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Special Issue: Rethinking Economic Planning
Competition & Change
2023, Vol. 0(0) 1–20
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/10245294231210980
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Postcapitalist Planning and Urban
Revolution
Matthew Thompson
Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD), Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Yousaf Nishat-Botero
Bayes Business School, City, University of London, London, UK
Abstract
Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting
collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange
with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle? In seeking answers to such questions, this article
reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a
renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre’s
work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic
planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract
space –an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through whichcapitalism
produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and
potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the
logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution,
through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities
for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical
struggles over the urban –as the mediator of capitalist relations –and look for inspiration to historical
and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.
Keywords
Henri Lefebvre, economic democracy, logistics infrastructure, new municipalism, production of
space, open Marxism
Introduction
It seems increasingly necessary to gain collective control over a planetary system of capital ac-
cumulation that through its compulsive self-valorization is plundering natural resources, extracting
Corresponding author:
Matthew Thompson, Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD), Cardiff University, Cardiff
CF10 3AT, UK.
Email: thompsonm19@cardiff.ac.uk
value from lifeworlds, exhausting ecologies and ‘cannibalizing’its own conditions of existence
(Fraser 2022) in a geological-historical era characterized as the ‘Capitalocene’(Moore, 2015).
Capital is enabled to wreck the planet in its thirst for exponential growth because we have no
obvious way to stop it. Yet capital is our own creation; it is alienated labour –dead labour –set in
motion (Charnock 2010). Capital misrepresents itself as a thing, successfully hiding its true reality
as a social relation. In this process of fetishism, capital prevents people from seeing and thus gaining
control over the relations that go into its production behind their backs. This requires capacities for
rendering the vaster social totality, and our position within it, politically intelligible and navigable
(Toscano and Kinkle 2015).
Thankfully, once again, democratic economic planning is a burgeoning field of critical-
theoretical enquiry seeking answers to these questions of collective control (Benanav, 2020;
Groos, 2021;Jones, 2020;Nishat-Botero, 2024;Sorg, 2022). Yet renewed interest appears not to
draw energy from political issues of organization in the face of domination by capital so much as
from new calculative possibilities presented by synergistic leaps in the predictive and coordinative
powers of computing technologies reopening interest in the socialist calculation debate. Much of
this renewed interest –notes Sorg (2022) –takes its cue from figures like Cockshott and Cottrell
(1993) and the more recent advancement and reconfiguration of capitalism according to algorithmic
and platform logics to speculate on the progressive potential of ‘digital socialism’(Morozov 2019),
‘red plenty platforms’(Dyer-Witheford 2013), ‘communist entrepreneurship’(Nieto 2021) and
‘platform socialism’(Muldoon 2022). Big data, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, platform
infrastructures and algorithmic technologies are held up as the basis for dynamic economic cal-
culation and coordination at scale, replacing market price signals as the mediating mechanism
between individual preferences and systemic response, between demand and supply, consumption
and production –thereby, finally, providing an answer to Hayek in the socialist calculation debate.
Counterposed to this technological and calculative trend in economic planning debates is a strand
emphasizing political and organizational aspects. The grand battle between the Plan and Market,
argue Mandarini and Alberto (2020: 13), can be seen as the ‘opposition between two modes of
neutralisation of the political’: between suppression of worker agency under the command economy
of state planning and the ‘immunisation of the domain of market transactions from collective
control’–a choice between personal and impersonal forms of domination (see Roberts 2017; also
Mau 2023 on the impersonal economic power or ‘mute compulsion’of capital). Bernes (2020)
suggests that (democratic) planning must satisfy two essential conditions for it to overcome what
can be restated as personal and impersonal forms of domination: that it be both transparent, in lifting
the veil of commodity fetishism, and tractable, in enabling both clear sight and control by workers
and citizens over the means of production, social reproduction and circulation. Transparency of
allocation decisions tackles the problem of impersonal domination of the market; tractability of
production decisions the personal domination of the workplace.
Missing from much of this renewed debate are several critical issues. First, urban space rep-
resents a form of mediation often overlooked in economic planning debates, which tend to focus on
the mediation of time –abstract labour time. Indeed, visions of both planned and marketized
societies presuppose questions of space (Huber 2013: 120; West 2020). ‘With abstract time’,as
Jason W Moore (2015: 70) highlights, ‘comes abstract space’. This raises questions about the urban
forms implied by postcapitalist planning –just as it does the space configured by capitalist relations.
Second, the role that embodied knowledge and desire must surely play in a democratic planning, in
which people have genuine control to shape space according to their needs and desires, is also often
overlooked in favour of the potential of enhanced calculation and information-sensing in algo-
rithmic technologies (see Neilson, 2020).
2Competition & Change 0(0)
Third, an inattention to actually existing experiments as they unfold through grounded, con-
textualized struggle in everyday life, set against more abstract or speculative modelling or theo-
rizing. Utopian visions and radical-revolutionary programmes for economic planning beyond
capitalism are all essentially ‘writing recipes for the cookshops of the future’(Marx quoted in Clegg
and Lucas 2020: 96). Indeed, as Clegg and Lucas (2020: 97) highlight, ‘[e]verywhere we find the
same uneasy relation between a relatively arbitrary concrete and a hazy speculative horizon’.An
attention to the production of space, we argue, provides the necessary mediating relation between
concrete struggle and this speculative horizon.
The common thread through these three overlooked aspects is urban everyday life. Building on
existing work in this direction (Benanav, 2020;Bernes 2020;Devine 1988;Federici and Jones 2020;
O’Neill 2003;Neilson 2020) we take the heterogenous potentialities of the urban everyday as the
foundation for postcapitalist planning futures. We argue that the growing field of economic planning
needs to be brought into conversation with ‘open’Marxism, and especially Henri Lefebvre’s (1991)
theorization of the production of space (Charnock, 2010;O’Kane, 2018a). These bodies of work
provide important insights for honing economic planning debates, drawing on notions of freedom
from the impersonal domination of the fetishized forms of capital, and for usefully situating
planning within capitalist mediations, by drawing on dialectical form-analysis to focus our attention
on struggle and social praxis as the animating moments in any transformation of capitalism.
