Old Mole Underground

The show's name explained, January, 2006

What is this “old mole,” and how can a mole root down a mountain? We can trace the figure of the “old mole” back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the first act, the ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks from beneath the ground (or beneath the stage), following and echoing Hamlet’s demand that his comrades keep secret what they’ve seen. In reaction to the ghost’s pursuit and speech, Hamlet says, Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast? / A worthy pioneer!”

The phrase was taken up by Hegel, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, where he substitutes the spirit of the times –or Spirit, with a capital S—for the spirit of the ghost. He says Spirit is “inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i' the ground so fast?”) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away.”

Karl Marx, of course, cared more for the earth than for its crumbling, and famously inverts Hegel’s idealism. In an afterword to the first volume of Capital, discussing “the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands,” Marx observes that “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

So Marx’s old mole is not the Spirit that speaks, but the Revolution that grubs, burrows, digs, undermines, or agitates. In an 1856 speech in honor of the anniversary of the Chartist People’s Paper, Marx said, “In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy, and the poor prophets of regression, we do recognize our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer — the Revolution.”But what has a mole in common with a pioneer? Both, as it turns out, are terms drawn from mining. A mole is a person who works underground or a machine used for tunneling, and a pioneer is an old word for a miner.Miners have been in the news recently, among the latest victims of the transfer of resources from workers to capital. Pierre Tristam on Commondreams.org, notes that

In its crudest but truest terms, the West Virginia mining tragedy . . . is an example of corporate dividends at the expense of workers’ safety. . . . the mine in Sago, W.Va., was a documented disaster zone of safety infractions. . . . But [few make that connection] between the cost of true safety in day-to-day, working America — in the workplace anywhere, in the mines, in the meat-packing plants, in the rail yards — and the cost of corporate corner-cutting in the name of shareholder demands. In all, 5,703 people were killed in job-related accidents in 2004 [the last year for which figures are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics] [and (58 of [those died] in West Virginia). It takes money to pay for government inspectors of workplaces. It takes money and commitment to make the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) be more than a wrist-slapper. But the Bush administration despises regulatory agencies like OSHA and sister agencies like the Mine Safety and Health Administration (to say nothing of the Environmental Protection Agency). It starves them of money and authority, enabling companies working under them to snub their noses at them. In 2004 eight workers at the Sago mine in West Virginia were injured badly enough to be kept off the job for at least a year. The entire year, the company sustained $9,515 in fines. . . . They call that safety regulation. . . . The bottom line isn’t safety. It isn’t keeping Americans secure in their job. It isn’t doing what it takes to hold employers accountable for workplace safety. The bottom line is the bottom line. . . . the West Virginia mining tragedy is a parable of Homeland Security America.

That transfer of resources form poor to rich has been going on a long time, but it’s been accelerated in recent years. The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy recently found that in 2004 the ratio of C.E.O. pay to worker pay at large companies has grown to 431 to 1. If the minimum wage had advanced at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would be $23.03 an hour instead of $5.15. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, of Bush's $1.7 trillion in tax cuts, $578 billion or 33% went to the top 1% of income earners, while the top 20% of income earners received 71% of all tax cuts. Henry Giroux, in a recent essay on dissidentvoice.org, puts these economic developments in a broader context. He traces a series of authoritarian developments, including market fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, attacks on critical education, and rising militarism.  Giroux writes,

Recent revelations in the New York Times about the Bush administration’s decision to allow the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without first obtaining warrants, the Washington Post disclosure of the chain of secret CIA torture prisons around the world, and the ongoing stories about widespread abuse and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan are just some of the elements in the popular press that point to a growing authoritarianism in American life. The government, as many . . . critics . . . have pointed out, is now in the hands of extremists who have shredded civil liberties, lied to the American public to legitimate sending young American troops to Iraq, alienated most of the international community with a blatant exercise of arrogant power, tarnished the highest offices of government with unsavory corporate alliances, used political power to unabashedly pursue legislative polices that favor the rich and punish the poor, and disabled those public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. Closer to home, a silent war is being waged against poor young people and people of color who are either being warehoused in substandard schools or incarcerated at alarming rates. Academic freedom is increasingly under attack, homophobia has become the poster-ideology of the Republican Party, war and warriors have become the most endearing models of national greatness, and a full-fledged assault on women’s reproductive rights is being championed by Bush’s evangelical supporters -- most evident in Bush’s recent Supreme Court appointment and nominee. While people of color, the poor, youth, the middle class, the elderly, gays, and women are being attacked, the current administration is supporting a campaign to collapse the boundaries between the church and state. 

