A pedagogy for space: Teaching,learning,and studying in the Baltimore Rebellion

Introduction

The recent educational interest in critical geography and analyses of space has sought to counter the historical emphasis on time in critical education scholarship (e.g. Ferrare and Apple, 2010; Ford, 2013; Gulson and Symes, 2007a, 2007b; Lipman, 2011; Peters, 2011). This work continues to uncover the complex interplay between education policy and practice and local and global spatial configurations, both in the present and the past. Yet this growing body of research has been limited in two regards. First, it has tended to focus on conducting spatial histories and analyses of education; it has generally not inquired into the relationship between space and educational theory. Second, and most importantly, it has tended only to ask what spatial tools and analyses can offer education; it has generally not sought to address the absence of educational and pedagogical theories within critical geography and critical analyses of space. This latter aspect, I believe, is particularly problematic for critical educational scholarship that seeks to advance struggles against exploitation, oppression, and privatization. The contribution of critical educational researchers and activists to social movements is precisely in the area of educational and pedagogical theory, as “the production of an unprecedented social condition is essentially a process of teaching and learning” (De Lissovoy et al., 2014: 80). There have, of course, been gestures toward joining educational theory and critical geography (e.g. Morgan, 2000; Neary and Amsler, 2012), yet these gestures tend to remain at the epistemological level. John Morgan (2000), for example, ends his article “Critical pedagogy: The spaces that make the difference” by arguing for an understanding of space as socially produced so that we in turn acknowledge that it can be produced differently, which entails reading space as “social texts” (285). He writes: “A critical pedagogy of space would involve analysing examples… to help students recognise the ways in which space is used to dominate and oppress some individuals and groups;” it also “enable[s] students to consider that there are also geographies of resistance through which people deal with, and resist, oppressive practices” (283).

This article works, then, not only to spatialize educational theory but, more importantly, to educationalize theories of space, and to do so in a systematic manner that is oriented toward ontological transformation. It does so by homing in on Henri Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) theorization of the production of space as a potentially revolutionary activity. The article begins by situating Lefebvre’s historical and theoretical analysis. This is a necessary task because Lefebvre’s The Production of Space is a book that is cited frequently in educational literature but rarely deeply engaged. When it is engaged – and not only in educational literature – the focus tends to be exclusively on the spatial triad developed in the book’s opening chapter. Thus, the crucial distinction between abstract and differential space is glossed over or ignored.

After situating Lefebvre’s work, I take his understanding of the production of space as an educational problematic, and then develop a spatial educational theory and a pedagogy for space, the latter being the mobilization of the former. In particular, I augment Lefebvre’s spatial triad of (1) spatial practice, (2) representations of space, and (3) representational spaces with an educational triad of (1) teaching, (2) learning, and (3) studying. To do this I draw primarily on the work of Tyson Lewis, Gert Biesta, and Peter McLaren. I argue that, while Lewis and Biesta provide us with an ontology of education, this ontology has to be thought of in relationship with political economy, lest education end up merely reinforcing and strengthening relations of exploitation and oppression. I propose that each component of the educational triad needs to be held in a precarious, contingent, and dialectical relation. The purpose of this educational triad is to assist in the struggle for differential space against abstract space, or to advance the position of the proletarian class camp (Marcy, 1979) in the class struggle. In order to ask more precisely after this relationship and to grasp how we might deploy this educational theory to understand and produce space, I read the theory through the Baltimore Rebellion of 2015. I contend that the Baltimore Rebellion was a struggle over the space of the city, and that it was a deeply pedagogical affair that entailed the orchestration of teaching, learning, and studying.

Abstracting and producing space

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre performs a transdisciplinary reading of the history of space and its production, drifting from and between political economy, history, sociology, architecture, philosophy, art, and geography. The primary overarching claim in the book is that space is not an empty or neutral container within which – or blank canvas upon which – social interactions take place. Rather, space is produced again and again by and through social interactions: “Space,” Lefebvre (1974/1991) proclaims, “is social morphology” (94, emphasis added). As social morphology, space is produced and productive. It is by approaching and theorizing space through its production that Lefebvre is able to unify “first, the physical—nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social” (11). In this schema it is the social that dominates and serves as the unifying force. This effort, however, is not about producing “a (or the) discourse on space;” it is instead concerned with working “to expose the actual production of space by bringing the various kinds of space and the modalities of their genesis together within a single theory” (16). Space is produced, and Lefebvre wants to demonstrate these processes of production so that we might begin, collectively and intentionally, to produce space differently, more justly, in accordance with use and use-value against exchange-value. This theory, uniting as it does the physical and the social with the mental, is simultaneously an epistemological and ontological endeavor; it entails a reworking of things and our conception of things, things as they are lived and things as they are conceived.

