Tag Archives: Class Struggle

Micro-Finance or Micro-Reaction?

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While micro-finance has proved successful in lifting families out of poverty it is politically problematic for two major reasons: it perpetuates capitalist social relations, thereby masking the root cause of poverty and the system is susceptible to manipulation by larger financial entities which charge interest and run counter to the socially conscious vision of Muhammed Yunus.

Yunus’ vision, while admirable, ultimately falls short because in the end it relies on a belief in “capitalism with a human face.”  His vision asserts that the periodic crises in global capitalism are the result of greed and mismanagement as opposed to a systemic problem.  The system of micro-finance that he pioneered gives people the impression that global poverty can be significantly reduced by small actions and that even the most basic economic exchanges should be formalized in the capitalist market.  Furthermore, the valid sense of hope generated through his model’s successes potentially negate any hope for concerted political action that would demand jobs and services (such as healthcare) that should be treated as rights in the first place.  The ideological implications of belief in such a system may outweigh the on-the-ground benefits in the long run.

Poverty is not accidental and such assertions that globalization can be transformed to include the Global South as a beneficiary are naïve at best.  The systemic issues of global capitalism and its symptoms of hunger and poverty cannot be adequately addressed through micro-finance.  The international working class is thoroughly productive and yet poverty and chronic unemployment are a result of mismanaged distribution at the hands of the owning class.

While it is obviously good to lift families out of poverty, and micro-finance has proven successful in many instances, the political implications of such a reliance may in fact maintain extreme levels of income inequality and power across the world.  If the solution were as easy as giving every poor family a small sum of money, global poverty would have been history years ago.  The system of micro-finance enshrines bourgeois social relations and provides a false sense of hope for the class that in reality produces the world’s wealth through its labor.

1. Dr Toh Han Chong,  Interview with Professor Muhammad Yunus, SMA News, Volume 40 No. 12 December 2008.

Spatial Subversion and Political Opposition

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Any spatial challenge to the inefficiencies and inequities generated by the global domination of capital requires a principled political opposition and the social engagement of the most oppressed sectors of the working class.  Spatial agency and networking are important tools to realize the goals of an anti-capitalist movement.  While Lenin speculated on the subversion of bourgeois state power through the creation of a dual state, there is a more immediate potential for the generation of subversive spaces that have the ability to serve as a nucleus for further revolutionary action.  Squatting settlements and slums are two examples where space functionally exists outside of state power.

Beyond some romantic revival of youthful 60s-inspired rebellion, these spaces can have explosive political consequences.  The FARC-EP, though primarily based in Colombia’s countryside, operate urban networks of alternate governance in the informal neighborhoods of Colombia’s largest cities.  This shadow government owes its efficacy to the informality of the space itself.  While this example is certainly extreme and related to a specific political/geographic context, it demonstrates that informal conditions can generate highly sophisticated forms of spatial and social organization.  Namely, the working class is capable of generating its own culture and spatial livelihood under even the worst circumstances.

The next step in reorganizing space, drawing from Teddy Cruz’s methodology in Tijuana, is from the design point of view.  The organization of the building project itself along a community-oriented mentality is capable of transforming how communities think about space.  Teddy Cruz does not merely propose recycling San Diego’s capitalist refuse to build individual housing units; he contends that the act of social organization necessary for such an endeavor will reinvigorate a larger sense of collective power.  Finally, he recognizes that the state will only recognize new settlements with infrastructural improvements only when these settlements exist as at least semi-permanent communities.

However, Cruz’s approach highlights the political roadblock that even the most well-intentioned projects encounter: how does one reconcile a principled critique of unjust systems while working to improve the lives of those most adversely affected by these systems?  Cruz’s speculative design for housing in Tijuana has many positive, potentially liberating elements but does it not also ignore the glaring contradiction that Mexican labor is hyper-exploited by the Mexican and American bourgeoisies, literally bound by a wall to prevent any chance of social mobility and then forced to consume the leftovers of U.S. capitalism’s overproduction (in this case physical refuse and under-valued capital in the form of housing)?  Architects must not only creatively work in contradictory, oppressive political climates but join movements to dismantle them.

Aquilino, Marie Jeannine. Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. New York, NY: Metropolis, 2010.
Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon, Oxon [England: Routledge, 2011.

Cruz, Teddy.  Tijuana Case Study: Tactcis of Invasion: Manufactured Sites.

 

Micro-Revolution: Class Struggle in 21st Urbanity

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While Harvey aptly describes the city as a dumping ground for surplus value, allowing capital to expand relatively (as opposed to absolutely) in space, it is important to recognize that the right to the city speaks as much to the right to public ownership of the means of production as it speaks to public control over the means of distribution.  The city is not merely hollow concrete buildings and its humbled inhabitants but a site of immaterial, creative, interpersonal and industrial labor.  Whatever right to the city Harvey is searching for will have to be answered in terms of the right to publicly own the means of production as well.

