一個人離開了，就像他要出遠門，沒有帶電話，你沒指望聯絡上他，他不打算讓你找到。
有些人離開了。你看見那一扇門，一直半掩，沒有人入過去，也沒有人推門出來。陽光穿過色彩斑爛的玻璃窗，靜靜地落在木門上，表層薄板微微隆起，經年的油漆佈滿網狀的裂紋，如同小時候舊居的大門，秋風不時令它激激作響，可總是無法完全闔上它，總留有一道不少的空隙，讓秋風繼續透過來，讓屋裡人聽得見，孩子們在外面，沒有跑掉。
也有一些人走了之後，令你的家變得異常寧靜，如深夜野外的一個湖。這時候不是夏天，沒有蟲聲牛蛙之類的騷擾，湖水黑得像墨水，除卻月光在湖面點上幾個暈圈之外，你甚麼也聽不見看不見。你甚至懷疑自己曾否住過這裡，曾否為己見辯論不休，曾否對他記恨，曾否按著不滿，卻裝出體諒她明白她的表情。
他走了，並不意味著消失，結束沒有帶來終結。太陽逐漸落下來，讓黃昏呈現，而黃昏結束後，你也沒有消失，你將會經歷下一個黎明，直至別人看見你和你的黃昏，共同在黑夜裡隱滅。
我彷彿永遠也看不到黑夜吞噬了我的黃昏，又不再還我黎明。我只能想像，有一天別人在我的家裡，做類似的事，卻不再和我談話，不再和我吵架，也許有人會記住我說過的話，如同我記著外婆要我好好讀書的教訓，也許不會，如同早晨葉子承托不住的露水，一滴滴下來，最終落到泥土，不見了。
敬悼愚公沙龍楊先生，政大哲學系張教授
2010年9月13日 星期一
pas pour moi, pour les manif
學生的特權，就是享受逃課的快感。下回待同學問起，生病了，上周為什麼不來，才不經意地說，天氣很好，教授老是談那個課題，文章不就在那裡發表了。記得讀大學的時候，揀一個晴朗而不炎熱的早上，挑一門大家都讚好的課，缺席，享受未圓湖畔的鳥語，吃兩「碟」點心。偶然遇上從圖書館出來的學長，說起畢業失業加失戀，他叼口煙，把全世界的黃八蛋都痛罵一頓。
小城Toulouse，市區人口43萬（地區人口110萬），前兩天有11萬（工會數字）人出來遊行了，比例為法國數一數二，唯一可比的，大概是地中海邊的馬賽20萬人遊行，市區人數82萬（地區人口160萬）。我猜，高行健《一個人的聖經》最後一節，描述的就是這個地方。
據說，高行健從不直接介入政治。遊行中，遇到傅柯生前頗為積極介入的愛滋病者和同性戀團體，同學們稱他們為傅柯主義者。我看，也不算十分傅柯，起碼還沒有剃光頭。他們又介紹我看哪些是法國毛派，不知怎的，他語帶嘲笑，我不明白法國內部的政治局勢，說不上好惡，就當見識見識。不過，他們談起Badiou這個毛派時，我不期然想起香港一名社會學者，有時知識份子議政，可以是很荒唐的。
我碰巧穿了黑色衣服，跟無政府主義者變成一夥，在黑壓壓的人潮裡面，倒不覺特別憤怒的氣氛，法國南部給人很舒泰的感覺，口音雖然有點適應不了，可是人都很熱情。無政府主義者不知哪來的收入，遊行後每人付很平的價錢就可喝啤酒了。我問他們，你們主張無政府，那麼如何組織，如何動員，如何立會章，他們侃侃而談，可我覺得總解決不了一些基本問題，法律就沒有意義了嗎？如何面對有人搭便車，不付錢不勞動光吃飯？這自然令人聯想到，Rousseau和費希特都談過這些問題了。
Althusser在80年代的訪問裡說，在巴黎高等師範學院那時候，我們都是共產主義者。不知他感慨今昔，還是誇張之辭。回想讀大學時遇到的學者，泰半都是搞自由主義的。研究自由主義，當然不一定時自由主義者，也有人喜歡強調左派自由主義跟其他不同，這自有其根據。換個角度看，為什麼我們就沒有人可以原原本本地講一遍Althusser, Marcuse, Adorno，而只有Rawls和哈貝馬斯中期的理性溝通理論的專家呢？為甚麼我們讀哈貝馬斯，但不看他解釋謝林的歷史哲學和馬克斯的關聯呢？也許曾經有過，也許我們該多花功夫，不要太聽老師的話。據他說，四十年代時曾每天花10小時搞社會運動，這些經驗令他後來擺脫列寧史大林的影子，重新思考辯證唯物主義應有的意義。他一個有趣想法（部份如馬克思的博士論文所說），Democrite, Rousseau, Machiavel, Marx, Heidegger都屬於唯物主義傳統。
遊行用到一個法文字les soumises，勉強譯成英文可是the suppressed或the subjugated，意思是受壓逼者，受社會政策壓逼，呼籲他們出來反抗。中文沒一種明確的被動時態，必須加上前綴詞來強調。我們用「基層」(grassroots)一字，社會的根基，就有較正面的意思，可是就表達不了被壓逼的意思。我問巴黎同學可以怎樣翻，她沒有頭緒。她問，你真要去遊行嗎？我說，難道你擔心我的安全嗎？她為趕功課死線，無法抽身，告別前我說好會發給她談現象學和Lacan的文章。後來自稱無政府主義者的同學，緩緩吐幾口煙，揶揄那位巴黎同學，說她以為搞遊行的人都煙不離手，半夜酗酒，坐地鐵從不買票。說罷，突然轉身和男友熱情擁吻，任由煙圈在身後繼續纏綿。大街上遊行群眾逐漸散去，我呆呆地看著兩個小孩的滑板車溜向廣場那邊去，此刻黃昏已過，酒吧傳來微弱的爵士樂。
小城Toulouse，市區人口43萬（地區人口110萬），前兩天有11萬（工會數字）人出來遊行了，比例為法國數一數二，唯一可比的，大概是地中海邊的馬賽20萬人遊行，市區人數82萬（地區人口160萬）。我猜，高行健《一個人的聖經》最後一節，描述的就是這個地方。
據說，高行健從不直接介入政治。遊行中，遇到傅柯生前頗為積極介入的愛滋病者和同性戀團體，同學們稱他們為傅柯主義者。我看，也不算十分傅柯，起碼還沒有剃光頭。他們又介紹我看哪些是法國毛派，不知怎的，他語帶嘲笑，我不明白法國內部的政治局勢，說不上好惡，就當見識見識。不過，他們談起Badiou這個毛派時，我不期然想起香港一名社會學者，有時知識份子議政，可以是很荒唐的。
我碰巧穿了黑色衣服，跟無政府主義者變成一夥，在黑壓壓的人潮裡面，倒不覺特別憤怒的氣氛，法國南部給人很舒泰的感覺，口音雖然有點適應不了，可是人都很熱情。無政府主義者不知哪來的收入，遊行後每人付很平的價錢就可喝啤酒了。我問他們，你們主張無政府，那麼如何組織，如何動員，如何立會章，他們侃侃而談，可我覺得總解決不了一些基本問題，法律就沒有意義了嗎？如何面對有人搭便車，不付錢不勞動光吃飯？這自然令人聯想到，Rousseau和費希特都談過這些問題了。
Althusser在80年代的訪問裡說，在巴黎高等師範學院那時候，我們都是共產主義者。不知他感慨今昔，還是誇張之辭。回想讀大學時遇到的學者，泰半都是搞自由主義的。研究自由主義，當然不一定時自由主義者，也有人喜歡強調左派自由主義跟其他不同，這自有其根據。換個角度看，為什麼我們就沒有人可以原原本本地講一遍Althusser, Marcuse, Adorno，而只有Rawls和哈貝馬斯中期的理性溝通理論的專家呢？為甚麼我們讀哈貝馬斯，但不看他解釋謝林的歷史哲學和馬克斯的關聯呢？也許曾經有過，也許我們該多花功夫，不要太聽老師的話。據他說，四十年代時曾每天花10小時搞社會運動，這些經驗令他後來擺脫列寧史大林的影子，重新思考辯證唯物主義應有的意義。他一個有趣想法（部份如馬克思的博士論文所說），Democrite, Rousseau, Machiavel, Marx, Heidegger都屬於唯物主義傳統。
遊行用到一個法文字les soumises，勉強譯成英文可是the suppressed或the subjugated，意思是受壓逼者，受社會政策壓逼，呼籲他們出來反抗。中文沒一種明確的被動時態，必須加上前綴詞來強調。我們用「基層」(grassroots)一字，社會的根基，就有較正面的意思，可是就表達不了被壓逼的意思。我問巴黎同學可以怎樣翻，她沒有頭緒。她問，你真要去遊行嗎？我說，難道你擔心我的安全嗎？她為趕功課死線，無法抽身，告別前我說好會發給她談現象學和Lacan的文章。後來自稱無政府主義者的同學，緩緩吐幾口煙，揶揄那位巴黎同學，說她以為搞遊行的人都煙不離手，半夜酗酒，坐地鐵從不買票。說罷，突然轉身和男友熱情擁吻，任由煙圈在身後繼續纏綿。大街上遊行群眾逐漸散去，我呆呆地看著兩個小孩的滑板車溜向廣場那邊去，此刻黃昏已過，酒吧傳來微弱的爵士樂。
DAVID HARVEY - THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
DAVID HARVEY
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
New Left Review 53, September-October 2008
Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann's reshaping of Paris and today's explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.
We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.
Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? The city, in the words of urban sociologist Robert Park, is:
man's most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. [1]
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. This general situation persists under capitalism, of course; but since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Capitalists have to produce a surplus product in order to produce surplus value; this in turn must be reinvested in order to generate more surplus value. The result of continued reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production at a compound rate—hence the logistic curves (money, output and population) attached to the history of capital accumulation, paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism.
The perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital-surplus production and absorption shapes the politics of capitalism. It also presents the capitalist with a number of barriers to continuous and trouble-free expansion. If labour is scarce and wages are high, either existing labour has to be disciplined—technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working-class power are two prime methods—or fresh labour forces must be found by immigration, export of capital or proletarianization of hitherto independent elements of the population. Capitalists must also discover new means of production in general and natural resources in particular, which puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable waste. They need to open up terrains for raw-material extraction—often the objective of imperialist and neo-colonial endeavours.
The coercive laws of competition also force the continuous implementation of new technologies and organizational forms, since these enable capitalists to out-compete those using inferior methods. Innovations define new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital and lessen the friction of distance, which limits the geographical range within which the capitalist can search for expanded labour supplies, raw materials, and so on. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market, then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting novel products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments, and debt-financing state and private expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of 'ruinous competition', monopolization (mergers and acquisitions) and capital exports provide ways out.
If any of the above barriers cannot be circumvented, capitalists are unable profitably to reinvest their surplus product. Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving them facing a crisis, in which their capital can be devalued and in some instances even physically wiped out. Surplus commodities can lose value or be destroyed, while productive capacity and assets can be written down and left unused; money itself can be devalued through inflation, and labour through massive unemployment. How, then, has the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable activity driven capitalist urbanization? I argue here that urbanization has played a particularly active role, alongside such phenomena as military expenditures, in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists perpetually produce in their search for profits.
Urban revolutions
Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The year 1848 brought one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour. It struck Paris particularly hard, and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and inequality that had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year. To survive politically, he resorted to widespread repression of alternative political movements. The economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. In the latter case, this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home, it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugène Haussmann to take charge of the city's public works in 1853.
Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labour and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. He drew upon the utopian plans that Fourierists and Saint-Simonians had debated in the 1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: 'not wide enough . . . you have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.' He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighbourhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crédit Mobilier and Crédit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.
The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. Paris became 'the city of light', the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure; the cafés, department stores, fashion industry and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck's Germany and lost. In the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history, wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the world that Haussmann had destroyed and the desire to take back the city on the part of those dispossessed by his works. [2]
Fast forward now to the 1940s in the United States. The huge mobilization for the war effort temporarily resolved the capital-surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s, and the unemployment that went with it. But everyone was fearful about what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy, and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As in Louis Bonaparte's era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early 40s, is all too familiar. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed.
In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann's efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what he had done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris. [3] That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process. Through a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization and the total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. When taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centres of the us—yet another transformation of scale—this process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after 1945, a period in which the us could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy by running trade deficits.
The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape, as subsidized home-ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defence of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African-Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity.
By the end of the 1960s, a different kind of crisis began to unfold; Moses, like Haussmann, fell from grace, and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses's projects with a localized neighbourhood aesthetic. But the suburbs had been built, and the radical change in lifestyle that this betokened had many social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents. If Haussmannization had a part in the dynamics of the Paris Commune, the soulless qualities of suburban living also played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the us. Discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of world—including a different kind of urban experience.