Why the emphasis on space, and why the necessity of producing space differently? To begin answering this question, Lefebvre points to several developments happening around the time of the publication of the book in 1974. Lefebvre marks three historical phenomena: (1) the worldwide consolidation of the state; (2) resistance and transgression in the face of this consolidation; and, relatedly, (3) the persistence of the class struggle (as the dominant expression of resistance and transgression). The consolidation of the state has to do with the strengthening of the state that began with the Keynesian social-democratic state, in which the state takes on many aspects of social reproduction and inserts itself more and more into the everyday. ¹ The resistance and transgression to this state refers to the movements of 1968 that sought to break free from the rule of capital and exchange-value, from the hyper-planning of the city and of life. Finally, this resistance is always expressed through class struggle, as Lefebvre insists on the primacy of political economy even as he concerns himself constantly with difference and subjectivity.

We can begin to see the importance of the dialectic for Lefebvre and his insistence on the persistence of class struggle: “State-imposed normality makes permanent transgression inevitable… differences can never be totally quieted. Though defeated, they live on, and from time to time they begin fighting ferociously to reassert themselves and transform themselves through struggle” (23). Lefebvre insists repeatedly throughout his works on the endless persistence of use and use-value (see Ford, 2013). Lefebvre maintains that this dialectic, between use and use-value, between identity and difference, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, and between capital and labor, takes place not only in space but is ultimately manifested through struggles over and for space and its production.

The increasing importance of space for Lefebvre has to do with transformations in the capitalist mode of production, in which space takes on “a sort of reality of its own, a reality clearly distinct from, yet much like, those assumed in the same global process by commodities, money and capital” (26). ² There are multiple reasons why space becomes central in capitalist production and in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. If capital is, as Marx (1939/1993) says, a “unity of production and realization, not immediately but only as a process” (407), then space serves as a product, a form of production, and a means through which realization takes place. As Lefebvre (1974/1991) writes: “Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it [space] is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it” (85). When space becomes a means of production, the relationship between production and realization is altered, or “widened” (85). Not only is production no longer taking place behind the factory gates, in Marx’s “hidden abode of production,” but both production and realization can take place in the same absolute space.

The introduction, or “invasion,” of space into production and production relations means that space has been subjected to the capital–labor dialectic. As such, in order to uncover the production of space, Lefebvre employs what he calls architectronics, the task of which “is to describe, analyse, and explain” how “the preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space” (229). Things have a way of remaining in space; “In space,” Lefebvre writes, “nothing ever disappears—no point, no place” (212). The idea is that social relations remain etched in space throughout time, to varying degrees of course. But this lasting presence means that we can uncover the history – and the present – of the production of space, with an eye toward the future.

Lefebvre is particularly concerned with understanding what he calls abstract space, which is associated with space under the capitalist mode of production. Abstraction here does not refer to a mental activity as it does, for example, for Marx (Ollman, 1993). Abstraction for Lefebvre is rather the ontological process akin to, or really even synonymous with, rationalization. The abstraction of space is, to begin with, the subjection of space to capitalist reification through the rule of exchange-value. Employing architectronics, Lefebvre reads this historical process through the history of urbanization, which would be defined as the generalization of the rationality of the town. Historically, this process is located as beginning in the 16^th century, when “the town [was] separated from the countryside that it had long dominated and administered, exploited and protected” (268). More than separation, the growing import of the town was the beginning of the decline of the feudal organization of society. Indeed, the rationality of the town is “the rationality of calculation and exchange – the Logos of the merchant” (269). The town assembles people and goods in time from across space for the purpose of exchanging use-values, but over time exchange-value comes to dominate. The city is defined in part, then, as “the space of accumulation” (263). One can sense an echo here of the Marx and Engels of The German Ideology, in which the co-authors write about the town–country antagonism. They write: “The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation” (Marx and Engels, 1932/1970: 69). Lefebvre (1974/1991) marks this separation of town and country as the first “spiral of spatial abstraction” (269). The second spiral was the domination of the state and productive forces over the city, both having superseded the city-scale.

