POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CITY (CLASSIC APPROACHES)
A. The political economy perspective studies social processes within urban space and links them to processes occurring at the general level of society.
B. The classical sociologists, Karl Marx and Max Weber, turned to historical analysis to explore their ideas regarding the general laws of social development.
C. Both understood that societies were organized around integrated systems of economics, politics, and culture.
i. Marx emphasized the dominance of economic considerations in analysis.
ii. Weber sought to show how cultural and political factors also affected individual behavior and social history along with economic activity.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CITY Marx
A. Marx exaggerated about Industrial Capitalism creating new social classes, i.e. proletariat and bourgeoisie, ignoring the fact that there were always only two social class groups.
B. In his analysis of the failure of the 1848 revolution in France, Marx identified seven social class groups and discussed why each group supported/opposed a new government.
i. In cities, industrial workers and small shopkeepers might support the revolution, because they would be benefited economically and politically by changing government.
ii. In contrast, the farmers and large merchants might oppose it, the government secured their economic and social interests.
C. In this sense, Marx’s view of social classes may be seen as a precursor to modern-day thinking about interest groups competing within the political arena.
D. The interests of capital and labor are not one and the same.
i.The capitalist producers always seek possible ways of minimizing the cost of production.
ii. Because, profit results from the difference between the costs of production (raw material,machinery, and labor) and the actual price for a commodity in the market.
E. Marx’s analysis is relevant for the monopoly capitalism as well as for the industrial capitalism.
F. Today, capitalist corporations are seeking to lower their labor costs.
i. The laborers are displaced by the automated machine;
ii. Large influx of immigration is taking place;
iii. Manufacturing industries are established in the developing world, for cheap labor and availability of raw materials.
G. All having a tremendous impact on the people and the built environment of urban and suburban settlement space across the world.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CITY Marx/Weber
A. For Marx, the early history of capitalism was a struggle between social relations located within urban areas and those in the countryside within feudal manors.
B. For Weber, the city developed because of its political powers.
i. The independence of city residents and their local government from feudal authority.
C. Marx and Weber showed that the modes of social organization, such as feudalism or capitalism, work through a form of space, the city, and social relations situated within that spatial form.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CITY Weber
A. During the Feudalism in Medieval Europe, traders and craftspeople set up towns and bargained for protection from the king against the activities of local feudal lords.
B. In these towns, capitalism began to thrive through trade in goods, and eventually overtook the feudal economy.
C. Thus, as capitalism became a dominating force in Europe, it also created the modern city.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CITY Engels
A. Marx and Weber hardly said anything about the industrial city of capitalism.
B. Friedrich Engels devoted some time to the topic.
C. He studied the working-class situation in nineteenth-century England, Manchester in particular.
i. Large Industrial City was the best place to study the general aspects of capitalism as a social system, and
ii. The factory was the best place to study the specific details of the relationship between Capital and Labor.
D. Engels picked Manchester, because it was built up as capitalism developed in England.
E. Engels observed several aspects of capitalism at work within the urban space.
i. First, he noted that capitalism had a “double tendency” of concentration –
It concentrated capital investment, or money, and
The workers.
ii. This centralizing process made industrial production easier, because of the large scale and close proximity of money and people.
iii. Second, as Manchester developed, investment moved away from the old center and extended farther out to the periphery.
Capitalism, unregulated by government planning, produced a spatial chaos of multiplying mini-centers.
iv. Third, the social problems created by the breakdown of traditional society and the operation of capitalism.
Extreme poverty and deprivation,
Homelessness and orphan beggars,
Prostitution, alcoholism, and violence.
F. This misery was the result of exploitation at the place of work, which went largely unseen in the factory itself, along with the failure of capitalism to provide adequate housing for everyone.
G. These conditions of the workplace or the living spaces were reproduced throughout the world to ensure the continued use of the working class across the generations.
i. In addition, the city of Manchester was a segregated space.
Rich and poor lived in segregated neighborhoods.
H. Engels concluded that capitalism produces this spatial isolation of the classes.
References
Flanagan, W. G. 2010. Urban Sociology: Images and Structure. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Maryland
Gottdiener, M. and Hutchison, R. 2011. The New Urban Sociology (4th ed.). Westview Press, Colorado
