Hi all,
I'm monetizing my creative work by combining my Confessions of a Mad Redneck vlog with this blog on Patreon. Anyone who subscribes at the $20 dollar level will receive a free signed copy of Confessions of a Mad Redneck: A Birmingham Boy's Struggle to Create Himself and His Home once it is released. Please support. Confessions of a Mad Redneck
Peace y'all
Zac
Friday, June 3, 2016
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Gentrification: Uneven by Nature
At this point, I'm basically just gloating. Public opinion has turned from ra-ra save Birmingham gentrification to some middle path that the revitalization is uneven (NPR's words) like somehow we can make it even. Capitalism is uneven by nature. Look at the globe. The defining feature of the globe is uneven development, hell, we even have a name for it - the first world and the third world. This is how capitalism works. It develops the places that are profitable and underdevelops the places that aren't. People invest in New York City over Ghana because you can make a lot more money in former than the latter, and people invest in downtown because you can make a lot more money there than West End. Why would any capitalist invest in West End?
There are two processes to uneven development - differentiation and equalization. When capitalists see a geographic area in which the potential profits are higher than the actual profits, they sink money into that area. The City of Birmingham signaled this by investing in Downtown. Early adopters and first to market in these areas are generally the most profitable, the pioneers if you will. Eventually, because of competition, profits equalize in that geographic area and investors leave it to rot until there is a large gap between the potential and actual profits and the cycle starts over. So, it's sort of capitalist whack-a-mole. They dump money into a geographic area until it's not profitable and then move and it happens from the global scale to the local.
In Birmingham there were and are three distinct phases of this. First, heavy investment into a new city creating the steel industry; the steel industry left as did whites and the era of suburbanization (investments in interstate highways and other infrastructure to support suburbs) and people commuting to downtown Birmingham for medical and financial jobs began. Finally, capital returned to invest in the three Rs of gentrification - retail, real estate, and restaurants and bars. The latter two invested very little into working class and poor communities which, in Birmingham, are almost exclusively black. The popular narrative is that white flight killed the city, but I would argue that deindustrialization hurt worse. The white folks that left weren't spending their money in black businesses anyway. Thus, the shape of development throughout the region and across the globe is and always has been unstable and uneven, subject to boom and bust cycles even between adjacent neighborhoods in the city.
It's funny that NPR would choose the word uneven to describe Birmingham's development, I think suggesting that it should be even. But, their observation is apt. Gentrification is uneven by nature and nothing is going to change that, nothing. The only way to change it is to change development strategies to a new economy strategy. It needs to be cooperative, small, sometimes cottage industries, small loans from community controlled banks, novel methods of land management controlled by the community such as community land trusts, and a branding strategy that sells the city as a model city for the 21st century.
And tell Brookings Institution to go take a hike.
There are two processes to uneven development - differentiation and equalization. When capitalists see a geographic area in which the potential profits are higher than the actual profits, they sink money into that area. The City of Birmingham signaled this by investing in Downtown. Early adopters and first to market in these areas are generally the most profitable, the pioneers if you will. Eventually, because of competition, profits equalize in that geographic area and investors leave it to rot until there is a large gap between the potential and actual profits and the cycle starts over. So, it's sort of capitalist whack-a-mole. They dump money into a geographic area until it's not profitable and then move and it happens from the global scale to the local.
In Birmingham there were and are three distinct phases of this. First, heavy investment into a new city creating the steel industry; the steel industry left as did whites and the era of suburbanization (investments in interstate highways and other infrastructure to support suburbs) and people commuting to downtown Birmingham for medical and financial jobs began. Finally, capital returned to invest in the three Rs of gentrification - retail, real estate, and restaurants and bars. The latter two invested very little into working class and poor communities which, in Birmingham, are almost exclusively black. The popular narrative is that white flight killed the city, but I would argue that deindustrialization hurt worse. The white folks that left weren't spending their money in black businesses anyway. Thus, the shape of development throughout the region and across the globe is and always has been unstable and uneven, subject to boom and bust cycles even between adjacent neighborhoods in the city.
It's funny that NPR would choose the word uneven to describe Birmingham's development, I think suggesting that it should be even. But, their observation is apt. Gentrification is uneven by nature and nothing is going to change that, nothing. The only way to change it is to change development strategies to a new economy strategy. It needs to be cooperative, small, sometimes cottage industries, small loans from community controlled banks, novel methods of land management controlled by the community such as community land trusts, and a branding strategy that sells the city as a model city for the 21st century.
And tell Brookings Institution to go take a hike.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Explosions: Repeasantization of the Urbanizing (Global) South
I spent most of Thursday in Jackson discussing cooperative strategy with regional movement leaders. The experience was very revealing and enlightening drawing clear distinctions between the Birmingham cooperative movement and the rest of the South. Particularly the notion that reruralization is not only a thing, but the future of the movement for justice in the South. Serendipitously, on the same day, I received Neil Brenner's edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanism. https://www.jovis.de/en/books/details/implosions-explosions.html
There are some important caveats about this volume's arguments, the biggest of which is that there are no longer rural areas or cities, but global processes of urbanization. The globe is essentially a network of territorialized capital, sociocultural, political, and socionatural process. I say socionatural because one of the central arguments in the book is that there is no wilderness since all of nature has been shaped by human hands - or at least climate change, itself a function of urbanization.
