Capitalist cities are founded on mechanisms of land speculation. Socialist cities built in the twentieth century under the Soviet influence rejected private ownership of land and nationalised it. Contemporary anti- (or post-)capitalist commonist ideas of the city aim to democratise ownership of land, focusing on common spaces and shared ownership. Therefore, it could be said that socialist and commonist cities attempt to create a material and spatial exterior to capitalism and localise it. This is why land ownership is at the centre of the anti-capitalist narrative.
There is no doubt that contemporary economy functions because of shared/free/common resources, such as open spaces, natural resources, infrastructure, and software. Without free air, life would be impossible. Without access to free spaces in cities—streets, roads, squares—there would be no cities. But maybe we should not focus on ownership of spaces and things, but on the relationships between them? Maybe the focus should be on the way they are structured?
Urban regulations exist almost in every city in the world . Obviously, in different forms: sometimes, as very strict regulations; in other cases, as suggestions and recommendations, or rules protecting particular interests, spaces, or activities. They are external to the “ownership essence” of spaces. This external context , the bigger picture, makes the difference, as Ernst Jünger points out:
Private initiative becomes harmless the moment it falls within the category of a specialized work-character that is, the moment it is placed under surveillance within a more comprehensive process.1
Regulations aim to maintain the general form (Gestalt2) of the city as an outcome of interactions and exchanges between urban actors. Korin Karatani3 proposes a switch from interest in modes of production to modes of exchange, and I believe it is an interesting path to follow. Therefore, this book aims to investigate the idea of the post-capitalist city from a slightly unexpected angle.
But what do I mean by capitalist, and subsequently, by a post-capitalist city? As I will explain in the following chapters, a capitalist city is an economic and socio-spatial entity where Karatani’s mode of exchange , C (commodity exchange) dominates over other modes of exchange. This is then a city where economic logic aims to accumulate capital. To some extent, the “classic” definition of capitalism—focused on ownership of means of production (must be private) and the market as a dominant mechanism of defining the value of products and services—even if still valid, is less useful. Obviously, there is no one model of a post-capitalist city, but rather, a multiplicity of ideas of what could happen (or what is currently happening) and how post-capitalist cities could function. In this book, I follow Karatani’s trajectory of thinking and attempt to imagine a post-capitalist city based on mode of exchange D, where the logic of unreciprocated gift giving dominates other modes of exchange.
To develop the idea of the post-capitalist city, in this book, I will make an attempt to reclaim and develop an idea of total mobilisation formulated by Ernst Jünger.4
Jünger is not a very popular figure, especially among progressive thinkers—his involvement with the conservative revolution movement in the 1920s and 1930s in pre-Nazi Germany put him in a similar position to Carl Schmitt, together with a few others, such as Ernst Kantorowicz, Edgar Jung, or Martin Heidegger. Schmitt’s thinking has been partly rehabilitated in recent years, adjusted and included in mainstream political theory, but Jünger is still perceived as a slightly obscure conservative thinker. He is probably better known in the Anglo-Saxon world as a writer, the author of masterpiece novels, Storm of Steel and On the Marble Cliffs; however, his seminal book, Der Arbeiter (The Worker)5 was fully translated into English only in 2017.
I am convinced that this perception of Jünger is wrong and unfair. In contrast to Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger, he never joined the Nazi party, and Der Arbeiter has been read by Nazis
...with hostility and irritation. (…) the Nazi organ, the Volkischer Beobachter, published a review by Thilo von Throtha, one of Rosenberg’s aides. He made it abundantly clear that the worldview of National-Socialism and of Jünger were at odd: Jünger was just not German enough.6
The Nazis were right—Jünger’s position has been world-centric and inclusive, his conservatism rooted in deep care for the earth and the humanity as a whole.
Jünger’s work produced before the World War II emerged among the crisis of capitalism and growing nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments, which is not dissimilar to what the world has been experiencing since the beginning of the twenty-first century. His predictions for the twentieth century presented in “Der Arbeiter ”, seemed to be off the mark then, but now, they seem extremely relevant. Jünger expected the ethos of work and the worker to overcome the ethos of the bourgeois (middle classes), but the world that emerged out of WWII was dominated fundamentally by the middle-class ethos. In the Western world , the turn of the twenty-first century (especially from 1989 to 2008) was defined by the dream of absolute domination of the middle class and liberalism. However, in reality, the middle class is fading and the precariat is growing.7 The middle-class ethos and the bourgeois ethics still define the horizon of mainstream political imagination, but clouds have been appearing on it for some time already.
Ernst Jünger was, and partly still is, an important figure for the European ultra -conservative right. Therefore, it seems important to investigate territories he has been—directly and indirectly—influencing. The rise of the political far right (reactionary, alt-right, neo-fascist, “dark enlightenment” etc.) parties and the presence of their ideologies in mainstream political discourse pose the question of what model of urbanity would be shaped by these ideas.
The similarity between the rise of the far right in the beginning of the twentieth century and the recent shift to the right in global politics in one of the main reasons why I am using Jünger’s thought as a theoretical framework to reflect on a potential model of the post-capitalist city. However, my main focus is on Jünger’s notion of total mobilisation , because it allows to see the city as an a...