In Paris, the campaign to stop the Left Bank Expressway and the destruction of traditional neighbourhoods by the invading 'high-rise giants' such as the Place d'Italie and Tour Montparnasse helped animate the larger dynamics of the 68 uprising. It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, which predicted not only that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that it was obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond. [4] The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban process, which was increasingly dominating the countryside through phenomena ranging from agribusiness to second homes and rural tourism.
Along with the 68 revolt came a financial crisis within the credit institutions that, through debt-financing, had powered the property boom in the preceding decades. The crisis gathered momentum at the end of the 1960s until the whole capitalist system crashed, starting with the bursting of the global property-market bubble in 1973, followed by the fiscal bankruptcy of New York City in 1975. As William Tabb argued, the response to the consequences of the latter effectively pioneered the construction of a neoliberal answer to the problems of perpetuating class power and of reviving the capacity to absorb the surpluses that capitalism must produce to survive. [5]
Girding the globe
Fast forward once again to our current conjuncture. International capitalism has been on a roller-coaster of regional crises and crashes—East and Southeast Asia in 1997–98; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 2001—but had until recently avoided a global crash even in the face of a chronic inability to dispose of capital surplus. What was the role of urbanization in stabilizing this situation? In the United States, it is accepted wisdom that the housing sector was an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s, although it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade. The property market directly absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through the construction of city-centre and suburban homes and office spaces, while the rapid inflation of housing asset prices—backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interest—boosted the us domestic market for consumer goods and services. American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the us ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. It has, in short, gone global. Property-market booms in Britain and Spain, as well as in many other countries, have helped power a capitalist dynamic in ways that broadly parallel what has happened in the United States. The urbanization of China over the last twenty years has been of a different character, with its heavy focus on infrastructural development, but it is even more important than that of the us. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997, to the extent that China has taken in nearly half the world's cement supplies since 2000. More than a hundred cities have passed the one-million population mark in this period, and previously small villages, such as Shenzhen, have become huge metropolises of 6 to 10 million people. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highways—again, all debt-financed—are transforming the landscape. The consequences for the global economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms thanks to the high price of copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina have recovered in part because of the strength of Chinese demand for raw materials.
Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicentre of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the us while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai, and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as the cities in the core capitalist countries, such as London and Los Angeles. Astonishing if not criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible.
This global scale makes it hard to grasp that what is happening is in principle similar to the transformations that Haussmann oversaw in Paris. For the global urbanization boom has depended, as did all the others before it, on the construction of new financial institutions and arrangements to organize the credit required to sustain it. Financial innovations set in train in the 1980s—securitizing and packaging local mortgages for sale to investors worldwide, and setting up new vehicles to hold collateralized debt obligations—played a crucial role. Their many benefits included spreading risk and permitting surplus savings pools easier access to surplus housing demand; they also brought aggregate interest rates down, while generating immense fortunes for the financial intermediaries who worked these wonders. But spreading risk does not eliminate it. Furthermore, the fact that it can be distributed so widely encourages even riskier local behaviours, because liability can be transferred elsewhere. Without adequate risk-assessment controls, this wave of financialization has now turned into the so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. The fallout was concentrated in the first instance in and around us cities, with particularly serious implications for low-income, inner-city African-Americans and households headed by single women. It also has affected those who, unable to afford the skyrocketing house prices in urban centres, especially in the Southwest, were forced into the metropolitan semi-periphery; here they took up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates, but now face escalating commuting costs as oil prices rise, and soaring mortgage payments as market rates come into effect.
The current crisis, with vicious local repercussions on urban life and infrastructures, also threatens the whole architecture of the global financial system and may trigger a major recession to boot. The parallels with the 1970s are uncanny—including the immediate easy-money response of the Federal Reserve in 2007–08, which will almost certainly generate strong currents of uncontrollable inflation, if not stagflation, in the not too distant future. However, the situation is far more complex now, and it is an open question whether China can compensate for a serious crash in the United States; even in the prc the pace of urbanization seems to be slowing down. The financial system is also more tightly coupled than it ever was before. [6] Computer-driven split-second trading always threatens to create a great divergence in the market—it is already producing incredible volatility in stock trading—that will precipitate a massive crisis, requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work, including their relation to urbanization.
Property and pacification
As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market niches—in both consumer habits and cultural forms—surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, 'pacification by cappuccino'. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas now gets its antidote in a 'new urbanism' movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization. [7] The defence of property values becomes of such paramount political interest that, as Mike Davis points out, the home-owner associations in the state of California become bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighbourhood fascisms. [8]
We increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas. In the past three decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich elites. Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since then, and in 2006 that country boasted the richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor had either stagnated or diminished. The results are indelibly etched on the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly consist of fortified fragments, gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance. In the developing world in particular, the city
is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many 'microstates'. Wealthy neighbourhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for survival. [9]
Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging—already threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethic—become much harder to sustain. Privatized redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn, prompting popular demands for police suppression. Even the idea that the city might function as a collective body politic, a site within and from which progressive social movements might emanate, appears implausible. There are, however, urban social movements seeking to overcome isolation and reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers, who are backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus.
Dispossessions
Surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect. It has entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through 'creative destruction', which nearly always has a class dimension since it is the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this process. Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from the city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. He created an urban form where it was believed—incorrectly, as it turned out in 1871—that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872:
In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called 'Haussmann' . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else . . . The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place. [10]
It took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisement of central Paris, with the consequences seen in recent years of uprisings and mayhem in those isolated suburbs that trap marginalized immigrants, unemployed workers and youth. The sad point here, of course, is that what Engels described recurs throughout history. Robert Moses 'took a meat axe to the Bronx', in his infamous words, bringing forth long and loud laments from neighbourhood groups and movements. In the cases of Paris and New York, once the power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and contained, a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its 'highest and best use'. Engels understood this sequence all too well:
The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers' houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected. [11]
Though this description was written in 1872, it applies directly to contemporary urban development in much of Asia—Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai—as well as gentrification in New York. A process of displacement and what I call 'accumulation by dispossession' lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism. [12] It is the mirror-image of capital absorption through urban redevelopment, and is giving rise to numerous conflicts over the capture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for many years.
Consider the case of Seoul in the 1990s: construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo-wrestler types to invade neighbourhoods on the city's hillsides. They sledgehammered down not only housing but also all the possessions of those who had built their own homes in the 1950s on what had become premium land. High-rise towers, which show no trace of the brutality that permitted their construction, now cover most of those hillsides. In Mumbai, meanwhile, 6 million people officially considered as slum dwellers are settled on land without legal title; all maps of the city leave these places blank. With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a global financial centre to rival Shanghai, the property-development boom has gathered pace, and the land that squatters occupy appears increasingly valuable. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. The pressure to clear it—for environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab—is mounting daily. Financial powers backed by the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of terrain occupied for a whole generation. Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost.
Will the people who are displaced get compensation? The lucky ones get a bit. But while the Indian Constitution specifies that the state has an obligation to protect the lives and well-being of the whole population, irrespective of caste or class, and to guarantee rights to housing and shelter, the Supreme Court has issued judgements that rewrite this constitutional requirement. Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively prove their long-term residence, they have no right to compensation. To concede that right, says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. So the squatters either resist and fight, or move with their few belongings to camp out on the sides of highways or wherever they can find a tiny space. [13] Examples of dispossession can also be found in the us, though these tend to be less brutal and more legalistic: the government's right of eminent domain has been abused in order to displace established residents in reasonable housing in favour of higher-order land uses, such as condominiums and box stores. When this was challenged in the us Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it was constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase their property-tax base.ct, decided on 23 June 2005 in case 545 us 469 (2005).', FGCOLOR, '#E3E3E3', BGCOLOR, '#000000')" onmouseout="nd();"> [14]
In China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied—three million in Beijing alone. Since they lack private-property rights, the state can simply remove them by fiat, offering a minor cash payment to help them on their way before turning the land over to developers at a large profit. In some instances, people move willingly, but there are also reports of widespread resistance, the usual response to which is brutal repression by the Communist party. In the prc it is often populations on the rural margins who are displaced, illustrating the significance of Lefebvre's argument, presciently laid out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction which once existed between the urban and the rural is gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development, under the hegemonic command of capital and the state. This is also the case in India, where the central and state governments now favour the establishment of Special Economic Zones—ostensibly for industrial development, though most of the land is designated for urbanization. This policy has led to pitched battles against agricultural producers, the grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal in March 2007, orchestrated by the state's Marxist government. Intent on opening up terrain for the Salim Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, the ruling cpi(m) sent armed police to disperse protesting villagers; at least 14 were shot dead and dozens wounded. Private property rights in this case provided no protection.
What of the seemingly progressive proposal to award private-property rights to squatter populations, providing them with assets that will permit them to leave poverty behind? [15] Such a scheme is now being mooted for Rio's favelas, for example. The problem is that the poor, beset with income insecurity and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a relatively low cash payment. The rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price, which is why Moses could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue. The lasting effect of Margaret Thatcher's privatization of social housing in Britain has been to create a rent and price structure throughout metropolitan London that precludes lower-income and even middle-class people from access to accommodation anywhere near the urban centre. I wager that within fifteen years, if present trends continue, all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the idyllic bay, while the erstwhile favela dwellers will have been filtered off into some remote periphery.
Formulating demands
Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the 'planet of slums'. [16] Periodically this ends in revolt, as in Paris in 1871 or the us after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist surplus-absorption through urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 68 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune? As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. Any of these revolts could become contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed most have no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand?
The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus. Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in social-democratic phases the proportion at the state's disposal rose significantly. The neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. The data for all oecd countries show, however, that the state's portion of gross output has been roughly constant since the 1970s.oecd Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, Paris 2008, p. 225.' [17] The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favours corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process. Raising the proportion of the surplus held by the state will only have a positive impact if the state itself is brought back under democratic control.
Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favourable to developers, Wall Street and transnational capitalist-class elements, and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists. He is, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich. In Mexico City, Carlos Slim had the downtown streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze. Not only affluent individuals exercise direct power. In the town of New Haven, strapped for resources for urban reinvestment, it is Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore, and Columbia University plans to do so for areas of New York, sparking neighbourhood resistance movements in both cases. The right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires.
Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months. In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by any measure, these added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 per cent less than the year before. In mid-summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank poured billions of dollars' worth of short-term credit into the financial system to ensure its stability, and thereafter the Fed dramatically lowered interest rates or pumped in vast amounts of liquidity every time the Dow threatened to fall precipitously. Meanwhile, some two million people have been or are about to be made homeless by foreclosures. Many city neighbourhoods and even whole peri-urban communities in the us have been boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices of the financial institutions. This population is due no bonuses. Indeed, since foreclosure means debt forgiveness, which is regarded as income in the United States, many of those evicted face a hefty income-tax bill for money they never had in their possession. This asymmetry cannot be construed as anything less than a massive form of class confrontation. A 'Financial Katrina' is unfolding, which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low-income neighbourhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner-city areas far more effectively and speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain.
We have yet, however, to see a coherent opposition to these developments in the twenty-first century. There are, of course, already a great many diverse social movements focusing on the urban question—from India and Brazil to China, Spain, Argentina and the United States. In 2001, a City Statute was inserted into the Brazilian Constitution, after pressure from social movements, to recognize the collective right to the city. [18] In the us, there have been calls for much of the $700 billion bail-out for financial institutions to be diverted into a Reconstruction Bank, which would help prevent foreclosures and fund efforts at neighbourhood revitalization and infrastructural renewal at municipal level. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers. Unfortunately the social movements are not strong enough or sufficiently mobilized to force through this solution. Nor have these movements yet converged on the singular aim of gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus—let alone over the conditions of its production.
At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a confrontation is difficult if not daunting. However, the opportunities are multiple because, as this brief history shows, crises repeatedly erupt around urbanization both locally and globally, and because the metropolis is now the point of massive collision—dare we call it class struggle?—over the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize space for the affluent.
One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.
[1] Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago 1967, p. 3.
[2] For a fuller account, see David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York 2003.
[3] Robert Moses, 'What Happened to Haussmann?', Architectural Forum, vol. 77 (July 1942), pp. 57–66.
[4] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis 2003; and Writings on Cities, Oxford 1996.
[5] William Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York 1982.
[6] Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation, Hoboken, nj 2007.
[7] Hilde Nafstad et al., 'Ideology and Power: The Influence of Current Neoliberalism in Society', Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 17, no. 4 (July 2007), pp. 313–27.
[8] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London and New York 1990.
[9] Marcello Balbo, 'Urban Planning and the Fragmented City of Developing Countries', Third World Planning Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1993), pp. 23–35.
