By LINCOLN SECCO*
Considerations on Anselm Jappe's book
The holiday of August 15, the date of the Assumption of Mary, is known in Italy as Ferragosto. It is also the title of a melancholic comedy from 2008 directed by Gianni Di Gregorio in which the character wanders through traditional shops to buy fish and other foods, without forgetting the medicines of old age. And all washed down with white wine.
Exactly the day before that Ferragosto from 2008 to Morandi Bridge,[I] in Genoa, collapsed. The event could refer us to the work of Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of St. Louis the King) in which it is discussed whether the fatal encounter of five people at the time of the fall was an accident or a design of fate.
In the Italian case, one can speak allegorically of “destiny.” The concrete, held together by steel bars inside the structure and subject to invisible corrosion, has a limited shelf life of about half a century. After that, it requires costly maintenance.[ii]
Moved by that event, Anselm Jappe wrote a dense but enjoyable book that combines history, architecture and a theoretical framework based on Karl Marx's concept of commodity fetishism.
The noun “concrete” (building material) is the most widespread concrete (adjective) side of the mercantile abstraction. This play on words is possible in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese; but not in European Portuguese, German or French, where the term is used Betonboorder ou Concrete.
History
According to Anselm Jappe, Portland cement appeared in 1824, based on clinker, that is, a mixture of approximately 80% limestone and 20% clay fired at 1450 °C to solidify it; it is then crushed to obtain cement powder. Since then, productivity has jumped from 1 ton per 40 h to 1 ton / 3 min today.
Artificial cement was vital for concrete (a mortar made of limestone, clay, sand and gravel) to become ubiquitous in the world's urban landscape from the 1960s onwards. In addition to cement, the reinforcement of the concrete, to which steel was added, was essential. While historical mortars were used to join natural stones together, concrete is an artificial stone that has been used since ancient times. In the case of Rome, it was made from a volcanic mixture with impressive durability.
Thus, although concrete has existed since ancient times, it has ceased to be just one of several construction techniques and has become dominant due to the flexibility and low cost of reinforced concrete structures. The price is only low in the short term, without considering that afterwards there are horrible ruins, abandoned buildings with leaks that need to be demolished. But this part of the cost is absorbed by society and not by the construction industry.
After a viaduct on Marginal Pinheiros collapsed in November 2018, three years later the City Hall created a Recovery and Maintenance Program for bridges, viaducts, small bridges, walkways and tunnels with an estimated investment of R$1,64 billion (a clearly insufficient item for the almost 200 bridges and viaducts in the city, with an average lifespan of over 40 years).
There are also environmental costs. Anselm Jappe cites the high energy consumption in cement production, CO emissions2 and prolonged inhalation of silica dust by people. His book does not spare personalities such as Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric chair!, Le Corbusier (the architect inspired by eugenics and social segregation), Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher; but he also mentions the enthusiasm of Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci[iii] by Fordism and the enthusiastic adoption of concrete in housing construction by Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.
It even recalls the use of concrete in anthroposophic architecture, although it avoids the right angles that mark the monotony of the urban world landscape. Oscar Niemeyer's curves did not eliminate the other problems of reinforced concrete either. Thus, concrete and plastic became a common background of modernity in real socialism and capitalism.
In Brazil
The work is fundamental for the reflection on the paths of peripheral modernity in Brazil. Without reinforced concrete, it would not have been possible. Although production had been taking place since the end of the 1920th century, modern cement production in Brazil began in the XNUMXs in the northwest corner of the city of São Paulo, in the current neighborhood of Perus.
The Brazilian Portland Cement Company Perus S/A opened its factory in 1926,[iv] fruit of the association of Canadian capital with a family that had two “governors” of the State of São Paulo among its members, Bernardino and Carlos de Campos.
In 1951 it passed to the JJ Abdalla Group until it closed in 1986, leaving a trail of accounting fraud, devastation of the surrounding rocks and forest to feed the furnaces. The neighborhood was also the loci the repression of the local workers' movement (the Queixadas movement) and a cemetery with a huge clandestine grave containing the mortal remains of those politically persecuted by the 1964 military business dictatorship.[v]
Negligence and corruption are combined with the fact that the decline of the factory occurred in inverse proportion to the increase in demand for cement. From the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek onwards, Brazil adopted a growth model based on external savings, maintaining dependence and associating multinational capital, national subsidiary companies and the State. But what matters here is that the great product of that economic model was the automobile.
