Arise, ye (in)debtariats of the world!

Revolution and the Critique of Human Geography. Prospects for the Right to the City After 50 Years’ is the paper that Don Mitchell read for the plenary lecture at the 7th Nordic Geographic Meet, held in Stockholm in June 2017. The paper was the Geografiska Annaler B Lecture, at the invi- tation Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography and the conference organizers. Proceeding from the premise that ‘revolution is a geographical act’, Mitchell relies on two key revolutionary thinkers cum protagonists to convey the profoundly spatial nature of revolution. The first, Henri Lefebvre is a well-known thinker in geographical circles not least through his oft- cited 1967 text The Right to The City, with the likes of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Neil Smith, Andy Merrifield, Bob Shields, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, and of course Don Mitchell himself, as interlocutors. The second protagonist, Guy Debord is a significant thinker in his own right, Lefebvre’s former student and political antagonist, well known in Marxian, media, film and cultural theory, but not so well known in geographical circles. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1995) is a pioneer work on commodified life, culture and power in the contemporary (Merrifield 2004). It is only apposite then that Mitchell grants Debord more space (15 entries on The Society of the Spectacle compared to the 4 or 5 entries on the Right to the City) in his deliberations on revo- lution. Even with the numbered format (reminiscent of Debord’s numbered Theses), one can discern an introduction, corpus and a coda. In what follows, I present my take on Don Mitchell’s lecture/ paper by focusing on two themes. The first revolves around issues of time and history, the second is parallel readings of Debord-Mitchell on questions of space, revolution and the critique of human geography. I wind up by offering an alternative take on revolution and the critique of human geography.