In this article, we start from the idea that democratic planning is ‘the process of collectively
governing and coordinating the plans and counterplans of a heterogenous mosaic of alternatives,
embedded within broader agendas of commonly determined ends’–that is, a spatialized process
through an ecology or ‘oikology’of interlinked alternatives to the state and market (Nishat-Botero,
2024). Like Silvia Federici’s arguments for a ‘counterplanning from the kitchen’(Federici and
Jones, 2020), we point towards a counterplanning from the ‘urban everyday’(more on which
below). We first review some of the literature that grapples with abstract labour time, to highlight
how space is missing. Second, we explore the most fully developed historical-materialist articu-
lation of how democratic economic planning might transpire through struggle in, against and
beyond the abstract space of capital. Third, we suggest how a closer engagement with the work of
Lefebvre can deepen and extend this analysis in ways more alive to how struggle unfolds in an
urbanized capitalism. Finally, we highlight empirical examples of an urbanized economic planning,
exploring how the new municipalist movement, in particular, is attempting to reinvent the commune
as the urban form of postcapitalist planning.
Abstract plans against abstract labour time
Much of the literature on economic planning takes an uncritical, non-dialectical approach to
understanding capitalism and its social forms. Capitalism is treated as a closed system, centred on
production and defined by the wage-relation. Indeed, the literature on economic planning tends to
address the economic issue of time –that is, labour time –while overlooking space. Various
planning proposals attempt to transform money, the concrete abstraction of labour time, or the social
relation wage-labour –one of the fundamental social forms of capitalism (see Browne 2011)–into
something else entirely. For economic planning to truly free us from capital’s domination and enable
genuine collective control, this alternative to money must minimally be no longer mediated by value
or the market, as value-driven markets act to subjugate both the sellers and buyers of labour power to
a force beyond their control but which their actions cumulatively create –a phenomenon described
as alienation –dominating our actions and making us incontinent in the face of price signals that
appear to have a life of their own (Roberts 2017).
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 3
Thus, one of the most ‘sophisticated and detailed elaborations’(Sorg 2022) of democratic
economic planning is a framework for ‘socialist laws of motion’envisioned by Saros (2014) which
inverts the production cycles of capitalism by putting consumers in charge of production by
choosing what they wish to consume from a ‘general catalogue’of use-values uploaded to their
digital ‘needs profile’–therefore ‘planning’production (see also Groos 2021). Organized through
self-managed worker councils, workers receive ‘credits’for consumption –explicitly not money, as
they cannot be traded and are not based on performance or productivity. As Sorg (2022) notes,
drawing on Fraser’s (2014) quadripartite definition of capitalism, this schema successfully manages
to abolish three of its four conditions –private property dividing society by class; competition
driving endless accumulation; market mechanisms regulating production and allocation –but leaves
one, arguably the most significant, altered but fundamentally intact: the ‘double’freedom of
workers, freed from feudal subsistence to sell their labour power on the market and to starve if they
fail to do so –a‘freedom’underpinning the wage-relation and abstract labour time. In Saros’(2014)
programme, therefore, workers still exchange their labour time in some form or another for credits to
access goods.
Struggling with this thorny issue of time is a common concern in the history of economic
planning. The European interwar council-communist movement produced a number of proposals
for transforming capitalism beyond abstract labour time, not least The Fundamental Principles of
Communist Production and Distribution written in 1930 (see Bernes 2021). Bernes shows how this
treatise makes a novel distinction between production of goods for individual consumption,
recompensed by labour-certificates rather than money, and production of goods for general use,
freely distributed to all who need them. The aim of the plan is to move societal production
progressively from the former to the latter, so that more and more goods, from food and clothing to
housing and healthcare, can be freely provided rather than exchanged, with labour-certificates
eventually transcended altogether, as a transitional stage to communism. The extent to which such
transitional plans can transcend labour time –through consumption credits or labour-certificates, or
‘coupons’(Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993)–and thus abolish the law of value becomes the first of
Bernes’(2021) two tests of communism (the second is collapsing the gap between producers and
consumers, for a ‘classless, moneyless, stateless society; freely associated workers meeting their
needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control’).
Time –abstract labour time –is thus the primary target of economic planning, and for good
reason (see Browne 2011). But what about space? What about economic planning and its concrete
historical geographies of life (Moore, 2015: 301)? Capitalism operates not only through the freezing
of human time within the alienated form of labour but also by secreting space in its own image, for
its own reproduction (Moore, 2015: 26). Yet the production of space remains conspicuously absent
from economic planning debates.
An agricultural or urban revolution?
A recent special issue proclaiming ‘the return of economic planning’(Jones 2020) represents
perhaps the fullest engagement with space to date. Many of its contributions are concerned with
how planning might contend with the growing power of logistics and supply chains as they are
spatially configured in a globalizing capitalism (Bernes 2020;Clegg and Lucas 2020;Federici and
Jones 2020;Mandarini and Toscano 2020;Neilson 2020; see also Mau, 2023: 273–295). The
challenge resides in how to democratize these new digitalized and spatialized technologies of
capitalism –a challenge fraught with problems. These problems are spelt out by Bernes (2013,
2018,2020) in a series of essays on the logistics revolution. Logistics is framed as a technological
4Competition & Change 0(0)
form as opposed to spatial or urban form of capital –and this has critical implications for how
overcoming their domination over human life is imagined to unfold.
A technological reading of logistical capitalism tends towards the reconfiguration thesis –the
idea that capitalist technological infrastructure can be reconfigured and repurposed for anti-capitalist
ends. Bernes holds Toscano (2014) accountable as an advocate, for believing capitalism’s planetary
system of logistical infrastructure to be malleable and salvageable and therefore ‘potentially re-
configurable’(Toscano) rather than ‘constitutively hostile’(Bernes) and unreconfigurable. First,
Bernes claims that the holistic design of logistics as a technological totality for producing profitand
suppressing resistance by exploiting uneven development and polarizing wage differentials,
generating surplus by decreasing labour costs rather than increasing labour productivity, through
what Bernes (2013) describes as ‘absolute surplus value masquerading as relative surplus value’,is
simply inimical to being harnessed instead for organizing life beyond capitalism.
Second, Bernes poses the question of scale: the planetary scale of logistical infrastructure, and the
tightening multi-scalar, trans-local integration of production nodes within a complex system of
circulation, not only imposes huge operational barriers to breaking down this unwieldy totality into
manageable parts, but also entails an overwhelming complexity, opacity and illegibility for col-
lective action to assail, such that its reconfiguration would fail the test of transparency. The
alienation experienced by democratic planners would far surpass the transhistorical alienation from
the product of one’s labours, argues Bernes, taking on a monstrous quality, as the concrete ma-
terialization of the law of value.
Finally, Bernes builds a practical, strategic case against reconfiguring logistical infrastructures
based on the historical record of actually existing revolutionary struggle. Struggle has only ever
occurred in one place or another first, before spreading into a revolutionary wave, but never
universally all at once, which therefore presents practical problems for the need to seize the entirety
of distended global supply chains in order to ensure survival or else develop productive capacities
locally for all needs. This important point speaks to the need to look to emerging empirical practices
as well as historical struggles for inspiration on how to plan; a point we come back to below.
