Principles for Left Urbanism

I've been having a series of frustrating conversations with other leftists (some of them you guys) about urban land use recently. I think we often disagree not just on strategy here but on principle. I think it might be clarifying to lay out for discussion some (polemical) principles for discussion here--I'd appreciate your thoughts.

1) Large, dense, growing, diverse, economically thriving, economically and racially integrated cities with robust tax bases are a positive social, economic and environmental good, both for those who live in and move to them and for society at large. For the contemporary left in particular, robust and growing cities offer the opportunity to provide robust and growing social services and to achieve significant environmental gains. Left urban politics today should accept urban growth both as a fact to be reckoned with and as a value to be promoted. It is likely not possible for us to halt urban growth and freeze cities and neighborhoods in their current configurations, but if it were possible it would not be desirable. Attempts to "preserve" cities from outsiders in the name of some misguided nativism are unimaginative, unambitious and counterproductive.

2) The post-white flight, pre-gentrification status quo of American cities was horrific and reflected a tremendous moral and political failure in this country. There is nothing natural or desirable about housing segregation--on the contrary, it is the central pillar of structural racism in the US today. There is very, very little about what, say, Bed-Stuy was like in the 1980s that's worth feeling nostalgic for. The return of the middle class to American cities is both a good thing and a big opportunity: a city with a middle class is a city able to provide jobs and social services to its working class. To argue that the best we can hope for is to exclude the middle class so as to preserve or regain the pre-gentrification status quo is to accept defeat on an almost unimaginable scale.

3) To the extent that the politics of urban housing can be analyzed in terms of class conflict, that conflict is between landowners, who want property values and rents to go up, and renters, who want property values and rents to go down. It most certainly IS NOT between "the community" and "developers," much less between one group of renters (say, white people) and another (say, minorities). Framing the conflict in those ways closes off productive solidarities and produces misguided politics.

4) Development is primarily an effect rather than the cause of rising rents. Bushwick wasn't low-rent in the 1980s because no one had decided to build condos there--no one wanted to build condos there because it was low-rent. Today, people build condos here because rents are rising, not the other way around. A politics aimed at stopping development is futile *at best* (rents aren't going to stop going up because you blocked a condo) but more likely counterproductive (rents are going to go up even faster as more people compete for a fixed quantity of housing).

5) The proper level at which to make most decisions regarding urban land use is the city, not the neighborhood or "community." Community control is at best NIMBY-dysfunctional and at worst racist-exclusionary. A city where the Bushwick community board can ban development is also a city where Park Slope can exclude affordable housing, and the Park Slope community board is always going to be a heck of a lot better connected and organized than the Bushwick one.

6) If you think the programs we need to maintain a working class in a growing, economically thriving city--affordable housing programs, new public housing, and transit infrastructure investment, among other things--will be hard to win, well, yeah, I agree. If you think they're *impossible* to win, that a growing city will necessarily be a neoliberal dystopia of working-class displacement and the best we can hope for is a desperate rear-guard action to preserve the status quo by blocking development and opposing new housing, well, first of all you've already given up, and second of all you'll lose even what you hope to preserve. If the contemporary left isn't strong enough to win the universally beneficial housing and transit programs it won decades ago, it's certainly not strong enough to reverse the tide of history and bring us back to the 1980s. We either face the challenges and opportunities of the growing, economically diverse city or we accept defeat and go home; there's not a third choice here.

Independence Day

When I think about what it means for me to be American (Irish-American, white American) I always find myself thinking about the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Because of course, of course, the Civil War is one of the very few wars in history I'm glad was fought, one of the wars that holds me back from condemning war. And yet, and yet--the working-class Irish men who had seen their homeland utterly destroyed by famine and British imperialism, who had fled a country where more than 10% of the population simply starved to death for a country where they were treated like dirt, and who were now being asked to atone in blood for the original sin of the United States, a sin they'd never committed and a country which didn't even want them until it needed cannon fodder for this war--even as the Anglo ruling elites who had abetted and profited from slavery for generations bought themselves off from the reckoning at $100 a head--well, I'd have rioted too. No matter how just this war was, it wasn't their goddamned war, and it wasn't just to compel them to fight it. Until, until, like the wicked fools they were, like the wicked fools wretched people so often become, they decided it was black people's fault for being enslaved, for requiring justice. And went out and lynched black men and terrorized black neighborhoods and burned down a goddamned orphanage, and chased a centuries-old black community off the island they'd decided was their own.