Giroux argues for the importance of critical education in responding to the authoritarian challenges to bourgeois democracy: “Education is the terrain where consciousness is shaped . . . and the capacity for self-reflection and social change is nurtured and produced. . . .” He acknowledges that “Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression,” but stresses that “at the same time institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness capable of recognizing the very need for such reform or the need to reinvent the conditions and practices that make it possible. . . . Fortunately, power is never completely on the side of domination, religious fanaticism, or political corruption.”

If the Sago miners are the latest in the flock of canaries in the coal mine of capitalism, we need to educate ourselves and each other to interpret the “the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy, and the poor prophets of regression.”Here’s one last bit of mole trivia for the day: a group of moles is known as not a flock or a pride but a labour. The labor of moles on the Old Mole Variety Hour is doing our part to read the bewildering signs of the day, to discover our usable history, and to root down the mountain of capitalism that threatens to bury us all.

a difficult genre

Read books.

Read books on paper, at least some of the time.

Watch movies on big screens, at least some of the time.

Be as aware as you can of as much of the world around
      you as you can.

Listen.

Pay focused attention to a few things. 

Ask questions.

Question authority.

Follow the money.

Find like-minded people and spend time with them.

Organize, agitate, educate.

Mourn, then organize.

Know your rights.

Film the police.

Ask who benefits, who bleeds.

Drink before you're thirsty.

Remember you are not a loan.

Remember graduate school is free in Germany and
        other places in the world, and not worth going
        into debt over anywhere.

Try to exercise skepticism.

Try to exercise compassion.

Try again.

Only connect.

Look up the words you don't know, at least some of the time.

Give prudent consideration to the size of this advice before
       swallowing.

Skip the sunscreen.  Wear a hat.

no confidence

Just as workers have risen up to demand fifteen dollars an hour and a union, just as residents of many areas have risen up to demand an end to dangerous and polluting practices like fracking and the transmission of oil and coal trains and pipelines,  just as renters have risen up to demand rent freezes and an end to no cause evictions, so too have students, teachers, and faculty members risen up to demand control over the conditions of their learning and working lives.

One of the tools faculty members  at colleges and universities have used is the vote of no confidence.  In 2015, presidents and other administrators were the object of faculty votes of no confidence at  Cal State University Chico, Ithaka College, University of Alabama Birmingham, Phoenix College, Bermuda College, San Bernadino Community College, Connecticut State Colleges and University, Northwest Nazarene University, University of Missouri, Yeshiva University, University of South Carolina Upstate, Sweet Briar College, Green River College, West Liberty University, and  Broward College.  And faculty of the University of Iowa voted no confidence in their Board of Regents.

The vote of no confidence is typically a statement to a university's Board of Regents, Governors, or Trustees, calling for a change in the administration, usually the firing of the president.
As law professor Mae Kuykendall of Michigan State University has described it,

The phrase arose in the British Parliament [in 1782, in response to the British surrender to the Americans at Yorktown]. The vote has come to express the loss of support by a group whose cooperation is necessary for a leader's exercise of her duties. Libraries, police departments, public schools, fire departments, universities and their subunits, and various nonprofit groups use the vote of no confidence.
A vote of no confidence undermines a leader's claim to legitimacy....
In authoritarian groups, regular members cannot demand a change. At the other end of the spectrum, democratic structures have clear, weighty procedures–impeachment and recall–for ousting their leaders. Universities and other nonprofit institutions sit in the middle of this spectrum. There is consultation to select leaders and to make decisions.

This year, in January, faculty at Loyola University and at University Hawaii Manoa voted no confidence in, respectively, their President and in their Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.
In February,  it was faculty at Grambling State University, the College of Saint Rose, the University of Akron, and the City Colleges of Chicago.