The taught logic with which Bernes refutes the reconfiguration thesis leads him to the inexorable
conclusion that any postcapitalist society must seek autonomy from the grid, building alternatives
locally in piecemeal fashion with the aim of connecting them together through new regional re-
lations. Bernes (2018) argues that food is the fundamental factor for finding autonomy from the grid,
without which revolutionary action will surely fail, as it has countless times for this reason. Food
production has become so fully integrated into other technical systems of capitalism –energy,
transport, advanced manufacturing, finance –that merely feeding revolutionaries cut off from global
supply chains becomes a huge challenge for any necessarily place-based revolution. This leads
Bernes (2018: 354-5; our italics) to the claim that an ‘authentic twenty-first century revolution,
breaking with capitalism and all class society, will likewise have to be an agrarian revolution’–
revolutionizing food production by localizing supply chains and healing the urban-rural divide and
the metabolic rift opened by capitalist urbanization; ‘making it much harder for [people] to be
subjugated by a bureaucratic layer, a hostile power or an emergent attempt at capitalist restoration’
(Bernes 2018: 359).
This position is broadly shared by Clegg and Lucas (2020), who argue that any transition to
postcapitalism will necessarily be an agricultural revolution –following the Neolithic revolution,
which subjugated hunter-gatherers as tillers of the productive grains that fed enlarged agrarian
empires and brought the state into existence as a social form, and the Capitalist agricultural
revolution beginning in fifteenth–sixteenth century England in which commoners were forced from
the means of subsistence into industrial cities to sell their labour, bringing wage-labour into
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 5
existence as a social form (a form of exploitation, argues Moore (2015), only made profitable by first
extending the frontiers of appropriation across Europe and its Atlantic colonies). Driving each
revolution was not technological development of the productive forces –not the plough and
domestication of animals, or crop rotation and mechanization, although these did play a propulsive
part –but rather transformations in relations of production, in property relations and social or-
ganization. While the Neolithic revolution tethered previously ‘free’hunter-gatherers to the land, as
domesticated peasants under the personal domination of early agrarian states, and the capitalist
agricultural revolution loosened this tether, cutting people free from the land and feudal bonds and
tethering people anew to a different form of domination, the impersonal domination of wage-labour,
then the third, postcapitalist agricultural revolution must necessarily cut the tethers of impersonal
and personal domination once and for all.
Capitalism’s dominance, it is assumed, rests on a spatial separation of people from the means of
subsistence –a‘profound deprivation’that invites exploitation or domination by those who do
control their means of subsistence (Clegg and Lucas 2020). The agricultural revolution thesis builds
on this insight to make the convincing case that any kind of large-scale, state-mediated form of
economic planning, leaving global supply chains intact, commandeering them through democratic
socialism, ‘merely reinforces the tethers of the state while substituting impersonal for personal
domination’. Simply shifting how the agricultural surplus is redistributed will always reproduce
forms of alienation and domination. Communism thus mends the metabolic rift(s) opened by
capitalism and reunifies people with the means of subsistence. What might this look like in
prefigurative practice? Struggles for food sovereignty in and around Barcelona and Rosario, for
instance, that are developing alternative logistical infrastructures, gesture at such a postcapitalist
social metabolism.
The solution, therefore, is closing this gap and bringing people back into direct contact with
survival processes, not least food production. For Bernes as well as Clegg and Lucas, this means
closing the gap, opened by capitalism, between town and country, urban and rural. Some kind of
spatial synthesis through a renewed relation to the land, to food and to energy sources is the key to
superseding capitalism. This, Clegg and Lucas (2020) maintain, is not some ‘apocalyptic abolition
of the city’but rather a qualitatively transformative synthesis of urban and rural practices, starting
with urban farming, localized food supply chains and greening the city. Likewise, Heron and
Heffron (2022: 126) call for an abolition of the hinterlands based on ‘intricate matrices of urban
and rural land uses’, which is contrasted with the land-sparing spatial practices of Vettese and
Pendergrass’s (2022) socialist planning for ‘Half-Earth’.
Such a vision provides an answer to the conundrum, astutely posed by Bernes, plaguing all
attempts at instituting democratic economic planning from within capitalist social relations: how to
motivate and incentivize work and production. Under capitalism, the compulsion to sell one’s labour
power to procure the goods required for survival ensures people work: a form of impersonal
domination or ‘mute compulsion’(Mau 2023). Under centrally planned societies, such as state
socialism, people lack this compulsion, under guaranteed employment and welfare needs, with no
means for ensuring compliance with production except through coercion or violence. In a post-
capitalist society, in which all forms of domination are abolished, what will provide the source of
motivation and incentive to work?
Baking and breaking bread together is one solution offered by Clegg and Lucas (2020) and
Bernes (2020) –an image evoking the full breadth of activities constituting our necessary and
collective metabolic exchange with nature for our survival. If we buy this argument, however, why
stop at basic subsistence? Surely, human life amounts to more than this? For postcapitalism to be
worth fighting for, to motivate people to organize, it must surely promise more than mere
6Competition & Change 0(0)
subsistence. It must recognize, as Mau (2023) puts it, that needs do not always override social
mediations. Indeed, the vicissitudes of desire and drive imply that nature, human or extra-human,
must, therefore, also be thought of ‘as incomplete, thwarted or shot through with antagonisms’
(Heron 2021: 501). This involves disentangling need and desire from the logic of the commodity-
form, for forms of communal luxury (Ross 2016), public d ´
epense (D’Alisa et al. 2014)and
collective enthusiasm for shared goals (Adler 2022). As we argue below, the idea of the ‘urban
everyday’(Beveridge and Koch 2019) might just provide such a spring to action for the radical
transformation of everyday life.
As Toscano (2014) argues, human needs go beyond the basic biological; subsistence alone is not
enough to bring people together in solidarity and spontaneous organization –nor to meet the
specialized needs of modern society. Toscano’s disquiet about this proposal appears to revolve
around the ‘re-ruralization’of everyday life and the simplification of complex social forms into
more immediate relations. ‘Postcapitalism, or communism, is not the absence of social form or
social synthesis but another form or synthesis, another mode of regulation’(Toscano 2014). All
modes of regulation of complex social synthesis require mediation. The point is, therefore, to
experiment with and develop new social mediations, animated by forms of social praxis that do not
conflate the critical embrace of abstractions with the uncritical celebration of capitalist imperatives
for speed and scale (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021: 165-167).