At which point it became their war, at which it became our atonement, because now their hands (our hands, my hands) were dripping with black blood too. At which point (and there's a whole history here, of course, but this is a moment in it) the enormous, weighty ambiguity of the American "we" became something they too could join into--for better or for worse. As pride and as responsibility, as guilt and as atonement. "We the people" kept slaves and we also fought a war to free them, we the people exploited immigrants in sweatshops and we won through bloody strikes a better life, we voted to open the prisons and we will vote and demonstrate and riot to shut them down. "We" doesn't mean a shared identity or even a shared history; Americans don't share those things. It means a shared future and a shared responsibility for that future. Am I "proud" to be American? I'm proud to assume that responsibility, and I would be ashamed to shirk it. So yes, I suppose I am.

In which it is proven that Dylan Roof is Mad

"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, ages it is the rule." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Part 1: Dylann Roof is Crazy

I've been reading a lot about whether the Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, ought to be considered "insane" or not. To me the question seems absurd: of course he is. This consuming obsession with and unquenchable rage against the racialized Other who is stealing "our" country, this reversal whereby the most oppressed and powerless groups in our society become the omnipotent, conspiratorial oppressors, the way this hatred twists history and mangles biology in order to project an imagined enemy and take bloody vengeance for a crime that never occurred--what is this if not insanity? If the white supremacist fantasy is quite common, very well: insanity is common in a mad world. If this fantasy serves certain functions--if certain politicians find it convenient to dog-whistle this hallucinatory marching-song in order to mobilize support--very well: no mental illness is without its political conditions, none is without its use.

Not that I don't understand the resistance to describing Roof as "crazy"--it's a matter of fairness. As Yasmin Nair recently wrote, "White guilt is psychoanalysed.  Black guilt is demonised." It's not fair that when black (and Muslim) people commit politically inflected violence, the media presents them as evil (and as representative of the evil that lurks in "their" "culture," whereas when white people do the same sort of thing they're treated as "mentally ill" (and as concomitantly unrepresentative, unpolitical, alone). But is the proper response to demonize white criminals? Demonization, precisely, appears to be the demand: my friends worry that if we admitted that Roof is mad we would lose sight of how he is evil. 

My friends apparently think that justice-in-representation here entails a reversal: because the mainstream media demonizes black crime and psychoanalyzes white guilt, we leftists will on the contrary psychoanalyze black guilt and demonize white guilt. I don't buy it. The trouble with calling Roof evil is not that it's wrong--it's right, I suppose, he is evil--but that it's useless. The role of the left here is not to morally condemn this crime; CNN will do that for us. Our role is to politicize it, to trace its historical and material conditions and make them targets for collective action. Psychoanalyzing is the first step toward such an explanation, since psychoanalysis searches out the reasons in unreason; moralizing is impotent for this purpose, because moral thought takes all "explanation" to be the evasion of guilt.

Part 2: Dylann Roof Reveals Virtually Nothing about Race Relations in America Today

But if you're still not convinced of Roof's madness, consider this: he is a white supremacist who railed against white flight. According to the New York Times, his manifesto "laments white flight, and suggested that the whites should instead stay behind in cities and fight." Now this, truly, is madness.

Here's the thing: intensified residential segregation, which has entered our collective memory under the name "white flight," is one of the two great pillars on which modern American racial oppression rests. (The other, of course, is the post-Drug War criminal justice system.) Residential segregation is a brilliant mechanism of racial control: once it is firmly in place, no one has to say a thing about race, and yet black people get screwed. Every city ordinance, every transit project, every school-funding bill and policing strategy intensifies the flow of resources from black people to white people, and yet no one need say a racist word, or even have a racist thought; the system is smooth and impersonal and it is crushing. And not just in the benighted Confederate-flag-waving South but in the suburb where you grew up, in the neighborhood where you read this. That's what "white flight" means, and that's how race functions in America today. A white supremacist railing against white flight is as insane as an environmentalist railing against the EPA.

