Verso, 2005.

Solidarity. “As We See It”. libcom.org https://libcom.org/library/as-we-see-it-solidarity-group.htm. (accessed 1st October, 2007).

Tronti, Mario. 1964. “Lenin in England”. libcom.org https://libcom.org/library/lenin-in-england-mario-tronti. (accessed 23rd January, 2008).

———. “The Strategy of Refusal”. libcom.org https://libcom.org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti. (accessed 24th January, 2008).

Virno, Paulo. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles, CA New York,NY: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2006.

[2] Debord’s perhaps overly caustically worded critique that the great failing of anarchism – that it privileges ideology over actual material conditions and struggles – still caries weight; Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press), 48-50.

[3] “Spectacle” does not just mean the all pervasive media, but rather the general image(s) of a society that is produced by the alienated creativity of all that live in it, all the time. Cf.Ibid.

[4] The word ‘labour’ may seem restricted and archaic to many people, calling to mind an image of work and politics that seems far behind us. Here labour means our creative activity that produces value. This extends far beyond work in the work place proper and wage labour. There is a brilliant radical current of feminist and autonomist writers that argue clearly how the reproductive work of women outside the wage relationship create the essential commodity: labour power. See for example Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction : Housework, Prostitution, Labour and Capital trans. H Creek (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995). For a contemporary example see Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike- Four Hypotheses ” The Commoner: A Web Journal For Other Values, no. 11 Spring (2006). Silvia Federici adds to this argument by showing how the creation of a hierarchy of  differences within the proletariat are an a priori requirement for actually creating  proletariat that will work for capital, see Silvia Federici, Caliban & the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brookyln, NY: Autonomedia, 2004). As such a radical concept of labour should not be used to sideline struggles over gender, sexuality, colour, desires, the personal etc – as it so often did and continues to do. This can be completed by the various writers who work to show that show creativity on a whole, not just wage-labour, is what creates value for capital. Cf.Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles, CA New York,NY: Semiotext(e), 2004). & Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

[5] For two different narratives of this see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England  Harvard University Press, 2000). & Midnight Notes Collective, “Introduction to the New Enclosures,” Midnight Notes, no. # 10 The New Enclosures ( Fall 1990).

[6] El Kilombo Intergalactico identify in the activity of the Zapatistas a practice of encounter, assemble, create and rebel which has deeply influenced the writing of this piece ., Cf. El Kilombo Intergaláctico, Beyond Resistance: Everything. An Interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.

[ii] Solidarity, As We See It ([cited 1st October 2007]); available from https://libcom.org/library/as-we-see-it-solidarity-group.htm.

[iii] Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2006), 334.

[iv] Subcomandante Marcos quoted in John Holloway, Ordinary People, That Is, Rebels (2005 [cited 2nd February 2006]); available from https://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=05/03/25/1319243

[v] El Kilombo Intergaláctico, Beyond Resistance: Everything. An Interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (Durham,North Carolina: Paperboat Press, 2007), 9.

[vi] Mario Tronti, Lenin in England (1964 [cited 23rd January 2008]); available from https://libcom.org/library/lenin-in-england-mario-tronti.

[vii] John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 157.

[viii] Mario Tronti, The Strategy of Refusal ([cited 24th January 2008]); available from https://libcom.org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti.

[ix] Malgré Tout Collective, Manifesto of the Malgré Tout Collective (1995 [cited March 8th 2008]); available from https://www.gtrlabs.com/node/106.

[x] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London & New York: Verso, 2002), 97.

[xi] Holloway, Ordinary People, That Is, Rebels.

Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There is not doubt that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through it’s technical military expressions, modifies organically absolute or relatively relations in the international field too – Antonio Gramsci (1971: 176).

Karl Marx once wrote “the economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former” (1990: 875). It has been argued, against the orthodox conceptions in the International Relations (IR) discipline, that the origins of the modern international system was bound up with the rise of capitalism in early modern England (Rosenberg 1994: 138; Teschke 2003: 11). The purpose of this presentation is to provide a Marxist interpretation of the origins the modern international system. The subject of this study is England and begins with analysing the establishment of agrarian capitalism, the “so-called primitive accumulation” of early capitalism which fostered the changing property-social relations of the land. I analyse the consequential economic, social and political transformations, that is, the reconfiguration of the English state/civil matrix. I examine how the changing social relations affected the shift from dynastic sovereignty to parliamentary sovereignty, in sharp contrast to the Absolutist state of France. I establish the transformation and duality of England’s foreign policy towards Europe, which shifted on the basis of a capitalist social property dynamic that revolutionised the British state. I demonstrate how the geopolitical pressures of British capitalism affected the course of socio-political development in the old European continent. Indeed, the aim of this presentation is to demonstrate, as Gramsci stated, how international relations are intricately linked to the correlation of social forces, in civil society and the state, both domestically and internationally. Finally, I conclude by analysing the nature of global capitalist hegemony, which had the British Empire at its core. This last section deals more with the theoretical aspect of hegemony than a empirical-historical analysis. I develop the neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony to explicate the social-cultural hegemony of a ruling class and the expression this has on international politics and the world order. In sum, I argue that the rising capitalist state/civil matrix in England “would play a pivotal role in the long-term restructuring of the European states-system” (Teschke 2003: 249). Overall, sixteenth to late seventeenth century England is the point of reference for this investigation. No single event or date can be singled out as the decisive point of the modern international system; for this is an era. International relations in this period of transformation were thus not modern, but modernising (Teschke 2003: 250).