The reduction of struggle to subsistence in the agricultural revolution thesis overlooks the
mediating role played by the urban, both in the production of exchange value for capital accu-
mulation and in our metabolic exchange with nature for the production of use-values. It therefore
does not go far enough to apprehend the mediating form that value takes spatially –the urban –that
produces and animates the technological and infrastructural networks underpinning agriculture. As
articulated in urban political ecology, urbanization is the ‘metabolic unity of human and non-human
entities that is socially and technologically mediated by the value relation’(Arboleda 2017: 368).
Town and country, urban and rural, are treated by the agricultural revolution thesis as separate
spheres divided and then brought back together by capitalism rather than contradictions within the
dialectical totality of the urban. To transform planetary urbanization, we must work in and through
this spatial rendering of value –not seek to escape or negate it, but to identify and create points of
‘excess’that open possibilities for postcapitalist futures (Dinerstein and Pitts, 2021: 167).
At the heart of this problem is the question of social metabolism, which is fundamentally in-
terwoven with urbanization. Usually used to refer to the biological process in which the body
converts matter into energy, metabolism plays an extraordinary role for humans, whose organs are
perhaps uniquely amongst animals located outside the body, what Moore (2015: 11) characterizes as
‘distinctive extroversions’, including ‘clothing and shelter as external fur’and ‘community as
external womb’, which might be extended to include all the tools, technologies and infrastructures
that sustain human societies, from housing to money to logistical networks. The urban can be read in
this light as essentially a vast extroverted, exoskeletal system of human metabolism; the infra-
structure through which matter from nature is converted into energy for human life and social
organization. Building on Moore’s (2015) concept of the oikeios –the dialectical ‘double inter-
nality’of the ‘web of life’, of humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity –economic planning can be
read as an ‘oikology’–that is, an ecology of practices regulating oikos, the household in an
expansive sense, for an oikonomia serving human and non-human nature’s needs, through a more-
or-less collectively planned social metabolism (Nishat-Botero, 2024). The urban becomes the
mediating process and social form through which metabolism occurs between humans and nature. It
really matters, then –for rebalancing our metabolic relationship with nature in the ecocidal
Capitalocene (Moore, 2015)–just how human settlements are (re)configured.
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 7
The agricultural revolution thesis is arguably the most historical-materialist and spatialized
interpretation of how democratic economic planning beyond capitalism might develop –the
analysis most alive to the grounded, material conditions for struggle and transformation –but it does
not go far enough to apprehend the urban form through which this revolution must dialectically
unfold. In treating the technological infrastructure of capitalism as unreconfigurable, it risks reifying
it from content to form. Does such an uncompromising rejection of capitalist technology –and
urbanization –misapprehend the dialectical nature of totality as comprised of contradictions,
generative of its own opposition and transformation into something else? Our actions are dominated
but not determined by the systemic totality we create through human labour –an open, not closed
totality (Goonewardena, 2018;O’Kane, 2018a). The urban is a concrete abstraction –an abstract
social form made concrete as an appearance and material practice that shapes but does not determine
social reality; a form of mediation, able to mediate social complexity and difference and bring
people together into more sophisticated and potentially emancipatory organizational formations
than ever before. The totality of capitalist urbanization therefore carries within its spaces of
possibility the seeds of its own supersession.
We can go further to extend this line of thinking. Recent developments in value-form theory led by
Juan Iñigo Carrera and Guido Starosta (see Arboleda 2017,2020) posit the production of scientific
consciousness in labour, as the forces of production develop, as capital’s constitutive contradiction,
planting the seeds for its supersession. On this reading, postcapitalism develops immanently through
the capital-relation radically transfiguring itself as it is shaped by labour through resistance and struggle.
Humans and nature –including technology, as transformed and alienated nature –are radically in-
terlinked, each dialectically determining the development of the other. ‘Such encounters’, writes
Arboleda (2017: 369), considering the entanglement of human and technology, labour and capital,
‘enable the possibility to hack and repurpose technology in such a way that it does not serve the abstract
imperatives of capital, but the embodied needs and potentialities of use value (i.e. the material life
process)’. If we extend this analysis to urban space –seeing the urban form as a technology, as alienated
nature (see Charnock, 2018)–then our fate is written into the production and transformation of urban
space. Or, as Lefebvre inferred: ‘To change life, however, we must first change space’.
Just like money and the state, the urban must be grappled with directly, reconfigured or transformed
into a socialform that no longer mediates capital. Within money is the idea of the universal equivalent,
which enables as much as it disables and alienates (Konings 2015). Within the state is the idea of
constituted power, which likewise enables complex social organization as much as it forecloses other
configurations and entails violence and alienation. The urban can be seen in a similar light. We must
work with and through the excesses of these social forms to find transformative formations in, against
and beyond rather than outside capitalist social relations. To understand where to look for such
transformations, we turn to Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space.
Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space
Following the form-analysis of an open Marxist critical-theoretical reading of capitalism (Dinerstein
and Pitts, 2021;O’Kane, 2018b) and of the work of Lefebvre (Charnock, 2010,2018;
Goonewardena, 2005,2018;O’Kane, 2018a), we can build a picture of how capitalism reproduces
itself in spatial form. Form-analysis enables us to see in conceptual, abstract terms the invisible
social relations that hold society together as a totality. The abstract social forms that operate behind
the backs of producers –the commodity, the state, property, law and, also, the urban –take concrete
form as objects that appear as things to us, divorced from their dialectical-relational production. This
mystifying process of relations appearing ‘thing-like’is that of fetishism; it is the role of critical
8Competition & Change 0(0)
theory to demystify the fetishization of social relations (Charnock, 2018), as part of struggles to
discover and develop humanity’s species-general knowledge and capacities.
Lefebvre (1991,2003,2009) aims to demystify the urban and the process of urbanization. The
urban form of capitalist modernity is the concrete realization of abstract space, just as money is the
concrete abstraction of labour time. Abstract space is, for Lefebvre, the socio-spatial form that
capitalism takes to ensure its own reproduction, one which ‘guarantees the everyday domination of
the linear time of labour and accumulation over the rhythmic time of biology, ecology and art’
(Charnock, 2018: 1456). Labour time is thus articulated into urban form through abstract space; the
process of urbanization is the spatial form of mediation that reproduces the socio-ecological re-
lations of capitalist re/production (Napoletano et al. 2020). Abstract space seeks to flatten all
qualitative differences and homogenize space to create a series or grid of quantitative equivalence
for the ‘exchangeability of all its component parts’(Lefebvre 1991: 341) –inscribing into space the
logic of the commodity-form itself. This is materialized and made concrete in the endlessly re-
peating patterns of the sprawl of speculative suburban housing plots, vertical housing units,
motorway lanes congested with commuters, the port and airport infrastructures for containerized
commodity transportation, planetary logistical networks that connect nodes in global value chains,
and the supercomputers and data centres that power the algorithms coordinating just-in-time
production circuits.
