[This new history of Detroit seeks to guide readers through a
century of the citys class struggles and the populations responses to
deindustrialization, bankruptcy, and post-bankruptcy
neoliberal-sponsored revival.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

ON CREATIVE DESTRUCTION, MYTHS, AND REVOLUTION  
[[link removed]]


 

David B. Feldman
February 1, 2021
Monthly Review
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ This new history of Detroit seeks to guide readers through a
century of the city's class struggles and the population's responses
to deindustrialization, bankruptcy, and post-bankruptcy
neoliberal-sponsored revival. _

,

 

A People’s History of Detroit
Mark Jay, Philip Conklin
Duke University Press
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-0834-7

Four decades have passed since Howard Zinn published _A People’s
History of the United States_, retelling the history of the most
powerful capitalist nation-state through the eyes of the downtrodden
and oppressed. In its own peculiar way, Zinn’s text was something of
an unintended rejoinder to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential
campaign slogan: “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Organized
labor and the powerful social movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
found themselves on the back foot as factories shuttered across the
industrial heartland and a pervasive sense of decline spread
throughout much of the U.S. populace. If, on the one hand, Zinn
rejected the notion that the United States represents some sort of
“shining city on the hill,” on the other hand, he expressed great
reverence for its storied tradition of popular resistance to
exploitation and domination. This type of “history from below”
enjoyed a mini renaissance under the administration of Donald Trump,
another right-wing former entertainer who captured the presidency
after promising to make America great again—albeit this time amid
rumblings of a new round of incipient left-wing social struggle.1
[[link removed]]

It is a testament to the clarity and scope of Mark Jay and Philip
Conklin’s vision that _A People’s History of Detroit_—which went
to press prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the onset of the most severe
capitalist crisis since the 1930s, and the eruption of an
unprecedented nationwide uprising (with global reverberations) against
police brutality—is replete with insights for those trying to make
sense of these deeply uncertain and troubling times. Zinn was wary of
romanticizing the oppressed and “invent[ing] victories for
people’s movements,” taking the view that “the cry of the poor
is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never
know what justice is.” Jay and Conklin go further, recognizing that
“in order to give a true ‘people’s history,’ one must do more
than condemn the malevolence of those in power and celebrate the
activists who have struggled for justice; one must also come to terms
with the social system in which these people lived. In our case, this
means confronting the logic of capital.” They ground their narrative
in the dialectical interplay between two concepts that are rarely
considered together: _creative destruction_ and _mythology_. In so
doing, they “seek to shed light on the ideologies that have masked
capitalism’s destructive tendencies and shifted the blame for social
dislocations onto discrete, identifiable groups.” Their project, in
other words, is “to break the hold that myths have on history.”2
[[link removed]]

From Rust Belt Capital to Comeback City

Few U.S. cities are steeped in as much mythology as Detroit, the
birthplace of Henry Ford’s Five Dollar Day, the moving assembly
line, and the Motown sound. Yet the Motor City quickly became the
unofficial capital of the Rust Belt; it lost almost two-thirds of its
peak population during the second half of the twentieth century, and
its municipal workforce was slashed in half between 1990 and 2013.
Things bottomed out in 2013, when Detroit filed for the largest
municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. The restructuring of $18 billion
of debt was overseen by Kevyn Orr, a Black corporate lawyer appointed
“emergency manager” by Michigan governor Rick Snyder. This cleared
the way for another round of punishing austerity for poor and working
people, with the city selling off public assets, deregulating industry
even further, and requiring that current pensioners accept reductions
to 74 to 96 percent of their original value. As the flow of capital
back into the city began to pick up steam once again, Orr received
ERASE Racism’s Abraham Krasnoff Courage and Commitment Award for his
services in the bankruptcy proceedings, and Detroit acquired the
moniker of the Comeback City.3
[[link removed]]

Jay and Conklin portray the “post-post-apocalyptic Detroit” of the
twenty-first century in gripping prose that reads like a marriage of
Mike Davis’s dystopian chronicles of urban life and David Harvey’s
analyses of the built environment in capitalist accumulation. On the
one hand, outlets such as the _New York Times_ heap lavish praise on
billionaire investors like Dan Gilbert and the late Mike Ilitch,
calling them the saviors of downtown Detroit. More than $9 billion
flowed into downtown real estate developments between 2006 and 2014.
Hordes of young professionals have quite literally followed the money
and a variety of shops and service providers have in turn followed in
the footsteps of these new arrivals, catering to their middle-class
consumption habits. On the other hand, out in “the neighborhoods,”
one is more likely to confront the daily reality of water shutoffs (40
percent of the city’s residents were affected between 2010 and
2018), school closures (more than two-thirds of Detroit public schools
have closed over the past two decades), and home foreclosures (in
2017, Detroit had approximately one-third fewer occupied homes than
ten years prior). In some areas, there is fewer than one job for every
ten people! The spatial dimension of the ongoing processes of
revitalization and abandonment is stark; one only wishes that there
was more visual representation of the dizzying array of material cited
in the text—such as a map of the numerous neighborhood development
projects—to better orient the reader.4
[[link removed]]