At this point we can more concretely develop exactly what Lefebvre means by abstract space, by the subjection of space to the domination of exchange-value. Mercantile and, later, capitalist logic reifies the lived space of the city. It seeks to produce and organize space in order to facilitate the production and realization of surplus-value. The city is reified, it comes to be seen as a finished thing instead of a process and product of social labor. Development, housing patterns, roads and transportation networks, the distribution of goods and labor-power, and circuits of exchange are all put to the service of capitalist accumulation. As these lived spaces come under the domination of exchange-value, differences are sought out, flattened, and absorbed within capitalism. Or at least the attempt to reduce and contain difference is made. “On first inspection,” Lefebvre notes, “it [abstract space] appears homogenous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them” (285). Upon closer inspection, however, after insisting on the persistent resistance of use and difference, Lefebvre argues that this abstract “space that homogenizes thus has nothing homogenous about it” (307), for difference and use can never be totally disappeared.

Abstract space embodies contradictions it cannot fully contain. The task is to study and seize upon these contradictions in order to produce a new space, a space of difference. Only through struggles directly over the production of space can capitalism and its attendant injustices be overthrown. To make this proposition, Lefebvre turns to Marx’s concept of constant capital as congealed, or dead labor, that is consumed productively: “Capital,” writes Marx (1867/1967), “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (224). It is only through the private ownership of the means of production (dead labor) that capital is produced. Lefebvre’s political goal is to turn this upside-down, or, better, right-side up:

But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the production of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity. In space needs and desires can reappear as such, informing both the act of producing and its products… In and by means of space, the work may shine through the product, use value may gain the upper hand over exchange value. (Lefebvre, 1974/1991: 348).

Under capitalism, space is abstracted and mobilized as a means of production; more specifically, it becomes mobilized as a means of productive consumption. Abstract space presents itself as dead, objectified labor towering over and ruling works and inhabitants. But this presentation, this form of appearance, is challenged and ultimately demystified in social movements and in smaller everyday practices. In space, goods and services are appropriated by social groups to be used in a way that cannot happen in, say, a factory – which is not at all to say that the factory is no longer an important site of struggle. But the factory remains a fragmented site of life, whereas in space – urban space, in particular – the totality of life, its encounters and contradictions, is present in simultaneity. Struggles have always taken place in space, of course, but Lefebvre observes that struggles are increasingly over and about space: “Space is becoming the principle stake of goal-directed actions and struggles… it has now become something more than the theatre, the disinterested stage of setting, of action” (410). The production of space has been foregrounded recently by the various Occupy movements, for example, and also by the recent uprising in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, to which I turn later in the article. These are struggles about economic exploitation, state repression, and oppression more generally, but the demands made are manifest through the staking out and taking up of space, and the struggles ultimately work toward the generation of new, alternative spaces.

Lefebvre convincingly demonstrates the importance of space in capitalist production and the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and the importance of space in social struggles and everyday life. He shows how capitalism has made space abstract and sought to homogenize differences. Further, he demonstrates how difference always persists and resists. Most importantly, he locates space – and the space of the city, in particular – as a privileged site of revolutionary activity, where living labor can appropriate dead labor, where use-value can reign over exchange-value, where use can annihilate the law of value altogether, and where social groups can be constituted as subjects. In short, through the production of space the expropriators can be expropriated.

The question, of course, is how these insights and forces can be harnessed for such a revolutionary transformation. This, I proffer, is ultimately a pedagogical question, and so the lack of an articulated educational theory haunts all of Lefebvre’s formulations. ³ What I want to do in the rest of this article is advance one contribution to the question of how revolution can occur through the understanding and production of space. In order to develop a pedagogy for space I turn first to Lefebvre’s spatial triad that he sketches for understanding spatial production. I then move to developing a spatial educational triad to add to this understanding, giving an explicit educational inflection to the production of space and providing one pedagogical approach – rooted firmly in revolutionary critical pedagogy – to working for revolutionary social transformation. In the final section, I provide an example of the mobilization of a pedagogy for space by reading the educational triad developed through the 2015 Baltimore Rebellion.

Lefebvre’s spatial triad

To begin formulating such an educational theory I want to turn to one of Lefebvre’s conceptual schemas put forth in The Production of Space: the spatial triad. It is introduced as a conceptual framework for understanding spatial practice and production as well as for understanding how it is that abstract space has come to be the dominant spatial experience. The spatial triad consists of: (1) representations of space; (2) representational spaces; and (3) spatial practice. This is introduced early on in the book but, as Andy Merrifield (2006) notes, it “is more implicit than explicit, assumed rather than affirmed” (109). It makes a brief appearance and then remains latent throughout the rest of the work and is, in true Lefebvrean fashion, never to make an appearance in a later work. This openness, however, means that we can “add our own flesh, our own content… rewrite it as part of our own chapter or research agenda” (109).