For Lefebvre, abstract space is inextricably bound up with the state form, or the ‘state mode of
production’.Toscano (2014) reconstructs Lefebvre’s‘state mode of production’concept in the
context of the ‘logistical state’, which ceaselessly intervenes to ‘lay out the space of stocks and flows
for the optimal reproduction of capitalist relations’; to plan, control and programme space in its own
image and that of the commodity-form; a space made both homogenous, evacuated of any dif-
ference that cannot be commodified, and broken or fragmented into multiple parts, the lots and
sections of interchangeable commodities and bureaucratic codes –that is, ‘difference-through-
sameness’.
This state-facilitated process of ‘planetary urbanization’unfolds through a double movement
captured succinctly by Lefebvre with a powerful metaphor borrowed from atomic physics: ‘im-
plosion–explosion’(Brenner 2014). Whilst implosion describes the ‘tremendous concentration (of
people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality’,
explosion is that ‘immense [...] projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs,
vacation homes, satellite towns) into space’(Lefebvre 2003: 14). This process is articulated most
fully by Wilson and Bayón’s (2016) metaphor of a universal physics of ‘black hole’dynamics,
symbolizing the ‘unobservable presence-absence’of Marx’s theory of value, ‘in which immense
gravitational forces of agglomeration are intertwined with dramatic expulsions of energy and matter;
a process that is both destructive and creative, and that forms a structuring principle of space in its
totality’(Wilson and Bayón 2016: 363). The explosion–implosion movement effects the global
subsumption of abstract space (Charnock, 2018).
Although some strands of Frankfurt School critical theory imply this expansive colonial process
of commodification as endless, until everywhere is subsumed, the dialectical dynamics of ur-
banization might rather suggest that an ‘outside’, a frontier zone, underpins the functioning of
capitalist accumulation as argued by Nancy Fraser (2014,2022). However, following an open-
dialectical understanding of totality (Goonewardena 2018), Fraser’s (2022) background conditions
of production –sources of value extracted rather than exploited from spatial peripheries at various
scales: the home, the colonial frontier, political processes, non-human nature –are not ‘external’to
planetary urbanization but constitutive and co-productive parts of the social totality (Conroy 2022:
19-10; Saito 2022: 15-16). This brings us closer to Moore’s (2015) holistic conception of capitalism
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 9
as a world-ecological system –co-constituted with ecology in which capital accumulation in
capitalized zones of exploitation of wage-labour is dialectically dependent on a rising rate of
appropriation of non-capitalized, unwaged and unvalued work by ‘cheap’human and non-human
natures (for a critical synthesis of Fraser and Moore, see Conroy 2022). Such a perspective suggests
how spaces of appropriation, seemingly external but immanently foundational to capital, are just as
if not more important a site of resistance to, and reconfiguration of, capitalism as spaces of
exploitation.
We can see the abstract form of implosion–explosion play out concretely through contemporary
capitalist urbanization, which, as Danyluk (2021) notes in his exposition of ‘supply chain ur-
banism’,isdefined by a dialectic of flow and fixity: long-distance trade and globally integrated
supply chains only made possible by dense agglomerations of fixed capital and urban activity at
particular nodes, and vice versa; each fuelling or propelling the other. Danyluk (2021: 2152) cites
Toscano: ‘this makes the growth of the city inseparable from the rise of logistics’. But cities are not
simply conduits or transistors for the faster flow of capital; their density, congestion, social
complexity, diversity and alterity also present ‘a major obstacle to circulation’(Cowen, cited in
Danyluk 2021: 2152), resisting the smooth circulation of capital and sometimes blocking the circuit
entirely. We might suggest that this revolutionary aspect of the urban form –made concrete as the
commune –contains the seeds of sublation of capital circulation into something else.
The urban, then, is the field of mediation between use value and exchange value, between
capitalist enclosure and postcapitalist commoning, a dialectical ‘totality’containing contradictory
parts and opposing tendencies and counterforces. In his open-dialectical-totalizing reading,
Goonewardena (2005,2018) highlights how Lefebvre sees the urban as the mediator between
structure and agency, the universal and particular, homogeneity and difference. Lefebvre proposes
three ‘levels’which can be used as a heuristic to understand the dynamic unfolding of urban life.
The ‘global’level, G, describes the structural processes of capitalism’s dual tendencies towards
private enterprise, private property and market liberalization, and state technocracy, control and
planning –the ‘abstract space’of globalizing state capitalism (Wilson 2013). The ‘private’or
‘habiting’level, P, constitutes the domain of lived experience, of the intimate internal spaces of the
home and imagination, extending out to the everyday life of neighbours and communities. Me-
diating these two ‘levels’is the crucial ‘urban’or ‘mediate’level M, the intermediary level through
which the global and private interact: ‘“projected”by the level G […] level M also introjects the
contested dynamics of the vital one “below”it: “level P.”’ (Goonewardena 2005). Whilst this frame
may appear a crude representation of territorial scales, Goonewardena highlights how Lefebvre
never meant it so rigidly, but sees all levels interacting together at multiple scales, in constantly
evolving dynamism, coalescing in the most intensely mediated site of struggle, the urban. In fact,
these ‘levels’of reality put forward in The Urban Revolution are the groundwork for Lefebvre’s
more commonly cited spatial triad; G, M and P reflected clearly in the three dialectical dimensions,
respectively: conceived, perceived and lived space.
Conceived space is ‘the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and
social engineers…all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’
(Lefebvre, 1991: 39). This is composed of ‘mental’abstractions –those intellectual, technocratic
and scientific discourses, theories, plans, models, maps, logics and programmes that construct
analytical and rational representations of social reality to order and regulate it as abstract space –
imprinting itself onto lived space, in the ‘devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived, by
abstraction’(Wilson 2013). The democratic appropriation of conceived space is fundamental if
postcapitalist planning is to forestall the instrumentalization of planning thought and the ho-
mogenization of the lived spaces of everyday life.
10 Competition & Change 0(0)
Lived space is ‘directly “lived”through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space
of “inhabitants”and “users”’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38-39). This is the most physical, ‘pre-rational’,
imaginative and affective space (Pierce and Martin 2015)–re/producing urban everyday life; the
realm of memory, mythology, superstition, imagination, intuition, desire, art, poetry, music, play,
eroticism, festivity, intoxication, excess (Merrifield 1995). For Lefebvre, this is the very essence of
the urban: creation through simultaneity: the concentrated interaction of people, ideas and cultures
through rich social encounter (Merrifield 2013). In much of the planning literature, such dimensions
of socially embodied knowledge and desire remain under-theorized, given the tendency to conflate
the epistemically richer concept of knowledge with the concept of information (see Mirowski and
Nik-Khah, 2017).