How did we get to this point? Orr’s assessment is quite simple:
“For a long time the city was dumb, lazy, happy, and rich.” Other
liberals have dusted off parts of the Kerner Commission of 1968, such
as its denunciation of “white racism” and its declaration that
“our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one
white—separate but unequal.” At first, this diagnosis may appear
to describe contemporary Detroit well; it “is an overwhelmingly
black city, but if you walk around Downtown, you see a preponderance
of white faces.” Yet the authors refuse to accept such facile and
mythological explanations. This is not a tale of _two_ cities or a
problem of so-called race relations. Rather, they argue that there is
_one_ Detroit and it exists within a broader class society.
“Downtown development and dispossession on the periphery are not two
separate processes; they are _two elements of the same process of
uneven development_,” a process that depends heavily on the state to
legalize theft, subsidize capital with public money, and protect the
hording of property through force. Moreover, “the police force
tasked with securing the city’s revitalization,” through
paramilitary-style SWAT raids and secret facial recognition
technology, “is now headed by a black police chief and is composed
of mostly black officers.”5
[[link removed]]

Capitalist Despotism and the Not-So-Golden Years

We are witnessing the city’s transformation from an industrial to a
postindustrial economy. “In contrast to the East, where industrial
satellites grew up around commercial centers,” Detroit was,
alongside other Midwestern cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh,
Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Cleveland, one of “the first true industrial
cities in America.” Accumulated capital grew 360 percent during the
last two decades of the nineteenth century, and the Ford Motor Company
began to dominate the city during the first two decades of the
twentieth. By this point, more than half of Detroit’s workers were
employed in the auto industry. It was here that the world’s first
moving assembly line was inaugurated in 1913, bringing with it
Taylorist forms of “scientific management,” a tyrannical control
over the labor process, and dizzying rates of worker turnover, which
reached an astonishing 370 percent that year.6
[[link removed]]

Capitalists like Ford adopted many strategies to clamp down on worker
militancy, ranging from the institution of the Five Dollar Day for
some workers to the development of an extensive system of spies and
close collaboration with the local police. They made a conscious
effort to drive a wedge between Black and white workers, deploying the
former as strikebreakers and private guards, assigning them “shit
work” in the factories, and forcing them to live in segregated
housing owned by predatory absentee landlords. In the first eight
months of 1925 alone, Detroit police shot fifty-five Black
people—more than were lynched in the entire South during this time.
A splinter group of the Ku Klux Klan known as the Black Legion
murdered nearly as many people during the 1930s. Their terroristic
practices included “the bombing of union headquarters and the
slaying of prominent communist organizers.”7
[[link removed]]

Intense labor strife raged throughout Detroit up until the end of the
Second World War, with the Industrial Workers of the World, the Auto
Workers Union, and then the United Auto Workers (UAW)—which
pioneered the great sit-down strikes of 1936 and 1937—leading the
charge. After nearly sixteen thousand Black workers refused to act as
strikebreakers during a walkout, Ford finally recognized the UAW in
1941. Even though the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 imposed serious
restrictions on labor activity, autoworkers continued to mount
impressive strikes and walkouts against production speedups until the
Big Three (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors) signed contracts with
the UAW in 1950. The so-called Treaty of Detroit granted UAW workers
annual cost of living agreements, unemployment benefits, and pensions,
inaugurating a new era of organized labor throughout the country. It
is this period that Trump hearkens back to when he talks about making
America great again. Yet for all the nostalgia associated with the
Golden Years, they left much to be desired—even for those lucky
enough to be unionized autoworkers in Detroit. To gain these benefits,
the UAW signed no-strike pledges and ceded control of the shop floor
to management, hastening the bureaucratization of the union’s upper
layers, as well as creating the conditions for wildcat strikes against
dangerous speedups. Full employment was nowhere on the horizon: 10
percent of all unemployment in the country was located in Metro
Detroit in 1952, and the city lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs between
1947 and 1963. Those who held onto their jobs faced compulsory
overtime and, as usual, “black workers were generally the last to be
hired and the first to be fired and were made to work in the
least-skilled, most dangerous positions.”8
[[link removed]]

