1. Today I'm going to talk about one method we can use to understand urban life which shows up in your readings for today, particularly in Gordon's article in the reader on capitalist development. Gordon, and Godfrey to a certain extent as well in the section of the book you read for today, are both using Marxist ideas to explain urban development and change.
2. What I want to do for you is to give an overview of what a Marxist analysis looks like, and how it can be used very usefully as a tool to explain both urban structures and social life. I'll return to both Gordon and Godrey at various points to give you an idea of how they're using Marxism.
3. First of all, I should note that the Marxist theories I'm going to talk about do not all come from the writings of Karl Marx, who you probably know as the 19th Century philosopher and communist who wrote The Communist Manifesto and a giant, extremely detailed and occasionally boring set of books called Capital. Just as background, I'll note that Marx is a key figure because he began developing ideas about how our current economic system, captitalism, affects human relationships. And Marx is actually most famous for explaining just how capitalism works to create profit for some people and poverty for many others. That was in the big series of books called Capital. He was also, of course, in favor of getting rid of capitalism because he basically thought it was unfair for some people to get rich off of the labor of the comparatively impoverished workers. Marx proposed that capitalism was destructive because it left so many people poor and unemployed, and that eventually it would have to be scrapped as a system in favor of something better, which he called communism. Marx's idea of communism, by the way, has little if nothing at all to do with what happened in the former soviet union and what continues to happen in mainland China. For Marx, communism was simply a way of describing a society where there was no class division, that is, no rich people getting rich off of the labor of poor people. That's what communism boils down to, for Marx: no class division, and no bosses using you for cheap labor. In a communist society, everybody would be equals.
4. But today I'll be mostly talking about theories that people have developed in the twentieth century, particularly in the last thirty years, which are heavily influenced by Marx, but talk about issues and problems that Marx did not himself tackle. I want to introduce you to three concepts from Marxist theory, which are quite valuable for our purposes in this class. They are: base, superstructure, and ideology (on board). Just for your information, most of my ideas about these concepts come from Raymond Williams, a British Marxist (quoted in the opening page of Gordon) who is still writing, and Louis Althusser, a French Marxist who died in the 1970s.
5. Diagram: Superstructure <--------> Ideology <----------> Base
6. Base is material reality and social relations. City structures, people on street, etc. Superstructure is a set of ideas, cultures, and beliefs -- this could include, for example, believing in capitalism, or family values, or punk rock. Anything which is a whole set of ideas, or sets of ideas. Base is always in communication with superstructure, and vice versa. How do they communicate? Through ideology (draw in arrows). Ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, and human relationships which affect material reality (one arrow), and at the same time its a set of ideas, beliefs, and social relationships which are in part created by material reality. So, base and superstructure exist in this perpetual conversation with each other using the language of ideology. But of, course, what's most important to remember is that every step of the way here we have human beings creating all three things. In other words, people use ideology as a way of connecting the base with the superstructure, and vice versa.
7. What is powerful about ideology is that people can use it to change physical reality. Let me give you some examples. Right now, in SF, there's a huge debate about a new stadium. Ideas about what is good for the city -- that is superstructural stuff -- will affect the base -- whether or not we get a physical stadium in the city. Using ideology, both sides of the debate will try to use their ideas to change the physical landscape of SF. Another example would be what Chris talked about in class on Tuesday when he mentioned the way citizen's groups in the 1950s stopped the state from building freeways all over SF. The state wanted to change the physical shape of the city, it's base, but citizen's action groups had different ideas and used community organization to change the future shape of SF. By using their alternative ideology, they changed the base and superstructure of the city -- they changed people's minds and ideas about how the city should look, and they made sure it's base -- its physical reality -- would not be marred by freeways.
8. Now I'm going to give you two more examples of how ideology works to create specific relationships between base and superstructure in the media. I'm going to show you two clips -- TV and movie -- which show San Francisco. Now, as you probably already know, the mass media is one place where you can often find pure, distilled ideology at work, trying to create a specific relationship between base and superstructure, and sometimes trying to change the base and superstructure themselves. Both clips are opening credits which are intended to frame the story, introduce you to one particular way of viewing San Francisco -- one is the opening credits for TV show "Full House" (old credits, sitcom about an alternative family in SF with three dads and three daughters -- now, if you keep up with the show, it's about three dads, three daughters, one mom and two sons, but whatever). Second from Interview With the Vampire, which takes place partly in San Francisco. Note how each set of credits show the physical reality of San Francisco, coupled with a very different superstructure. We see ideology cementing physical scenes to specific ideas and moods. [clips]
9. Note how both begin with shot of bridges. First, happy, joyful family. In daytime, with happy beautiful people mostly in parks, in the house. Very middle-class, very suburban even when in an urban location. Focus on children, and family values. We see San Francisco the city very little -- in other words the physical reality of San Francisco is sort of taken away from us and replaced by parks and the inside of a very nice, expensive house. In a basic sense, what we have here is middle-class ideology trying to convince us that San Francisco is a nice place for family values to bloom, and that biases the way we see the city. Second clip focuses on darkness, descends into streets where we see poor people, regular folks, wetness, dirtiness, etc. This is a story about a vampire, Louis, who sometimes preys upon poor people in urban places because they aren't usually missed. Here we see a vastly different view of the city, as a crowded, anonymous place where the poor and alone are potential prey for a vampire. Both clips show San Francisco as a physical place, but both present vastly different ideas about SF. Their superstructure is different, you might say, and thus the ideology of the TV show and movie convey a very different message to us about the city itself. The differences here show graphically how ideology can be used to vastly change the city by changing the relationship between base and superstructure.
