[p2p-research] the city as commons, book review

[Michel Bauwens]

the 21st in the p2p-f blog:

 « Wikileaks, the New Network News Ecology, and the Super-Empowered
Individual<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wikileaks-the-new-network-news-ecology-and-the-super-empowered-individual/2010/11/13>

Common Ground in a Liquid City: the Commons in the
City<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=11712>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
21st November 2010

 ** Book: Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban
Future <http://www.akpress.org/2009/items/commongroundinaliquidcity>. Matt
Hern. AK Press, 2009.*

>From a double review<http://www.processedworld.com/carlsson/nowtopian/book-reviews/conundrums-of-the-commons>by
*Chris Carlsson*:

“Two books I read in the past month overlap with each other in useful ways.
The first, Commonwealth by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, is the third volume
of their epic theoretical work that began with Empire and continued through
Multitudes. While I’m not a camp follower per se, I did get a lot out of
these efforts and was glad to read Commonwealth as the conclusion. It made
some parts of their argument clearer, but left some important areas
unresolved and even self-contradictory. I suppose that’s to be expected with
such an ambitious effort to unravel this moment in history, the rise of new
paradigms of both capitalist self-perpetuation and (potentially)
revolutionary subversion.

The other book is by my host in Vancouver this week, Matt Hern, Common
Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. His book,
like Nowtopia, is published by AK Press, and I had the pleasure of hearing
him present some of his arguments at the Studio for Urban Projects in San
Francisco a few months ago. I like a great deal of his argument, pitting a
grounded sociality against the forces of capital that continually render
everything that is solid into air, or in the case of his book, turning the
solidity of urban space into endlessly liquid flows of capital. As he asks,
“how can we imagine commonality and neighborhood in such a relentlessly
liquid world?”

The key for Hern, parallel to the arguments by Negri and Hardt, is a form of
exodus, to “actively expand the non-market sectors of the economy and
society.” But where Hern’s is practical, based on new forms of trust,
friendship, and hospitality, and rooted in specific places (Vancouver is his
chosen locale), the Negri/Hardt (N/H) version is largely a theoretical
assertion based on their odd and contradictory notion of “biopolitical
labor.” Given my own years of helping produce Processed World, a magazine
that documented well ahead of its time the rise of precarious labor when it
was still in its early, affirmative, assertive form of exiting as much as
possible the stupid world of wage-labor, I’m quite sympathetic to analyzing
the important emergence of immaterial labor. A sweeping argument of N/H is
that biopolitical labor is becoming hegemonic (something that invariably
gets yowls of protest from anyone who wants to check on the statistical fact
that there are more people working in tightly managed industrial factories
today than at any previous time in history). By biopolitical labor they mean
the activities that comprise all of our lives; a crucial piece of this line
of thought is to assert that a new form of capitalist exploitation is taking
shape in the cutting edge industries and geographies of the modern world,
and that it is becoming increasingly dominant.

On page 142 of Commonwealth, they provide a conveniently concise summary and
in it is the contradictory notion clearly stated:

- “In the biopolitical context capital might be said to subsume not just
labor but society as a whole, or, really, social life itself, since life is
both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced.
This relationship between capital and productive social life, however, is no
longer organic in the sense that Marx understood the term because capital is
increasingly external and has an ever less functional role in the productive
process. Rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body,
biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more autonomous, with capital
simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes,
apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and
the like.”

Is” biopolitical labor” autonomous or is it an example of the real
subsumption of labor? Are freelance web designers working precariously
“autonomous” or are they an individual who is ALWAYS working, always
expanding their commercial contacts (via social life) and their networks in
the hope of the next job—in other words, an individual who is fully
integrated into capitalist life as a quasi-independent worker/entrepreneur?
In this way I think their argument starts to look suspiciously like Richard
Florida’s flattering (and sycophantic) portrait of the “creative class” in
which anyone working in a bank or insurance company is somehow “creative”
because they have to work with computers all day! In N/H they get tagged
“autonomous” because so much of the labor process requires a fair amount of
self-directed cooperation. Just because you are working on a project that
has different teams working on various components stretched across the
planet (designers in Manhattan, programmers in New Delhi, graphic artists in
San Francisco, packaging and manufacturing in Guangdong China) does not make
the work you’re doing autonomous. Granted, there are parts of the work
you’re doing that have an autonomously cooperative quality and perhaps in
that quality we can see the kernel of something more interesting, a capacity
for radical self-management. I want to give N/H the benefit of the doubt
here, but if you look at their own quote above, you can see how they first
define the biopolitical context as one in which the entirety of society is
subsumed under the logic of capital. How then are individuals whose activity
is apparently fully subsumed simultaneously becoming autonomous from capital
(especially if that autonomy is defined as a quality of the work they’re
doing while earning wages)? That’s never satisfactorily explained.