[10] Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, New York 1935, pp. 74–7.
[11] Engels, Housing Question, p. 23.
[12] Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003, chapter 4.
[13] Usha Ramanathan, 'Illegality and the Urban Poor', Economic and Political Weekly, 22 July 2006; Rakesh Shukla, 'Rights of the Poor: An Overview of Supreme Court', Economic and Political Weekly, 2 September 2006.
[14] Kelo v. New London, ct, decided on 23 June 2005 in case 545 us 469 (2005).
[15] Much of this thinking follows the work of Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York 2000; see the critical examination by Timothy Mitchell, 'The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World', Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 46, no. 2 (August 2005), pp. 297–320.
[16] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006.
[17] oecd Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, Paris 2008, p. 225.
[18] Edésio Fernandes, 'Constructing the "Right to the City" in Brazil', Social and Legal Studies, vol. 16, no. 2 (June 2007), pp. 201–19.
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
New Left Review 53, September-October 2008
Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann's reshaping of Paris and today's explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.
We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.
Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? The city, in the words of urban sociologist Robert Park, is:
man's most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. [1]
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. This general situation persists under capitalism, of course; but since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Capitalists have to produce a surplus product in order to produce surplus value; this in turn must be reinvested in order to generate more surplus value. The result of continued reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production at a compound rate—hence the logistic curves (money, output and population) attached to the history of capital accumulation, paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism.
The perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital-surplus production and absorption shapes the politics of capitalism. It also presents the capitalist with a number of barriers to continuous and trouble-free expansion. If labour is scarce and wages are high, either existing labour has to be disciplined—technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working-class power are two prime methods—or fresh labour forces must be found by immigration, export of capital or proletarianization of hitherto independent elements of the population. Capitalists must also discover new means of production in general and natural resources in particular, which puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable waste. They need to open up terrains for raw-material extraction—often the objective of imperialist and neo-colonial endeavours.
The coercive laws of competition also force the continuous implementation of new technologies and organizational forms, since these enable capitalists to out-compete those using inferior methods. Innovations define new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital and lessen the friction of distance, which limits the geographical range within which the capitalist can search for expanded labour supplies, raw materials, and so on. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market, then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting novel products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments, and debt-financing state and private expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of 'ruinous competition', monopolization (mergers and acquisitions) and capital exports provide ways out.
If any of the above barriers cannot be circumvented, capitalists are unable profitably to reinvest their surplus product. Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving them facing a crisis, in which their capital can be devalued and in some instances even physically wiped out. Surplus commodities can lose value or be destroyed, while productive capacity and assets can be written down and left unused; money itself can be devalued through inflation, and labour through massive unemployment. How, then, has the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable activity driven capitalist urbanization? I argue here that urbanization has played a particularly active role, alongside such phenomena as military expenditures, in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists perpetually produce in their search for profits.
Urban revolutions
Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The year 1848 brought one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour. It struck Paris particularly hard, and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and inequality that had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year. To survive politically, he resorted to widespread repression of alternative political movements. The economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. In the latter case, this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home, it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugène Haussmann to take charge of the city's public works in 1853.
Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labour and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. He drew upon the utopian plans that Fourierists and Saint-Simonians had debated in the 1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: 'not wide enough . . . you have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.' He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighbourhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crédit Mobilier and Crédit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.
The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. Paris became 'the city of light', the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure; the cafés, department stores, fashion industry and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck's Germany and lost. In the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history, wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the world that Haussmann had destroyed and the desire to take back the city on the part of those dispossessed by his works. [2]
Fast forward now to the 1940s in the United States. The huge mobilization for the war effort temporarily resolved the capital-surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s, and the unemployment that went with it. But everyone was fearful about what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy, and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As in Louis Bonaparte's era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early 40s, is all too familiar. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed.
In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann's efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what he had done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris. [3] That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process. Through a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization and the total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. When taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centres of the us—yet another transformation of scale—this process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after 1945, a period in which the us could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy by running trade deficits.
The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape, as subsidized home-ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defence of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African-Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity.
By the end of the 1960s, a different kind of crisis began to unfold; Moses, like Haussmann, fell from grace, and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses's projects with a localized neighbourhood aesthetic. But the suburbs had been built, and the radical change in lifestyle that this betokened had many social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents. If Haussmannization had a part in the dynamics of the Paris Commune, the soulless qualities of suburban living also played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the us. Discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of world—including a different kind of urban experience.
In Paris, the campaign to stop the Left Bank Expressway and the destruction of traditional neighbourhoods by the invading 'high-rise giants' such as the Place d'Italie and Tour Montparnasse helped animate the larger dynamics of the 68 uprising. It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, which predicted not only that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that it was obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond. [4] The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban process, which was increasingly dominating the countryside through phenomena ranging from agribusiness to second homes and rural tourism.
Along with the 68 revolt came a financial crisis within the credit institutions that, through debt-financing, had powered the property boom in the preceding decades. The crisis gathered momentum at the end of the 1960s until the whole capitalist system crashed, starting with the bursting of the global property-market bubble in 1973, followed by the fiscal bankruptcy of New York City in 1975. As William Tabb argued, the response to the consequences of the latter effectively pioneered the construction of a neoliberal answer to the problems of perpetuating class power and of reviving the capacity to absorb the surpluses that capitalism must produce to survive. [5]
Girding the globe
Fast forward once again to our current conjuncture. International capitalism has been on a roller-coaster of regional crises and crashes—East and Southeast Asia in 1997–98; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 2001—but had until recently avoided a global crash even in the face of a chronic inability to dispose of capital surplus. What was the role of urbanization in stabilizing this situation? In the United States, it is accepted wisdom that the housing sector was an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s, although it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade. The property market directly absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through the construction of city-centre and suburban homes and office spaces, while the rapid inflation of housing asset prices—backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interest—boosted the us domestic market for consumer goods and services. American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the us ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. It has, in short, gone global. Property-market booms in Britain and Spain, as well as in many other countries, have helped power a capitalist dynamic in ways that broadly parallel what has happened in the United States. The urbanization of China over the last twenty years has been of a different character, with its heavy focus on infrastructural development, but it is even more important than that of the us. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997, to the extent that China has taken in nearly half the world's cement supplies since 2000. More than a hundred cities have passed the one-million population mark in this period, and previously small villages, such as Shenzhen, have become huge metropolises of 6 to 10 million people. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highways—again, all debt-financed—are transforming the landscape. The consequences for the global economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms thanks to the high price of copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina have recovered in part because of the strength of Chinese demand for raw materials.
Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicentre of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the us while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai, and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as the cities in the core capitalist countries, such as London and Los Angeles. Astonishing if not criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible.
This global scale makes it hard to grasp that what is happening is in principle similar to the transformations that Haussmann oversaw in Paris. For the global urbanization boom has depended, as did all the others before it, on the construction of new financial institutions and arrangements to organize the credit required to sustain it. Financial innovations set in train in the 1980s—securitizing and packaging local mortgages for sale to investors worldwide, and setting up new vehicles to hold collateralized debt obligations—played a crucial role. Their many benefits included spreading risk and permitting surplus savings pools easier access to surplus housing demand; they also brought aggregate interest rates down, while generating immense fortunes for the financial intermediaries who worked these wonders. But spreading risk does not eliminate it. Furthermore, the fact that it can be distributed so widely encourages even riskier local behaviours, because liability can be transferred elsewhere. Without adequate risk-assessment controls, this wave of financialization has now turned into the so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. The fallout was concentrated in the first instance in and around us cities, with particularly serious implications for low-income, inner-city African-Americans and households headed by single women. It also has affected those who, unable to afford the skyrocketing house prices in urban centres, especially in the Southwest, were forced into the metropolitan semi-periphery; here they took up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates, but now face escalating commuting costs as oil prices rise, and soaring mortgage payments as market rates come into effect.
The current crisis, with vicious local repercussions on urban life and infrastructures, also threatens the whole architecture of the global financial system and may trigger a major recession to boot. The parallels with the 1970s are uncanny—including the immediate easy-money response of the Federal Reserve in 2007–08, which will almost certainly generate strong currents of uncontrollable inflation, if not stagflation, in the not too distant future. However, the situation is far more complex now, and it is an open question whether China can compensate for a serious crash in the United States; even in the prc the pace of urbanization seems to be slowing down. The financial system is also more tightly coupled than it ever was before. [6] Computer-driven split-second trading always threatens to create a great divergence in the market—it is already producing incredible volatility in stock trading—that will precipitate a massive crisis, requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work, including their relation to urbanization.
Property and pacification
As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market niches—in both consumer habits and cultural forms—surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, 'pacification by cappuccino'. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas now gets its antidote in a 'new urbanism' movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization. [7] The defence of property values becomes of such paramount political interest that, as Mike Davis points out, the home-owner associations in the state of California become bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighbourhood fascisms. [8]
We increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas. In the past three decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich elites. Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since then, and in 2006 that country boasted the richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor had either stagnated or diminished. The results are indelibly etched on the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly consist of fortified fragments, gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance. In the developing world in particular, the city
is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many 'microstates'. Wealthy neighbourhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for survival. [9]
Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging—already threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethic—become much harder to sustain. Privatized redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn, prompting popular demands for police suppression. Even the idea that the city might function as a collective body politic, a site within and from which progressive social movements might emanate, appears implausible. There are, however, urban social movements seeking to overcome isolation and reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers, who are backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus.
Dispossessions
Surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect. It has entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through 'creative destruction', which nearly always has a class dimension since it is the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this process. Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from the city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. He created an urban form where it was believed—incorrectly, as it turned out in 1871—that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872:
In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called 'Haussmann' . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else . . . The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place. [10]
It took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisement of central Paris, with the consequences seen in recent years of uprisings and mayhem in those isolated suburbs that trap marginalized immigrants, unemployed workers and youth. The sad point here, of course, is that what Engels described recurs throughout history. Robert Moses 'took a meat axe to the Bronx', in his infamous words, bringing forth long and loud laments from neighbourhood groups and movements. In the cases of Paris and New York, once the power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and contained, a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its 'highest and best use'. Engels understood this sequence all too well:
The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers' houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected. [11]
Though this description was written in 1872, it applies directly to contemporary urban development in much of Asia—Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai—as well as gentrification in New York. A process of displacement and what I call 'accumulation by dispossession' lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism. [12] It is the mirror-image of capital absorption through urban redevelopment, and is giving rise to numerous conflicts over the capture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for many years.
Consider the case of Seoul in the 1990s: construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo-wrestler types to invade neighbourhoods on the city's hillsides. They sledgehammered down not only housing but also all the possessions of those who had built their own homes in the 1950s on what had become premium land. High-rise towers, which show no trace of the brutality that permitted their construction, now cover most of those hillsides. In Mumbai, meanwhile, 6 million people officially considered as slum dwellers are settled on land without legal title; all maps of the city leave these places blank. With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a global financial centre to rival Shanghai, the property-development boom has gathered pace, and the land that squatters occupy appears increasingly valuable. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. The pressure to clear it—for environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab—is mounting daily. Financial powers backed by the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of terrain occupied for a whole generation. Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost.
Will the people who are displaced get compensation? The lucky ones get a bit. But while the Indian Constitution specifies that the state has an obligation to protect the lives and well-being of the whole population, irrespective of caste or class, and to guarantee rights to housing and shelter, the Supreme Court has issued judgements that rewrite this constitutional requirement. Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively prove their long-term residence, they have no right to compensation. To concede that right, says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. So the squatters either resist and fight, or move with their few belongings to camp out on the sides of highways or wherever they can find a tiny space. [13] Examples of dispossession can also be found in the us, though these tend to be less brutal and more legalistic: the government's right of eminent domain has been abused in order to displace established residents in reasonable housing in favour of higher-order land uses, such as condominiums and box stores. When this was challenged in the us Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it was constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase their property-tax base.ct, decided on 23 June 2005 in case 545 us 469 (2005).', FGCOLOR, '#E3E3E3', BGCOLOR, '#000000')" onmouseout="nd();"> [14]
In China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied—three million in Beijing alone. Since they lack private-property rights, the state can simply remove them by fiat, offering a minor cash payment to help them on their way before turning the land over to developers at a large profit. In some instances, people move willingly, but there are also reports of widespread resistance, the usual response to which is brutal repression by the Communist party. In the prc it is often populations on the rural margins who are displaced, illustrating the significance of Lefebvre's argument, presciently laid out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction which once existed between the urban and the rural is gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development, under the hegemonic command of capital and the state. This is also the case in India, where the central and state governments now favour the establishment of Special Economic Zones—ostensibly for industrial development, though most of the land is designated for urbanization. This policy has led to pitched battles against agricultural producers, the grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal in March 2007, orchestrated by the state's Marxist government. Intent on opening up terrain for the Salim Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, the ruling cpi(m) sent armed police to disperse protesting villagers; at least 14 were shot dead and dozens wounded. Private property rights in this case provided no protection.