Lived and conceived space form two of three ‘moments’in Lefebvre’s spatial triad; dialectically
interacting to produce ‘perceived space’or spatial practices –Lefebvre’s third, unifying dimension
in the triad. Spatial practices ‘secrete’society’s space through accumulated multiple ‘daily realities’
of individual routines, behaviours and habits; the ‘urban reality’of ‘routes and networks which link
up the places set aside for work, “private”life and leisure’(Lefebvre 1991: 38-39). This productive
‘secretion’is a kind of spatial projection: plans, visions, interpretations, dreams and desires are
projected into space and play out in physical and social practices, through combined daily
movements of inhabitants through the material form of the built environment (Pierce and Martin
2015).
A second dynamic structuring the urban form (of capitalism) is the conflict between the dif-
ference emerging from lived space, in which diverse humans dream, desire and interact sponta-
neously and unpredictably, and the homogeneity deriving from how the state mode of production
harnesses conceived space to design, plan and control an abstract space. If abstract space is the
projection, petrification and penetration of abstract labour time into the spatial practices of society,
sustained by yet suppressing human encounter, then that which resists and escapes the grip of
abstraction presents the promise of a postcapitalist ‘differential’space (Wilson 2013). Differential
space seeks to reconnect that which abstract space divides –‘divisions between work and product,
between repetitive and differential, or between needs and desires’(Lefebvre 1991: 291). Such a
dialectical countermovement for the re-appropriation of urban space as dis-alienated resonates with
Bernes’(2020: 70) notion of ‘planarchy’, a vision of planning that embraces the ‘self-directed,
spontaneous, and creative character of human action’.
Differential space implies precisely this aspect of invention and innovation: difference-as-
novelty. Lefebvre (1991: 372) distinguishes between ‘produced’/‘maximal’difference –radical
change –and ‘induced’/‘minimal’difference, ‘generated by iteration or recurrence’, such as the
‘diversity between villas in a suburb filled with villas; or between different “community facilities.”’
Induced/minimal difference is the system reproducing itself through empirically distinct, though
conceptually continuous, variation. Produced/maximal difference, in contrast,
Presupposes the shattering of a system; it is born of an explosion; it emerges from the chasm opened up
when a closed universe ruptures […when] a given set gives rise, beyond its own boundaries, to another,
completely different set. (ibid)
It is the implosive–explosive dialectical dynamic of the urban form itself –in bringing so many
diverse individuals together in collective encounter, organized in complex and creative ways –that
propels the production of differential space and maximal difference. ‘Once groups and classes
succeed in meeting face to face, once they come to grips’, writes Lefebvre, ‘a free dialogue explodes
under the dialectical impetus’(quoted in Charnock, 2018: 1457); suggesting the struggle for
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 11
differential space comes not from outside the urban form, but from within; as much from urban
spaces of appropriation as from those of exploitation.
We must thus look to materialist struggles over urban everyday life, historical and contemporary,
as the fount of democratic planning –as a metabolic oikology –of an economy beyond capital.
Lefebvre placed hope in practices aiming for autogestion –collective self-management of urban
life, and therefore social metabolism (Napoletano et al. 2020). Where can we find actually existing
or emergent movements for autogestion of the urban? One promising place to look is ‘radical
municipalism’(Roth et al. 2023), a global urban social movement, partly inspired by Lefebvre’s
(2003) ‘right to the city’, attempting to reinvent the commune –the urban form of differential space.
Radical municipalism is the more politically ambitious and radical-revolutionary, rather than merely
progressive or reformist, strand of the new municipalism –a recent reinvention of counter-
hegemonic praxis in which the urban and the local state are privileged as the strategic entry
points for democratically transforming the patriarchal, colonial, capitalist state (Roth et al. 2023). As
such, municipalism is also grounded in the lived experiences, embodied knowledge and affective
desires of urban everyday life, which, as our engagement with Lefebvre’s work highlights, must
surely play a vital role in any successful praxis for democratic economic planning. Indeed, a
democratic economy must be a lived, libidinal economy (Nishat-Botero, 2024). The next section
explores these connections.
Municipalist experiments in differential space
In their expansive survey of the planetary operation of capital, Mezzadra and Neilson (2019: 243-4)
conclude that the only realistic option to contest its hegemony is a dual power strategy of ‘re-
inventing the soviet’–the commune –by constructing a ‘stable system of counterpowers’alongside
directly attacking constituted power:
[S]uch a strategy is the only one we see as viable in the face of competing proposals –for example, the
‘let it rip’attitude of accelerationism or the quietude of postcapitalist economic experiments, which
[each] labor under the hope of reaching an eventual tipping point where capital begins to crumble
without ever having been subjected to a direct political challenge.
That challenge is to be found in struggles consciously contesting the social forms of capital, not
least the commodity, the state and the urban. Contemporary movements that consciously adopt a
dual power strategy of attempting to transform these social forms while nurturing counterpower are
thus most promising.
Prevailing contemporary tactics of revolt against planetary urbanization, however, tend to take a
negative form, to disrupt or blockade the physical flow of commodities through global supply
chains, targeting chokepoints and critical nodes –such as Occupy Oakland’s blockade of Oakland
Port in 2011. Such resistance may be interpreted as a variation on the theme of ‘riot’in Joshua
Clover’s (2019) identification of a renewed era of riot, replacing the primacy of the strike in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following the shift of value’s locus from the point of production
to circulation. These are necessary but not sufficient forms of resistance. Toscano (2014) suggests
such tactics fetishize the physical objects of circulation rather than transforming the social form that
animates these objects; he asks a pertinent question: ‘What would it mean to struggle not simply
against material flows but against the social forms that channel them’?
As recent critical theory has begun to articulate –for instance, Verónica Gago’s (2017) concept of
‘neoliberalism from below’, Martijn Konings’(2015) ‘emotional logic of capitalism’and Richard
12 Competition & Change 0(0)
Seymour’s(2022: 144) reflections on the libidinal affections of fossil fascism –capital’s social
forms are deeply entrenched in the affective and emotional bonds of everyday life, in psycho-social
attachments and anchorings in social reality, that they profoundly structure lived space and cannot
be so easily abolished without some alternative or equivalent form of mediation. Money –the
‘common currency’of daily existence –is a good example. Konings (2015) makes a convincing
case for the iconic and affective power of money in popular culture, deeply interwoven into the (late-
capitalist) social fabric, an insight ‘progressives have missed’and continue to ignore to their huge
disadvantage –a much-needed corrective to progressive assumptions, often rooted in Polanyian
thought, that people automatically feel ‘dis-embedded’or alienated by capital’s social forms. Thus,
in the words of Mezzadra and Neilson (2019: 241; our italics), ‘it is also necessary to work towards
the building of a system of counterpowers that can confront neoliberalism and the operations of
capital at the level of daily life’.
