The Origins, Schools And Change Of Neo-Marxist Theories Of Urban Politics

The city as the most basic forms of production and life of human society organizations is increasingly becoming an important object of social science research. Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States as the representative of the Western academia has published numerous books about the city government, making the city gradually detached from political science and political science, to become relatively independent branch, in a sense, modern politics is the city’s politics. As a great change in the history of human thought, Marxist political theory generated on the development and improvement of the city has an indelible impact. Marx and Engels’ theory of development and urban development are closely linked, Marxist classical writers rich discussion of production and urban issues, making study of Marxist political theory become urban social structure and understanding the basic principles of Marxism important part of the capitalist city.Since the1960s, the theme of cities has transformed to the social conflicts from the social integration. The western developed capitalist society entered into a recession period after a long-term postwar stability and prosperity. The transformation of the urban problems urgently requires the update of the research paradigm. The French Marxists are the first to bring the urban problems into the Marxist theoretical paradigm. They study the urban problems in stressing the framework of production mode and try to reveal the internal contradiction between the urban spatial development and the production mode of capitalist, and to discover the logic relevance of class struggles, based on which they created New Marxism city school. This school begins with Henri Lefebvre, founded by Castells, is further developed by an American—David Harvey later on.Marxist theories of urban politics are defined here as those which situate ’the urban’ and ’politics’within a Marxist theorization of capitalism. This implies:A: that the urban is conceived as a locus of the contradictory and crisis-ridden process of capital accumulationB: that, capitalist class relations provide a fundamental perspective on urban politicsC: a recognition of the ideological content of categories such as ’the urban’ and of the bourgeois separation of the’political’, the’social’ and the’economic’.