As such, an urban place is not a discrete entity, but a dynamic, constantly transforming agglomeration of these processes, many of which are contradictory. For instance, in Birmingham, regional governance would be great for capital, but is politically impossible because of the politics of race. Capital is trying to territorialize the entire region, while political processes are defending the boundaries.
Uneven development also plays a major role in the emergence of megacities, which hold two thirds of the American population and just under half of the global population. Within these urbanized spaces exists centers of decision making and wealth creation, while, increasingly, the peripheries are places of profound lack. One billion people live in slums in peripheries of megacity regions.
Even those that don't live in megacities are urbanized through transportation networks, media, and information technologies. People in Harlen County, Kentucky are singing along to the same music as the Southside of Chicago.
While there was once hope that cities offered real opportunity for some utopian future, that hope has faded. Across the globe capital has seized on urbanizing processes and produced staggering profits for a very few. However, there are opportunities.
Much of the arguments in Implosions/Explosions revolve around the work of Lefebvre, probably the most important urban theorist in history. He argues that one of the major processes of urbanization is the destruction or agrarian economies and industrialization and automation of them. The city exists because of industry. Thus, my question is why can't we create an alternative form of urbanization using a cultural, political, and economic agenda of repeasantization? (I understand that the term peasant in the west has a negative connotation, but it is not meant this way in academic literature. I'm specifically invoking the research of anthropologist, Eric Wolf and his analysis of peasant societies as dynamic and fully integrated into the modern world. It means a group of people who have a distinct style of life and who farm, often with time honored techniques. For more information of Wolf's ideas see here.)
A rough outline of such an agenda follows:
Economic - seizing of land through legal or extra legal means and turning it into productive landscapes, community owned housing, or other assets. Land banks could be used. Aquaponics is highly desirable because of its productivity and ability to produce strong revenues. Long term, strong, autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives are a must.
Cultural - This should be worked out particularisticly by communities in resistance, but should include some broad notion of shared wealth. It should also include a clear narrative articulating values through as many different media outlets as possible. Clever, sensational, and attention-getting protest is a plus.
Political - a broad agenda for public money spent on productive agrarian industries that should include a strategy for every level of governance from global to local since these political processes combine to help produce the urban.
I want to end with a story from Alabama. Uniontown in Perry County has become a hot site for activists, who have helped the people there bring a great deal of attention to the plight on the Uniontown residents with coal ash. It is important to recognize, however, that the coal ash dump is a process of urbanization. The coal is dug in a poor town in Appalachia, shipped to a plant, used to generate electricity, which satisfies demand of urban residents, and then shipped to Uniontown. The coal ash exists because of demand from urban residents. Uniontown is being urbanized in a particularly oppressive way.
However, the creation of autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives, long term would erase the existence of coal ash, and reterritorialize the urbanization process of energy production. The only way to stop the dumping of coal ash in poor communities is to eliminate demand for the coal, to urbanize alternatively.
There are some important caveats about this volume's arguments, the biggest of which is that there are no longer rural areas or cities, but global processes of urbanization. The globe is essentially a network of territorialized capital, sociocultural, political, and socionatural process. I say socionatural because one of the central arguments in the book is that there is no wilderness since all of nature has been shaped by human hands - or at least climate change, itself a function of urbanization.
As such, an urban place is not a discrete entity, but a dynamic, constantly transforming agglomeration of these processes, many of which are contradictory. For instance, in Birmingham, regional governance would be great for capital, but is politically impossible because of the politics of race. Capital is trying to territorialize the entire region, while political processes are defending the boundaries.
Uneven development also plays a major role in the emergence of megacities, which hold two thirds of the American population and just under half of the global population. Within these urbanized spaces exists centers of decision making and wealth creation, while, increasingly, the peripheries are places of profound lack. One billion people live in slums in peripheries of megacity regions.
Even those that don't live in megacities are urbanized through transportation networks, media, and information technologies. People in Harlen County, Kentucky are singing along to the same music as the Southside of Chicago.
While there was once hope that cities offered real opportunity for some utopian future, that hope has faded. Across the globe capital has seized on urbanizing processes and produced staggering profits for a very few. However, there are opportunities.
Much of the arguments in Implosions/Explosions revolve around the work of Lefebvre, probably the most important urban theorist in history. He argues that one of the major processes of urbanization is the destruction or agrarian economies and industrialization and automation of them. The city exists because of industry. Thus, my question is why can't we create an alternative form of urbanization using a cultural, political, and economic agenda of repeasantization? (I understand that the term peasant in the west has a negative connotation, but it is not meant this way in academic literature. I'm specifically invoking the research of anthropologist, Eric Wolf and his analysis of peasant societies as dynamic and fully integrated into the modern world. It means a group of people who have a distinct style of life and who farm, often with time honored techniques. For more information of Wolf's ideas see here.)
