ABSTRACT

The divorce between workplace and living place concomitant with industrial capitalism is widely recognized as of immense significance. Work on neighborhood activism and the related politics of turf has tended to receive less attention from Marxists, but, where it has, the relation to class has also been a prime consideration. The concept of turf politics is deceptively straightforward. Although a number of core meanings attach to it, their resituation with respect to different contexts adds significant complexity. A central focus is that of collective consumption: the collective consumption in the living place of such values as education and physical amenity; and of such dis-values as congestion and local taxation. Alongside a class politics of collective consumption it is possible to define a class politics of location. Just as capital's accumulation fund interacts with labor's consumption fund, the relation has a spatial expression. For the geography of capital accumulation is from one standpoint a geography with respect to worker's living places.