Outside of the factories, a policy of “slum clearance” was leading
to the displacement of poor Black people and rolling out the carpet
for middle- and high-income residents. Fifty tenants’ rights
organizations formed in the city during the mid–1960s, launching
rent strikes and holding demonstrations. The Detroit Police Department
(DPD) responded by massively expanding its Red Squad (which was tasked
with monitoring and infiltrating radical groups) and introducing new
“tactical mobile units.” It is not difficult to see why Detroit,
supposedly the poster child of postwar U.S. prosperity, was also the
site of the bloodiest of the “civil disturbances” of the 1960s.
Forty-three people lost their lives during five days of unrest known
as the Great Rebellion of 1967. More a political uprising than a
“race riot,” this epochal event ushered in a short transitional
period “characterized by the conflict between revolutionary forces
calling for a refashioning of Detroit’s political economy,” such
as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the local chapter of
the Black Panther Party, “and repressive state forces allied with
corporate interests vying for a continuation of capitalist
accumulation.” The League was a self-identified Marxist-Leninist
organization that saw Black workers, who by 1968 constituted a
majority in the production departments of the Big Three, as the
vanguard of the revolution. The Panthers, meanwhile, sought to
organize dispossessed populations into a revolutionary force.9
[[link removed]]

Capital Flight and Surplus Populations

The state had decisively defeated these groups by the middle of the
1970s, thanks in no small part to the deadly use of force. It was
nonetheless a Pyrrhic victory: industrial capital continued to flee
Detroit, the city’s homicide rate _tripled_ as the drug trade
expanded during the 1970s, and a string of Democratic mayors struggled
to entice other fractions of capital back to the city. Coleman Young
used public money in an unsuccessful effort to “turn Downtown
Detroit into a vibrant commercial center.” His successor Dennis
Archer pushed for the construction of several sports stadiums and
casinos. The administration of Kwame Kilpatrick moved to integrate the
city more tightly into global financial markets, issuing $1.4 billion
dollars in securities to Wall Street banks in 2005 alone. These
efforts bore little fruit: Detroit’s population declined by two
hundred thousand during the 1980s, the official unemployment rate was
25 percent during the mid–1990s, and by the time the city declared
bankruptcy, it stood at an astonishing 45 percent.10
[[link removed]]

Of course, moments of neglect and despair are necessary in the cycle
of capitalist accumulation and destruction. “What is unique about
Detroit,” Jay and Conklin posit, “is the amount of time [the
transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy] has taken
and the immensity of the disinvestment and poverty it has incurred in
the meantime.” One might add that the flip side of this is that the
city may actually be _ahead_ of the curve in offering a frightening
image of what threatens to emerge from the rubble of the current
crisis, during which states across the nation have seen their
financial obligations increase and their sources of revenue dry up.
The very same people who administered Detroit’s bankruptcy and
corporate restructuring have already overseen the more recent debt
structuring in Puerto Rico. If the federal government remains
steadfast in its refusal to bail out states and municipalities, who
cannot print their own money and are often hemmed in by balanced
budget requirements, a wave of devastating bankruptcies and more
punishing austerity is sure to follow.11
[[link removed]]

In Detroit and other U.S. cities, mass incarceration and the
militarization of police forces during the post-Fordist, neoliberal
order are best understood as methods for controlling surplus
populations under a particularly revanchist capitalism, as developers
and real estate capitalists seek to “take back the city.”
Beginning in 2013, the DPD launched a series of seventeen SWAT police
raids in the poorest areas of the periphery with the ostensible goal
of busting low-level drug dealers—terrorizing inhabitants but often
finding nothing. At the same time, the average police response time
for the most serious crimes in the periphery, including armed
robberies and homicides, was fifty-eight minutes. Indeed, the DPD has
not emerged unscathed from the recent round of austerity, shrinking by
25 percent since the financial crisis of 2007–08. The simultaneous
existence of _under_ policing and _over_ policing helps explain why
some poor Black residents actually support the paramilitary raids and
why others—particularly those in the middle class—have even formed
“community crime patrols.” Meanwhile, Dan Gilbert’s poorly paid
private security guards patrol the downtown area in concert with the
DPD.12
[[link removed]]

