Urban Crisis, State Policies and the Crisis of the State: the French Experience

Abstract

Urban contradictions are increasingly becoming of central political importance in the majority of advanced capitalist societies; but this historical tendency has given rise to radically opposed theoretical interpretations which lead to very different political projects. For some, the problems of the ‘quality of life’ are substitutes for the contradiction between capital and labour as they become new causes of social antagonism.1 For others, urban contradictions are only one expression among others of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class.2 In reality, the research we have carried out3 seems to show a series of new contradictions, linked to the present stage of capitalism, which play a new role in the political class struggle. In this sense they are marked and defined by the logic of capital — capital as a social relationship and not as an incarnation of the power of money. On the other hand, if urban problems are indeed the result of the development of contradictions structurally rooted in the economic and political interests of capital (and thus of the bourgeoisie), they do not rest on a direct contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the working class, but between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the popular classes, who both submit to the mode of organisation of daily life imposed by the logic of capital. It is precisely this multi-class character of urban contradictions which makes them strategically fundamental for a transformation of social relations, for they objectively generalise the sources of opposition to the dominant class for the great mass of the people.