The replacement of the railway network by the road network occurred at the same time that the consumption of reinforced concrete exploded in Europe. According to geographer Leandro Santos: “The increase in cement consumption during the 1970s went from 9,3 to 24,8 million tons and was mainly due to housing policies under the tutelage of the State – through the National Housing Bank (BNH) – and to large engineering projects, including the construction of hydroelectric plants, highways and bridges.”[vi].
Concrete was also responsible for the construction of Brasília, and the growth of cities that polarized industrialization had their landscapes destroyed by reinforced concrete skyscrapers. In the 1980s, São Paulo was already a disfigured city, but there was still plenty of room in the neighborhoods for verticalization. In the period 1988–2000, cement production continued to rise: it went from approximately 25 million tons to 39 million. Brazil exported a small portion (0,47%) to countries in South America. The process continues to this day.[vii].
In the opposite direction to the case of Perus, the Fábrica Santa Helena was created in 1936 in a city that already had an industry installed: Sorocaba. The enterprise gave rise to the multinational group Votorantim, which stood out in the production of aluminum. The metal gave its name to a city in São Paulo (Alumínio) that produced cement in the early XNUMXth century and had a glass factory and later an aluminum factory.
In the Ribeira Valley, the municipality of Cajati stood out for its limestone production thanks to the “support” of the Geographic and Cartographic Institute of São Paulo. The activity left permanent environmental damage and in 2021 the city was among the champions of deforestation of the Atlantic Forest.[viii]
In 2024, the city of São Paulo broke the historical record of delivering 800 condominiums, eliminating small local businesses, townhouses and old houses and morphologies, with worsening traffic. Some of the properties, however, were not used for housing but for speculation.
Crisis
This is a relevant aspect that would complement Anselm Jappe's book. The concrete manifestation of the cyclical crises of the abstract value circuit is most evident in the real estate market. The 2008 crisis originated in the sector, especially in lending. subprime granted to borrowers with a higher risk of default. But who obviously paid higher interest rates. Mortgages (papers that had houses as collateral) were securitized, transformed into derivative securities and traded.
For Anselm Jappe, abstract labor is the fundamental concept for the critique of this society of concrete, glass, plastic and air conditioning.[ix] All work under capitalist conditions has a concrete side that is expressed in a use value, that is, in the usefulness of the commodity; and it has an abstract side that is an average unit of time for the production of anything, regardless of the quality and type of work.
This value only becomes visible when it is shown in a form that is exchange value: “We must not confuse value – which is labor time – with exchange value, which consists of another commodity (historically, above all precious metals and then money)” (p.146).
This has nothing to do with the material or immaterial nature of production. The work of a carpenter who makes a table has an abstract side (which gives the table its value). The work of a blogger has a concrete side, which is to produce, for example, fake news (p. 146). Fake news, pesticides, Gustavo Lima's songs and Pablo Marçal's courses have a use value, however dubious it may be.
In value, the sensory qualities of products are erased in an “undifferentiated jelly of abstract labor” (Marx). Value is a social relation that needs to be represented, symbolized in a sign of value: money, which appears as an autonomous power, an external power that is foreign to the producers of commodities: “The exchange value split off from the commodities themselves and existing within them is: money. All the properties of the commodity as exchange value are presented in money as an object distinct from it, as a form of social existence split off from its natural form of existence.”[X]
With capitalist development, the concrete side exists increasingly only as the “temporary and interchangeable incarnation of the abstract” (p. 147). By abstracting the concrete particularities of commodities, their qualities disappear and what remains is what allows for exchange between them: the quantity of labor time abstracted from all its concreteness.
We are trapped within the automatic and subjectless movement of Capital: “for value, the infinite forms of the world are no more than the covering of an ever-identical substance” (p. 149). For Anselm Jappe, reinforced concrete is the materialization par excellence of (abstract) value: “The concrete [in English] is the visible face of abstraction. It is a material without its own limits (liquid from the beginning), amorphous, polymorphic and that can be poured into any mold” (p. 150).