Throughout the period of the seventeenth century a new modern English society and state began to emerge, and England’s position in the world was transformed. The structural transformations that took place in the seventeenth century were more than merely a constitutional or political revolution, or a revolution in economies, religion or lifestyle. It embraced the totality of society (Hill 1980: 1-4). Indeed, as British Historian Eric Hobsbawn describes, by the dawn of the Industrial Revolution the most fundamental transformations in human life had occurred in the history of the world (1968: 1). This era, “was the triumph not of ‘industry’ as such, but of capitalist industry; not of liberty and equality in general, but of middle class or ‘bourgeois’ liberal society; not of ‘the modern economy’ or ‘the modern state’, but of the economies and states in a particular geographical region of the world (part of Europe and patches of North America), whose centre was the neighbouring and rival states of Great Britain and France” (Hobsbawm 1962: 17-8). During the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the British Empire ascended to become a global hegemon and was at the core of the world economy. But how was it that at the beginning of the seventeenth century England was a second-class power and by the early eighteenth century it was the greatest world power? What were the structural – social, political and economic – transformations in England? And what geopolitical consequences did this have for the European continent and eventually the international sphere?

During the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, England was less advanced, even backwards, in commerce and technology than its European rivals, but its development, both its successes and its failures, was shaped by a distinctive system of social property relations (Wood 2002: 94). This unique configuration was the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and reproduction of social life. The foundations of the early English economy lay in agriculture. The fundamental structural transformations made English agricultural practices more productive than its continental rivals (DuPlessis 1997: 64). Agrarian capitalism, argue Marxist scholars (Teschke 2005:10; Wood 2002: 99; DuPlessis 1997: 64), originated as the unintended result of class conflict between landlords and peasants in the agrarian sphere. In contrast to France, landlords in the English rural society succeeded in transforming copyhold agreements on the land into leaseholds, renewable at the whim of the landlord. This enabled lords to profit from rent prices that were subject, not on fixed rents or customary standards, but on the emerging dependence on the market (DuPlessis 1997: 64; Wood 2002: 100). Consequently, this made the acquisition and concentration of land more lucrative. Landlords concentrated land by the dispossession of commoners through enclosures, acquiring and draining marshlands and obtaining royal parklands (Hill 1980: 14). The enclosure movement was the most distinctive definition of changing property relations that started in the sixteenth century and continued into the eighteenth century, it was backed by a series of post-1688 Acts of Parliament, that destroyed the commons and subsistence farming (Teschke 2003: 251). Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, “traditional conceptions of the land had to be replaced by new, capitalist conceptions of property – not only as ‘private’ but as exclusive” (Wood 2002: 108). Marx referred to this transformative period as “so-called primitive accumulation”, which is “the historical process of divorcing the producer [the peasantry] from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital” (1990: 875). This historical era was, as Marx called it, the genesis of agrarian capitalism. This period was not a simple extension or expansion of the market or exchange processes but a complete transformation in social relations.

In the sixteenth century, “England went a long way toward eliminating the fragmentation of the state, the ‘parcellised sovereignty’, inherited from feudalism” (Wood 2002: 98). Politically, the transformation of a militarised feudal class into a demilitarised class of capitalist landlords provided the social basis for the new constitutional monarchy (Teschke 2003: 252). The aristocracy was among the first in Europe to be demilitarised, and was part of an increasingly centralised state (Wood 2002: 99). The aristocracy no longer possessed what Marx called ‘extra-economic’ powers – direct coercion, exercised by landlords or the state – of surplus extraction from peasant producers as their European counterparts. In contrast, the Absolutist state of France centralised the pre-capitalist method of appropriation in the ‘tax/office’ structure (Wood 2002: 96). In pre-capitalist society the apparatus of the state was implicated directly in the process of surplus extraction from peasant producers; under the modern state, the extraction of surplus from wage-labourers is accomplished through the non-political power associated with new forms of property-social relations (Rosenberg 1994: 124). In other words, capitalists appropriated the workers’ surplus labour without the direct coercion of the modern state.

The distinctive conjuncture in England – the absence of ‘extra-economic’ powers and changing property relations – meant that agrarian landlord’s leased land to capitalist tenant farmers who employed wage-labourers for commercial farming. Consequently, tenant’s were increasingly subject not only to direct pressures from landlord’s to produce but also to unique, capitalistic market imperatives, in competition for access to land and wage-labourers (Wood 2002:100). The unique English rural society was polarised between large landowners and a growing propertyless multitude, also referred to as “the proletarianised peasantry”. The result was the landlord, capitalist farm tenant, and wage-labourer, and “with the growth of wage labour the pressures to increase productivity also increased” (Wood 2002: 102). Consequently, this increased the productivity of English agriculture and was capable of sustaining a large population not working in agriculture, providing the conditions for a growing home market for cheap commodities, a wage-labour force, and the urbanisation of spaces, the elements of which provided the conditions for the future Industrial Revolution (Teschke 2003: 252). In England, the market therefore did not represent an opportunity for selling surplus produce, but an economic imperative in which landlords, tenant farmers, and wage labourers reproduced themselves (Teschke 2003: 252). Until this unique development in social-property relations, England had lagged behind other European counterparts (Hill 1980: 15). This was a new form of life in England where the market and state, public and private became increasingly differentiated.

Class conflict in England was driven by conflicts between landowning capitalist, aristocracy against a reactionary class alliance of big monopoly merchants, surviving feudal magnates and the monarchy. “This conflict climaxed in the Glorious Revolution with the capture of power by the capitalist aristocracy and the downgrading of the monarchy to the formula ‘Crown-in-Parliament’” (Teschke 2005:11). The Glorious Revolution of 1688, according to Hill, “was a turning-point in economic as well as in political and constitutional history” (1980: 224). The Revolution enhanced the power of the propertied classes in Parliament and, by advancing the interests of larger landowners, it allowed directly for the promotion of capitalism and the capitalist conception of property (Wood 2002: 121). Indeed, the changing from dynastic to parliamentary sovereignty signals the consolidation of modern sovereignty.

