Historically, urbanisation, the growth of cities, was the realm which capital created and within which capital established itself as a social relationship of production, distribution or exchange.

This is very clear today with the sprawling metropolises of the capital order on a global scale. Some cities contain more people than individual countries or regions.

The essential purpose of the city for capital has always been for capital’s expansion and accumulation. For the ease and facilitation of making profit, for production, ease of circulation and exchange. For the realisation of its historic mission to continuously accumulate and expand. As capital’s creation, the city brings with it urbanisation and all the associated social and psychological conflicts and problems.

Even the very first cities in human history – those which were the result of the development of agriculture in the great river valley civilisations, such as Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Yangtze, the Indus and the Ganges – were established as centres of commodity exchange which, of course, implies money, the cash nexus, exchange. That is, as centres where commodity capital and money capital could circulate and augment in value. They were places where agricultural surpluses became stamped with the character of exchangeable value. The first markets and cities arose on the foundations of the surpluses produced on the fertile soils of the great river valleys of the planet.

And what future for the cities? They will disappear with the very relation (capital) whose genesis and evolution has created them. The ages beyond the capital order will see a return to more disseminated forms of human settlement. The city will gradually disappear and be replaced by less urbanised forms of human settlement and activity.

Shaun May

September 2021

mnwps@hotmail.com