In the history of attempts at building such a ‘system of counterpowers’in everyday life, various
movements for autogestion –from the Paris Commune to the soviets of revolutionary Russia to the
interwar council-communist movement in Germany and Holland and post-war revolutionary
councils of Hungary (Muldoon 2021)–tended to focus on worker control of production to the
neglect of social reproduction. The history of Yugoslavian self-management and ‘social ownership’
replacing state property, following Tito’s break with Stalin, more fully incorporated social re-
production, with Organisations of Associated Labour interconnected with Self-Managing Com-
munities of Interest –before devolving into market socialism, presaging the bloody disintegration of
socialist Yugoslavia (Kirn 2019).
Across these movements, a functional and spatial separation between production and
reproduction –following capitalism’s ideological separation of economy from society –placed the
greater power with workers’councils, risking sliding into syndicalism. Recent attempts at building the
commune have tried to control for this by foregrounding social reproduction. In Chavez’s Venezuela,
‘communal councils’were developed from 2006, bringing together co-ops and assemblies into more
formal organs for collective control, with ‘social property enterprises’nested within this federated
structure and reinvesting their surpluses into the commune (Ciccariello-Maher 2020).
Similarly, in the post-Yugoslav space, municipalist movements are today building on more recent
activism around the commons and the right to the city, to ‘commonize’the state. In Zagreb and
Belgrade, these movements are fighting hard against decades of neoliberal, ethno-nationalist and
clientelist urban politics to reinstitute and renew Yugoslavia’s historical forms of self-management
(Milan, 2023;Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023). Likewise, organizations like Decidim Barcelona (We
Decide Barcelona) are taking some first steps in integrating digitally enabled connectivity and
collaboration within the existing fabric of municipal institutions, neighbourhood associations and
the broader social solidarity economy.
In controlling for the tendency towards syndicalism, however, such attempts often risk falling
into the opposing trap of bureaucratization and capture by state machinery. Before his death in 2013,
Chavez talked of a –paradoxical perhaps –‘communal state’(Ciccariello-Maher 2020). These two
tendencies –syndicalism versus statism –appear to mark the history of attempts at building council
communism (Muldoon 2021). One vests control with workers, creating a labour aristocracy and
productivism that ignores the needs of society and rest of nature; the other with bureaucrats or
technocrats, who take decisions across firms on behalf of society and nature, through the state. The
history of Yugoslav socialism can be read as a series of counteracting reforms, oscillating between
decentralized market socialism –less syndicalist than managerialist –and centralized state socialism
(Kirn 2019). Where the former reproduces a fetishism of the economic –under capitalism’s
ideological separation of economy from polity –the latter contains a fetishism of the political; one
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 13
collapses into the impersonal domination of the Market, the other into the personal domination of
the Plan (Mandarini and Toscano 2020). For a dis-alienated democratic planning, the economic and
political must be resolved together.
An alternative communalist-municipalist strand in the history of council communism emerged
where struggles in the workplace converged with those of the household and neighbourhood, in the
development of houses of the people. Described by Mike Davis (2018: 103; 101) as ‘authentic
proletarian cathedrals’, the ‘ultimate symbol of proletarian public life in most cities’of the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries inhabited by the industrial working class, these were,
significantly, physical buildings and spaces constructed by and for the people, home to diverse
functions and activities spanning production, reproduction and exchange, from cooperative
workshops and assembly rooms to libraries, theatres and caf´
e-bars. Margaret Kohn’s (2003)
historical study demonstrates the importance of the houses of the people of Emilia-Romagna as
sites for popular encounter, self-provisioning, mutual aid, cooperative production, political edu-
cation, collective festivity, recreation and identity-formation –becoming symbols in the communist
fight against fascist collectivism and bourgeois individualism.
Municipalist houses of the people were inspired by the Paris Commune, in which economic
planning was underpinned by embodied knowledge, affective attachment and popular participation
encompassing everyday life. In Communal Luxury, Kristin Ross (2016) shows how the Paris
Commune was fomented in the countless ‘revolutionary clubs’, the reunions, associations, salons,
bars and committees that sprung up across Paris in the years preceding 1871: ‘buzzing hives’of
subversive political activity for a ‘quasi-Brechtian merging of pedagogy and entertainment’;
‘schools of the people’–and ‘schools of disturbance and depravity’–in which labourers, artisans,
artists and intellectuals encountered one another and radical new ideas. For 72 days of autonomous
self-government, the Parisian Communards institutionalized ‘communal luxury’, over competitive
scarcity, partly though a pioneering programme of universal education in the founding of crèches
and schools in which specialization was shunned for more holistic, artistic, humanist pedagogies
(Ross 2016). These were crucial sites of learning for the formation of democratic subjectivities
versed in the skills and values of self-government, socially useful industrial design and cooperative
production. The Communards demonstrated through spatial practices what the concept of the
commune might look like in lived, affective and material terms, deeply impressing upon Marx’s
conception of communism and Murray Bookchin’s (1992,2014) ‘communalism’–the theory of
democratically confederated communes motivating new municipalist movements today.
A communalism rooted in everyday life, in which decisions taken at the neighbourhood level in
people’s assemblies are scaled up through democratically delegated federations of assemblies at
greater spatial scales, is currently being rediscovered by actually existing municipalist experiments
such as the ‘autonomous democratic confederalism’of Rojava in Syria (Van Outryve d’Ydewalle
2019). Communalism begins with Bookchin’s idea of politics invested in the ‘polis’–in popular
assemblies of face-to-face democratic-deliberative decision-making –rather than in ‘statecraft’–
professionalized, technocrat institutions of government. Where issues transcend the scope of the
polis, assemblies delegate decisions to members of higher-scale councils, federated at regional and,
potentially, global levels. This confederal network of councils is purely administrative, delegating
authority to the assemblies. Following Otto Neurath, such institutional conditions potentially open
space for the co-articulation of a plurality of plans, enabling ‘forms of economy of various kinds to
co-exist without being forced into competition’(quoted in O’Neill, 2003: 195).