This raises questions about whether it is possible to assemble the
type of political coalition necessary to win meaningful and necessary
reforms around abolishing or defunding the police, or whether, given
the looming austerity and balance of forces, political elites may be
able to use this slogan as cover to make their police departments even
_less_ responsive to any type of democratic accountability through
privatization, without any concomitant increase in funds for social
services. The speed with which the Democratic establishment, liberal
media, and nonprofit industrial complex moved to channel the anger on
display during the uprisings after George Floyd’s murder into
various iterations of “woke capitalism” was remarkable, if not
particularly surprising.13
[[link removed]]

Myths on the Left

“Myths,” Jay and Conklin write, “tell stories that map on to our
desires about how the world ought to be rather than how it actually
is.” In this sense, myths can be something of a substitute for
political programs with “a positive, emancipatory vision for
society.” This explains why “the prevalence of myths…can be
understood only alongside the formation and repression of political
movements that advocate radical social alternatives.” That is, they
tend to shore up bourgeois rule by presenting it as natural and
eternal. How do we square this with Jay and Conklin’s insight
“that some might view [their own] narrative as yet another myth”?
The writers offer a tentative solution, noting that, unlike the myths
propagated by apologists of capitalism, theirs is footnoted and thus
transparent. But is this the case for all left-wing myths? Roland
Barthes pulled no punches in arguing that these result precisely from
the _failure_ of the left to fundamentally transform society. In
effect, their emergence signals the transformation of the
“revolution” _into_ “the left.” The passage of Black Power
aesthetics into the realm of mythology is, indeed, largely a
consequence of the _defeat_ of the most radical elements within the
broader movement.14
[[link removed]]

One is tempted to return to Karl Marx’s wry observation on the 1848
French Revolution: “Just when individuals appear to be
revolutionising themselves and their circumstances, in creating
something unprecedented, in just such epochs of revolutionary crisis,
that is when they nervously summon up the spirits of the past,
borrowing from them their names, marching orders, uniforms, in order
to enact new scenes in world history, but in this time-honored guise
and with this borrowed language.” But Marx was not passing judgment
on the reclamation of historical figures and imagery for revolutionary
movements in general—he also noted how “the resurrection of the
dead” in the seventeenth-century English Civil War “served to
glorify new struggles, not to parody the old; to magnify fantastically
the given task, not to evade a real resolution, to recover the spirit
of revolution, not to relaunch its spectre.”15
[[link removed]]

Some have argued that “the oppressed” may make use of mythology to
hasten the development of a political consciousness on the path toward
revolution, but a full two decades after the formal elaboration of
this concept, it still lacks any real proof. It is hard to escape the
conclusion that “compulsive magical thinking obscures any honest
inventory of resources, strategies, timetables, mistakes, and
failures—all the accounting necessary for a serious-minded political
strategy.”16
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin are right to be critical of the limitations of recent
horizontalist organizing in Detroit, but they frame much of the
discussion around the potential for cooptation by capital and
political elites, rather than already existing weaknesses. This
mythologically inflected strategy may certainly serve as the
handmaiden to political cooptation, but it is also—and perhaps more
fundamentally—the product of _prior_ political defeats. The first
step toward building the mass working-class movement we so desperately
need is to recognize that it does not yet exist. It is our task to
rebuild it.

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]]
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). See, for example, Beacon Press’s
release of titles such as An Indigenous People’s History of the
United Statesand An African-American and Latinx History of the United
States as part of its ReVisioning History series.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 10; Jay and Conklin,
A People’s History of Detroit, 7, 13.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 45, 47.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 17, 29.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 25, 40, 46, 70.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Sidney L. Harring, Policing A Class Society (1983; repr. Chicago:
Haymarket, 2017); Kim Moody, Tramps and Trade Union Travelers
(Chicago: Haymarket, 2019), 83, 38.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 83, 85–86.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 95, 111, 112, 114,
132.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 15–16, 134–35,
141.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 186, 208, 214,
218–19.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 47, 72.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Mark Jay interviews Cedric Johnson, “Abolish the Conditions
[[link removed]],”
The Periphery, July 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Adolph Reed Jr., “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of
Patterns of Police Violence,” Nonsite, September 16, 2016; Jay and
Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 60, 66.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Jay and Conklin, A People’s History of Detroit, 13; Roland Barthes,
Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957), 234. Author’s
translation.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Later
Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
32–33.
* ↩
[[link removed]]
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000); Amber A’Lee Frost, “The Poisoned
Chalice of Hashtag Activism,” Catalyst 4, no. 2 (2020): 246.

David B. Feldman is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on capitalist
globalization and migrant labor.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]