Once upon a time, before the civil rights movement, an important part of the American system of racial oppression was Root-style vigilante violence. Think the KKK. That time is over; that battle was won; that system does not exist anymore. And more than that: the racial system we know and love uses precisely that victory as its legitimating ideology. If "racism" means KKK-style self-consciously political vigilante violence, then there is virtually no racism in today's America; the other thing, the thing where black neighborhoods are starved of resources and black children go uneducated and young black men are sentenced to decades in prison, all thanks to residential segregation and the carceral state, well that's not racism. The people who keep that system functioning smoothly, why, they have black friends!

That's how the adult, sane, powerful white supremacists speak and act in America today. From their perspective someone like Roof is an atavism, a liability: they'll condemn him as loudly as anyone precisely because it's only by not being anything like him that they can legitimate themselves.

The civil rights movement was not a failure. It destroyed the post-Reconstruction racial settlement in this country. In place of that settlement a new one has emerged, and today it is our enemy. To say "nothing has changed" in this country, a rhetorical tic in some parts of the left, is to commit both a failure of analysis and a significant strategic error.

Part 3: The Scandal Trap

I've seen so many people step up to declare that the Charleston shooting is "proof" that "racism is alive and well in America." Certainly, racism is alive and well in America, but the racism which is alive and well looks nothing like the Charleston shooting; the shooting proves nothing. To imagine that we have discovered in Roof's act the dark truth of contemporary American race relations is foolish; that dark truth emerges in the poverty statistics, in the prison system. It neither requires nor is susceptible to further proof.

Whence the temptation? Well, we know that our society remains deeply racist, and here we have an instance of racism that everyone agrees is horrible; let's shout from the rooftops: "see how bad it is? SEE?!"

The trouble is that the people who enforce systemic racism in this country will be only too delighted to agree with us, to say "yes, precisely, this lone shooter is the last remnant of American racism, how horrible!" They'll be happy to sic the FBI on the white supremacist organizations, to expand the surveillance state, to push toothless gun laws and pass new hate-crimes legislation and burn the Confederate flag. They'll do these things all the more gladly because differentiating themselves from the last remnants of KKK-style violence is precisely how they legitimate vastly more significant forms of racism; when someone comes along and says "your housing policy, your school funding, your three-strikes law is racist," they'll be able to answer "how can you say such a thing when I just passed a hate-crimes bill?"

It's easy to imagine that you can attack a system through its scandals--that you can prove the Republicans are racist because one of them says the N-word when the mike is still on, or prove the American criminal justice system is racist because one cop steps over the line on video. But these events are scandals precisely because they're not essential to how the system works. The real scandal, the real enemy, is what the cops do when they're following the rules, how the system works right out in the open. It's that that we have to attack. If we attack the scandals, we'll very often win--the N-word-user will get run out of the party, the cop will get fired; the system doesn't need them, doesn't even want them. When we take someone like Roof as "proof" of anything, we're accepting that that's what real racism looks like--but it's not. The real and powerful racist system looks nothing like that at all; it looks like housing segregation, it looks like drug laws, it looks like people who loudly condemn the KKK and proclaim tolerance while promoting housing segregation and drug laws. If we remain within an analysis of racism that the system has long since shed, we make it easy for the actually existing system to defend itself and to co-opt us, because we're fighting the last war.

The Species-Limit of Politics

So I recently started reading Scott Alexander's blog Slate Star Codex and boy is it fascinating. Scott is a member of the, ahem, rationalist community (maybe subculture is a better word?) associated with sites like Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias, and they're really not nearly as irritating as you'd think; I got back into them because I saw them linked in some extremely sensible discussions of the everyday problems of polyamory, for instance. Plus reading a genuine rationalist (as opposed to a rhetorician, or a mystic) is always salutary, because even when they're wrong, the progress of their argument reveals (rather than obscuring) the flaw in their premise.