The city, as a narrative, also offers the revolutionary question, “What happens now?”  Harvey masterfully demonstrated how the success of Hausmannization was negated by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the “American dream”/suburbia could not contain the revolutionary explosion of the civil rights movement in the 60s.  During the Modernist period of revolutionary upheaval from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the demise of the socialist camp by 1991, imperialism and capitalist expansion was naively predicted to halt and lurch into fatal crisis once every conceivable area of the globe was parceled up by national monopoly capitalists in the West.  While this prognosis seemed plausible in the heat of both World Wars, the Cold War demonstrated capitalism’s ability to survive crisis through the wanton destruction of surplus value and through the frenzied urbanization of the globe (Harvey 29).

The question for revolutionaries and oppressed peoples in the 21st century is how to confront a system that seemingly can expand and revive itself infinitely.  The answer is probably somewhat obvious: if capitalism expands infinitely through urbanization and the conscious destruction of surplus value, each instance of that relative expansion becomes a potential for rebellion.  Of course there are no guarantees for success, as the Paris Commune was drowned in blood and the militancy of the American Civil Rights movement has led to a banal post-racial liberal excuse for equality.  One could not conceive of the Paris Commune without Paris, nor the American Civil Rights movement without the march on Washington, but today’s conflicts with capital are generalized and universal.  From the banlieus to the favelas to the slums, marginalization is meeting a common globalized enemy that cares little for tradition or national peculiarities.  Following Rem Koolhaas’ logic of the Generic City expanding across the globe, the multitudes that are disenfranchised and forced to live informally or semi-legally are in some ways in an analogous position to the industrial proletariat of the 19th century.  Broudehoux’s description of Olympics Beijing is indicative of this explosive social struggle, pointing out that corruption, growth and disenfranchisement represent the rule, not the exception (Broudehoux 100).  The coming period of struggle and capitalist crisis is exciting from a revolutionary perspective because it is unprecedented in scope.  The right to the city will have to be answered in the coming period because the 21st century city is the clearest example of capitalist exploitation.  Whereas institutions such as the factory, church, or school previously articulated the roles in class struggle, today’s struggle can be understood on a larger, urban level.

 

Works Cited

 

Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. Delirious Beijing: Euphoria and Despair in the Olympic Metropolis.

 

Harvey, David. “New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City.” New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2013.

 

Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S M L XL: OMA. S.l.: S.n., 1993.

The Social/Political and Emergence

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What I find most compelling about the framework set up by emergence is that their implications can cross over into the social/political.  After all, are not legal systems and social systems capable of creating new inputs that generate measurable change in the world of architecture?  Emergence should not only be understood in terms of technology’s ability to generate inventive and environmentally responsive forms.  Architecture can also be informed by changing social understandings.  For example, the nuclear family and racist legal structures facilitated the rise of suburbia in the United States and the notion of the “American Dream.”  In this case, social inputs generated specific formal outputs such as the division of land along (generally patriarchal) family lines, etc.  As a result, suburban spatial configurations and developments look similar across the entire United States, without too much differentiation based on geography.

The exciting potential lies in architectural speculation based on social change.  A queer architecture that rejects the heterosexual nuclear family as a given would most likely generate a wholly different spatial experience that is itself queer.  Of course, to have a “queer emergence” would require massive social upheavals that are more involved than changing a parameter on a computer screen or observing the social organization of ant colonies.  Such historic changes are possible when one considers the civil rights movement of the 60s, the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement.  Nevertheless, if emergence can be applied to the complexities of urban life, it can also comment on social transformations.  Rather than viewing form as the primary subject of emergence in architecture, maybe social conditions can inform program or overall spatial layout.

Studying emergence in relation to architecture and urbanism also has the potential to blur boundaries between understandings of class and other social divisions.  While whitewashing the demographics of a city would have disastrous political consequences, viewing urbanism in its entirety along the lines of emergence could demonstrate how seemingly separate social systems manage to intersect or interact.

A class analysis of emergence could draw from the contradictions outlined in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, specifically his descriptions of “mixed-used” industrial/agricultural quarters in working class neighborhoods.  Here, Engels outlines the interaction between high-density housing which included courtyards for pigs where the residents were forced to dispose of waste.  Emergent issues of oscillation could be applied to changes in environmental qualities for residents.  Engels inadvertently observed what can be understood as oscillation when he states, “The couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter,” (Engels 80).  With the impending climate crisis and massive inequalities in wealth distribution, we may be able to recognize emergent patterns in human migration, especially on an urban level.  This could suggest that informality will become not only widespread but the urban cultural norm.

 

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2013. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf>.