However, there was still a problem. Real estate is the most difficult to fully subsume into the logic of turbo capitalism. One way to increase surplus value was to increase the number of times the same invested capital was turned over. If you invest in a tree plantation to harvest the wood in 20 years, that is the time for turning over and, therefore, for the return on investment. Until then, there will still be maintenance and surveillance costs, etc.[xi]
The buildings of the old factories on Avenida Presidente Wilson in São Paulo, today industrial ruins made of English brick, were part of the fixed capital that rotated much less than the circulating capital, obviously. The machines were already undergoing moral depreciation (Marx) and had to be replaced by more efficient ones before their useful life reached its end. Now, the skyscrapers of the capital of São Paulo are built with planned obsolescence.
With total disregard for materials and the environment, everything becomes “old” faster. Increasing the speed of circulation of goods has become essential: “Contemporary subjects have become accustomed to the obsolescence and incessant renewal of their clothes and cars; they have also become accustomed – by resorting to psychotropic drugs and therapies – to the continuous replacement of their friends and lovers, their children (in the case of blended families), their work, their places of residence and their political opinions. However, the total absence of already known and therefore recognizable scenarios can drive subjects to madness.” (p.152).
Even cities have become replaceable. “A city rebuilt every generation, as Antonio Sant'Elia dreamed, could only be a nightmare” (p.153). In other words, São Paulo is a nightmare, despite all the human qualities fixed in its space by its working class.
Anselm Jappe also comments on the absurdity of concrete and glass in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The architects did not take into account that books should not be exposed to light: “Perhaps they had already foreseen at the time, in their great wisdom, that the future digital book would emancipate itself from its archaic paper support”, the author states ironically (p.139).
Our present time is that of a world without books, of ruins of concrete and rust and, in the landfills, piles of obsolete cars and cell phones in place of natural mountains (now hollow like those in Minas Gerais)[xii]. Brave new world. Modernity is “a reduction ad unum” (p.99) teaches Anselm Jappe in his, despite everything, beautiful book.
* Lincoln Secco He is a professor in the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of History of the PT (Studio). [https://amzn.to/3RTS2dB]
Reference
Anselm Jappe. Concrete: Capitalism's Mass Construction Weapon. Lisbon, Editora Antígona, 2022, 168 pages. [https://abrir.link/cZnVw]
Notes
[I] It was inaugurated on September 4, 1967 and its length was 1.182 meters at a height of 45 meters.
[ii]There are clearly many advantages to choosing reinforced concrete. For example, the coefficients of thermal expansion of steel and plain concrete are almost the same, preventing the two materials from expanding at different rates. Tensile and compressive strength, fire resistance and other qualities could be invoked.
[iii]It doesn't seem to me that Gramsci is assertive in his Notebook 22. He uses many sentences in the conditional tense and there are doubts about Americanism and Fordism.
[iv]In 1933, a US-owned factory began operating in São Gonçalo/RJ.
[v]An old friend, the worker Salvador Pires, drew my attention to the history of Perus. More recently, I visited the region with the historian Rosa Gomes, who has worked hard to preserve the memory of the workers' struggles in the Perus neighborhood.
[vi]Leandro Bruno Santos.The cement industry in Brazil: origins, consolidation and internationalization”, Society and Nature, 2011. Accessed on 7/1/2025.
[vii]Brazilian Mineral Balance, 2001.
[viii]Galileo, 30 Jun 2021.
[ix]He recalls that large ancient buildings had natural solutions for ventilation and cooling.
[X]Marx, K. Fundamental Elements for the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse),15 ed. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1987, v. I p.70.
[xi]Following an example from Marx: imagine that a capitalist “A” has advanced 500 pounds sterling of variable capital for a period of 5 weeks, when his capital returns with an increase of 500 pounds sterling of surplus value; the capital of entrepreneur “B” who rotates only once a year and not ten times like “A”, needs to reinvest 500 pounds, always new after 5 weeks and which have not flowed back from the productive employment of the labor force. Only after 50 weeks (1 year) will 5.000 pounds sterling flow back, which is the advance of capital “B” (500 x 10, with 10 being the number of rotations of “A”). We are abstracting from the greater investment in fixed capital of capitalist B and the greater productivity of labor, as well as the equalization of the rate of profit and other concrete situations.
[xii]Between Itajubá and Maria da Fé it is possible to see one of those sad spectacles of hollow mountains that exist in abundance in Minas Gerais.
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