An educational triad

Teaching, learning, and studying in the streets: a pedagogy for space

Like Lefebvre’s spatial triad, the educational spatial theory I have sketched is posed in a triple dialectical and antagonistic unity. The next thing to do is to ask more precisely after this relationship. In other words: How might we deploy this spatial educational theory to understand and produce space? To answer this question I want to read this theory through the Baltimore Rebellion of 2015.

During the end of April and the beginning of May 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, there was a popular rebellion, something that is best referred to as an urban insurrection. The insurrection was urban not only because it took place in a city, but because it took place over the city, over the right to inhabit the city, the right to the city as differential space, as use and use-value, the right to move freely throughout the city without fear of repression. This fire was sparked before 9am on April 12, when 25 year-old Freddie C Gray was beaten and arrested by three cops, Lieutenant Brian W Rice, Officer Edward Nero, and Officer Garrett E Miller, who were patrolling the area of the Gilmor Homes low-rise housing project in the Sandtown neighborhood on the Westside of Baltimore City. Gray was walking in his own neighborhood – a dangerous activity for any person of color – when the three cops spotted Gray who, according to police reports, “made eye contact” with them and then ran away. A chase ensued, and Gray was attacked and arrested for carrying a small pocketknife (which the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, Marilyn Mosby, has said was of legal size). The arrest was recorded by two community members, and the recording documents Gray screaming in agony as cops beat and drag his limp body. ⁵ The cops threw him in a police transport van.

Gray was taken for what people in Baltimore – and cities across the country – call a “rough ride,” during which the cops place a victim unrestrained or improperly restrained in a van and drive it chaotically around town. That the cops had other things than “justice” on their minds is confirmed by the fact that they chose to make four stops between Gilmor Homes and the Western District police station, a distance of about half a mile. Further, it took them 30 minutes to make the five block trek. When they finally arrived at the police station, paramedics were called in. The paramedics treated Gray for just over 10 minutes before taking him to the University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Treatment Center. Gray was in a coma, had multiple broken vertebrae, and had a severed spine at the neck.

When news of this brutal act of aggression spread through the streets, spontaneous protests began. Baltimore has a fairly rich activist scene, with Black churches, community organizations, a fairly active left (dominated by anarchists, but with a fair share of Marxist organizations), and the Nation of Islam. The first protest took place on April 18 outside the Western District Police Station on North Mount St. on Baltimore’s Westside, less than a mile away from where Gray was first arrested (Fenton, 2015). This action was organized by Black religious leaders like Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant of the Empowerment Temple Family Life Center (who would later give Gray’s eulogy) and was attended mostly by local residents of the Westside. Hundreds of people marched on the police station. Unafraid, once they got to the station they went right up to the station’s entrance, standing and dancing on the steps and on a short wall that is positioned in front of the station, symbolizing and enacting a barrier between the people and the cops.

Gray died in the hospital on April 19, and demonstrations got increasingly militant as a result. The first arrests of protesters took place on April 23 during a march from City Hall to the Western District; one for “disorderly conduct” and another for “property destruction” (Iletto, 2015). The march was routed through the city’s Inner Harbor, which is truly a flawless example of abstract space, of the city as exchange-value, with sports arenas, corporate headquarters, high-rise hotels and condominiums, and chain restaurants taking up the majority of space. If you watch the videos available from this protest you can clearly see that there were no permits secured for the march. Instead, protesters weave through traffic, blocking it as they see fit for a spontaneous “die-in.” Again, when the people arrived at the police station they took a confrontational stance toward police, shouting in their faces. The police responded by putting out the hashtag #WeHearYou.

A mass march was planned for Saturday, April 25. There were actually two marches organized, one by the Peoples Power Assembly and another by the Black community and religious organizations, such as Black Lawyers for Justice. People from all over the city and county of Baltimore (which are distinct entities) showed up, as did comrades from Washington DC and the surrounding areas. One rally started out at City Hall and another took place in the heart of the Gilmor Housing Project, where Gray was arrested. Marches proceeded throughout downtown Baltimore. When they got to Camden Yards – home of the Orioles – in the Inner Harbor at 6pm, however, protesters were attacked by drunk sports fans (Soderberg, 2015). As protesters chanted “Black lives matter!” a handful of white bar patrons yelled back “No they don’t!” The white bar patrons turned into counter-protesters and escalated the struggle, throwing beer cans and bar stools at demonstrators, who responded in kind. Fights broke out in front of a few restaurants. Protesters attacked private property in the downtown area and smashed the windows of cop cars.