A rough outline of such an agenda follows:
Economic - seizing of land through legal or extra legal means and turning it into productive landscapes, community owned housing, or other assets. Land banks could be used. Aquaponics is highly desirable because of its productivity and ability to produce strong revenues. Long term, strong, autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives are a must.
Cultural - This should be worked out particularisticly by communities in resistance, but should include some broad notion of shared wealth. It should also include a clear narrative articulating values through as many different media outlets as possible. Clever, sensational, and attention-getting protest is a plus.
Political - a broad agenda for public money spent on productive agrarian industries that should include a strategy for every level of governance from global to local since these political processes combine to help produce the urban.
I want to end with a story from Alabama. Uniontown in Perry County has become a hot site for activists, who have helped the people there bring a great deal of attention to the plight on the Uniontown residents with coal ash. It is important to recognize, however, that the coal ash dump is a process of urbanization. The coal is dug in a poor town in Appalachia, shipped to a plant, used to generate electricity, which satisfies demand of urban residents, and then shipped to Uniontown. The coal ash exists because of demand from urban residents. Uniontown is being urbanized in a particularly oppressive way.
However, the creation of autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives, long term would erase the existence of coal ash, and reterritorialize the urbanization process of energy production. The only way to stop the dumping of coal ash in poor communities is to eliminate demand for the coal, to urbanize alternatively.
Sunday, May 8, 2016
November 9, 2016
Dear American Left,
As we sit here attempting to pick up the pieces and debating about what went wrong, we must face the fact that Donald Trump is the president. After parsing all the data and analyzing the campaign, we will realize one thing - that this failure is a generational failure of the left to build a truly imclusive coalition that actually includes the 99%. The simple fact is that after McCarthy, we abandoned class politics, wholesale, and left the largest group of oppressed people, the white working class, to twist in the wind and be lured by white nationalism, gussied up with fresh local food and other purity narratives about nature and community.
This is not your mother's white nationalism. It includes queer people, feminists, and even some people of color. Hell, it may not even be white nationalism, but simply nationalism fortified by the arguments of taken-for-granted intellectuals like Milo Yiannopoulos, who is gay by his "choice." This white nationalism is cool, youthful, irreverent and fun. It's a snarky, freewheeling, and energetic white nationalism, and we took it for granted.
What we took for granted was that the working class is utterly sick of being talked down to while at the same time seeing their bank accounts drain to nothing. We told men just laid off at the plant that they were doubly privileged for being white and male, and while though it may be technically true, it's kinda assholish and a dramatic political miscalculation.
This is not to say that we should have ignored our traditional strongholds or race, gender, and sexuality, but to acknowledge that the creation of a strong justice oriented working class identity that is hopeful and an economic program that truly addresses both who they are and their growing despair was necessary to beat the right. And they beat us, fair and square. The right deserves credit. They revamped old ideas, made them more palatable. But, much of the blame is ours. Our political philosophies became old, rigid, institutionalized, and virtually impossible for the white working class to decipher. We didn't realize how many of them there were until Trump broke every turn out record in the book. We became more wedded to dogma than efficacy.
And we lost, badly.
Sincerely,
Zac Henson
As we sit here attempting to pick up the pieces and debating about what went wrong, we must face the fact that Donald Trump is the president. After parsing all the data and analyzing the campaign, we will realize one thing - that this failure is a generational failure of the left to build a truly imclusive coalition that actually includes the 99%. The simple fact is that after McCarthy, we abandoned class politics, wholesale, and left the largest group of oppressed people, the white working class, to twist in the wind and be lured by white nationalism, gussied up with fresh local food and other purity narratives about nature and community.
This is not your mother's white nationalism. It includes queer people, feminists, and even some people of color. Hell, it may not even be white nationalism, but simply nationalism fortified by the arguments of taken-for-granted intellectuals like Milo Yiannopoulos, who is gay by his "choice." This white nationalism is cool, youthful, irreverent and fun. It's a snarky, freewheeling, and energetic white nationalism, and we took it for granted.
What we took for granted was that the working class is utterly sick of being talked down to while at the same time seeing their bank accounts drain to nothing. We told men just laid off at the plant that they were doubly privileged for being white and male, and while though it may be technically true, it's kinda assholish and a dramatic political miscalculation.
This is not to say that we should have ignored our traditional strongholds or race, gender, and sexuality, but to acknowledge that the creation of a strong justice oriented working class identity that is hopeful and an economic program that truly addresses both who they are and their growing despair was necessary to beat the right. And they beat us, fair and square. The right deserves credit. They revamped old ideas, made them more palatable. But, much of the blame is ours. Our political philosophies became old, rigid, institutionalized, and virtually impossible for the white working class to decipher. We didn't realize how many of them there were until Trump broke every turn out record in the book. We became more wedded to dogma than efficacy.
And we lost, badly.
Sincerely,
Zac Henson
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