10. Now, let's return to what we read for today, and get back to how capitalism fits into all of this. Capitalism is, as you know, an economic system -- Gordon talks a lot about this in his article, and talks about how capitalism works. It is also an ideology, that is to say, it is both a set of beliefs and a set of material realities. So, for example, this is why Gordon is eager to explain how physical structures in the city -- its base -- changed as a result of new developments in economic ideas and human relations. So, for example, Gordon argues on p. 26 (p. 184 in the reader):... That is, machines in capitalism develop to control people, and spacial forms -- ie, urban forms -- reproduce capitalist control and classes (people). What he's saying is simply this: capitalism is an ideology which creates both material machines/cities which maintain it, and also maintain ideas about how people should act. Quick example of this: computer work in cubicles. Want workers to do lots of boring work. How? Keep them isolated (so they don't revolt). Also, keep them entertained (Internet). And, keep them fed (money). Base and superstructure both locked together in an unhealthy relationship by capitalism. Why unhealthy? It keeps people poor, underemployed, bored, lonely, and isolated. Capitalism is thus what you might call a dysfunctional ideology, because what it does is maintain class divisions both on an emotional or human level, and on a physical level. Perfect example of this would be Chinatown. Racism, superstructurally, and, physically, a bad place to live. Caused by competition between workers, basically -- fighting for money. That's also why so many movies right now about life in the black ghetto are about the importance of money -- money, or capital, is the invisible wall which holds the ghetto in and the rest of the city out. The ghetto is another creation of capitalism, which gets perpetuated by racism and by bad physical structures and resources. Godrey talks a little bit about this in chapter 2, particularly when he says that minority neighborhoods are both cultural and physical.
11. Now I want to conclude with a final point about history and historical analysis in relation to Marxism. Marxist analysis, as I've been showing you, is an effort to name the relationships between base, superstructure, and ideology. The purpose of doing this is, mostly, to make people aware of how their social and physical world got constructed, and why. Marxism helps us connect intangibles like ideas with tangibles like bus schedules, ghettos, and money.
12. Here's where history fits in. History is also a form of belief, as we know. It's part of our base and superstructure -- and what we believe about history can dramatically change how we understand the present and future. That's why minority groups have fought to have their histories included in mainstream history books -- if you don't realize that slavery happened, or that there was a Chinese Exclusion Act, that these are historical events, you won't understand why Chinatown exists, or why ghettos got created. If you don't realize that, historically, capitalism created urban poverty by grouping a large number of workers into a small space in order to use their labor, slums would seem like random events -- more likely, they would seem to be the fault of the people who live there instead of a logical extension of historical events. That is, history is a very, very powerful ideology which helps to create the present.
13. Marxists are deeply interested in history, becuase when you look at historical events you can begin to see how the superstructure and the base interact to create, for example, contemporary SF. That was the point of those photos Chris showed us on Tuesday, when we switched back and forth between images of old and new SF -- we were watching how historical SF had been different from the present and got changed by the ideology of capitalism. In several cases, land developers eager for more money had changed the landscape in order to get that money. That's why Gordon is obsessed with telling you how capitalism changed the way cities look, moving industry into the heart of urban areas, then moving corporate headquarters into them, and moving the workers around all the time to keep them isolated and confused so they wouldn't organize effectively for better pay and better working conditions. So knowing your history makes it much easier for you to flesh out a relationship between base and superstructure.
14. Now I'm going to leave you with a mind-blowing idea from Louis Althusser, the cool French Marxist I mentioned earlier. He once wrote, "Ideology has no history." (on board). Think about this today, as you think about the ideologies around you helping to link up the base and superstructure. Why doesn't ideology have a history? Because ideology -- in this case, the ideology of capitalism -- doesn't want us to know that the base and superstructure could be any different than they are now. You'll notice that our pal the Marxist writer Gordon suggests at the end of his article, "quote." When you don't know that history helped to create the present, and that things were once different from they are today, it's impossible to imagine changing the world for the better. When you look at things from the point of view of capitalist ideology, everything looks capitalist forever and everywhere. That's why ideology has no history.
15. The point of Marxism is to give us back our history, to give us knowledge about where our current social and urban systems come from and what groups of people are responsible for them. Knowing that capitalism has changed social reality, also empowers us, because we realize that if we take matters into our own hands we can change social reality too -- and make things better. That's what Marx hoped for over 100 years ago when he talked about communinsm, and that's what we mean today when we talk about promoting equality and ending class divisions which ghettoize some people and put other people in penthouses. Ideology has no history, but people do, and that's what Marxism tries to tell us about.