The capitalist aristocracy acquired essential control over Parliament and the state apparatus – taxation, the army, jurisdiction, foreign policy, and the right of self-convocation (Teschke 2003: 253). Parliament broke the back of the merchant monopolies of the great chartered overseas companies – East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Royal Africa Company – paving the way for freer trade and greater capitalist endeavours aboard (Teschke 2003: 254). In 1702, Parliament declared that trade “ought to be free and not restrained” (Hill 1980: 225). After 1688, the English state was characterised by a growing and increasingly efficient fiscal bureaucracy. Core Departments of Government – the Treasury, the Excise and the Navy – turned from patrimonial into modern bureaucracies (Teschke 2005: 15). The structural expansion and transformation of the administrative apparatus, took on what Teschke claims is “the Weberian traits of modern bureaucracy – professionalism, salaries and pensions, examinations, appointments, merit-based promotion, a hierarchical career path, records and bookkeeping, procedure, seniority, accountability, and a sense of public duty” (2003: 254). The landed classes resorted to self-taxation which amounted to the main source of state revenue until 1713. The establishment of modern financial institutions such as the Bank of England and the National Debt, the introduction of paper money and cheques date from this period. These were important developments for facilitating business transactions that provided the conditions for future industrial expansion (Hill 1980: 232-3).
By the eighteenth century, England was at the height of agrarian capitalism. With a growing urban population, London was the largest city in Europe (Wood 2002:188). However, England was in the “process of creating an industrial capitalism” (Wood 2002: 188). There had been an expansion of the cheap consumer-goods industries. Indeed, all sections of the population were to some extent cash customers for goods produced outside their areas. The home market was variously estimated at from 6 to 32 times the foreign market (Hill 1980: 227). During this period there was the expansion of large-scale enterprises. This period also saw an expansion of trade union activity (Hill 1980: 228-9). During this era, the English economy was geared to the export of large quantities of cheap goods. “England”, writes Hill, “had entered the competitive epoch, well ahead of her rivals” (1980: 232).

After 1688, England started to employ new foreign policy methods while remaining surrounded by pre-capitalist states that focused on inter-dynastic rivalry, territorial accumulation and plunder (Teschke 2003: 250). England’s foreign policy was not determined by dynastic interests but the ‘national interest’. Consequently, Parliament followed a ‘dual foreign-policy strategy’, based, on the one hand, on active power-balancing against its continental rivals; and, on the other hand, on trading and colonial expansion overseas (Teschke 2005: 17). In the eighteenth century, Britain not only became Europe’s major power but a “fiscal-military state” (Teschke 2003: 261). Indeed, during the continental confrontation Britain’s taxable capacity rose steadily while France’s declined (Hill 1980: 226). Britain set a new pattern of warfare against France, with an expensive war of attrition, where Britain subsidised continental armies. Meanwhile, dynastic states continued their traditional, feudal-like practices of territorial expansions and wealth accumulation through plunder. The British-style of warfare, however, could only be undertaken, argues Teschke (2005: 25), so vigorously and successfully due to the capitalist property regime which generated the necessary resources to finance Britain’s belligerent foreign policy, “without the constant threat of bankruptcy and royal defaulting on debts that was so characteristic of France” (2005: 15). In other words, Britain’s strength was underpinned by its dynamic and expanding capitalist economy and its post-revolutionary state that politically secured efficient fiscal measures. But how did capitalism, which had specifically developed in England, come to expand and dominate the European continent, and  that would eventually become a global hegemonic order?

In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels eloquently articulate the logic of capitalisms structural antagonisms, drive for expansion, accumulation and profit-maximisation, and the nature of its own reproduction:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere […] The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country […] All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations […] The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image (Marx and Engels 2004: 65-6).

“England’s peculiarity”, claims Wood, “was not its role in an outwardly expanding commercial system but, on the contrary, its inward development, the growth of a unique domestic economy” (2002: 174). But the development of capitalism was not confined to the island nation, rather, “capitalism came to be the general ether that gave all subsequent developments, domestic and international, a specific colouring” (Teschke 2003: 255). Justin Rosenberg (1996: 6) suggests that the Marxian concept of combined and uneven development – originally developed by Leon Trotsky – is the theoretical key to recovering the lost history of international relations. Capitalism is itself a process of uneven and combined development, riddled with internal and reproducing antagonisms and contradictions (Rosenberg 1996: 8). In this regard, Benno Teschke, suggests that the engendering of capitalism to the European continent and the rest of the world was geopolitically combined and socially uneven development, that is, it was riddled with social conflicts, civil and international wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions (Teschke 2003: 266).

It was the geopolitical pressures exerted by the capitalist British nation, which manipulated the old inter-dynastic rivalries through active balancing, that consequently led to recurrent crises, intra-ruling class struggle, and the collapse of states in the old European continent. British foreign policy had the unintended affect of “forcing continental states to respond to and finally adjust to the superior socio-political British model, especially under the impact of the Industrial Revolution” (Teschke 2003: 263). European states organising on pre-capitalist principles of trade, or geopolitical and military rivalry, that were indistinguishable from the ancient, feudal conflicts over territory and plunder, “would be driven by England’s new competitive advantages to promote their own economic development in similar way” (Wood 2002: 143). Wood (2002: 176) argues that the traditional, pre-capitalist states, together with the old commercial network, became a transmission belt for capitalism. In this regard, “capitalism was ‘born into’ a system of dynastic polities that had consolidated their territories during the absolutist period” (Teschke 2003: 264). Capitalism therefore emerged in a territorially prefigured states-system. Marx classically quantified this emergence: the material conditions of the new society grows in the womb of the old. The nature of this new form empire, that is, the global magnitude of capitalist hegemony, and the role of the (powerful) state (in this case Britain) in world politics is the next point of discussion.