The protests continued into the night, and the militancy of the people was channeled directly toward the police, particularly at the Western District Police Station. And something happened at this point, something pedagogical: there was a shift from learning to studying. I couldn’t find out if protest permits had been secured for the march, but the mass demonstration was marked by a high level of coordination and planning. In most respects, it fit well within the confines of protests that take place in – and are acceptable to – bourgeois democracies. There were organized contingents of groups, scripted chants, well-formulated slogans and demands, printed placards, painted banners, and a clear spatial trajectory through the city. But the learning stopped when night fell and a real battle began.

I watched this battle unfold on social media. Several close friends and comrades were on the frontlines, reporting on Facebook and Twitter through their phones. One of my closest comrades, Andrew Castro, an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition and a leader in the Baltimore branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was at a battle between the people and the cops at the Western District Police Station during the late hours. He posted a one-minute video that captured succinctly the tragedy and hope running through the streets. The sun had long since set and the first mass protests that took place earlier that day had ended. The video shows a nondescript street corner in Baltimore, with multicolored row houses and a corner store in sight, and a few dozen riot cops are standing behind the barricades. We don’t get a full view of the street but it looks like the cops outnumber the people. Most of the people are Black and, although we can’t see the cops’ faces, we know what color most of them are.

There is no march taking place, no rally, no speeches. Instead, people seem to wander about. They are yelling at the cops, and for the duration of the video bottles, cans, rocks, and other objects are constantly being hurled across the barricades. Many people are recording the interactions, and some others are standing right up at the barricades, unafraid of the cops and the state power that they represent. Most of the people are just around the corner, and that’s where the attacks on the cops originate (the spatial layout of the battle and barricades makes this the safest place to be). Others approach the barricades, shouting and gesturing at the cops, and then retreat again so they don’t get hit by flying bottles and rocks. One woman – the only one that we can see who holds a placard – is standing near my comrade as he records, and so her voice is clear. “Y’all still a bunch of bitches!” she yells. She then begins chanting, “Fuck y’all! Fuck y’all!” Meanwhile, the cops, clad in full riot gear, cower behind their shields.

In another video that is a bit longer (over three minutes) posted by The Guardian (2015), we see the cops try to advance against the people. The cops duck out from behind the barricades and march toward the people, most of whom remain calm and put their hands up in the air. The video shows that there are at least a hundred police officers. Most of the cops form a new barricade at the location from where most of the objects were being thrown, and then they retreat, marching away from the protest. A few dozen cops remain behind for a bit, harassing protesters and forcing them back just a bit. At this point the video cuts out, but the victors are clear. The people, armed only with bottles and outrage, bandanas and determination, cell phones and will, defeated the riot cops.

Watching this unfold, I couldn’t help but see an act of studying taking place. No clear, predetermined goal was expressed through the actions captured on my comrade’s camera phone, no plan unfurling. What took place instead was a certain wandering within and beyond boundaries, or rather experimentation with those boundaries and our relationship with them. Instead of well formed chants and orchestrated contingents, there were cries of indignation and anger and multitudinous swarms forming and disbanding; advancing, retreating, and advancing yet again. The skirmishes with the cops weren’t leading up to a big finale; they were rehearsals for a revolutionary event, for something that we can’t quite envision yet, but we know is immanent in the present.

The next day was eerily quiet, suspiciously so. But the streets weren’t quiet for long. On Monday, April 27 a full-scale rebellion broke out all over the city. This was the day of Gray’s funeral, which took place at the New Shiloh Baptist Church, near the transportation hub on W. North Ave, a main gathering center for Baltimore’s Black community on the Westside. It was an open casket funeral, and the speeches delivered were a contradictory mix, expressing outrage but calling for calm. Outside the funeral, multiple spontaneous swarms were forming through social media. At 3pm – notably after school got out – a group of students met up at the Mondawmin Mall, less than a mile away from the funeral, and right by Frederick Douglass High School. The police were aware of the gathering and had hundreds of riot cops stationed at the mall. They also began circulating a rumor that “rival gangs” had formed a pact to “take out” police officers (this rumor was disproven quickly). The police tried to prevent people from getting to the mall, stopping buses and forcing young people out of them and blocking roads.