For instance: Scott, a vegetarian himself, notes that most people agree that we should care to some degree about the suffering of animals, although most would agree that they're not quite as important as humans. So let's put a number on this, he suggests:

If it takes a thousand chickens to have the moral weight of one human, the importance of chicken suffering alone is probably within an order of magnitude of all human suffering. You would need to set your weights remarkably precisely for the values of global animal suffering and global human suffering to even be in the same ballpark. Barring that amazing coincidence, either you shouldn’t care about animals at all or they should totally swamp every other concern. Most of what would seem like otherwise reasonable premises suggest the “totally swamp every other concern” branch.

If you accept that the suffering of animals is a political issue, it should become almost the sole political issue, since there are a lot of animals out there, after all.

Scott's conclusion is that as a matter of fact animal suffering really should be far more important to him than it has been so far, and that the fact that it isn't reflects his atavistic and irrational tribalism. The progress of mankind has consisted in the steady extension of sympathy, from clan to nation to mankind as a whole; isn't the next step an extension beyond the boundaries of mankind? Wouldn't anything less be arbitrary human chauvinism, a sort of higher nationalism? He ought to devote most of his resources to the political program of ending animal suffering.

Hm.

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My question is: what does the realization of such a political program look like? Suppose passionate, intelligent people like Scott devote all their energy to ending animal suffering, and at long last they achieve victory: what does that world look like?

Well, first of all, in this world everyone is vegetarian, so must domestic animals go virtually extinct. The global cow population drops from its current 1.4 billion to a few thousand kept in zoos for historical interest.

Second, and more interesting, it ought to be recalled that we humans aren't the only animals who eat other animals. Naturally if we think a gazelle's suffering is as important as a child's, we can't allow gazelles to be eaten by lions all the time any more than we could allow children to be so eaten. Perhaps we decide to kill off all lions--their suffering pains us, but just as we inflict suffering on criminal humans to protect innocent humans, we'll punish lions to save gazelles. But perhaps we find another way: we remove lions from the wild, where they will eat gazelles, and keep them in enormous zoos where they're fed on gazelle-flavored tofu product. Likewise with all the hawks, owls, wolves, cats, etc.

But--I can hear the ecologists jostling back there--this solution creates its own problem: Absent predators to regulate their population, gazelle populations will explode until they exhaust all available resources, at which point they'll face mass starvation. Now we don't allow humans to starve, or at least we shouldn't--how can we refuse to protect gazelles? Simply sending in UN relief workers to feed them won't work, since they'll just continue breeding. So we'll have no choice but to control their breeding through a massive ecological birth-control program, and similarly with all other prey animals.

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My point is not that such solutions are "absurd"--to assert that would be to beg the question. My point is that the only way to realize an end to animal suffering would be through a vast and intense application of human "biopolitical" technologies to animals, in order to "humanize" them.

I think it's not too much to say that such a program to end animal suffering would, ironically enough, destroy the animal world as such. Lions would still exist in one sense, as organisms, but a lion who doesn't hunt and is fed tofu is like a human who doesn't live in a society and doesn't speak: if those were the only sorts of humans left in the world, I think we'd be justified in saying that "humanity" no longer existed. Analogously, animals whose entire natural ecology had been entirely destroyed and replaced by human technologies would scarcely still be animals. (And domestic animals, whose natural ecology is already humanity, would largely disappear.)

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My interest in this thought experiment has nothing to do with refuting animal-rights politics, which after all is not a force in the world. Rather, I'm interested in the sense in which humans are the only political animals--the only animals who can be the object of properly political concern. Simply put, to end the suffering of gazelles would require a wholesale change in their way of life, and gazelles of course can neither conceive nor enact any such a change. If it is to be done at all it will be done by humans, and gazelles will be its passive object; they will understand it neither before nor after it occurs. Thus any project to end the suffering of gazelles will entail their ever-increasing domination by humans. Hayek's attitude to politics in The Road to Serfdom is correct here: for beings who can never become political agents, a project to improve their lives can only be a project to decrease their freedom. Hayek applies this dictum to humans simply because he believes that the mass can only ever be an animal.