On the other hand, I’m a proponent of finding the revolutionary
possibilities in our everyday lives. By the time you get to the end of
Commonwealth, they unabashedly make a teleological argument, but one not
based on any invisible hands or inevitable forces, just that we CAN push the
world towards one of our own making, one based on our own self-direction,
cooperation, and general happiness. On page 242 they say “Today, in fact,
revolution is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the
future but has to live in the present, an “exceeding” present that in some
sense already contains the future within it.” A little later they continue
to argue for the inability of capitalism to adequately capture the value
produced in the new realm of biopolitical labor: “…the results of
biopolitical production, including social subjectivities and relations,
forms of life, have an immediately ontological dimension. Value is generated
in this process, but it is immeasurable, or rather it constantly exceeds the
units of any accounting scheme; it overflows the corporation’s double-entry
ledgers and confounds the public balance sheets of the nation-state. How can
you measure the value of an idea, an image, or a relationship?” If only it
were only such things that comprised wealth. And perhaps that is one of the
points here, that as we reach the self-destructive end of the capitalist
mode of production, an important path out is to recognize the enormous value
of “not-things,” of aspects of our common life that have gone unmeasured and
radically undervalued in this social arrangement.

Matt Hern stays resolutely on the ground in addressing the revolutionary
qualities of social activity. He is an enthusiastic localist, waxing
rhapsodic about Critical Mass as a proving ground for social problem-solving
and creating convivial common experiences, while also arguing that if we
REALLY cared about reducing violence against teens (as all the gang and drug
taskforces claim) we’d be radically reducing the use of autos wherever
possible. Way more youth are killed every year on the roads in car crashes
than in any other activity, and yet we treat that like it’s a fact of nature
or something. He talks about the 130,000 trees in Vancouver and wonders why
10% or even 30% can’t be converted to fruit trees, thereby providing free
food to everyone?

But he knows why:

- …We cannot have global capitalism and embrace localization… Our only
alternative is to constrict the economy. We cannot have economic growth and
ecological sanity… Maybe the easiest way to think about contracting the
economy is getting your hands dirty and growing some food. There’s not much
ambiguity there. It’s simple and cheap and convivial. But more than that it
represents exactly how we need to be de-commodifying our relationship with
the natural world and reconfiguring our cities as common ground.”

Negri and Hardt build on some of the autonomous theorizing that’s been going
on during the past couple of years’ rupture of the neoliberal model. Again
the two books come together in interesting ways on the question of the city
as a locale of exploitation and reinvention.

-“The metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to be the
industrial working class… metropolis primarily generates rent, which is the
only means by which capital can capture the wealth created autonomously…
Rent operates through a desocialization of the common, privatizing in the
hands of the rich the common wealth produced and consolidated in the
metropolis.” (N/H p. 250 and 258)

Earlier in the book they describe the rise of financialization as a
mechanism to capture the wealth produced outside the logic of commodities
for sale. If it’s true that we’re together producing an ever-richer shared
life, and that most of that new richness is unmeasurable, we’re nevertheless
seeing a significant part of that wealth siphoned away from us as rent,
whether for residential or commercial spaces, to landlords or to banks.

They describe this a bit differently:

- “… in the contemporary networks of biopolitical production, the extraction
of value from the common is increasingly accomplished without the capitalist
intervening in its production. This renewed primacy of rent provides us an
essential insight into why finance capital, along with the vast stratum that
Keynes designates as functionless investors, occupies today a central
position in the management of capitalist accumulation, capturing the
expropriating the value created at a level far abstracted from the labor
process.” (p. 141-42)

Matt Hern offers a definition of urban vitality that in a more vernacular
way describes the kind of wealth N/H are talking about too:

- “…that’s my definition of urban vitality: constantly running into people
who aren’t like you, who don’t think, look, or act like you, people who have
fundamentally different values and backgrounds. And in that mix there is
always the possibility to reimagine and remake yourself—a world of
possibility that is driven by public life and space, that it its best turns
into common places and neighborhoods. That’s what makes a great city, not
the shopping opportunities.”

A good deal of his book takes us from Vancouver to other cities around the
world, but the promise of a comparative study is rarely fulfilled. Mostly
he’s interested in and talking about Vancouver with the odd juxtaposition to
New York, Montreal, Molokai, Diyarbakir Turkey, Fort Good Hope near the
Arctic Circle, and other locales. I understand what he’s up to. As he notes
in his introduction, you really see your city most clearly when you are
away, in other contexts.