What of the seemingly progressive proposal to award private-property rights to squatter populations, providing them with assets that will permit them to leave poverty behind? [15] Such a scheme is now being mooted for Rio's favelas, for example. The problem is that the poor, beset with income insecurity and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a relatively low cash payment. The rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price, which is why Moses could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue. The lasting effect of Margaret Thatcher's privatization of social housing in Britain has been to create a rent and price structure throughout metropolitan London that precludes lower-income and even middle-class people from access to accommodation anywhere near the urban centre. I wager that within fifteen years, if present trends continue, all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the idyllic bay, while the erstwhile favela dwellers will have been filtered off into some remote periphery.
Formulating demands
Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the 'planet of slums'. [16] Periodically this ends in revolt, as in Paris in 1871 or the us after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist surplus-absorption through urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 68 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune? As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. Any of these revolts could become contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed most have no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand?
The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus. Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in social-democratic phases the proportion at the state's disposal rose significantly. The neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. The data for all oecd countries show, however, that the state's portion of gross output has been roughly constant since the 1970s.oecd Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, Paris 2008, p. 225.' [17] The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favours corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process. Raising the proportion of the surplus held by the state will only have a positive impact if the state itself is brought back under democratic control.
Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favourable to developers, Wall Street and transnational capitalist-class elements, and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists. He is, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich. In Mexico City, Carlos Slim had the downtown streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze. Not only affluent individuals exercise direct power. In the town of New Haven, strapped for resources for urban reinvestment, it is Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore, and Columbia University plans to do so for areas of New York, sparking neighbourhood resistance movements in both cases. The right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires.
Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months. In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by any measure, these added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 per cent less than the year before. In mid-summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank poured billions of dollars' worth of short-term credit into the financial system to ensure its stability, and thereafter the Fed dramatically lowered interest rates or pumped in vast amounts of liquidity every time the Dow threatened to fall precipitously. Meanwhile, some two million people have been or are about to be made homeless by foreclosures. Many city neighbourhoods and even whole peri-urban communities in the us have been boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices of the financial institutions. This population is due no bonuses. Indeed, since foreclosure means debt forgiveness, which is regarded as income in the United States, many of those evicted face a hefty income-tax bill for money they never had in their possession. This asymmetry cannot be construed as anything less than a massive form of class confrontation. A 'Financial Katrina' is unfolding, which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low-income neighbourhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner-city areas far more effectively and speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain.
We have yet, however, to see a coherent opposition to these developments in the twenty-first century. There are, of course, already a great many diverse social movements focusing on the urban question—from India and Brazil to China, Spain, Argentina and the United States. In 2001, a City Statute was inserted into the Brazilian Constitution, after pressure from social movements, to recognize the collective right to the city. [18] In the us, there have been calls for much of the $700 billion bail-out for financial institutions to be diverted into a Reconstruction Bank, which would help prevent foreclosures and fund efforts at neighbourhood revitalization and infrastructural renewal at municipal level. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers. Unfortunately the social movements are not strong enough or sufficiently mobilized to force through this solution. Nor have these movements yet converged on the singular aim of gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus—let alone over the conditions of its production.
At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a confrontation is difficult if not daunting. However, the opportunities are multiple because, as this brief history shows, crises repeatedly erupt around urbanization both locally and globally, and because the metropolis is now the point of massive collision—dare we call it class struggle?—over the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize space for the affluent.
One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.
[1] Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago 1967, p. 3.
[2] For a fuller account, see David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York 2003.
[3] Robert Moses, 'What Happened to Haussmann?', Architectural Forum, vol. 77 (July 1942), pp. 57–66.
[4] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis 2003; and Writings on Cities, Oxford 1996.
[5] William Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York 1982.
[6] Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation, Hoboken, nj 2007.
[7] Hilde Nafstad et al., 'Ideology and Power: The Influence of Current Neoliberalism in Society', Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 17, no. 4 (July 2007), pp. 313–27.
[8] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London and New York 1990.
[9] Marcello Balbo, 'Urban Planning and the Fragmented City of Developing Countries', Third World Planning Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1993), pp. 23–35.
[10] Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, New York 1935, pp. 74–7.
[11] Engels, Housing Question, p. 23.
[12] Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003, chapter 4.
[13] Usha Ramanathan, 'Illegality and the Urban Poor', Economic and Political Weekly, 22 July 2006; Rakesh Shukla, 'Rights of the Poor: An Overview of Supreme Court', Economic and Political Weekly, 2 September 2006.
[14] Kelo v. New London, ct, decided on 23 June 2005 in case 545 us 469 (2005).
[15] Much of this thinking follows the work of Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York 2000; see the critical examination by Timothy Mitchell, 'The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World', Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 46, no. 2 (August 2005), pp. 297–320.
[16] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006.
[17] oecd Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, Paris 2008, p. 225.
[18] Edésio Fernandes, 'Constructing the "Right to the City" in Brazil', Social and Legal Studies, vol. 16, no. 2 (June 2007), pp. 201–19.
最近讀什麼 - 《無對象：資本主義、主體性與異化》
Franck Fischbach, Sans objet: Capitalisme, Subjectivité, Aliénation (無對象：資本主義、主體性與異化) Paris ; Vrin, 2009.
我們應該如何生活在一起？就此看，直覺回答，我們不應互相殘殺，不應妄顧他人等等。這些道理，自是顯而易見，不待論証。假若這個問題指向基本的社會政治結構應該如何安排，這就不簡單了。如果說，社會政治結構應當保障每個人的就業機會平等，一般而言，雖然很難合理地反駁這個說法，但是，似乎無關痛癢。以香港為例，除了少數情況外，教育和法律制度等基本上都實踐了這個原則，對思考和改造現實並無重大啟示。在其他地方，因應不同的社會環境，其意義自然有所不同。
基本社會政治結構應該如何安排？如果說只有對社會最弱勢的人最為有利的條件下，經濟的不平等分配才是合理的，這個說法需要論證之處，不僅因為有不少人持有相反的看法，例如多勞多得才是合理的分配原則，也因為事實上在絕大多數的社會，經濟不平等，或者說，貧富差距是普遍現象，這個說法就有針對現實之處。
如果我們主張，應當以尊重個人自由，彼此平等相待為最首要原則，以規定基本社會政治結構，並視之為應當努力實現的社會政治藍圖，這個說法之所以需要詳加論証，除了因為不少人持其他意見，也因為我們現在的社會並未體現這個藍圖。
那麼為什麼我們不先處理現實的處境為何這一問題？事實上，我們是如何生活在一起？我們現在共同生活的方式跟以前有什麼分別？這個問題固然可以從歷史學、統計學或實証社會學來回答，同時，哲學史告訴我們，黑格爾和馬克思的最重要貢獻（如果要細數，還有不少哲學家思想家，如Herder, Schelling, Dilthey, Durkheim, Nietzsche, Husserl, Weber等），就是了解我們身處的歷史時代，人類文化發展到甚麼地步，我們如何共同生活在一起。他們基本上不借助實証科學的方法 (這不排斥當中有部份人曾經進行實証研究)，就我們的歷史時代提出見解，這些見解既非憑空猜想，亦非由實証資料証明，既非主觀地想當然，亦非客觀地無容置疑。我們描述和分析歷史，但不等如馬上要作出應然和實然互相排斥的判斷，或許暫時可以說，以描述歷史經驗來澄清觀念，以透視歷史來觀照自身。
那麼，我們現在是如何生活在一起？
我們的流行文化充滿著罐裝笑容、罐裝恐怖、罐裝性感，甚至罐裝民主，電視的遊戲節目有慣用的搞笑技倆，電影有慣用的驚嚇橋般，寫真有慣用的性感姿態，甚至鏡頭裡的政客有慣用的民主話頭。罐裝的意思，不在於說他們真不真實，一般來說他們都很逼真地表演於你面前，而我們總是習以為常地做觀眾，甚至怕被視為不正常，而不得不為之發笑、恐懼、喜愛和支持。誰是真心發笑和恐懼，不是問題所在，現實是廣告、媒體、商品消費以至文化工業都要我們以它們為中介，來觀看和感受別人正在觀看和感受的氣氛，來享樂和消費，易言之，以文化工業的產品或一般商品作為中介來經歷人生。通過消費來生活，以商品為媒介來過活，Zizek稱之為interpassivity，「經由他人，我才是被動的，也就是說，我讓我存在中被動的那一面，屈從於他人。」[Le sujet interpassif,dans Lasubjectivité à venir. Essais critiques sur la voix obscène,2004, p.19-20.] 也就是說，資本主義的消費文化令我們失去了親身感受生活的機會，而轉為享用他人的感受令自己得到生活的質感。Zizek甚至認為，這就好像我們閹割了親身感受的被動性，如同異化 (alienation)於真正的自己。[Subversions dusujet. Psychanalyse, philosophie, politique, 1999, p.172.)
