ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book compares the weak groups of urban China with the urban poor of the West. The rapid transformation of China's great cities in the past three decades reversed the earlier revolutionary and socialist course and reintegrated the great cities into the global capitalist economy. David Harvey outlines that anticapitalist struggle must be urban based, because the city has replaced factories as the space to produce surplus value and urbanization played a role in the absorption of capital surpluses since Haussmann rebuilt Paris, and done so at ever-increasing geographical scales. Harvey envisages the capitalist control of the redistribution of surplus capital in the urban context being replaced with democratic control by urban commons. The urban-based movements for gay rights, women rights, and immigrant rights for the part seek to redefine humanity within capitalist society rather than replacing capitalism with something completely new.
