Class analysis for whom?

Abstract

In a valuable and engaging critique, Hamnett and Butler conclude that our analysis of the socio-spatial dimensions of inequality in London originates from a ‘parallel universe’, that it is ‘bizarre’ for us ‘middle-class university professors’ to claim that ‘the middle class does not exist,’ and that our approach involves 'looking into the rear view mirror or class structure in the 1840s.' In this paper we provide a response, and we reiterate the urgent need for class-conscious politics and method in contemporary urban research. Dominant narratives of postindustrial transnational urbanism tend to erase any concern for class conflict, as old occupational structures that once closely reflected locally-observable relations of production are replaced by a much more intricate and respatialized occupational matrix of positions that (when analysed in conventional ways) creates an aspirational mirage of utopian middle-class opportunity. Yet the materialist conditions of capitalist urbanization intensify class antagonisms, while polarizing social relations within domains typically understood as 'middle-class' (including the professoriate). At the same time, the Right has hijacked traditional Left commitments to radical openness to difference and contingency, thus diverting critical energies away from fundamental challenges to class inequality into the safer technocratic territory of managing inequalities with a creative, de-classified menu of friendly-sounding policies of inclusion, mixing, tolerance, and social sustainability. One way to challenge this dangerous trend involves a fusion of multivariate quantitative analysis with contemporary critical social theory (drawing on Žižek and others) to account for the new multidimensional relations of postindustrial occupational structures within the increasingly severe class antagonisms of capitalist urbanization.

Keywords:

• class
• London
• Žižek
• inequality

Notes

As Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer (2009) have argued, the need for critical theory in urban research should hardly need to be re-affirmed, with cities serving as ‘major basing points for the production, circulation and consumption of commodities, and [consequently] their evolving internal sociospatial organization, governance systems and patterns of socio-political conflict must be understood in relation to this role’ (178).

For anyone familiar with labour history, it will be evident that this form of analysis has been consistently challenged by various elements of the Left since the inception of ‘Marxism’.

This dynamic is well illustrated for part of the working classes in Watt's (2013, 114) analysis of East London ex-tenants who used the Right-to-Buy option, but who are now ‘trying to preserve, either symbolically or literally, a sense of their homes and neighbourhoods as constituting a place with positive meaning—a community …’ While these owner-occupiers ‘appeared to benefit from the Thatcherite expansion of the “property-owning democracy”’, their ‘inclusion … has turned out to be chimerical. Despite investing in their homes in terms of both use value and exchange values, the latter are simply inadequate relative to the potential returns that could be achieved if the land is parcelled up and sold off for higher-value property development.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Davidson

Mark Davidson is Assistant Professor of Geography at the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. Email: [email protected]

Elvin Wyly

Elvin Wyly is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia.