What would Rousseau, who penned his classic Discourse on Inequality in 1755, have made of things today? Had he still been around, had he travelled around the globe a bit, he’d have doubtless despaired of how little ‘civilized’ society had ameliorated the ‘artificial’ inequalities that derive from the conventions that govern us. Maybe he’d have also played a cameo role in a new documentary, Inequality for All, directed by Jacob Kornbluth with economist Robert Reich as the unlikely lead.1Already a big hit at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Inequality for All follows Reich teaching his packed undergraduate class on Wealth and Poverty at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978, says Reich, your typical male worker doing just fine in the USA was pulling in around $48,000 a year; your boss back then was probably making around $390,000. Thirty-odd years on, in 2010, the former struggles to earn $33,000 a year, while the latter’s average share has bloated to well over a million bucks a year. ‘Where America leads’, Reich says, ‘the rest of the world follows. This same thing is affecting people all over the world. If nothing is done to reverse this trend, Britain will find itself in exactly the same place as America in just a few years’ time.’ Indeed, as at December 2010, 10 per cent of the fattest cats in the UK own 40 per cent of the national wealth; and Royal Bank of Scotland bankers, after finagling Libor interest rates and suffering losses for 2012 of £5.2 billion, now award themselves bonuses in excess of £600 million.
Never
before has growth – especially urban growth – depended so
centrally on the creation of new mechanisms to wheel and deal finance
capital and credit money, on new deregulated devices, underwritten by
the state, for looting and finagling, for absorbing surplus capital
into real-estate speculation. These days capital accumulation
predicates itself not so much on production as such but
on dispossession,
on expropriation.2 In
the nineteenth century, Baron Haussmann tore into central Paris, into
its poor neighbourhoods, dispatching denizens to the periphery as he
speculated on the centre; the built urban form became simultaneously
a property machine and a means to divide and rule.
Nowadays, neo-Haussmannization is
a process that likewise integrates financial, corporate and state
interests, yet tears into the whole globe and seizes land through
forcible slum clearance and a handy vehicle for dispossession known
as ‘eminent domain’, wherein the public sector expropriates land
and then gives it away for upscale private reappropriation, letting
private economic interests cash in on what is legalized looting.
In
our nouveau
régime that
Reich evokes in Inequality
for All an
upper bourgeoisie has risen to such prominence, has accumulated such
wealth and power, that now they assume the mantle of a new
aristocracy, an astonishingly rich, new-monied group of people who
behave like a class of old feudal lords, presiding not only over
particular companies, but over entire national and
supra-international governments as well. At the same time, a big
chunk of the middle ground has caved in, imploded, meaning middling
types have slipped into the ranks of the sans-culottes,
finding it ever more difficult to make ends meet. In the process, the
top 1 per cent has decoupled itself from the rest of us and has
become the parasitic bearer of merchant and rentier capital, filching
profits from unequal exchanges and interest-bearing assets, as well
as claims to absolute rent from class-monopoly control of urban land.
From the city to la cité
In
one of the great works on the French Revolution, The
Sans-culottes (1968),
Albert Soboul points to the influence Rousseau exerted on the popular
revolutionary throng, even if few had actually read his texts. Yet
the sans-culottes weren’t
a class as such, Soboul says: instead they comprised artisans and
small shopkeepers, modest merchants and ‘journeymen [and women] day
labourers – along with a bourgeois minority’;3 those, we
might say, who’ve slipped into the popular ranks and are now, in
our day, beginning to know it. The sans-culottes represented
an irresistible force, says Soboul, undergirding a coalition
collectively conscious of a common aristocratic enemy; they propped
up a strategic alliance that recognized a common revolutionary
project. Today insurrection must rid itself of a new aristocracy
without a liberal bourgeoisie stepping in in its stead. Any new
revolutionary movement against our economic absolutism needs
a sans-culottes leading
the way. A passionate desire for equality might cue this militancy,
drafting, en route, a new social contract. It is, however, the
question of what kind of social contract this might be that I want to
address here.
In The
Social Contract (1762),
near the end of the ‘Social Compact’ (pacte
social)
section, there’s a footnote added by the author. In it, Rousseau
qualifies what he means by the idea (and ideal) of citizen,
of how it embodies a particular territorial disposition, and how, ‘in
modern times’, ‘the real meaning of the word has been almost
wholly lost’.4 The
footnote has one of the most famously quotable lines from The
Social Contract:
‘houses make a town, but citizens make a city’. (The most
famously quotable, of course, is the opening refrain: ‘humans are
born free; and everywhere they’re in chains.’) The notion that
‘houses make a town, but citizens make a city’ is the standard
English riff on Rousseau’s original French, passed down the
historical line, unchanged and unchallenged. The phrase gets preceded
by this musing: ‘most people mistake a town for a city, and a
townsman for a citizen’.5 Yet,
in our own modern times there’s something woefully inadequate about
this translation; and Rousseau’s concern about losing the real
meaning of citizen seems more prescient than even he might have ever
imagined. Worse, the standard translation hints at a certain
bourgeois reappropriation and makes Rousseau’s radical text sound a
lot less radical than it still might be. So let’s consider his
original text more closely: ‘la plupart prennent une ville pour une
cité, et un bourgeois pour un citoyen. Ils ne savent pas que les
maisons font la ville, mais que les citoyens font la cité.’6 These
two sentences, it’s true, pose difficulty for any Anglo translator.
Not least because the word ‘town’ doesn’t really exist in
French: petite
ville is
often its everyday usage, a small city, but Rousseau isn’t using
the word petite
ville;
he says, quite clearly, ville.
On the other hand, cité has
no direct equivalent in English. And yet, if we move beyond semantics
and get into the spirit of Rousseau’s intended meaning, the
standard translation might satisfy political scientists and
philosophers, but it can no longer be acceptable for radical
political urbanists.
For
a start, ‘town’ is a much too archaic term, and a much too
limited (and redundant) political jurisdiction to have meaning for a
contemporary reader; and so, too, is ‘city’ a problematic basis
for a ‘modern’ concept of citizenship. Cité,
though, does continue to speak politically, yet only if its domain is
reconsidered imaginatively, perhaps even normatively. In that sense,
here’s how a contemporary urbanist, a contemporary philosopher of
the urban, might recalibrate Rousseau: ‘the majority [of people]
take a city for the cité and
a bourgeois for a citizen.’ (Rousseau, we might note, uses the
politically charged ‘bourgeois’ not benign ‘townsman’.) He
continues: people ‘don’t know that houses make a city, but
citizens make a cité’.
I’ve left this notion of cité untranslated
for the moment, because it’s the part that needs a refreshed
vocabulary, a contemporary reloading. And this is what I’d like to
propose and develop as a working hypothesis: ‘the majority [of
people] take a city for thecité,
and a bourgeois for a citizen. They don’t know that houses make a
city but citizens make the urban [la
cité].’
The
urban, then, might be better suited for Rousseau’s notion of cité:
it satisfies more accurately, and more radically, a politically
charged concept of citizenship that goes beyond nationality and flag
waving. (Cité,
we might equally note, raises the ‘popular’ spectre in bourgeois
circles, pejoratively evoking quartiers
des sans-culottes,
the no-go zones
sensibles,
the globalbanlieues.)
For the physical and social manifestation of our landscape, for its
bricks and mortar, we have what most people would deem ‘city’.
But as a political ideal, as a new social contract around which
citizenship might cohere, we have something we might call ‘the
urban’: a more expansive realm for which no passports are required
and around which people the world over might bond. Citizenship might
here be conceived as something urban, as something territorial, yet
one in which territoriality is both narrower and broader than ‘city’
and ‘nationality’; a territory and citizenship without borders.
So
maybe the idea of cité –
a territory both real and ideal – satisfies the jurisdictional
ideal of Rousseau’s Social
Contract:
the living space of modern democracy in the making. That’s why
there are no passports for Rousseauian citizens of the urban
universe, no passports for those who know they live somewhere
yet feel they
belong everywhere. Or who want to feel it. This conjoining of knowing
and feeling is what engenders a sense of empathy whose nom de plume
might really be citizenship itself. Here we might take the notion of
‘dwelling’ in its broadest sense: as
the totality of political and economic space in which one now
belongs.
The urban helps affinity grow, helps it become aware of itself, aware
that other affinities exist in the world, that affinities can
encounter one another, become aware of one another as sans-culottes,
the 99 per cent, in a social network connected by a certain tissuing,
by a planetary webbing: an affinity of urban citizenship. Houses make
a city, but citizens makela
cité.
What
Rousseau terms the people’s ‘general will’ today can only ever
express itself within this urban [cité]
context. The general will [la
volonté générale]
is the sum of urban affinities taking shape, an expression of
dissatisfaction en masse, perhaps at first knowing better what this
will doesn’t like, what it is against, than what it’s actually
for.7 At
any rate, Rousseau’s logic is rather beautiful: the general will of
the people, he explains, is both infallible and fallible:
The general will is always upright and always tends to the public advantage; but it doesn’t follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude. Our will is always for our own good, but we don’t always see what it is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.8
Yet
how might this general will work itself out? And how might the common
urban affinities that cement people together actually develop today?
Where might these affinities, and this general will, emerge? How can
particular wills be made aware of themselves as something more
general, as a larger collective constituency that is something
greater than the sum of individual parts? What are the institutions
through which affinity might develop? A direct response to these
questions might be: in the citizens’
agora,
in the space of the urban, in the popular realm where a public might
come together and express itself as a general will.
Every revolution has its agora
The
citizens’ agora is something more than the public spaces of the
city; more, even, than the public institutions we once knew as public
– state institutions forever under fire. One reason for this is
that it isn’t clear any more just what the public domain
constitutes, what it is, let alone what it might be. In our day, the
public realm hasn’t so much fallen from grace as gone into
wholescale tailspin. Eighty-odd years after The
Social Contract,
and almost sixty after the 9th Thermidor counter-revolution, Marx,
in The
Communist Manifesto,
demonstrated what liberal bourgeois democracy had bequeathed us: ‘no
other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous cash payment … drowning the most heavenly ecstasies of …
chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water
of egotistical calculation’. Bourgeois society, Marx says, ‘has
resolved personal [and public] worth into exchange value’, and rips
away halos of every sort, converting all erstwhile hallowed and holy
realms, including the public realm itself, into another money realm,
into another means to accumulate capital.9 Marx,
in a nutshell, leaves us with the rather bleak task of picking up the
pieces of what the public realm might still mean.
There’s
a consequent need to redefine not an urban public realm that’s
collectively owned and managed by the state, but a public realm of
the cité that
is somehow expressive of
the people, expressive of the general will – a will, maybe, that
incorporates an affinity of common notions, notions that Spinoza
always insisted were not universal notions, not universal rights.
Spinoza was against such an abstract conception of universality,
which he thought was an inadequate
idea.
Common notions are general rather than abstract, general in their
practical and contextual applicability. From this standpoint, when
something is public, its channels for common expression remain open,
negotiable and debatable, political and urban in the sense that they
witness people encountering other people, dialoguing with other
people, arguing with other people, formulating an infallible general
will.
Twenty-first-century
urban spaces of the cité will
be public spaces not for reasons of pure concrete physicality or
centrality, nor even because of land tenure, but because they are
meeting places between virtual and physical worlds, between online
and offline conversations, between online and offline encounters.
Space won’t so much be divided between public and private as
between passive or active;
between a space that encourages active encounters of people and a
space that resigns itself to passive encounters, a space that isn’t
so much public as the Sartrean ‘practico-inert’: it envelops us
as passive backdrop, like dead labour functions in redundant fixed
capital, as plain old bricks and mortar, as concrete and steel. For
urban spaces to come alive, to be public in Rousseau’s republican
sense (not the Tea Party’s), they need to express dynamic social
relations between people, between people there and elsewhere,
elsewhere in other urban spaces, creating a network of living,
conjoined spaces – sovereign spaces, we might say – not dead
zones that alienate and separate. Thus people in these sovereign
spaces might come together to create a
function, to talk and meet, to hang out; sometimes they’ll come to
protest, to express themselves in angry not tender ways. In either
sense, they’re not responding to a function like a crowd of
shoppers. In coming together they express active rather
than passive affects; plazas, parks, squares, streets and civic
buildings become what Jeffrey Hou calls, in a contribution to the
collection Beyond
Zuccotti Park,
‘insurgent public space’. ‘[A]s we envision the future of
public space in North America and beyond,’ Hou says,
it is clear that the focus of our efforts should be equally, if not more, on the making of the public than on the making of space. While space remains critical as a vehicle for actions and expressions, it is through the actions and the making of a socially and politically engaged public that the struggle for public space as a forum of political dialogues and expressions can be resuscitated and sustained.10
Following
Rousseau, the ‘incorruptible’ Robespierre insisted that the poor
have most need of ensuring its voice gets heard,
that its needs take priority.11 But
to speak out, in the making of an active public of the kind that Hou
articulates, there is first then a need, among other things, for a
free press, or at least, in our day, for an alternative free press
that reports on the sort of news items people ought to
hear about. Today, this is clearly not the celebrity gossip and
right-wing propaganda mainstream media boom out every day, at every
hour, the fear and loathing peddled by the likes of Fox and News
International, but other sources, often online, sometimes clandestine
media. If a space to petition guarantees a citizen’s right to be
heard, then a free press guarantees a citizen’s right to hear,
to listen to
social truths getting circulated within the cité.
To speak and to hear correspondingly require an urban space in which
to debate and argue, and, above all, to meet, for citizens to
come together. Robespierre acknowledged the need for any democracy to
allow people to assemble, to do so peaceably and without arms;
although, of course, if this right is denied, if the principles of
free urban assembly are opposed, then the subclause is that citizens
ought to be able to assemble through any means necessary, peaceable
or otherwise. It is in this space that citizens have the power
to act,
to act after being heard, to act after having listened to other
citizens; mutually reinforcing public agoras, in other words –
citizens’ agora – as much experiential spaces as physical
locations.
The
dilemma here, however, is that the citizens’ agora is needed either
side of urban insurrection: on the one hand, it’s required to put
in place any revolutionary insurrection; it’s instrumental, in
other words, for insurrection itself, for propagandizing and
organizing it, for spreading the word and for news sharing – even
if, sometimes, this organization initially needs to be discreet,
needs to tread cautiously in its propagation of open democracy. New
social media can obviously be one component for creating a new
citizens’ agora. On the other hand, the day after the insurrection
such an agora needs to be inscribed into any written constitution,
into any actual urban social contract guaranteeing they remain the
rights of all citizens. In a way, Rousseau’s Social
Contract seems
better attuned, in this sense, to the post-insurrectional epoch, to
the aftermath of citizens’ revolutionary upheaval, when the urban
carnivals are over, when the insurrection has triumphed, if it ever
triumphs; ‘rights-talk’ beforehand isn’t maybe the best means
through which to gain one’s
rights. In fact, one might wonder whether the whole theme of
‘rights’, so prevalent again today – rights of man, right to
the city (le
droit à la ville),
and so on – really helps either in changing society or in
understanding how society changes. Rights-talk can inhibit rather
than enable things to happen. Rights can be positive and negative
depending on how you frame them politically: they are empty
signifiers that need filling with content; and once you’ve filled
them their implications are so indeterminate that opposing parties
can use the same rights language to express absolutely differing
positions.
Le
droit à la ville is
an unfortunate victim. At the United Nations-sponsored ‘World Urban
Forum’, held in Rio in March 2010, the UN and the World Bank both
incorporated ‘the right to the city’ into its charter to address
the global poverty trap. On the other side of the street in Rio, at
the ‘Urban Social Forum’, a people’s popular alternative was
also being staged; there activists were appalled by the
ruling class’s reappropriation of such a hallowed grassroots
ideal, of its right
not theirs.
The mainstream has now converted its own right into a tactical right
that has often become a watchword for conservative rule. The Tories
in Britain are quick to acknowledge people’s right to
self-management, happily endorsing ‘community rights’ and
‘citizens’ right to choose’, since all this means the
neoliberal state can desist from coughing up for public services.
Self-empowerment thereby becomes tantamount to self-subsidization, to
self-exploitation, to even more dispossession, mollified as ‘social
enterprise’ and the voluntary ‘third sector’.
So
rights, including the right to the city, have no catch-all universal
meaning in politics, nor any foundational basis in institutions;
neither are they responsive to any moral or legal argument. Questions
of rights are, first and foremost, questions of social power, about
who wins.
The struggle for rights isn’t something ‘recognized’ by some
higher, neutral arbiter; instead, for those people who have no
rights, rights to the cité must
be taken; they involve struggle and force. What has been taken must
be reclaimed through practical action, through organized militancy,
through urban insurrection. A Bill of Rights remains the ends not the
means for enforcing one’s democratic right. It’s the joyous
product not the guiding light in the dogged process of struggle: the
struggle for the new and necessary citizens’ agora we have yet to
invent.
Notes
1. See
Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Inequality for All: Another Inconvenient
Truth?’, Observer,
2 February 2013.
2. See
David Harvey, The
New Imperialism,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, pp. 137–182.
3. Albert
Soboul, The
Sans-Culottes,
Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1980, p. 256.
4. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, The
Social Contract and Discourses,
trans. G.D.H. Cole, Dent, London, 1973, p. 192.
5. Ibid.
6. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Du
contrat social,
Éditions Sociales, Paris, 1968, p. 68.
7. ‘“The
people”’, Peter Hallward says, ‘are simply those who, in any
given situation, formulate, assert and sustain a fully common (and
thus fully inclusive and egalitarian) interest, over and above any
divisive and exclusive
interest.’
‘The Will of the People: Towards a Dialectical
Voluntarism’, Radical
Philosophy 155,
May/June, 2009, pp. 17–29.
8. Rousseau, The
Social Contract and Discourses,
p. 203.
9. Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto;
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.
10. Jeffrey
Hou, ‘Making Public, Beyond Public Space’, in Ron Shiffman et
al., eds, Beyond
Zuccotti Park,
New Village Press, Oakland CA, 2012, p. 94.
11. See
Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Le droit de pétition’, in Robespierre:
pour le bonheur et pour la liberté,
La Fabrique, Paris, 2000, pp. 101–4.