我們共同生活的方式，落入特定的社會政治結構之中，那麼應該研究，資本主義的生活方式是怎樣的？一方面，在工作間，打工仔出賣勞動予老闆以換取薪水，另一方面，在商品市場，大家一起以薪水消費商品來過活。由勞動轉化為薪水，勞動和薪水對打工仔而言，不過是用以交換生活所資的途徑，我們儘管可以自由地選擇工作，甚至有專業學歷和資歷的人可能選舉更多。然而，自由選擇工作並不意味著工作和薪水本身可以自主而定，因為工作和薪水是按過去市場的勞動價值和需求而定的。正如你可以選擇購買不同地區的樓房，但樓房的設計和售價均不由你決定。按Fischbach的解讀，這是馬克思強調異化的第一方面，由於為薪水而付出勞動，不是為表達自己(self- expression)，不是為了生活本身而勞動，而是為了搵兩餐維持生計。Arendt更認為，資本主義令人類為求生計而勞動，忘卻了人類的本性──行動(action)，恆久共有的世界也無從建立，自由的行動失卻應有的意義，而容易被扭曲成為求生計的勞動。她認為，資本主義的私有財產方式，就是「化共同世界(a common world)的一個個部份為私人擁有」，這「同時創造了財富的原始累積，和以勞動來轉化財富為資本的可能性」。[Condition de l'homme moderne, 2000, p.320-1.] 以馬克思的話來說，打工仔的勞動，失去了表達其生命的特性，成為抽象的勞動，令人致死的勞動，成為在地產市場、金融市場、投資項目中的非人的 (impersonal)流動資本，生活成為交易和擁有(possession)商品。不斷消費和毁棄商品，財富就源源不絕產生，而人們就陷入絕對的貧困。
第二方面的異化，就是以在商品市場中以消費商品來過活，馬克思稱之為商品拜物教，Fischbach解釋為，「人際間失去社會關係，事物裡呈現社會關係」。[p.202]換句話說，勞動化為薪水和資本，不僅令工作間成為異化的場所，消費市場也一樣，在此人際交往通過商品交易為媒介。廣告、購物商場、員工管理、市場調查、經濟數據成為人際交往的途徑。馬克思評論Mill的時候指出：「我們對他人和他人對我們的價值，就是我們各自（擁有）的對象的價值」(轉引自Fischbach, p.205) Fischbach認為，這不是說人們成為了商品，而是人們經由商品來接觸他人。可以說，我們並不是認為人們不再是人，而只是生產的機器，利潤的發票，對之加以崇拜如原始宗教，而是我們壓抑了人之為人的根本尊嚴於資本流動之下，因此我們甘願接受工作更長時間來負擔高樓價，甘願馴服於大財團，任由貪得無嚴的利潤榨取低微的工資，忍受毫無自主可言的工作間免受裁員之苦。以Zizek詭譎的語言，可以說象徵(symbolic)比真實(real) 更為真實(real)，資本主義的商品消費呈現出來的生活畫面，比每天工作間的剝削，更為實在，更值得享受追求。這說明了，為什麼媒體總是代入政府運輸處的角色，每逢巴士罷工便趕緊報道交通情況如何受阻，又積極擔負警察的職責，密切監視遊行示威的衝突場面，忠實報道政府如何奉公守法地宣傳政策，而民眾如何擾亂秩序，妨礙社會有效運作。勞動換取薪水，薪水換取商品，天經地義，資本的流動和累積，不容干預，成為人們的教條。Fischbach指出，人際交往中各種欲求，經由抽象而不確定的他者來表達，如同參與商品交易，人與人之間的衝突也化約為商品交換的價格差異，勞資關係如同議價，這說明了人情味經已異化。
可以說，Fischbach此書有兩個重要目標：第一，重新詮釋馬克思哲學中的異化觀念，作為貫穿1844年《巴黎手稿》、1857-58年《政治經濟學批判概論》(Grundrisse)至1865年《資本論》第一卷的根本課題。由此反駁盧卡其1923年《歷史與階級意識》中對馬克思異化觀念的解釋，Fischbach指出，馬克思所言的異化，不是人變成死物的物化(réification或 chosification)，這是費爾巴哈的版本，而非馬克思。簡言之，異化(Entfremdung,alienation)是指，資本主義生產方式令人類失去其可資表達自我的對象，可稱之為去對象化或失語(Entgegenständlichung或 Entäusserung，désobjectivation或désexpression)[p.192]。無產階級朝夕勞動，而勞動過程中所操作所生產的對象，只具有交換價值，而無可供使用、欣賞或意欲的內在價值，無法藉它們來表達自我的精神活動，因此，可資表達自我的對象一概變成交易的工具，不再由生活本身來支配，也容不下生活本身的表達，這也是書名《無對象》之意。資本主義帶來的改變，就是令人通過交易來交往。（但是，這不排斥說在資本主義出現的整體歷史變動裡，沒有其他人類交易和交往的方式，沒有理由視馬克思的資本主義分析為決定論，這是不少馬克思研究者和筆者的立場。）
第二，Fischbach力圖呈現馬克思哲學可以如何回應海德格和Arendt的後主體性哲學。海德格在1927年《存在與時間》第38節中，以異化 (Entfremdung, alienation)來描述此在(Dasein)有意無意間拋棄其特有的存在方式，而化身於眾人或無人之中而失掉自己，自視為存在者的存在方式。[Fischbach, p.43]這即是說，視自己如同一物，如同死物般無法抉擇，不正視自己為實現可能性的存在，這等如把自己異化於真正屬於自己的存在方式。海德格和 Arendt均認為馬克思的勞動概念為生物存在，視主體為一存在者，然而，Fischbach反駁道，馬克思的主體觀植根於德意志觀念論的傳統，視主體為活動(Tathandlung,activity)而非有形相之物，不視勞動得來的財產為主體擁有之物(possession)，而是主體表達自我之途徑 (expression)。他認為，Arendt在1958年The Human Condition中所謂人們異化於世界 (alienation of the world)，馬克思的異化學說，同樣指出了人們異化於經由對象來表達自我之世界(alienation of the world of self-expressionby means of objects)。
由此看，馬克思強調無產階級失去了本來屬於他們的勞動成果，我們不當視之為據自己的利益以爭取更高工資，更多物質條件，而是實實在在反映了失去可資表達的對象的異化問題。要解決此問題，一方面，必須在爭取物質條件的同時，讓勞動異化儘可能減輕，讓無產階級重新掌握生活，重新學會通過對象來表達自我，實現自主；另一方面，反抗以商品交易為人際交往的生活，反抗以加速消費和毁棄商品來創造和累積財富。兩者缺一不可，因為缺乏了第一項，第二項只會成就狹義的消費者運動或綠色運動，提倡簡樸生活，卻不考慮打工仔受剝削的現況，而缺乏了第二項，第一項只會成就狹義的工人運動，忽略其他受壓逼群體，無法繒畫社會改革的整體圖像，無法突顯資本主義令人們在工作間和消費市場兩方面的異化問題。
讀者或會問，異化如果是無可避免的話，我們憑什麼來反抗，鐵籠中如何可能找到出路？Fischbach引用Gorz的看法，我們可以提倡減少工作時間和重新分配工作時間，以達至減少工作和消費，同時更好地實現自主，不用擔心失去工作和生活的安全感。[p.261]這樣可以避免僅僅為了維持生計而工作，為了工作而生活，而讓人們的生活本身來籌劃工作，以人際交往來駕馭商品交易。我們發現，異化問題的研究，並不帶來一組特定的程式，供人們執行而自然能實現人類的自由。準確地說，異化問題令我們察看擠身的歷史處境，在特定的社會脈絡裡尋求實現自由。Fischbach指出，如同Schelling所言，人類自由的定義為其不可界定性(indéfinnisabilité)[p.254]，我們在異化的不自由狀態裡，努力建立自由的領土，捍衛人類的尊嚴，不容任何新自由主義包裝的資本主義加以扭曲。
我們應該如何生活在一起？
讀者或會疑問，馬克思的思想恐怕有集體主義的成份，有拒絕價值多元論的傾向，我們怎可能斷定異化對別人或所有人都不可欲(desirable)？自由對別人或所有人都不可欲？同理，也值得追問，憑什麼可以斷定正義感是人們共同生活最基本而且優先於善的道德？憑什麼可以斷定每個人都是道德主體？
雖然康德沒有告訴我們人類的自由如何屈從於資本主義(l'assujettissementde l'homme sous la logique du capitalisme)，雖然他稱女人和工匠等為依賴他人、尚未獨立、被動的公民，不應享有投票權利，但是他對自由和平等的思考相當深刻。在1797年《道德之形而上學》第46節同時指出，自由和平等對被動的公民仍然有效，而且我們應當以自由和平等的理念來引領他們成為真正自主（或主動）的公民，這就是說，自由和平等要求我們無條件尊重他人。想深一層，受人尊重更可說植根於人類的傾向，人皆有之，我們藉端莊的舉止(意譯Sittsamkeit)以期受他人尊重，進而彼此尊重對方為人。康德在1786年《人類歷史開端之推測》中稱，這種傾向是人類群居組成社會的根源，也是人類視自己為道德存在(意譯 Sittlichkeit)的基礎。可以說，自由和平等意味著，一方面是人類彼此互認為人的道德要求，另一方面是我們對他人的尊重、關注、扶持，甚至面對和他人共處的衝突(意譯ungesellige Geselligkeit)，對待陌生人外來者的友善款待(意譯Hospitalität)，這是發自我的要求而跟他人共同實現。在這一點上（當然，在其他方面，兩者的分歧不可輕視），Fischbach認為，馬克思和德意志觀念論傳統相當一致，我們當期望共同實現自由，因為說到底只有我個人擁有財產的自由，並不堪稱為自由。
我們應該如何生活在一起？就此看，直覺回答，我們不應互相殘殺，不應妄顧他人等等。這些道理，自是顯而易見，不待論証。假若這個問題指向基本的社會政治結構應該如何安排，這就不簡單了。如果說，社會政治結構應當保障每個人的就業機會平等，一般而言，雖然很難合理地反駁這個說法，但是，似乎無關痛癢。以香港為例，除了少數情況外，教育和法律制度等基本上都實踐了這個原則，對思考和改造現實並無重大啟示。在其他地方，因應不同的社會環境，其意義自然有所不同。
基本社會政治結構應該如何安排？如果說只有對社會最弱勢的人最為有利的條件下，經濟的不平等分配才是合理的，這個說法需要論證之處，不僅因為有不少人持有相反的看法，例如多勞多得才是合理的分配原則，也因為事實上在絕大多數的社會，經濟不平等，或者說，貧富差距是普遍現象，這個說法就有針對現實之處。
如果我們主張，應當以尊重個人自由，彼此平等相待為最首要原則，以規定基本社會政治結構，並視之為應當努力實現的社會政治藍圖，這個說法之所以需要詳加論証，除了因為不少人持其他意見，也因為我們現在的社會並未體現這個藍圖。
那麼為什麼我們不先處理現實的處境為何這一問題？事實上，我們是如何生活在一起？我們現在共同生活的方式跟以前有什麼分別？這個問題固然可以從歷史學、統計學或實証社會學來回答，同時，哲學史告訴我們，黑格爾和馬克思的最重要貢獻（如果要細數，還有不少哲學家思想家，如Herder, Schelling, Dilthey, Durkheim, Nietzsche, Husserl, Weber等），就是了解我們身處的歷史時代，人類文化發展到甚麼地步，我們如何共同生活在一起。他們基本上不借助實証科學的方法 (這不排斥當中有部份人曾經進行實証研究)，就我們的歷史時代提出見解，這些見解既非憑空猜想，亦非由實証資料証明，既非主觀地想當然，亦非客觀地無容置疑。我們描述和分析歷史，但不等如馬上要作出應然和實然互相排斥的判斷，或許暫時可以說，以描述歷史經驗來澄清觀念，以透視歷史來觀照自身。
那麼，我們現在是如何生活在一起？
我們的流行文化充滿著罐裝笑容、罐裝恐怖、罐裝性感，甚至罐裝民主，電視的遊戲節目有慣用的搞笑技倆，電影有慣用的驚嚇橋般，寫真有慣用的性感姿態，甚至鏡頭裡的政客有慣用的民主話頭。罐裝的意思，不在於說他們真不真實，一般來說他們都很逼真地表演於你面前，而我們總是習以為常地做觀眾，甚至怕被視為不正常，而不得不為之發笑、恐懼、喜愛和支持。誰是真心發笑和恐懼，不是問題所在，現實是廣告、媒體、商品消費以至文化工業都要我們以它們為中介，來觀看和感受別人正在觀看和感受的氣氛，來享樂和消費，易言之，以文化工業的產品或一般商品作為中介來經歷人生。通過消費來生活，以商品為媒介來過活，Zizek稱之為interpassivity，「經由他人，我才是被動的，也就是說，我讓我存在中被動的那一面，屈從於他人。」[Le sujet interpassif,dans Lasubjectivité à venir. Essais critiques sur la voix obscène,2004, p.19-20.] 也就是說，資本主義的消費文化令我們失去了親身感受生活的機會，而轉為享用他人的感受令自己得到生活的質感。Zizek甚至認為，這就好像我們閹割了親身感受的被動性，如同異化 (alienation)於真正的自己。[Subversions dusujet. Psychanalyse, philosophie, politique, 1999, p.172.)