Antonio Gramsci is distinguished among Marxist scholars for elaborating and conceptualising hegemony and the sphere of civil society. Gramsci theorised that hegemony is exercised on two major superstructural levels: “civil society”, understood as the private or non-state sphere that includes the economy and other institutions; and the “political society” or “the State” (1971: 12). In other words, hegemony is not only exercised by coercion, or direct domination, but in social-cultural spheres. But Gramsci also reconceptualised and extended the traditional meaning of the state: instead of just an administrative and coercive apparatus, Gramsci recognised the underpinnings of the political structure in civil society – institutions such as the church, education, and the press, etc. Aspects which help create the behavioural modes and expectations of the social hegemonic order (Cox 1983: 164). Hegemony thus bridged the categories of state and civil society.

The hegemonic concept of world order is not just founded upon inter-state relations but, importantly, upon a “globally-conceived civil society, i.e., a mode of production of global reach which brings about links among social classes of the countries encompassed by it” (Cox 1983: 171). “It means”, as Rosenberg asserts, “the rise of a new kind of empire: the empire of civil society” (1994: 131). The precondition to hegemony is a powerful state, which have typically undergone profound social and economic revolutions, as was the case in Britain (Cox 1983: 171). A world hegemony is thus “in its beginnings the outward expansion of the (internal) national hegemony established by a dominant social class” (Cox 1983: 171). Such was the case with eighteenth century European history, which was marked and transformed by the capitalist English ruling class. However, it is important to stress the class nature of hegemony, that it represents the interest of a transnational class, particularly for the major capitalist states that emerged in Europe and North America (Gill and Law 1988: 76). Hegemony takes the form of consensual dominance. Direct dominance by a powerful state may be necessary but not a sufficient form of hegemony (Bieler et al. 2006: 10). Essentially, at an international level hegemony is not just an order among states, it is:

an order within a world economy with a dominant mode of production which penetrates into all countries and links into other subordinate modes of production. It is also a complex of international social relationships which connect the social classes of the different countries (Cox 1983: 171).

Robert Cox (1983: 170) quantifies various distinct international hegemonic periods: firstly, (1845-75) was characterised as a world economy with Britain being at its core; secondly (1875-1945) the balance of power in Europe became destabilised, where other countries challenged British supremacy. This is an era marked as non-hegemonic; thirdly, post-second World War where the U.S ascended as a hegemonic power, occupying the role that Britain once had. Of course, the nature and status of U.S hegemony is another point for discussion. The similarities between British and U.S hegemony is this: the fundamental point is that to achieve hegemony, a powerful state (Britain then, the U.S now) was required to found and protect a world order that was universally desirable, that is, not a world order where one state exploits others for its own benefits, but where there is shared interests across many states, in particular the powerful capitalist states. In this regard, this is what can be said about the U.S today. Therefore, “the key idea of modern international relations is no longer the war-assisted accumulation of territories [as was the case in the dynastic periods], but the multilateral political management of global capital’s crisis-potential and the regulation of the world-economy by the leading capitalist states”.

In conclusion, this research project has argued that the emergence of the modern international system cannot be understood as an isolated phenomena, rather it is linked with the rise of capitalism in England, and the specific transformation of social property relations that set this in motion. Agrarian capitalism was the unintended result of class struggle between the landlord’s and the peasantry. Lord’s concentrated land and created a labour-force through the expulsion of commoners and by enclosures. I argued that the English aristocracy was the first to be demilitarised and was unique in Europe as it did not possess what Marx termed ‘extra-economic’ powers, that is, the state did not extract surplus from producers. Instead, the burgeoning capitalist aristocracy extracted surplus direct from the producers. The result of this unique social-property transformations was the landlord, capitalist farm tenant, and wage-labourer. These actors were submitted and reproduced under the imperatives of the market. In sum, I argued that the distinguishing factor of early modern English society was that the exercise of power had two linked aspects: a public political sphere that manages the states-system, and a private political sphere that manages the extraction of surplus.

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the capitalist aristocracy gained important control over Parliament and the state apparatus. Mercantile monopolies were discarded, new state departments were erected and key financial institutions and practices were created, which allowed for the continual expansion and development of capitalism. Britain had a dual foreign policy based on active power-balancing and expansion. Meanwhile, Britain was surrounded by feudal-like Absolutist states, characterised by inter-dynastic rivalries, territorial accumulation and plunder. I argued that the geopolitical pressure exerted by the British capitalist nation had the unintended affect of driving it’s continental rivals to adopt its superior socio-economic model. Thus capitalism was engendered in the old European continent, in a combined geopolitical and socially uneven development. I have developed the neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony to understand the nature of capitalist hegemony and as such the modern international system. Gramsci claimed that hegemony is exercised by social-cultural consent. On an international level hegemony represents a transnational class. Marx claimed that capitalism seeks to create a world in its image. Such a reproduction of a social-economic model was advanced by the hegemonic British Empire, first on the European continent then on the international level. However, such a hegemonic state is one that advances and protects a world order, managing it, and having a shared interests with other great capitalist powers. I have depicted that the modern international system is relatively recent and dates back to sixteenth-seventeenth century England. In sum, the modern international system is a social construct, one that is open to contention and change.

References

Bieler, Andreas, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham and Adam D. Morton. 2006. Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour: Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

DuPlessis, Robert. 1997. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cox, Robert W. 1983. ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method’.  Millennium – Journal of International Studies 12(2): 162-175.

Gill, Stephen and David Law. 1988. The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems, and Policies. Hertfordshire: Harvester – Wheatsheaf.

Gramsci, Antonio, ed. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harman, Chris. 2008. A People’s History of the World. London: Verso.

Hill, Christopher. 1980. The Century of Revolution 1603-1714, 2^nd ed. London: Routledge.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1962. The Age of Revolution. New York: Mentor.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1968. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin Books.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1990. Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin Books.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, ed. [1848] 2004. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. L.M. Findlay. Toronto: Broad View Press.

Rosenberg, Justin. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations. London: Verso.

Rosenberg, Justin. 1996. ‘Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations’. New Left Review 215: 3-15.

Teschke, Benno. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso.

Teschke, Benno. 2005. ‘Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the International’ Historical Materialism 13(2): 3-26.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.