Building on mechanisms developed in the Paris Commune, delegates –contra elected
representatives –are mandated, recallable and fully accountable to the assemblies (Van Outryve
d’Ydewalle 2019). The relationship between the assemblies and their delegates, and the experts and
14 Competition & Change 0(0)
professionals they commission to administer and execute their proposals and plans –what Bookchin
calls, respectively, policymaking and administration –is constantly negotiated and renewed through
iterative feedback. A tension between upholding the assembly’s sovereignty and the space required
by professionals to exercise their technical expertise is expressed in the dangers of creating a
technocratic ruling class pulling against the need for maintaining effective management of complex
allocative and coordinative planning decisions. It is in this space that the practical operations of
democratic economic planning need working out in practice, in materialist experimentation through
praxis, deliberation and collective learning. One avenue for exploring this is through cybernetic
thought, according to which loosely coupled systems can maintain local autonomy without sac-
rificing economy-wide cohesion (West, 2020).
By bringing into conversation Lefebvre’s theory of urban everyday life and Bookchin’s
communalism with contemporary municipalist struggles, we may begin to see what democratic
economic planning might look like in practice. Central to municipalist praxis is a deeply practical
strategic approach to transforming ‘all levels of social practice, including the agencies of coor-
dination’,inLefebvre’s (2009: 148) expansive sense of autogestion. Working through the urban
form itself, municipalist praxis harnesses the implosive power of agglomeration and simultaneity,
assembly and encounter, to bring people together to collectively coordinate their shared material
interests through distinctly urban institutions that tap into desires, jouissance and the libidinal
economy of the urban everyday. We follow Beveridge and Koch’s (2019: 147) politicized con-
ception of the ‘urban everyday’as the ‘(re)shaping [of] urban space through collective activities
residing in the everyday’;‘using or appropriating urban space or resources for everyday needs’,
from squatting housing to reappropriating water flows; and/or ‘establishing alternative urban
systems of the everyday’, from social centres to time-banks –practices cohering around the
municipalist commune and its associated institutions, notably co-ops and assemblies. But the
commune is only one aspect of the urban and of municipalist dual power; the other aspect is working
within existing structures of the state and capital to contest and reconfigure these technologies of
power to support the flourishing of the commune (Roth et al. 2023).
We must therefore look across the planetary landscape of extensive urbanization, up and down
global value chains, for struggles that attempt to contest or harness logistical power for municipalist
ends. In contradistinction to Danyluk’s (2021) identification of ‘supply chain urbanism’, we should
look to the emergence of what we might call a ‘supply chain municipalism’. Recent struggles in
cities such as Rosario, Argentina, point to the embryonic development of municipalist alternatives
to capitalist logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2023). Here, networked cooperative federations of
family farmers and municipal food companies are working to not only localize supply chains but
‘democratise technical knowledge and substitute mercantile processes of valorisation with co-
operative economies’for ‘improvised, autonomous infrastructures [that] contest discourses of
efficiency, profitability and surplus, to construct and promote, through counter-logistical ar-
rangements, a different territorial organisation structured around open and democratic supply chains
that value environmental resources, cooperative economies and the sustainment of life’(Minuchin
and Maino, 2023: 20). Similarly, Terra Pagesa (translated imperfectly as Peasant Land or Farmers’
Land) is a supply chain municipalism of sorts, led by the Catalan Union of Farmers and supported
by Barcelona City Council, working to re-localize Barcelona’s food system. These struggles
represent the potential socialization and municipalization of the metabolic infrastructures that give
structure to the urban.
Minuchin and Maino (2023: 11) highlight Bookchin’s stark opposition between municipalist
politics and logistics: ‘If the distinction between policy making and administration is kept clearly in
mind, the role of popular assemblies and the people who administer their decisions easily
Thompson and Nishat-Botero 15
unscrambles logistical problems from political ones’(Bookchin, 1992: 247). This is where we see
the limits to Bookchin’s undialectical thinking; something that engaging with Lefebvre can
overcome. If logistics as currently spatialized under planetary urbanization is insulated from the
political by capital’s separation of economy from polity, then a municipalist supply chain strategy
would aim to re-politicize logistics through a dual power approach of extending the logic of the
commune over existing global value chains, where possible, coupled with building autonomous
circuits of value.
Conclusion
In this article we have sought to contribute to current critical debates in democratic economic
planning by considering the role that the overlooked aspect of space must necessarily play in any
creative construction of postcapitalism. First, we reviewed what we see as the most fully articulated
conceptualization of spatial issues in the literature –one focused on planetary logistical infra-
structures as state-capitalist technologies of exploitation and control (Bernes 2018,2020;Clegg and
Lucas 2020). This thesis presents such infrastructures as intrinsically resistant to reconfiguration for
postcapitalist ends, arguing for a third agricultural revolution to transcend the impersonal domi-
nation of globally integrated supply chains. Next, through engagement with open Marxism
(Charnock, 2010;O’Kane, 2018a), we suggested how this thesis of agricultural revolution misses
the crucial mediating role played by urban space as a social form of capitalism as a totality –both in
its dominating and emancipatory dimensions. We then synthesized the work of Lefebvre on
planetary urbanization and the production of space to explore how abstract space dominates our
lives and yet carries, in the differential spaces of urban encounter and assembly, the seeds of its own
potential overcoming. If planning has been historically associated with abstract space and the
logistical state, with personal and impersonal domination, a Lefebvrean perspective suggests
possibilities for a dis-alienated and democratically planned autogestion. In this way, we argued that
any democratic economic planning capable of challenging capital must activate, and be animated
by, the collective desires and enthusiasms embedded in everyday life. What is wanted, in other
words, is the discovery and invention of new forms of social mediation grounded in the actually
existing material struggles and experiments of the ‘urban everyday’.
Finally, we pointed to historical and contemporary examples of such struggles as they have
unfolded in syndicalist, council-communist and radical municipalist movements. Future research in
economic planning could usefully attend to urban-rural struggles around municipalist counter-
logistics, as counter-movements to ‘supply chain urbanism’(Danyluk 2021). When combined with
the digital technologies of ‘platform municipalism’(Thompson 2021)–such as Barcelona’s
Decidim platform for citizen participation in planning –how far can such a counter-logistics be
brought under collective control through confederated assemblies channelling the urban form of the
commune? This would constitute a different kind of ‘counter-logistics’than that articulated by
Bernes (2013) –proactively building counterpower in and through urban social forms. Through a
dual power strategy, might it be possible to connect municipalist experiments trans-locally, con-
federated at regional and global scales, in a process that slowly removes dependency on capitalist
logistics and just-in-time production, and builds a postcapitalist alternative in the shell of the old? If
the spaces of possibility of the urban everyday are to thrive and give rise to an expanded autogestion,
planning will have to be understood in praxis-oriented terms, something irreducible to the opti-
mization and rationalization of the web of life.
16 Competition & Change 0(0)
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council; (ES/
S012435/1).
ORCID iD
Matthew Thompson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5691-4851
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