我們共同生活的方式，落入特定的社會政治結構之中，那麼應該研究，資本主義的生活方式是怎樣的？一方面，在工作間，打工仔出賣勞動予老闆以換取薪水，另一方面，在商品市場，大家一起以薪水消費商品來過活。由勞動轉化為薪水，勞動和薪水對打工仔而言，不過是用以交換生活所資的途徑，我們儘管可以自由地選擇工作，甚至有專業學歷和資歷的人可能選舉更多。然而，自由選擇工作並不意味著工作和薪水本身可以自主而定，因為工作和薪水是按過去市場的勞動價值和需求而定的。正如你可以選擇購買不同地區的樓房，但樓房的設計和售價均不由你決定。按Fischbach的解讀，這是馬克思強調異化的第一方面，由於為薪水而付出勞動，不是為表達自己(self- expression)，不是為了生活本身而勞動，而是為了搵兩餐維持生計。Arendt更認為，資本主義令人類為求生計而勞動，忘卻了人類的本性──行動(action)，恆久共有的世界也無從建立，自由的行動失卻應有的意義，而容易被扭曲成為求生計的勞動。她認為，資本主義的私有財產方式，就是「化共同世界(a common world)的一個個部份為私人擁有」，這「同時創造了財富的原始累積，和以勞動來轉化財富為資本的可能性」。[Condition de l'homme moderne, 2000, p.320-1.] 以馬克思的話來說，打工仔的勞動，失去了表達其生命的特性，成為抽象的勞動，令人致死的勞動，成為在地產市場、金融市場、投資項目中的非人的 (impersonal)流動資本，生活成為交易和擁有(possession)商品。不斷消費和毁棄商品，財富就源源不絕產生，而人們就陷入絕對的貧困。
第二方面的異化，就是以在商品市場中以消費商品來過活，馬克思稱之為商品拜物教，Fischbach解釋為，「人際間失去社會關係，事物裡呈現社會關係」。[p.202]換句話說，勞動化為薪水和資本，不僅令工作間成為異化的場所，消費市場也一樣，在此人際交往通過商品交易為媒介。廣告、購物商場、員工管理、市場調查、經濟數據成為人際交往的途徑。馬克思評論Mill的時候指出：「我們對他人和他人對我們的價值，就是我們各自（擁有）的對象的價值」(轉引自Fischbach, p.205) Fischbach認為，這不是說人們成為了商品，而是人們經由商品來接觸他人。可以說，我們並不是認為人們不再是人，而只是生產的機器，利潤的發票，對之加以崇拜如原始宗教，而是我們壓抑了人之為人的根本尊嚴於資本流動之下，因此我們甘願接受工作更長時間來負擔高樓價，甘願馴服於大財團，任由貪得無嚴的利潤榨取低微的工資，忍受毫無自主可言的工作間免受裁員之苦。以Zizek詭譎的語言，可以說象徵(symbolic)比真實(real) 更為真實(real)，資本主義的商品消費呈現出來的生活畫面，比每天工作間的剝削，更為實在，更值得享受追求。這說明了，為什麼媒體總是代入政府運輸處的角色，每逢巴士罷工便趕緊報道交通情況如何受阻，又積極擔負警察的職責，密切監視遊行示威的衝突場面，忠實報道政府如何奉公守法地宣傳政策，而民眾如何擾亂秩序，妨礙社會有效運作。勞動換取薪水，薪水換取商品，天經地義，資本的流動和累積，不容干預，成為人們的教條。Fischbach指出，人際交往中各種欲求，經由抽象而不確定的他者來表達，如同參與商品交易，人與人之間的衝突也化約為商品交換的價格差異，勞資關係如同議價，這說明了人情味經已異化。
可以說，Fischbach此書有兩個重要目標：第一，重新詮釋馬克思哲學中的異化觀念，作為貫穿1844年《巴黎手稿》、1857-58年《政治經濟學批判概論》(Grundrisse)至1865年《資本論》第一卷的根本課題。由此反駁盧卡其1923年《歷史與階級意識》中對馬克思異化觀念的解釋，Fischbach指出，馬克思所言的異化，不是人變成死物的物化(réification或 chosification)，這是費爾巴哈的版本，而非馬克思。簡言之，異化(Entfremdung,alienation)是指，資本主義生產方式令人類失去其可資表達自我的對象，可稱之為去對象化或失語(Entgegenständlichung或 Entäusserung，désobjectivation或désexpression)[p.192]。無產階級朝夕勞動，而勞動過程中所操作所生產的對象，只具有交換價值，而無可供使用、欣賞或意欲的內在價值，無法藉它們來表達自我的精神活動，因此，可資表達自我的對象一概變成交易的工具，不再由生活本身來支配，也容不下生活本身的表達，這也是書名《無對象》之意。資本主義帶來的改變，就是令人通過交易來交往。（但是，這不排斥說在資本主義出現的整體歷史變動裡，沒有其他人類交易和交往的方式，沒有理由視馬克思的資本主義分析為決定論，這是不少馬克思研究者和筆者的立場。）
第二，Fischbach力圖呈現馬克思哲學可以如何回應海德格和Arendt的後主體性哲學。海德格在1927年《存在與時間》第38節中，以異化 (Entfremdung, alienation)來描述此在(Dasein)有意無意間拋棄其特有的存在方式，而化身於眾人或無人之中而失掉自己，自視為存在者的存在方式。[Fischbach, p.43]這即是說，視自己如同一物，如同死物般無法抉擇，不正視自己為實現可能性的存在，這等如把自己異化於真正屬於自己的存在方式。海德格和 Arendt均認為馬克思的勞動概念為生物存在，視主體為一存在者，然而，Fischbach反駁道，馬克思的主體觀植根於德意志觀念論的傳統，視主體為活動(Tathandlung,activity)而非有形相之物，不視勞動得來的財產為主體擁有之物(possession)，而是主體表達自我之途徑 (expression)。他認為，Arendt在1958年The Human Condition中所謂人們異化於世界 (alienation of the world)，馬克思的異化學說，同樣指出了人們異化於經由對象來表達自我之世界(alienation of the world of self-expressionby means of objects)。
由此看，馬克思強調無產階級失去了本來屬於他們的勞動成果，我們不當視之為據自己的利益以爭取更高工資，更多物質條件，而是實實在在反映了失去可資表達的對象的異化問題。要解決此問題，一方面，必須在爭取物質條件的同時，讓勞動異化儘可能減輕，讓無產階級重新掌握生活，重新學會通過對象來表達自我，實現自主；另一方面，反抗以商品交易為人際交往的生活，反抗以加速消費和毁棄商品來創造和累積財富。兩者缺一不可，因為缺乏了第一項，第二項只會成就狹義的消費者運動或綠色運動，提倡簡樸生活，卻不考慮打工仔受剝削的現況，而缺乏了第二項，第一項只會成就狹義的工人運動，忽略其他受壓逼群體，無法繒畫社會改革的整體圖像，無法突顯資本主義令人們在工作間和消費市場兩方面的異化問題。
讀者或會問，異化如果是無可避免的話，我們憑什麼來反抗，鐵籠中如何可能找到出路？Fischbach引用Gorz的看法，我們可以提倡減少工作時間和重新分配工作時間，以達至減少工作和消費，同時更好地實現自主，不用擔心失去工作和生活的安全感。[p.261]這樣可以避免僅僅為了維持生計而工作，為了工作而生活，而讓人們的生活本身來籌劃工作，以人際交往來駕馭商品交易。我們發現，異化問題的研究，並不帶來一組特定的程式，供人們執行而自然能實現人類的自由。準確地說，異化問題令我們察看擠身的歷史處境，在特定的社會脈絡裡尋求實現自由。Fischbach指出，如同Schelling所言，人類自由的定義為其不可界定性(indéfinnisabilité)[p.254]，我們在異化的不自由狀態裡，努力建立自由的領土，捍衛人類的尊嚴，不容任何新自由主義包裝的資本主義加以扭曲。
我們應該如何生活在一起？
讀者或會疑問，馬克思的思想恐怕有集體主義的成份，有拒絕價值多元論的傾向，我們怎可能斷定異化對別人或所有人都不可欲(desirable)？自由對別人或所有人都不可欲？同理，也值得追問，憑什麼可以斷定正義感是人們共同生活最基本而且優先於善的道德？憑什麼可以斷定每個人都是道德主體？
雖然康德沒有告訴我們人類的自由如何屈從於資本主義(l'assujettissementde l'homme sous la logique du capitalisme)，雖然他稱女人和工匠等為依賴他人、尚未獨立、被動的公民，不應享有投票權利，但是他對自由和平等的思考相當深刻。在1797年《道德之形而上學》第46節同時指出，自由和平等對被動的公民仍然有效，而且我們應當以自由和平等的理念來引領他們成為真正自主（或主動）的公民，這就是說，自由和平等要求我們無條件尊重他人。想深一層，受人尊重更可說植根於人類的傾向，人皆有之，我們藉端莊的舉止(意譯Sittsamkeit)以期受他人尊重，進而彼此尊重對方為人。康德在1786年《人類歷史開端之推測》中稱，這種傾向是人類群居組成社會的根源，也是人類視自己為道德存在(意譯 Sittlichkeit)的基礎。可以說，自由和平等意味著，一方面是人類彼此互認為人的道德要求，另一方面是我們對他人的尊重、關注、扶持，甚至面對和他人共處的衝突(意譯ungesellige Geselligkeit)，對待陌生人外來者的友善款待(意譯Hospitalität)，這是發自我的要求而跟他人共同實現。在這一點上（當然，在其他方面，兩者的分歧不可輕視），Fischbach認為，馬克思和德意志觀念論傳統相當一致，我們當期望共同實現自由，因為說到底只有我個人擁有財產的自由，並不堪稱為自由。
最近讀甚麼
常言道，沒有看不完的書，只有讀不倦的人生。既然快要離開，讓我總結一下在比利時讀到哪些哲學家。哲學史裡的經典，眾所週知，我就不多談了，以下列出我接觸到的比利時哲學研究，旁及相關歷史，一方面作為學習紀錄，另一方面為讀者介紹一下比利時的法文和英文哲學研究 (我不諳荷文,故無法閱讀)，作為認識比利時的一道風景。比利時是一小國,比起法國或德國的哲學研究規模,自然遠遠不及,不過地處中央,國內不同地區使用荷文,英文,法文和德文,不失為德法哲學間的溝通橋樑。
1. Alphonse De Waelhens (1911-1981)
比利時藉
差不多是最早討論Merleau-Ponty的學者，在上世紀40年代開始以法文撰寫胡塞爾、海德格和心理分析的著作。他指導過眾多學生，如 Ghislaine Florival, Jacques Taminiaux，美國學者Alphonso Lingis,和比利時學者Rudolf Bernet,德國學者Rudolf Boehm。Lingis是美國最早期研究Merleau-Ponty和Levinas的學者之一，翻譯了Merleau-Ponty晚年手稿和 Levinas的重要著作為英文。Boehm是Merleau-Ponty的知覺現象學的德文翻譯者。
2. Herman Leo Van Breda (1911-1974)
比利時藉
他在盧汶大學以荷文撰寫胡塞爾為題的博士論文。最有名的事迹，當然是30年代把胡塞爾的手稿運到比利時魯汶大學，成立胡塞爾檔案館，並組織大量學者整理和編輯手槁出版。他指導了眾多學生，例如在美國發展的Robert Sokolowski, 在德國發展的Elmar Holenstein, 還有不少胡塞爾全集編者，如Eduard Marbach, Brand Gerd。
3. Jean Ladrière (1921-2007)
比利時藉
據老師說，他是邏輯學專家，同時又研究傳統歐洲哲學，如德意志觀念論。他指導過眾多學生，例如台灣學者沈清松，新盧汶大學的Marc Maesschalck。Maesschalck的研究範圍非常廣，博士論文以謝林哲學為題，由德意志觀念論至海德格，法蘭克福批判學派、治理理論、傅柯、政治行動的理論和道德理論等。
4. Jacques Taminiaux (1928- )
比利時藉
據統計，Taminiaux教授是指導了最多學生的新盧汶大學的教授，1954年以柏格森哲學和傳統的二元論為題完成論文，1967年以德意志觀念論和希臘思想的關聯為題拿到教席。他指導過大量學生研究黑格爾、胡塞爾、海德格、Merleau-Ponty和Levinas，例如台灣學者丁原植以英文撰寫海德格和道家為題的博士論文（他在1990年完成，比張祥龍在美國以相近題目的博士論文，更早兩年），法國女學者Françoise Dastur，任教於盧森堡的比利時藉學者Robert Brisart。他有一本書研究Hannah Arendt和海德格，是我最喜歡他的一本書。
5. Ghislaine Florival (1929- )
比利時藉