Gonzalo Villanueva (gonzalo [dot] n [dot] villanueva [at] gmail [dot] com)

What is value? Well we experience it every day. One only has to walk through the streets of a city, such as Brisbane, with no money in their pocket (nor access to credit) to feel its effects: you are effectively exiled from collective human cooperation and society.  Every day we worry about the money we have or we owe, the cost of almost everything and we fear what the seemingly angry deity of the stock market will do to our lives. This is of course small beer to those who face starvation due to the commodification of the globe.[1] But the question of what value actually is infrequently asked. Or better yet, the reality of the reign of value effaces its questioning. (Here we are reminded of the anecdote of Marx’s father writing to him expressing his desire that his son would stop writing about money and start making some. The reality of the latter often prevents the former.)

Value is one of the most difficult concepts in Marx’s[2] work, but possibly one of the most important: important because it reveals the ground floor logic of capitalism, its motivating rationale. However as Michael Heinrich[3] points out there are ambivalences within Marx own ideas. Heinrich points out that Marx attempts seven different arguments to present his ideas on value (four being different versions, additions and editions of Capital volume 1).  Heinrich argues that we find traces of two different conceptualisations of value: a “‘substantialist-naturalist theory of value’ and a ‘monetary theory of value.’”[i]

The first is the notion that we can determine the value of a single commodity from the labour that it took to create it; the second is the notion that value is a product of the relation of commodities with each other. The first is still part of the conceptual schema of the bourgeois political economy Marx was critiquing; the second is Marx’s radical invention… and a more useful tool to understand the operations of capital. Yet it is the substantialist theory which has been the one that was the most dominant in orthodox Marxism. As Milios writes:

The prevailing Marxist tradition portrays Marx’s value theory as a continuation and completion of the classical labor theory of value, specifically in the version formulated by David Ricardo. The assumption is that Marx’s most important contribution to labor theory is his analysis of the exploitation of the laboring classes by capital (appropriation of surplus labor) through introduction of the notion of labor power and elaboration of what makes it distinct from labor. In the context of this tradition, value is defined as the quantity of (socially necessary) labor contained in a commodity, and surplus value as the quantity of labor appropriated by the ruling classes after the laborer has been remunerated in keeping with the value of his or her labor power. But there is an alternative Marxist tradition that comprehends value and surplus value as historically specific social relations: namely, as the specific form assumed by economic relations, exploitation, and the products of labor in societies based on commodity production (i.e., capitalism). This alternative tradition emphasizes Marx’s analysis of the value form and money, above all in section 1 of volume 1 of Capital, an analysis that seems to have been neglected by all ‘‘classical’’ approaches to Marxian value theory. [ii]

Leaving aside the Pandora’s Box of what Marx really meant, it is the alternative tradition which can add more power to the understanding and critique of capitalism.

What then is value? Most simply the substance of value is labour-time, yet it only appears through exchange and finds its clearest expression in the form of money. It is the vicissitudes of exchange that calculate the magnitude of value, value is a social not a technical question. Marx writes “It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.”[iii]

In both Capital and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx starts his argument with the same point: that in capitalism wealth (the product of the interaction between human creativity and the non-human world) takes on the appearance of the commodity.[iv] Marx’s work on the commodity is essential for understanding the nature of capitalism, including the nature of value. Key to this is Marx’s argument that “the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves…”[v] Value, which seems to appear to be a natural condition of human society, a material property of the commodity and/or a technical result of the labour process, is in fact the result of the social organisation of creativity within capitalism.

The commodity has two aspects, its direct utility or use-value and exchange-value. The utility of a commodity is the product of specific concrete labour and refers to its concrete properties (even when the commodity is immaterial). Marx remarks how if you could grasp the use-value of a commodity outside of the society that produced it you couldn’t tell what kind of society it came from. “From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist.”[vi] (The sad joke being that increasingly, with the degradation of the quality of food, amongst so much else, due to the imperatives of capitalist society, in a strange way the taste of  a product increasingly does betray its social origins, and tells us much about the society that produced it). The exchange-value of a commodity is due to its existence as a specific social form. For much of human society the creation of wealth has not taken the form of the commodity. Hypothetically it is possible to speculate that the very same practise of a specific labour-process may take place in different societies but one might produce wealth for exchange and thus commodities, whilst the other might produce it for direct use or perhaps tithe and therefore be non-commodified.[4] The commodity is a social relationship.

Marx stresses that the exchange-value does not and cannot arise for use-value, it doesn’t come from the actual properties of an item of wealth. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value in a pearl or a diamond.”[vii] Indeed if exchange is the exchange of equivalents, then it cannot be done on the characteristics of the actual properties of a commodity: since they would be radically different. The very fact that exchange does involve the exchange of commodities with such radically different qualities means that some other quality must be the determining ‘thing’. Marx writes that “Thus one volume of Propertius and eight ounces of snuff may have the same exchange-value, despite the dissimilar use-values of snuff and elegies.” There has to be another “common denominator”.[viii] This is labour: but that is only the start of it.

Just as we cannot find an equivalency between commodities due to their actual use-values we cannot find an equivalency on the basis of the concrete labour that created them.