But humans are different: humans collectively can decide (for instance) that their overpopulation is likely to lead to famine, and change their breeding habits accordingly. Humans collectively (and to a fair lesser extent, individually) can transform their way-of-life in such a way that decreased suffering goes hand-in-hand with increased liberty. The political community extends to every human because in the era of global capitalism, collective decisions concerning way-of-life can be made only on the scale of the universal. But the political community can never extend beyond the human because while non-humans can be the object of political action, they can never be its subjects.

Marxism is an Anti-Moralism

Once I tutored a girl (junior in high school) in physics who was very bright but didn't like physics. The first couple of lessons I read the book aloud to her and she got it immediately, the third lesson I asked her what she liked to read and we talked for half an hour, the fourth lesson I told her that as long as she kept getting A's in physics by reading the book once in a while we could just chat every lesson. So that's what we did. She brought me various questions she had about things, and didn't tell her parents. I bummed her cigarettes sometimes but I felt bad about that.

One day this girl asked me (because her mother hadn't given her a satisfying answer) what exactly the difference was between socialism and communism. You can imagine how much fun I had explaining it, with historical examples and thought experiments and so forth. In the end she said something like: "I mean, they both seem pretty good to me. But, like, I don't know. People on welfare who just sit around and don't do anything all day, and other people have to work and pay for them. That doesn't seem fair."

And I could have said: "Yeah, but you getting to be literate and the apple of your father's eye when they don't get that, that's not fair either." Or I could have said: "Yeah, but most people don't want to sit around that way, they just don't have the opportunities you do." Which I think those things would have been true. But in the end I decided to say: "I think that maybe you just shouldn't care about that because maybe it just doesn't matter at all." And she asked why and I said, well, because society is rich enough to be leeched off of a little bit, so we don't have to go around measuring who deserves what and in what way and why, and deciding whether people are the deserving poor or lazy niggers, and even if it costs you not having air conditioning or a nice car wouldn't you just rather we all stopped wondering who deserved what all the time? Because the conservatives talk about it (I deserve my money and they don't! No fair!) and the liberals talk about it (I don't deserve my money and they do!) and the whole thing turns into this elaborate morality play when really, we could just all have enough food and a place to sleep and a little bit of free time and chill out. And I think that's why I'm a Marxist instead of a liberal, because instead of wanting to live in a society where everyone is treated fairly (according to their deserts) I want to live in a society which doesn't try or need to decide who deserves.

I don't know if she was convinced, but I at least surprised her.

I don't think feeling guilty is ever a political good, I think guilt is inseparable from liberal-progressive politics, and I think we as a society can do better than mere justice, whatever justice means.

Shadow Objects

Sometimes it's pretty clear who is the object of your affections, because you think about her every day or something like that. But objects also play hide-and-seek. Like, you break up with someone, and it's kind of okay, and you're like "I guess it wasn't so important to possess that object." And then you find out she's getting married and you're all crying or whatever and you're like "I guess I was secretly possessing that object all this time in a weird future-burrow of my mind, and I didn't even know it, and I guess it was kind of important." You know?

A related situation that amuses me a little: on those rare occasions when I find myself in serious situations, I often leave those situations and promptly begin to think of something else entirely. But then I think: "Wait! That was serious!" and I try to think about it but it doesn't work. And then I wonder whether perhaps I am "missing" or even God forbid "avoiding" a Major Event in my life. But then I think it's hard to tell which things are Major.

All things considered, it's very hard to tell.

I have been reading some Meghan Boyle. (You can too! http://muumuuhouse.com/ ) Her extremely consistent style (affectless, lists) allows the extremely efficient representation of two things: sweetness and shame. Both are rendered "bearable," and in the same way, since sweetness evokes shame. I am deeply mistrustful of the whole enterprise.