L'état et l'urbain

The outline which follows must be considered as the summary of eight years of empirical and theoretical research on the relationships between economic base and state super-structure in the urban field. These have been personal projects exemplified notably by three theoretical studies (Lojkine, 1969; 1972; 1975) and three regional monographs (Lojkine, 1973; 1974; 1976). But it is also for us a reflection upon the whole of marxist research as it has developed in France since the early 1970s in the realm of urban planning and policies. We hope that it may contribute to a better use of dialectical materialism in our concrete research as well.     

L'analyse marxiste de l'état

The differences which have characterized various marxist analyses of the state are to a large extent due to an inability to envisage simultaneously the four major levels of reality of the state, that is:

• 1 The state defined as a ‘developed form of the socialization of the process of production’.
• 2 The state as instrument of domination and hegemony at the service of the dominant class.
• 3 The state as the place of confrontation and unstable balance between antagonistic social classes.
• 4 Finally, the state as a place of rupture or transition between a declining dominant class and a rising dominated class—to take up Gramsci's formulation.

Applied to the analysis of urban capitalist policies, such a dialectical method should enable one to grasp, in all its contradictory aspects, the intervention of the capitalist state in the process of production-consumption. Instead of opposing or isolating these four levels of analysis, it should on the contrary lead to demonstrating how the state apparatus can be understood at the same time as:

• 1 Process of financing and spatial organization of the means of collective consumption.
• 2 Process of social segregation at the profit of the dominant class.
• 3 The place of confrontation between classes with antagonistic interests, confrontation being the result of political concessions to the dominated classes, the nature of these concessions—their real impact—varying according to the historical period considered, and consequently according to the margin of economic man?uvre available to the capitalist class.
• 4 The place of formation of a counter-hegemony which will produce a revolutionary social movement made up of a new rising class, which will bring with it a new urbanistic model as well as a new project of society.

     

“Which side are you on?” A historical study of union membership composition in seven Western countries

This study uses surveys from the past 60 years to study union membership in Denmark, France, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We first revisit aggregate union densities finding that, for France and Italy, they were at times under- and overestimated, respectively. Second, we document the evolution of the composition of union membership in terms of gender, occupation, education, and sector. Different stylized facts emerge for different groups of countries. These facts do not lend support to the composition-based theory that attributes deunionization to deindustrialization, nor to the technological theory that predicts the exit of the high-skilled from unions.