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.[ix]

If abstract labour is the substance of value, how can it be measured?  Abstract labour is measured by time, time in relation to the combined labour of a society and the social and material capabilities of that society. He continues saying that:

…the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifest in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogenous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour power.[x]

It is easy to see at this point how a substaintialist reading is possible. It appears that you could identify value, that is abstract labour, through an examination of the labour-process. Marx’s crucial point however is that value of a commodity, even if its substance is socially necessary abstract labour, only really comes into being in relation to another commodity, and more importantly the totally of commodities in a society. In slightly different language he writes in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that “the labour-time of individuals becomes materialised universal labour time only as the result of the exchange process.”[xi]

Part of the ambiguity could be related to this notion of time. It is possible to assume at first that it refers to the actual time of labour-process. After all capitalism is obsessed with the application of the measurement of time at the point of production (the application of Key Performance Indicators in call centres, which measure call duration, toilet breaks, etc of an entire workday in seconds is but the current apex of a long journey). But this has to do with the exploitation of labour rather than the calculation of the magnitude of value. Rather by time Marx means that through the process of exchange we find that the product of certain concrete labour process (whatever its actual duration) is worth a certain proportion of the abstracted labour time of the entire society.[5]

Not only is value determined by exchange, it is impossible to grasp the value of one commodity outside of a relation to another. Michael Heinrich argues that this a point that Marx believed he did not emphasises enough in Capital and thus in a manuscript he prepared as part of his revision of Capital he notes the (referring to his comparison of the value of coats and linen) “Outside their relation to each other – outside the relation, in which they are considered as equal – neither coat nor linen possess value-objectivity or their objectivity as congealed quantity of human labour as such.”[xii] The value of one commodity can only be expressed in relation to another. In a barter economy we when we say x amount of a commodity are worth y amount of b commodity, b commodity functions to express the value of a commodity: how much it embodies socially necessary labour time. This is what Marx calls the “relative form of value”.[xiii] In a very real sense this is how value is measured. You cannot stand next to someone working with a stop-watch and work out the value of their product. It is only through exchange that the value, the socially necessary labour time that a commodity is a bearer of, is measured.

But value only really comes into its own with the development of money. This is when one commodity forsakes its use-value to stand as the representative of value for all commodities. It is at this point that value can throw off the shackles of being tied to specific commodities and dominate in a pure form. This is crucial for capitalism because the capitalist mode of production is one where the accumulation of value is it central rationale. The purpose of production is not simple the generation of more wealth but rather the investment of money to create commodities to sell for an increased amount of value. This is what Marx calls the “general formula of Capital”: M-C-M’.[xiv] When we grasp value as a fetishised form produced through a social relationship we can understand how value can circulate, how it can move from its money forms through production into a commodity form and then back to money and on and on. What is moving is the magnitude of the fetish in relation to the sum totally of social fetishism. But it doesn’t float about the world but is intertwined in its materiality. When Marx describes in detail the processes of circulation in Volume II of Capital, he describes the almost torturous journey of value to valorise itself. It is bound to the material aspects of the commodity, to the drawn out production process, to circulation time, to the entire duration it takes to turn over before it can find its free and more natural state in money again. But of course in money it can only be simple hoarded and thus must be hurled into the world once more.[xv] We can see why the dream of financial capital is capital’s most prized fantasy: money accumulating itself apparently out of nothing but itself.

Marx is quick to point out however that if we assume that exchange is the exchange of equivalences, how can you possible generate more value? (This leaves aside swindling and theft which of course play a very real role in actual existing capitalism) The answer is well known. Capitalism exploits the labour power of those it employs by paying wages that represent a value smaller than the value produced by their labour. Thus when the commodity is sold it realises for the capitalist M’. The variability of value and the nature of capitalist competition and of the struggles and resistances of the exploited in part explain the incredibly dynamism of capitalist society.

What should we take from all this? That value is the product and premise of the social relations of capitalism. That human creativity that takes place within capitalism produces wealth that exists within the fetishised form of the commodity and concrete labour is exploited by its abstraction that also happens through the circulation of the commodity.  It also explains two of the key ways capitalism tries to organise society: through commodities and wage-labour, this is the hard kernel of capitalist life.

Bello, Walden. The Food Wars. London & New York: Verso, 2009.

Heinrich, Michael. 2004. “Ambivalences of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy as Obstacles for the Analysis of Contemporary Capitalism”. oekonomiekritik.de https://www.oekonomiekritik.de/310Ambivalences.htm. (accessed 21st January, 2010).

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.

———. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by David Fernbach. Vol. 2. London: Penguin Classics, 1992.

———. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S.W Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970.

Milios, John. “Rethinking Marx’s Value-Form Analysis from an Althusserian Perspective.” Rethinking Marxism Volume 21, no. Number 2 (2009): 260-74.

[2] A ‘return’ to Marx can often be a theological operation, here I wish to marshal the potency of his critique. Marx remains our complain not so much because of his own qualities but rather because the target of his critique continues to immiserated our lives.

[3] Michael Heinrich’s work raises some problems for those of us the read Marx in English as it is based on having access to

[4] Of course the actual history of capitalism leads to the constant transformation of the labour-process in the pursuit of relative surplus value: something Marx explores with his notions of ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption in ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ in Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 948-1084. This is just part of capitalism endless transformation of society more generally.

[5] Society does not mean nation-state here, as capitalism is clearly global.

[ii] John Milios, “Rethinking Marx’s Value-Form Analysis from an Althusserian Perspective,” Rethinking Marxism Volume 21, no. Number 2 (2009): 260.

[iii] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 166.

[iv] Ibid., 125, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 27.

[v] Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 164.

[vi] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 28.

[vii] Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 177.

[viii] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 28.

[ix] Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 128.

[x]Ibid., 129.

[xi] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 45.

[xii] Quoted in Michael Heinrich, Ambivalences of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy as Obstacles for the Analysis of Contemporary Capitalism (2004 [cited 21st January 2010]); available from https://www.oekonomiekritik.de/310Ambivalences.htm.

[xiii] Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 140.

[xiv] Ibid., 251.

[xv] Cf.Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 2 (London: Penguin Classics, 1992).



