Capitalism to be relevant always try to innovate itself. Whenever we think capitalism is dying, we undermine its capacity to redesign itself and develop new forms that do away with some of the old flaws. And one big example of this project of Capitalism is Saudi Arabia’s very cognitive and smart city called NEOM. Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince, has worked to modernise and diversify the Arab nation. He developed the “Vision 2030” plan, which calls for restructuring the Saudi Arabian economy and reducing its reliance on oil output. The centerpiece of Vision 2030 is NEOM, a 26,500 square kilometer city situated on the Red Sea coast. The city is divided into three parts. The first part is named “the Line”, a 170 km linear city which is designed to house 9 million people without cars, all of whom can access basic amenities within a 5-minute walk. The second part of the project is the 250 square km Oxagon, which will emphasis expanding the Duba port through contemporary manufacturing, industrial research, and development. The third part of the city is Trojena which will be the Arabian Peninsula’s first significant outdoor skiing destination.
The cosmopolitan elite-focused NEOM will have its tax structure and operate under progressive legislation that is consistent with international norms and supportive of economic growth. It will therefore be mostly free from the repressive Wahabi Islamic regulations that govern life in the rest of the Kingdom. Various commodities like food, entertainment, sports, tourism, education, and biotech will be introduced in this state-of-the-art city. As Mohammed bin Salman says, this project will kickstart “a civilisational revolution that puts humans first”. An introduction video on Neon by the Saudi government claims that it is a cognitive city that doesn’t just accommodate your needs but will develop the ability to foresee them, simply a more formal way of expressing you’ll be continuously monitored by the Saudi state. Here, infrastructure is determining social, political and economic structure. Saudi Arabia is trying to counter allegations on conservatism through infrastructural modernity.
Bourgeoise throughout the world tries to constantly expand the market for its products. As Karl Marx points out in Communist Manifesto while thriving this goal of constantly expanding, “Bourgeoise nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”. NEOM city is a good example where Saudi Arabia trying to utilise its desert land to commodify it and generate capital through the commodification of unused space. The worker can create nothing without nature, as Marx says in Estranged Labour, but here, capitalism is not working with nature, but exercising power over it, making nature a commodity.
Time and space determine whatever produces within them and there is a distinct relation between them. Space is a social construct where society determines the usage of space, as with the change in the mode of production from feudalism to capitalism, there has been a change in the nature of space and private property comes. In NEOM, the whole structure of space changes, it is being said that NEOM is self-sustained, which also means that the society is exclusive in nature, there is no need for outside labour into it.
NEOM, as shown to us through advertisement is like a fictitious commodity where values are determined before its being created, it’s just an imagination. The value of the commodity is determined before it gets finished and comes to market. The notion of the exchange of commodity as a tangible finished good in the market has been transformed. NEOM as a commodity has no form, but has exchange value.
The city is not for everybody, but it will be for only selective people, who are elites, and highly skilled technocrats, not the one who is building the commodity. The semi-skilled or unskilled workers will have no say or no excess points to this city after the project will be completed. The worker is alienated throughout the process feeling they don’t belong here, and will not be allowed inside the city after the project will be completed. Those people who are giving value to NEOM city will have no stake in the product. Nadhmi Al-Nasr, the CEO of the NEOM project, was accused by former workers of encouraging a management culture that “belittled expatriates, established unrealistic demands, and overlooked discrimination in the workplace”.[1] “I drive everybody like a slave, when they drop down dead, I celebrate. That’s how I do my projects”, said Nasr in one of the meetings. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020, he threatened to replace workers trapped in other nations, including the previous director of branding and marketing. Marx while distinguishing animals from humans talks about the concept of species being and its essence being a free conscious activity, but here we can’t distinguish the workers of NEOM project from animals, in the words of Marx, “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”
As Marx says, the city that labour is building confronts it as “a power independent of the producer,” which is something alien. Their labour becomes into something alien to them, something that exists outside of them. There is no direct relationship between the labourers working there and the NEOM city. For those who designed the city, it could be ambitious project for them, but for those who are semiskilled and manual workers, the meaning of the city is quite different as they even don’t know what they actually making. Here, the labourer is not alienated from the product, but also from the production process. As the city will build in the future, the power of worker on the city will decrease thus, as the more commodities it produces, the cheaper the worker as a commodity becomes, and the commodity it produces start exercising power on the worker.
Through NEOM, technology driven modern scientific world has been presented to us, but it’s a mask to hide the social oppression in the society. Instead of investing in those issues, Saudi Arabia is creating a mirage which is so ostentatious that anybody who looks at it, the first thing that comes to the mind is NEOM city. This is how the new imagination is sold to us. The subject of what development means to each of us is one that keeps coming up. Development for whom as it hampers the class dynamics in Saudi Arabia through exclusion.
City for whom? Who would be living in this city? Are they the technocrats, elites or the labourers who are building this project? Are those people living there actually matter? There is a dialectics which is existing with the NEOM project, is it a city for people or people for city? The prime importance here is given to the city, to the technologies than to the residence, which makes it an ultra-modern version of smart cities.
In Neom city, residents are also a commodity. Highly skilled people are a commodity, as cities accommodate only these kinds of people. The grandeur of the city has dehumanised the agency of the citizen since not everyone can live there, one has to prove itself as a commodity worthy for the city to become a resident of the city.
The Kuwaiti tribe now lives in the area where the project is slated to be built. According to The Guardian, at least 20,000 tribal members are currently facing eviction as a result of the project and are unsure of their future housing arrangements. Due to displacement, the mode of subsistence of the tribe changes, they will migrate as a proletariat who don’t own any kind of means of production, which causes the disposition of means of production and brings politserisation. Massive scale displacement is now unquestionably a reality of our time. It is tempting to quote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto’s opening graph, as Arturo Escobar says. ” “A spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of displacement. All the powers of the New World Order are joining to exorcise it.”
Critics also accuse Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of greenwashing – making grand promises about the environment to distract from the social reality of the society. When states try to divert people from the real issue, they emphasize development.
There is a juxtaposition which exists between the people who are living in Saudi Arabia right now, their cultures and those who are going to live in the NEOM city. Through this kind of project, Saudi Arabia is going through a transition from a conservative society to modern society. But this transition is not the transition of thought process, but it’s a transition of technology, creating a modern society based on technology, not on ideas. Thus, the commodity reifies modernity in NEOM city, giving more emphasis on commodity, and citizen as a component doesn’t matter as such, defying the human angle into it.
– Aditya Kumar Pandey