她以普魯斯特的欲望(désir)為題在魯汶大學拿到博士，是六十年代少數的文學和哲學女教授，指導過大量學生研究Merleau-Ponty和 Levinas，例如內地學者佘碧平，意大利學者Mauro Carbone和比利時梅洛龐蒂學者Raphaël Gély。她和同事合著五卷本《哲學人類學研究》，據說為早年新盧汶大學的哲學教本之一。她和Taminiaux都是五十年代去巴黎留學，上過 Ricoeur和Merleau-Ponty課的學生。她首經在1992年來中國參加倫理學的學術會議。
6. Marc Richir
比利時藉
他長期在比利時布魯塞爾任教，間中在法國兼課，著有大量現象學著作。他主持了一個出版系列，取胡塞爾晚年思考核心為名，Krisis (危機)。這個系列是法語世界研究現象學和德意志觀念論不可少的叢書。我個人比較喜歡他早年兩本書，Du sublime en politique (1991) 和 Le rien et son apparence (1979)，兩者都針對現象學，可是卻不直接從現象學的討論出發，而更多從Fichte和Schelling出發，對我的啟發頗大。
7. William Desmond
愛爾蘭出生
他原本在美國完成博士和任教，後來獲邀到舊魯汶大學，一直用英文書寫和指導學生作黑格爾研究，例如國內學者劉哲。他有三卷重要著作Being and the Between (1995), Ethics and the Between(2001)和God and the Between (2008)。如果你對歐洲哲學的形上學不明所以，不妨一讀他的書，行文流暢，少學究味道，務求逐步令讀者明白哲學史上重要的哲學家如何闡釋形上學探究，最後他提出the between這一思路來走出黑格爾哲學的困難，而又能令形上學恢復生機。我正在讀Being and the between，此書五白多頁，英文世界鮮有如此詳細而又少學究氣的書寫。
8. Rudolf Bernet (1946- )
比利時藉
眾所週知，他的著作是研究現象學者必讀的佳作。他的著作以四種語文發表,荷文,英文,法文和德文，希望將來有更多的中文譯本。
後記:
Jean Ladrière有一長文名為Cent ans de philosophie à l'Institut Supérieur de Philosophie (哲學高等學院一百年來的哲學),勾勒十九世紀末以來一百年的新舊盧汶大學的哲學研究發展(新舊盧汶大學在60年代開始分立)及重要著作(荷文,法文和拉丁文),當中特別提到De Waelhens和Van Breda兩位學者引入現象學和心理分析的貢獻,有助進一步確立哲學人類學的研究傳統。當然,天主教神學研究一直是盧汶大學的傳統,但是他認為經過近一百年的發展,不論神學或其他哲學,都突顯出思考人本身這個根本課題。或可從這個角度,一窺盧汶的哲學風格。
1. Alphonse De Waelhens (1911-1981)
比利時藉
差不多是最早討論Merleau-Ponty的學者，在上世紀40年代開始以法文撰寫胡塞爾、海德格和心理分析的著作。他指導過眾多學生，如 Ghislaine Florival, Jacques Taminiaux，美國學者Alphonso Lingis,和比利時學者Rudolf Bernet,德國學者Rudolf Boehm。Lingis是美國最早期研究Merleau-Ponty和Levinas的學者之一，翻譯了Merleau-Ponty晚年手稿和 Levinas的重要著作為英文。Boehm是Merleau-Ponty的知覺現象學的德文翻譯者。
2. Herman Leo Van Breda (1911-1974)
比利時藉
他在盧汶大學以荷文撰寫胡塞爾為題的博士論文。最有名的事迹，當然是30年代把胡塞爾的手稿運到比利時魯汶大學，成立胡塞爾檔案館，並組織大量學者整理和編輯手槁出版。他指導了眾多學生，例如在美國發展的Robert Sokolowski, 在德國發展的Elmar Holenstein, 還有不少胡塞爾全集編者，如Eduard Marbach, Brand Gerd。
3. Jean Ladrière (1921-2007)
比利時藉
據老師說，他是邏輯學專家，同時又研究傳統歐洲哲學，如德意志觀念論。他指導過眾多學生，例如台灣學者沈清松，新盧汶大學的Marc Maesschalck。Maesschalck的研究範圍非常廣，博士論文以謝林哲學為題，由德意志觀念論至海德格，法蘭克福批判學派、治理理論、傅柯、政治行動的理論和道德理論等。
4. Jacques Taminiaux (1928- )
比利時藉
據統計，Taminiaux教授是指導了最多學生的新盧汶大學的教授，1954年以柏格森哲學和傳統的二元論為題完成論文，1967年以德意志觀念論和希臘思想的關聯為題拿到教席。他指導過大量學生研究黑格爾、胡塞爾、海德格、Merleau-Ponty和Levinas，例如台灣學者丁原植以英文撰寫海德格和道家為題的博士論文（他在1990年完成，比張祥龍在美國以相近題目的博士論文，更早兩年），法國女學者Françoise Dastur，任教於盧森堡的比利時藉學者Robert Brisart。他有一本書研究Hannah Arendt和海德格，是我最喜歡他的一本書。
5. Ghislaine Florival (1929- )
比利時藉
她以普魯斯特的欲望(désir)為題在魯汶大學拿到博士，是六十年代少數的文學和哲學女教授，指導過大量學生研究Merleau-Ponty和 Levinas，例如內地學者佘碧平，意大利學者Mauro Carbone和比利時梅洛龐蒂學者Raphaël Gély。她和同事合著五卷本《哲學人類學研究》，據說為早年新盧汶大學的哲學教本之一。她和Taminiaux都是五十年代去巴黎留學，上過 Ricoeur和Merleau-Ponty課的學生。她首經在1992年來中國參加倫理學的學術會議。
6. Marc Richir
比利時藉
他長期在比利時布魯塞爾任教，間中在法國兼課，著有大量現象學著作。他主持了一個出版系列，取胡塞爾晚年思考核心為名，Krisis (危機)。這個系列是法語世界研究現象學和德意志觀念論不可少的叢書。我個人比較喜歡他早年兩本書，Du sublime en politique (1991) 和 Le rien et son apparence (1979)，兩者都針對現象學，可是卻不直接從現象學的討論出發，而更多從Fichte和Schelling出發，對我的啟發頗大。
7. William Desmond
愛爾蘭出生
他原本在美國完成博士和任教，後來獲邀到舊魯汶大學，一直用英文書寫和指導學生作黑格爾研究，例如國內學者劉哲。他有三卷重要著作Being and the Between (1995), Ethics and the Between(2001)和God and the Between (2008)。如果你對歐洲哲學的形上學不明所以，不妨一讀他的書，行文流暢，少學究味道，務求逐步令讀者明白哲學史上重要的哲學家如何闡釋形上學探究，最後他提出the between這一思路來走出黑格爾哲學的困難，而又能令形上學恢復生機。我正在讀Being and the between，此書五白多頁，英文世界鮮有如此詳細而又少學究氣的書寫。
8. Rudolf Bernet (1946- )
比利時藉
眾所週知，他的著作是研究現象學者必讀的佳作。他的著作以四種語文發表,荷文,英文,法文和德文，希望將來有更多的中文譯本。
後記:
Jean Ladrière有一長文名為Cent ans de philosophie à l'Institut Supérieur de Philosophie (哲學高等學院一百年來的哲學),勾勒十九世紀末以來一百年的新舊盧汶大學的哲學研究發展(新舊盧汶大學在60年代開始分立)及重要著作(荷文,法文和拉丁文),當中特別提到De Waelhens和Van Breda兩位學者引入現象學和心理分析的貢獻,有助進一步確立哲學人類學的研究傳統。當然,天主教神學研究一直是盧汶大學的傳統,但是他認為經過近一百年的發展,不論神學或其他哲學,都突顯出思考人本身這個根本課題。或可從這個角度,一窺盧汶的哲學風格。
Toulouse短遊雜感
Toulouse回來後，一件小事掛在心頭。我看見一個既不在香港出生，現在又不在香港工作和居住的中國人，在國藉上填上「香港」和另一個西方國家。我想，香港有一定的吸引力。
遇到有一個美國學生，她來過中國幾天，她有兩個印象：一是她認為美國，特別是奧巴馬上台後，比中國更社會主義，二是她很喜歡香港這個先進而獨特的城市。第二點，我自然高興地讚同，第一點我卻相當無奈。
香港到底有多國際呢？出國後，我經常試圖回答這個問題。我在巴黎的街頭，努力地找「法蘭西多士」，企圖驗証一下它的來源，當然遍尋不獲。我問過不少人，法國有什麼獨特小吃，可是來來去去都不過是crêpe（字典翻譯為「油煎雞蛋薄餅」，類似我小時候吃的「薄餐」，是廣東人的小吃），配以不同口味，可以加上果醬、火腿或別的東西。我心目中的小吃是，逢甲夜市，或者北京王府井，既便宜又野味，可是看來法國就是不喜歡這樣的飲食文化。精緻高雅的餐廳，又不是一般人負擔得起。我家沒有焗爐，自然做不到烤羊脾烤雞焗蛋糕之類的食物。於是，常常吃面包和三文治，直至遇到一個新加坡年青人問我為什麼歐洲的面包那麼硬，入口很不舒服，我才發覺，已經一年沒有再問這個問題了。
說回香港，在語言方面，香港的確是相當國際化。新加坡人被歐洲人以為是美國人，因為他們不懂分辦新加坡英語的獨特口音，可是大家都知道，這一片英語文化的地方，一般都不喜歡學其他語言的，當然美國不同區域或專門人才有例外。日本人一般英文不行，所以他們無法跟美國人，甚至同是亞洲的新加坡人或印度人溝通。我可以跟日本人講法文，也可以跟美國人講英文，雖然兩者均不甚流利，甚至帶有強烈廣東話口音（即是部份尾音會急速切斷，部份音節會不自覺加重語氣），但起碼也可以偶然充當美國人和法國人之間的翻譯，或者亞洲人之間的橋樑。有時跟新加坡人講國語（他們稱為華語，我小時候大家用台灣名稱，稱之為「國語」，現在則幾乎都用大陸名稱，稱之為「普通話」了），這時候就發覺，原來香港人真的很努力地適應時代的變化，包括一國兩制的名存實亡。
我經常跟台灣人說，千萬不要信鄧小平的詭計，一聽此話，他們自然對我另眼相看，有英雄所見略同之感，或許可以藉此騙來一杯啤酒。話絕對不是亂說，你看西環不就成了香港的總指揮嗎？我們早該明白曾特首說要打好呢份工，是說給誰聽的。跟日本的年青人說起，他們知道一國兩制這回事，我說這不過是共產黨的宣傳罷了，天下間的共產黨在控制言論自由方面，不論是東德、捷克或蘇聯，都一樣。日本的年青人沒有經歷過共產黨，他們不明白什麼叫統戰，我也不知道該怎樣解釋，大概就像浦沢直樹的漫畫Monster那樣。
還是說回香港。記得在巴黎某個火車站，遇到一對香港夫婦，他們說到英國和法國的差別，說到做事，自然是英國人更為有效率和可靠，那些法國人連上班也可以帶埋隻狗，你話點可以專心工作，香港人早就炒左啦。另一個畫面令我相當難忘，可能是自聽懂法文以來最難忘的：三個學者同坐在台上作報告，左邊是法國人，中間是英國人，右邊是美國人。美國人一直帶著耳機聽即時傳譯，英國人是某大學的法文系主任，西裝筆挺，袋巾顏色奪目，一直用英式英文夾英式幽默演講，內容引述法國作家的部份，全部以字正腔圓的法文讀出，讀到某些文意曲折修辭深邃的句子時，加以誇張的表情，以示難以理解。法國人穿的恤衫跟我的差不多有同樣的皺摺痕跡，他滿頭白髮，不，嚴格來說，由前額至後腦全禿，白髮僅集中在兩耳之上張開來，像畫中的叔本華一樣。
說來說去，好像還未真的說到香港。我這個土生土長的香港人，在國藉上毫不猶豫地填上「中國」，不論1997年之前，或者之後。
遇到有一個美國學生，她來過中國幾天，她有兩個印象：一是她認為美國，特別是奧巴馬上台後，比中國更社會主義，二是她很喜歡香港這個先進而獨特的城市。第二點，我自然高興地讚同，第一點我卻相當無奈。
香港到底有多國際呢？出國後，我經常試圖回答這個問題。我在巴黎的街頭，努力地找「法蘭西多士」，企圖驗証一下它的來源，當然遍尋不獲。我問過不少人，法國有什麼獨特小吃，可是來來去去都不過是crêpe（字典翻譯為「油煎雞蛋薄餅」，類似我小時候吃的「薄餐」，是廣東人的小吃），配以不同口味，可以加上果醬、火腿或別的東西。我心目中的小吃是，逢甲夜市，或者北京王府井，既便宜又野味，可是看來法國就是不喜歡這樣的飲食文化。精緻高雅的餐廳，又不是一般人負擔得起。我家沒有焗爐，自然做不到烤羊脾烤雞焗蛋糕之類的食物。於是，常常吃面包和三文治，直至遇到一個新加坡年青人問我為什麼歐洲的面包那麼硬，入口很不舒服，我才發覺，已經一年沒有再問這個問題了。
