http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2013/877
David Harvey’s Rebel Cities is a call to arms. If Marx’s Communist Manifesto offered a call to arms for the uprisings of 1848, Rebel Cities coincides with a diversity of contemporary uprisings from Alto (in Bolivia) to Zuccotti Park (in New York). These diverse sites of uprising in developed and undeveloped, historical and contemporary sites offer lessons about urban movements with a principled commitment to democratic and anti-capitalist alternatives. Rebel Cities seeks to “engage with, but also create an alternative to, the capitalist laws of value determination,” through an “anti-wealth politics” and “construction of alternative social relations,” with a “material but also a spiritual and moral” shift to ecological sustainability and “the abolition of the dominant class relation that underpins and mandates the perpetual expansion of surplus value production and relation” (126-8). The following paragraphs will take up the core elements of Rebel Cities’ argument: urban, precariat, and democratic anti-capitalism, and end with some observations about the politics of struggle laid out in Rebel Cities.