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(Ira Katznelson, 1992, p. vii)

This quotation from Katznelson's Marxism and the City is set down here at such length because it encapsulates so well the vital idea of his thought: Marxism as a political philosophy may be dead, but as a tool for social and city planning it may yet be invaluable. Marxism is then a great device to understand the way cities function, how their space is organized and how people use and respond to these arrangements of this space. For Katznelson, Marxism is an antidote to the social forgetfulness of postmodern architecture.
Marxism and the City is a masterly review of some of the many scholarly critiques that have been made in the past century of the place of Marxism in the organization and development of cities and their 'space'. Katznelson finds in the literature of Marxism hints and suggestions that the political and economic weaknesses of Marxism can be converted into a theory of city planning and development to replace or complement the social hiatuses of capitalism. Katznelson argues that Marxism is still vital for historians seeking to understand how society developed from a world of feudalism into a globalized system of capitalist Western economies and national-states where the majority of workers have weakly become enthralled by the allurements and pressures of capitalism. Katznelson perceives in the existing Marxist literature of the city an overemphasis upon the weaknesses of traditional Marxist theory and suggests instead that there should be a re-balance of opinion in favour of the advantages of 're-spatialized Marxism'.
Marxism in the City starts with a chapter named 'Marxism and the City? where the question mark represents what Katznelson thinks is a fundamental error in the thinking and methodology of traditional Marxism. He argues that whereas Marx was acutely aware of the political and social situation of workers in Russian and European cities, he nonetheless gave little emphasis to the spatial realities and conditions of these cities. Marx ought to have urged, according to Katznelson, that revolutions within the structure of the proletariat should have been accompanied by corresponding changes in the organization of the spaces and developments within those cities. That is, redevelopment of the architecture and buildings of cities could transform the economic and social conditions of the workers who inhabited them. But instead, laments Katznelson, ' the city was virtually ignored in the development of Marxist theory for more than a century' (Katznelson, 1992).