說回香港，在語言方面，香港的確是相當國際化。新加坡人被歐洲人以為是美國人，因為他們不懂分辦新加坡英語的獨特口音，可是大家都知道，這一片英語文化的地方，一般都不喜歡學其他語言的，當然美國不同區域或專門人才有例外。日本人一般英文不行，所以他們無法跟美國人，甚至同是亞洲的新加坡人或印度人溝通。我可以跟日本人講法文，也可以跟美國人講英文，雖然兩者均不甚流利，甚至帶有強烈廣東話口音（即是部份尾音會急速切斷，部份音節會不自覺加重語氣），但起碼也可以偶然充當美國人和法國人之間的翻譯，或者亞洲人之間的橋樑。有時跟新加坡人講國語（他們稱為華語，我小時候大家用台灣名稱，稱之為「國語」，現在則幾乎都用大陸名稱，稱之為「普通話」了），這時候就發覺，原來香港人真的很努力地適應時代的變化，包括一國兩制的名存實亡。
我經常跟台灣人說，千萬不要信鄧小平的詭計，一聽此話，他們自然對我另眼相看，有英雄所見略同之感，或許可以藉此騙來一杯啤酒。話絕對不是亂說，你看西環不就成了香港的總指揮嗎？我們早該明白曾特首說要打好呢份工，是說給誰聽的。跟日本的年青人說起，他們知道一國兩制這回事，我說這不過是共產黨的宣傳罷了，天下間的共產黨在控制言論自由方面，不論是東德、捷克或蘇聯，都一樣。日本的年青人沒有經歷過共產黨，他們不明白什麼叫統戰，我也不知道該怎樣解釋，大概就像浦沢直樹的漫畫Monster那樣。
還是說回香港。記得在巴黎某個火車站，遇到一對香港夫婦，他們說到英國和法國的差別，說到做事，自然是英國人更為有效率和可靠，那些法國人連上班也可以帶埋隻狗，你話點可以專心工作，香港人早就炒左啦。另一個畫面令我相當難忘，可能是自聽懂法文以來最難忘的：三個學者同坐在台上作報告，左邊是法國人，中間是英國人，右邊是美國人。美國人一直帶著耳機聽即時傳譯，英國人是某大學的法文系主任，西裝筆挺，袋巾顏色奪目，一直用英式英文夾英式幽默演講，內容引述法國作家的部份，全部以字正腔圓的法文讀出，讀到某些文意曲折修辭深邃的句子時，加以誇張的表情，以示難以理解。法國人穿的恤衫跟我的差不多有同樣的皺摺痕跡，他滿頭白髮，不，嚴格來說，由前額至後腦全禿，白髮僅集中在兩耳之上張開來，像畫中的叔本華一樣。
說來說去，好像還未真的說到香港。我這個土生土長的香港人，在國藉上毫不猶豫地填上「中國」，不論1997年之前，或者之後。
社會行動不是哲學思考
離港還不到一年，看到有可能出現第二次市民包圍立法會，要求政府撤回議案。有香港的朋友跟我說，他對最近的某些社會行動很不滿，特別是八十後青年，以象徵性行動，來號召支持，鼓吹企硬就是英雄，離理性反思越來越遠。我不知道有沒有理解錯他的想法，也許這也代表一些市民的想法。
聽到這些想法，心裡確實很焦慮，因為這可能意味著那一連串的社會行動沒有受到認真看待和理解。我未試過包圍立法會，除了在媒體上，我也未親眼目睹過成百上千人衝向禮賓府示威，也許我的想法是沒有實質証據的。我感覺到，不是「社會不滿的聲音越來越大，行動越來越激進」，而是「越來越多人願意純粹以市民身份來就社會議題而監察政府，提出自己的意見」。想一想，包圍立法會並不是沒有代價的，原本的時間可以用來上班賺取名譽和金錢，也可以拿來放假輕鬆，誰樂意整個晚上勞氣而委屈自己坐在地上，等待政府官員和保皇議員發落？中環晚上並不容易找到公厠，而且香港人多，你不可能像外國一樣，到處在草地或沒人經過的角落行個方便。這些人不過是為了屬於整個社會的事務，為那些沒有空閒關注，甚至他們沒有能力關注的人來行動，經過反高鐵的事情後大家很清楚，代價是可能會被拘捕的。
包圍立法會，堵塞交通，的確妨礙了議員官員的出入自由。同時，他們要建高鐵，也妨礙了不少人享受大自然的自由。這不是說享受大自然比出入自由更有價值，而是說社會決策的後果是必須共同承擔的，而且，往往有些人比另一些人承擔更多。經常坐高鐵的人，多數不會去鐵路沿線旅遊，可是住在鐵路沿線的居民，或負擔不起長途旅遊的人，就少了一些可供欣賞的自然生態了。就像建一座朗豪坊，它令附近的唐樓要承受更大的城市熱島效應，可是你開車來的，坐地鐵來，就不用考慮這些成本了。
呂大樂的說法，我玩味了很久，現在還不十分確定他的意思。我理解到的是，他認為如果我們今天接受包圍立法會是合理的行動規範，則我們也應當接受他人這樣對待我們，如果我們不接受，那表示我們也不應如此對待他人。假如中央接受比民主黨區議會改良方案更進步的方案，而民建聯堅決反對，因為市民對增加民主成份沒有共識，而要求按原來方案來表決，於是召集一大群支持者來反對民主黨和政府。這個假想當然是天方夜譚，原因很簡單，雖然保皇黨經常指民主派搞分化，可是，實際上我們的社會從沒出現過兩種不同立場，而動員能力是勢均力敵的黨派，也就是從沒有勢均力敵的對壘造成的分化。選票上或許有勢均力敵的情況，可是投票對市民來說，是各種社會行動裡成本最低的。我們何曾見過批評政府的七一遊行外，有另外一個支持政府，或持不同立場批評政府的遊行，而又具同樣聲勢的？這些市民即使要負如此高成本，也要採取行動，這說明了他們的訴求遠比其他人強烈，並樂意以遊行示威集會來公開表達，呼籲更多人關注和表達意見。我不明白的是，為什麼某些人不接受包圍立法會，就是過激，政府應當採取果斷行動清場，而不是倒過來，包圍者不接受其他人不反包圍，或某些旁觀者不接受另一些旁觀者漠不關心，而要求政府採取行動？我想，這反映了表面看似是和平抗爭的底線，而實際上是以警察可否立即拘捕為準則的。
外國的朋友說起，我們其實怎麼知道混在集會和遊行的人沒有警察便衣或其他黨派的滋事分子？凡是有遊行經驗的，都幾乎可以肯定地回答有，問題只在於他們是否會作出一些行動來搗亂，或催化集會遊行的氣氛以致失控，讓警察拘捕或媒體譴責有機可乘。在這樣一個複雜的情況裡，和平抗爭的底線不是沒有，例如蓄意傷害他人身體，但是這條底線之下，卻不一定都來自示威者的衝擊，也可以是警察部署或滋事份子的計謀，也可以是旁觀者的挑釁或感到不受尊重被抹黑等，可是媒體報道並沒有辦法作出調查，旁觀者也不可能完全掌握。基於這些考慮，追究示威者的責任時，必須要考慮不單純來自示威者的因素，而這往往是難以完全預料和公開追討的。在這個角度看，示威者的成本有可能比當初參與時預計為高，因為警察可否立即拘捕這條底線，可以不是來自示威者衝擊的，當群眾情緒一旦受刺激或鼓動，就可能會集體地認同要逾越這條底線。這是集體行動自然具有的心理狀況，這不一定等如合理，無可批評，而是批評的時候需要考慮到，集體行動和旁觀者各自分離的行動有重大不同，就像安坐家中的電視機前，不會感受到身後的警察給你的壓力，身旁的陌生人給你默默的認同一樣。
我沒法像保皇黨那樣給一個簡單的回答，社會有共識或沒有共識，包圍立法會一定是不恰當或恰當的。同時，我無法不反問，為什麼我們覺得示威者包圍立法會就一定會對官員和議員造成危險？香港比合法持有槍械的國家更為安全，而且，警察完全有能力在立法會及附近大樓設員監察示威者是否有武器，只要官員和議員不是站在高台上，有生命危險的機會是相當低的。人身安全這條底線從來沒有人踰越，究竟他們是否害怕面對積極的社會行動者，害怕市民自己組織起來，威脅到政府和保皇黨的聯盟，而急於要國家機器來遏制？旁觀者是否不願意面對示威者正面宣示的訊息，社會事務的後果大家早晚要共同承擔，而且肯定的是有些人比另一些人承擔得更多？
社會行動當然不是哲學思考，它無法回答我朋友的質疑。我想到了另一個場合，在香港歷史博物館裡，有幾個場景和展品提及石硤尾大火導致公共房屋政策，又有一部舊衣車，表現香港六七十年代的工業成就。展品本身不會說話，可是它卻告訴了你片面甚至是失實的歷史：誰都知道木屋區大火，五六十年代無日無之，木屋區不僅會發生火警，也會山泥傾瀉，徧徧麥理浩十年建屋計劃並不是火警或山泥傾瀉造成的。香港當年的工業成就如果不是廉價供應美國和歐洲的市場，如果不是數十萬的婦女勞工付出一生的職業病，網球手、頸椎和腰背勞損，我們這一輩八十後也不可能三餐溫飽地長大。哲學思考沒有告訴我這些東西，我想，這也不是她的責任。
聽到這些想法，心裡確實很焦慮，因為這可能意味著那一連串的社會行動沒有受到認真看待和理解。我未試過包圍立法會，除了在媒體上，我也未親眼目睹過成百上千人衝向禮賓府示威，也許我的想法是沒有實質証據的。我感覺到，不是「社會不滿的聲音越來越大，行動越來越激進」，而是「越來越多人願意純粹以市民身份來就社會議題而監察政府，提出自己的意見」。想一想，包圍立法會並不是沒有代價的，原本的時間可以用來上班賺取名譽和金錢，也可以拿來放假輕鬆，誰樂意整個晚上勞氣而委屈自己坐在地上，等待政府官員和保皇議員發落？中環晚上並不容易找到公厠，而且香港人多，你不可能像外國一樣，到處在草地或沒人經過的角落行個方便。這些人不過是為了屬於整個社會的事務，為那些沒有空閒關注，甚至他們沒有能力關注的人來行動，經過反高鐵的事情後大家很清楚，代價是可能會被拘捕的。
包圍立法會，堵塞交通，的確妨礙了議員官員的出入自由。同時，他們要建高鐵，也妨礙了不少人享受大自然的自由。這不是說享受大自然比出入自由更有價值，而是說社會決策的後果是必須共同承擔的，而且，往往有些人比另一些人承擔更多。經常坐高鐵的人，多數不會去鐵路沿線旅遊，可是住在鐵路沿線的居民，或負擔不起長途旅遊的人，就少了一些可供欣賞的自然生態了。就像建一座朗豪坊，它令附近的唐樓要承受更大的城市熱島效應，可是你開車來的，坐地鐵來，就不用考慮這些成本了。
呂大樂的說法，我玩味了很久，現在還不十分確定他的意思。我理解到的是，他認為如果我們今天接受包圍立法會是合理的行動規範，則我們也應當接受他人這樣對待我們，如果我們不接受，那表示我們也不應如此對待他人。假如中央接受比民主黨區議會改良方案更進步的方案，而民建聯堅決反對，因為市民對增加民主成份沒有共識，而要求按原來方案來表決，於是召集一大群支持者來反對民主黨和政府。這個假想當然是天方夜譚，原因很簡單，雖然保皇黨經常指民主派搞分化，可是，實際上我們的社會從沒出現過兩種不同立場，而動員能力是勢均力敵的黨派，也就是從沒有勢均力敵的對壘造成的分化。選票上或許有勢均力敵的情況，可是投票對市民來說，是各種社會行動裡成本最低的。我們何曾見過批評政府的七一遊行外，有另外一個支持政府，或持不同立場批評政府的遊行，而又具同樣聲勢的？這些市民即使要負如此高成本，也要採取行動，這說明了他們的訴求遠比其他人強烈，並樂意以遊行示威集會來公開表達，呼籲更多人關注和表達意見。我不明白的是，為什麼某些人不接受包圍立法會，就是過激，政府應當採取果斷行動清場，而不是倒過來，包圍者不接受其他人不反包圍，或某些旁觀者不接受另一些旁觀者漠不關心，而要求政府採取行動？我想，這反映了表面看似是和平抗爭的底線，而實際上是以警察可否立即拘捕為準則的。
外國的朋友說起，我們其實怎麼知道混在集會和遊行的人沒有警察便衣或其他黨派的滋事分子？凡是有遊行經驗的，都幾乎可以肯定地回答有，問題只在於他們是否會作出一些行動來搗亂，或催化集會遊行的氣氛以致失控，讓警察拘捕或媒體譴責有機可乘。在這樣一個複雜的情況裡，和平抗爭的底線不是沒有，例如蓄意傷害他人身體，但是這條底線之下，卻不一定都來自示威者的衝擊，也可以是警察部署或滋事份子的計謀，也可以是旁觀者的挑釁或感到不受尊重被抹黑等，可是媒體報道並沒有辦法作出調查，旁觀者也不可能完全掌握。基於這些考慮，追究示威者的責任時，必須要考慮不單純來自示威者的因素，而這往往是難以完全預料和公開追討的。在這個角度看，示威者的成本有可能比當初參與時預計為高，因為警察可否立即拘捕這條底線，可以不是來自示威者衝擊的，當群眾情緒一旦受刺激或鼓動，就可能會集體地認同要逾越這條底線。這是集體行動自然具有的心理狀況，這不一定等如合理，無可批評，而是批評的時候需要考慮到，集體行動和旁觀者各自分離的行動有重大不同，就像安坐家中的電視機前，不會感受到身後的警察給你的壓力，身旁的陌生人給你默默的認同一樣。
我沒法像保皇黨那樣給一個簡單的回答，社會有共識或沒有共識，包圍立法會一定是不恰當或恰當的。同時，我無法不反問，為什麼我們覺得示威者包圍立法會就一定會對官員和議員造成危險？香港比合法持有槍械的國家更為安全，而且，警察完全有能力在立法會及附近大樓設員監察示威者是否有武器，只要官員和議員不是站在高台上，有生命危險的機會是相當低的。人身安全這條底線從來沒有人踰越，究竟他們是否害怕面對積極的社會行動者，害怕市民自己組織起來，威脅到政府和保皇黨的聯盟，而急於要國家機器來遏制？旁觀者是否不願意面對示威者正面宣示的訊息，社會事務的後果大家早晚要共同承擔，而且肯定的是有些人比另一些人承擔得更多？
社會行動當然不是哲學思考，它無法回答我朋友的質疑。我想到了另一個場合，在香港歷史博物館裡，有幾個場景和展品提及石硤尾大火導致公共房屋政策，又有一部舊衣車，表現香港六七十年代的工業成就。展品本身不會說話，可是它卻告訴了你片面甚至是失實的歷史：誰都知道木屋區大火，五六十年代無日無之，木屋區不僅會發生火警，也會山泥傾瀉，徧徧麥理浩十年建屋計劃並不是火警或山泥傾瀉造成的。香港當年的工業成就如果不是廉價供應美國和歐洲的市場，如果不是數十萬的婦女勞工付出一生的職業病，網球手、頸椎和腰背勞損，我們這一輩八十後也不可能三餐溫飽地長大。哲學思考沒有告訴我這些東西，我想，這也不是她的責任。
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