He spends a fair amount of time critiquing what I assume are various
initiatives in Vancouver of the “New Urbanist” variety, efforts to promote
and celebrate a developer-driven vision of urban vitality.

- “…there’s more color and nuance to be added in, more than simple
capital-labor contestation. There is a shared cultural response to the
challenge and value of public space, and in some ways Living First has
morphed into another subtle variant on enclosure, delicately displacing the
power of public space into private hands…This speaks to a fundamental
difference between public spaces and common places, and this is one of the
core themes of this book: how can a city, this city, become a city of common
places. Public space, lots of it, is crucial but we have to realize that we
need more than that. People move through public space—but common space is
where they stop, what they learn to inhabit, and make their own.” (p. 58-59)

As an urbanist Hern gets to speak with other planners and bureaucrats, and I
assume he’s made the rounds of plenty of those promotional conventions for
architects and planners where they are faced with the relentless pressure to
“sell” their cities to investors.

- “…economic globalization is driving municipalities into direct competition
with one another for capital resources, seeking to attract funding with
incentive packages promising juicy profits for investors… Running a city in
the twenty-first century is all about the hustle.”

This parallels the N/H discussion of rent, because broadly understood, this
is precisely what these development schemes and sales campaigns are
promising capital: come to OUR city and you’ll make a great return. You
don’t have to run factories or offices, or even hotels or restaurants. Just
make capital available to the city for its development plans and the rising
wealth of a successful urban revitalization effort will handsomely reward
the lenders with steady payouts for years to come (this is mostly done
through the municipal bond market).

At one of the conferences Hern recounts, he captures the emergent conflict
quite well:

- “Overwhelmingly present, but entirely subsumed was a critical
discontinuity between a neoliberal globalization agenda articulated by the
World Bank, IMF, and an omnipresent array of private financiers and
development companies, and an apparent consensus on the importance of
decentralization, local economies, local energy production, local control,
and local democracies.” (p. 171)

This is another variation on the argument I made in Nowtopia about an
emergent working-class movement with an agenda that escapes the logic of
wage-labor and the perpetuation of capitalism. The still mostly invisible
presence of an agenda based on local economies and local democracy is
bubbling up in many locations. It just hasn’t found its political voice yet.

Negri and Hardt do a nice job of capturing this historical process:

- “Capital will not continue to rule forever, and it will create, in
pursuing its own rule, the conditions of the mode of production and the
society that will eventually succeed it. This is a long process, just as was
the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production, and
there is no telling when it will cross the crucial threshold, but we can
already recognize—in the autonomy of biopolitical production, the centrality
of the common, and their growing separation from capitalist exploitation and
command—the makings of a new society within the shell of the old.” (p. 301)

Both books offer deeper suggestions about orientation and values too, much
more than I can accommodate in this already too-quote-heavy blog entry, but
nevertheless here’s a couple more:

Matt Hern:

- “…otherness cannot and should not be collapsed into a tolerant
multiculturalism, but requires an acknowledgement of, appreciation for, and
trust in profoundly different ways of living and social organization. A city
of immigrants has to learn to live together, but if it is going to thrive
people have to learn to trust each other. Paradoxically, that trust cannot
emerge without community, but community needs trust to develop. Perhaps
hospitality and friendship are a partial way out of the chicken v. egg thing
here.” (p. 104)

Negri/Hardt:

- “The refusal of work is a central slogan of this project, which we have
explored at length elsewhere. The refusal of work and ultimately the
abolition of the worker does not mean the end of production and innovation
but rather the invention, beyond capital, of as yet unimagined relations of
production that allow and facilitate an expansion of our creative
powers……Revolutionary class politics must destroy the structures and
institutions of worker subordination and thus abolish the identity of worker
itself, setting in motion the production of subjectivities and a process of
social and institutional innovation.” (p. 332-33)

My argument is that this process of self-abolition of the category of worker
is already visible in the activities many of us are engaged in when we’re
NOT at work, when we’re busily appropriating technologies in innovative and
artistic ways, when we’re addressing the ecological crisis by using the
waste stream in unpredictable ways. Hern gets it too: “…when lots of us
start riding bikes everywhere, we stop buying cars and gas and it hurts
business. This also occurs when we start closing streets down or living in
co-op housing or planting fruit trees all over the city. All of this is all
good and fun and ecological and “green,” but really it presents a direct,
antagonistic challenge to capitalism. And so it should be. I want planting
gardens to be not just an aesthetic activity or an attempt to ameliorate
capitalism’s worst excesses but the first punch in a street fight.”


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