Henri Lefebvre; or a politics of urban space and everyday life for the 21^st century – Jon Piccini (jon.piccini [at] uqconnect [dot] edu [dot] au)

In today’s green anti-capitalist discourse, the urban question is too often seen as predetermined. Cities are hives of CO2 emissions and other pollutants, we are told, centres for poverty and dispossession alongside repositories of great wealth for a select few. With the UN now indicating that 50% of the earth’s population live in the metropolis, we are told by luminaries of the ecological left that this mode of habitation is unsustainable. Some unfortunately vocal intellectuals advocate what amounts to a ‘return to the countryside’ – accompanied by a massive decrease in human population – as the only answer to our current environmental conjuncture, seemingly mirroring Engels’ quaintly 19^th Century understanding that the city would simply disappear in a post revolutionary situation.[i] To change contexts briefly, in Shanghai, I was recently informed, it is possible to visit the preserved home of Zhou Enlai, leading Chinese Maoist and Foreign Minister. The building is a tribute to revolutionary austerity, containing the few meagre possessions which Enlai lived from over the decades. Problems arise, however, when one leaves the house – only to be surrounded by advertisements for Prada, Gucci, and other western commodities. Here the urban revolution has been decided firmly in global capital’s favour.

This captures the problematic which today underlines the urban question. How can cities be made liveable in the face of ecological imperatives, the stigma of mass poverty and the colonisation of their spaces by the spectacle of capital? I propose that we must, even with these problems, defend the urban: not only as it is the only means of mass inhabitation possible but also because it’s form provides a kernel, if of a utopian variety, of hope for a truly communist future. Henri Lefebvre, the great French Marxist intellectual, would certainly agree. Described somewhat audaciously by Andy Merrifield as possibly “the most self-effacing and least narrow-minded Marxist…who ever lived”[ii], Lefebvre’s peripatetic oeuvre encapsulates work in a multiplicity of fields. However, his most instructive writing is that related to urban spaces and everyday life – and the revolutionary possibilities incipient in these. What follows will outline Lefebvre’s and other like minded thinkers conception of the city and the possibilities for resistance that lie within them. This must not be seen as a fleeting exercise, but rather one central to the Left’s project, for as Mike Davis stated recently in NLR – “Left to the dismal politics of the present…cities of poverty will almost certainly become the coffins of hope; but all the more reason that we must start thinking like Noah. A new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias.”[iii]

Perhaps it is best to start this discussion within everyday life. Born in 1901 in a small village in the French Pyrenees, bordering Spain, Lefebvre’s early work was largely concerned with the nature of rural life in his home province and sociological explanations of its cultures. These were topics considered insufficiently revolutionary by the Stalinist French Communist Party, from which he was expelled after Soviet tanks crushed Hungary’s carnival of resistance in 1956. Leaving that grey behemoth of the French far-left, Lefebvre found some new, younger friends in the form of Guy Debord and his Situationist International – who were only at this stage beginning to codify their ideas around the abstraction of the city and everyday life into 1966’s Society of the Spectacle. It was this friendship – born of a mutual affection for politics and alcohol – that “piqued…Lefebvre’s interest in things urban” – drawing him towards an understanding of the ‘urban’ both as an ideology in Marx’s terminology, a politicised expression of capitalism’s desire for immortality, as well as a canvas upon which ordinary people could make their own realities.

Lefebvre’s experience of the 1968 student-worker movement in Paris, upon which he was a vital intellectual inspiration from his professorship at Nanterre, provided ample evidence for his developing theory that modern city of revolutionary ferment was both a spatial representation of the status quo whilst simultaneously nurturing a nascent counter-hegemonic framework. He saw the city as eclipsing industrialisation as the key point of capitalist profitability, “we can consider industrialisation as a stage of urbanisation” Lefebvre remarked “as a moment, an intermediary, an instrument. In the double process (Industrialisation-Urbanisation), after a certain period the later term becomes dominant, taking over from the former”.[iv] This privileging of the production of urban forms over traditional concepts of industrial development was matched with a premonition of the city’s role in post-fordist surplus value absorption – with the end of the post war boom and opening of markets giving way to rampant speculation in real estate, of “liquid loot yearning to become concrete in space”. This problematic has a certain historicity, as David Harvey notes in his ideas on the role of surplus capital absorption in mid 19^th century France, a State whose response to the European wide political-economic crisis of 1848 was to invest heavily in urban redevelopment. The most famous of these projects was of course the Haussmannisation of Paris, where utopian ideas of city planning drawn up by early socialists were reconfigured and bastardised on a grand scale – entire working-class suburbs were demolished to make way for the gigantic boulevards and nascent shopping arcades which would soon make Paris famous as the ‘city of lights’.[v]

It was displacements and dispossessions such as this which drove Lefebvre to think of cities not just in a purely economic way, but spatially – culturally, socially and politically. The result of this work was his 1974 publication The Production of Space, which sought to comprehend how the urban itself was constructed and reconstructed by its leaders and inhabitants. Lefebvre’s conception of urban space has been likened to a “flaky pastry…layered and heterogeneous” through which “the city can be understood as a subset of multiple urban practices and imaginations”.[vi] This encapsulates his layered methodology of space as a “conceptual triad” of the conceived, the lived and the perceived. Conceived, represented space is space as understood by power, it is “constructed by assorted professionals and technocrats” so as to carry signifiers and meanings upholding the hegemony of the dominant, capitalist, mode of production. It is engraved in “monuments and towers, factories and office blocks”.[vii] People, however, actually live in these spaces, and it is this lived experience that furnished their direct understandings of that same environment, creating what the author calls representational space. As Lefebvre relates, “this is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”. It is how the urban is experienced on a daily symbolic basis, as the local café, as East 52^nd Street, or the family Laundromat.[viii] This relationship between the conceived and the lived gives rise, in a dialectical fashion, to a final category, that of the perceived. Otherwise referred to as spatial practice, this can be seen as the synthesis of the conceived-lived dialectic, mediating between the spaces of everyday life and space as conceived by dominant hegemony, creating either societal cohesion, or political-cultural conflict.[ix]