Groups of students were at the mall, many of them stranded there by the police blockades; the cops “did not allow the after-school crowd to disperse” (Brodey and McLaughlin, 2015). The cops started marching toward the students, and violence broke out. There is remarkable footage showing the students fighting off the cops, throwing rocks at them and forcing them to retreat (Wing, 2015). The cops were also throwing bricks and rocks at the students. The whole Westside erupted. At the Penn/North transportation hub another crowd had assembled. They broke into a CVS (drug store) and began “looting” (read: expropriating goods). Cop cars were burned. As tanks rolled through the streets the people hurled anything they could find at them. It was an insurrection, an insurrection of violence and joy, love and rage. As stores were being reclaimed and cops were being attacked, people danced in the streets. Watching on live stream I saw people smiling, dancing, and having their pictures taken in front of burning cop cars. All of this has to be placed in the context of insurrection:

As the young people came to feel their collective power, they have first gone after the easiest targets, the retail stores in their own neighborhoods. The police and the politicians above them were of course perfectly willing to let this happen. When state authority appears to collapse, people go after the things they have long been denied or cannot normally afford. For many in Baltimore, that includes basic household items, food, cleaning supplies and diapers – which is what one could see being taken from CVS. (Party for Socialism and Liberation, 2015)

The rule of exchange-value over the city and city life was directly challenged with force. Use and use-value reigned supreme as people claimed and consumed goods without regard for price or the laws of exchange. Privatized spaces were destroyed. Fixed capital was no longer fixed capital but the target of indignation. The streets and sidewalks were not being used for production proper nor for social reproduction under capitalism; what was dead was taken hold of by what was living, as Lefebvre wished.

I contend that all of this was an act of studying. The rules of protest were suspended and new forms of action were experimented with. But this is not to devalue organized protests and demonstrations, for these too are rehearsals for revolution. And organization is needed for revolutions to succeed and, most importantly, to consolidate. This is where the act of teaching comes in. We need spontaneity and organization, studying and learning. But just as the logic of learning has come to dominate at the expense of studying, so too have the received forms of protest that bourgeois democracies can accommodate come to dominate at the expense of insurrectionary tinkerings. The hope is that these tinkerings can generate new knowledges, skills, subjectivities, and forms of organization that can then be generalized and subsumed in a mass movement and, ultimately, an insurrectionary moment and a new revolutionary social, political, and economic order. Yet we need teachers to perform the delicate balancing act of studying and learning, to perform the contradictory act of directing and organizing the processes of learning and studying. During the Baltimore Rebellion the teachers were the Fruits of Islam and a triad of gangs: the Bloods, Crips, and Black Guerrilla Family. These organizations had all united to “minimize looting and refocus the youth’s righteous militancy” (Party for Socialism and Liberation, 2015). This is precisely the role of the teacher, which in a revolutionary situation becomes the Party, which serves as a collective organ that anticipates the transition from learning to studying and back again, from insurrection to organization.

Conclusion

Police violence was the spark that set the Baltimore Rebellion off, but the rebellion wasn’t just about police violence. It was about the right to be in and move through space, about the right to have control over the production of space. On any given night around 3000 people sleep without a home in the city of Baltimore (Health Care for the Homeless Inc., n.d.). Meanwhile, there are 47,000 vacant homes and other properties throughout the city that are boarded up so that people can’t enter them, sleep in them, or fix them up. If someone breaks through the boards and enters into one of these properties, the police arrive to evict and arrest them. In Gray’s neighborhood over 50% of people between 18 and 65 are unemployed (Justice Policy Institute, 2015). Yet on May 18, 2015, the state of Maryland voted to spend US$30m on a new jail for youth in Baltimore. And two days later the Governor took US$11.6m from Baltimore school aid. It’s not that the resources and materials needed to employ, educate, and house people aren’t there, it’s that they are privately owned. It’s the capitalist mode of production that has produced this reality and the radically uneven spaces of Baltimore, and the city isn’t unique in this respect.

Capitalism has abstracted space, producing an uneven and constantly shifting landscape adequate to its needs. This space suits the needs and desires of the ruling class, those who have the power to consume space as finished product, space as exchange-value. But as Lefebvre reminds us again and again, differences and class struggle resist indefinitely. The Baltimore Rebellion was an expression of this resistance. Space is both the site and stake of such struggles. In the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression we have to understand the relationship between capitalism and spatial production so that we can produce space and society differently. It is toward this end that I hope to have offered a beginning.