Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City [Paperback]

Andrew Merrifield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0415933498 | ISBN-13: 978-0415933490

"Metromarxism" discusses Marxism's relationship with the city from the 1850s to the present by way of biographical chapters on figures from the Marxist tradition, including Marx, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, and David Harvey. Each chapter combines interesting biographical anecdotes with an accessible analysis of each individual's contribution to an always-transforming Marxist theory of the city. He suggests that the interplay between the city as center of economic and social life and its potential for progressive change generated a major corpus of work. That work has been key in advancing progressive political and social transformations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

People who equate Marxism with drabness have not been keeping up with their shopping (Prada) or their reading. Merrifield, a British writer who now lives in New York, is accessible, optimistic and even fun. The urban center, Merrifield argues, is the site of economic extremes and for that reason the most promising field for social change. A primer for the postindustrial children of Marx and Coca-Cola.
–The New York Times

The strengths of Metromarxism are immediately apparent. Merrifield is a lively, engaging , and sometimes humorous writer... He says enough about their ideas to pique our interest, concisely, and with the minimum of jargon. His judgements are consistenly sound, and the selected references useful... More taster than primer, this book nicely fills a niche..
–H-Net

About the Author

Andy Merrifield is Professor of Geography at Clark University. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford and is the coeditor of The Urbanization of Justice in addition to being a contributor to The Nation and Dissent.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (August 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415933498
• ISBN-13: 978-0415933490
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good survey, but some assumptions questionable, June 4, 2003

By 

flux1968 (Brooklyn, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (Paperback)

As a survey of Marxist thinking on cities, he does a pretty good job on a couple of thinkers I'm familiar with [Debord, Lefebvre], so I'm inclined to believe his summaries of other thinkers are just as good. Merrifield's book serves as an important reminder that Marxists thinkers have made important contributions in all fields including urbanism. This is hardly acknowledged except for Engels, who is still required reading in urban studies courses.

However, the author's own take on urban theory has limitations that mirrors those of his subjects: he is concerned with describing the contradictions within cities but does not consider the relationships between cities and the rest of the economy, nor between cities on an international level.

In his introduction, he dismisses third world socialists as "anti-urban" without seriously considering the impact that cities had on national [and in the third world's case, largely agricultural] economies. The impact had been that cities tended to monopolize resources, leaving the countrysides impoverished. This was, and still is, the pattern across various third world countries. Even today, in industrialized first world countries, in particular the US, our economies are dependent on a handful of large cities, which leads to my next criticism.

Neither Merrifield nor his subjects ever considers the effects of city size. One of the ways Maoist China attempted to equalize resources was to discourage the development of huge cities, and encourage the development of small- to medium-sized cities spread out all over the country. Merrifield never even questions whether it is desirable to have cities as large as Paris or New York. It would seem that Merrifield is not so much pro-urban as pro-megalopolis, but this is an approach shared by many otherwise insightful thinkers.

Since this book is concerned with charting the historical relationship between Marxism and urban theory, it can only briefly touch on new developments. For a look at some interesting new work, I would recommend that people keep up with Manuel Castells [no longer a Marxist I believe] and David Harvey, as well as Saskia Sassen [not a Marxist as far as I know but extremely insightful]. For all their differences, they all contain important insights which could lay a basis for a fruitful synthesis in the future.