Lefebvre however notes the overwhelming role conceived understandings of space play in this mediation, especially under late capitalism’s drive for urbanisation, and posits this as resulting from the abstracted nature of represented space. Under this abstract space “lived experience”, as well as the critical spatial practice of perception, “is crushed, vanquished, by what is ‘conceived of’’” in a process often accompanied by violence.[x] Abstract space finds its manifestation in the ideologically laden forms of capitalism, “monuments have a phallic aspect, towers exude arrogance, and the bureaucratic and political authoritarianism immanent to a repressive space is everywhere”.[xi] Such space “dances to the tune of the homogenising forces of…capital” while “denying the celebration of lived experience, of tradition…of sensual differential space”.[xii] However, in a typically Gramscian turn, Lefebvre notes that the bourgeoisie are unable to totalise their hegemony of conception, instead insisting that

They find themselves unable to reduce practice (the practico-sensory realm, the body, social-spatial practice) to their abstract space, and hence new, spatial, contradictions arise and make themselves felt.[xiii]

The Wachowski Brothers dystopian sci-fi flick The Matrix provides a useful way of engaging with these ideas. Thomas Anderson, mild manner software engineer and after hour’s computer hacker, lives in a giant unnamed metropolis – one he is partly aware is not completely real. Jason Abbott explains how “the world of the Matrix is one in which there is no clear division between the virtual and the ‘real’, both are lived spaces, both are contingent, both are interconnected, impacting upon each other”.[xiv] Neo, as Anderson comes to be known, lives in ‘The Matrix’, a computer program which represents reality as it was at the beginning of the 21^st century. This is Lefebvre’s conceived space, space as represented by capital – the city itself is a living embodiment of capital’s achievements and provides all the alienated work, recreation and subcultures a modern metropolis requires. As Lefebvre postulated, this constructed city has taken over from any possibility of a space directly lived and experience, that which is presented in film as a disturbingly Cartesian separation between the body and mind enclosed in giant farms which harvest humans for power. What this program covers over, Mr Anderson soon discovers, is ‘the desert of the real’, the fact the world has been destroyed in a brutal war between machines and man – a political truth which at times can enter The Matrix, in the form of resistance fighters hacking into its core programming.

It is thus clear, Abbott elaborate, that The Matrix “is nonetheless a space in which there is room, albeit limited, for subaltern groups to manipulate the same technologies to contest the hegemonic order” – and this is just as true in the real world as it is in Hollywood. Lefebvre claimed that one of the means through which ‘differential space’ could be created in the metropolis was through reclaiming “the right to the city” the right to an urban centre and an everyday life different to the abstractions forced on us by capital. As Merrifield articulates,

This isn’t any pseudo-right…no simple visiting right…‘this right can only be formulated’ he says, ‘as a transformed and renewed right to urban life’…there can be no city without centrality, no urbanity, he believes, without a dynamic core, without a vibrant, open public forum full of lived moments and ‘enchanting’ encounters, disengaged from exchange value.[xv]

What does this mean then for struggles today? The first, and most obvious example is the now seemingly unfashionable praxis of Reclaim the Streets parties, aimed at “transforming stretches of asphalt into places where people can gather without cars, without shopping malls, without permission from the state, to develop the seeds of the future inside the present society”[xvi] We need not look to American or European examples either, for Brisbane has been host to a variety of struggles against abstract urban space. During the sixties and seventies Brisbane’s New Left activists engaged in a concretely urban-centred style of activism, seeking to appropriate spaces for contestation of the boring, capitalist city. Trades Hall, for example, was ‘borrowed’ by the Student Left to run a highly popular disco-cum-political centre called FOCO, which regularly attracted thousands of young people throughout 1968 and 1969 while activists have always had to contest our right to march on the street, a right the honourable Lord Mayor seems dead set on taking away once again. These are contestations of the physicality of space as well as the forms of life we want to create within them, and consequently redevelopment of King George Square could then have been a point of much greater contestation for Brisbane’s left. Having served since its construction as a large meeting place, hosting rallies as diverse as the response to Communist MP Fred Paterson’s bashing in 1948 to the famous Right to March movement of 1977-79, the location has been reconstructed in a truly alienated, abstract fashion, replete with an oddly slopped surface, wall to wall concrete and a few corporate coffee shops to boot. Here too it would seem, like in the exploding metropolis of Shanghai, we have left the urban question to be solved in capital’s favour.

If the Australian Left is to emerge from its current morass, it could do worse than critically deal with the Marxist urbanism of Henri Lefebvre. If we are to reimagine the urban in a beyond its current unsustainable, poverty stricken dimensions, the it is necessary for us to deal with issues of urban space and its uses in a much more concrete manner – involving ourselves in daily struggles for urban space and an unrestrained right to a differential everyday life. Many scholars have previously pointed out the fundamentally utopian nature of the modern metropolis, constructed as it is to provide an eternal monument to capitals greatness and power whilst hiding the realities and structural violence which underpins it, perhaps best exemplified by Dubai’s great slave-built towers. However, it is through struggles over and for spaces of free expression and rebellion that we can start to construct our own utopic condition within the metropolis – the seed of Mike Davis’s Ark, and of a communist future within the urban.

[ii] Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, A Critical Introduction (New York, London: Routledge, 2006)

[iii] Mike Davis, “Who will build the Ark?” New Left Review No. 61 (Jan-Feb 2010): 30.

[iv] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003) Translated by Robert Bonnono, 72.

[v] David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (Sept-Oct 2008), 25-6.

[vi] Gyan Prakash, “Introduction” in Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruse (eds.) The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics and Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 7.

[vii] Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 109.

[viii] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 39.

[ix] Harvey Molotch, “Review essay: The space of Lefebvre”, Theory and Society, No. 22 (1993), 897.

[x] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 51.

[xi] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 49.

[xii] Andrew Merrifield, “Place and space: a Lefebvrian reconciliation”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 4 (1993), 524.

[xiii] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 63.

[xiv] Jason Abbott. “Living in The Matrix: Capitalism, Techno-Globalization and the Hegemonic Construction of Space.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Mar 17, 2004.

[xv] Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 92.

[xvi] RTS poster quoted in Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 56.