Last month, faculty at Hartwick College  voted no confidence in their president, and this month, faculty at campuses across the University of Wisconsin system have been voting no confidence in their President and Board of Regents.

Although each of these cases differs from the others, some patterns emerge.  In some cases the votes are precipitated at least in part by administrative mishandling of incidents of racism, as at University of Missouri and Ithaca College, where the faculty vote of no confidence was actually preceded by one held by the students. Often, the votes come in response to administrative cuts to programs or firing of tenured faculty, as at the College of Saint Rose or Northwest Nazarene University. Occasionally the complaints involve financial irregularities, or worse.  At the University of Louisville, where some of the senior administrators have been convicted of financial crimes, the trustees themselves contemplated voting no confidence in the scandal-plagued president.  But often there there are multiple grievances, and frequently they reflect a sense that the institution has moved further from the democratic end of Kuykendall's spectrum and closer to the authoritarian end. 

As the American Association of University Professors puts it, this is a time when "governing board members are increasingly drawn from the business community," and  "some critics of the tradition of shared governance have encouraged boards to adopt top-down decision-making strategies and to intrude into decision-making areas in which the faculty traditionally has exercised primary responsibility."  Most of the recent entries in Sean McKinniss's No-Confidence Vote Database cite violations of "shared governance."

My guess is that in many cases, at public as well as private universities, the underlying problems relate to the wider crisis of capitalism and some typical neoliberal responses to these crises.   As the rate of profit has tended to decline, capital has turned toward wage repression, cutting of social services, and financialization of the economy.  And since 2008 we've seen even more upward redistribution of resources, offshoring or no-shoring of jobs, military and carceral controls. Pending international trade deals are likely to make all this worse.  College education costs more, and the financial advantage it once seemed to offer diminishes.  Funding for public education is cut, and teachers are blamed for the failure of every child to be above average, beating the odds in a world of diminishing returns. As Diane Ravitch was quoted recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "We’re projecting economic insufficiencies onto the education system" and "The college-for-all talk is like fairy dust sprinkled over the conversation."

In Wisconsin, under an overhaul signed by Gov. Scott Walker last summer, the Wisconsin Legislature stripped tenure and shared-governance protections from state law, leaving it to the regents to set new policies for the system on both fronts. The board enacted those policies in March over the objection of faculty leaders, who argued that the new protections would leave professors vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal and would hamstring the system’s faculty-recruitment efforts.

One Wisconsin legislator commented that "It’s a clear example of the complete disconnect between UW Madison faculty who seem to expect their job to come with a forever guarantee and the average Wisconsin family struggling just to make ends meet.” And… “I think it shows that they’re a little out of touch with the average Wisconsin citizen who doesn’t have the job protections they have through tenure.”

Wisconsin Professor Chuck Ryback points out that the important points in those comments are not the attitude of Madison faculty but that average Wisconsin families struggle to make ends meet and don’t have job protections. "If the argument is that UW faculty should have less job protections and salary, then we’re moving the needle the wrong way," he observes. "I mean, what legislator would argue that what the state of Wisconsin needs right now is even more people with limited to no job protections? Who wants a race to the bottom?"

The protections that tenure affords for the increasingly small section of the professoriate that has access to it are not a "forever guarantee," but the right to free speech on the job and entitlement to due process before dismissal, and those should be the right of every worker.

But the business orientation of many boards may support their tendency in the aftermath of a no confidence vote to declare their support for an unpopular president. And if the goal of a no confidence vote is to change the leadership and direction of a college or university, a vote of no confidence may fail even if it succeeds in ousting a president. If it leads to withdrawal of donor funding and loss of students and the tuition that keeps some universities afloat, it may exacerbate financial problems and negatively impact some of the very issues faculty and students are often seeking to address: it may make it even more difficult to hire diverse (or any new) faculty, for instance.

In the lead up to the vote at University of Wisconsin Madison, Dave VanNess in an open letter to his colleagues, observed that

many of us are afraid that expressing ... lack of confidence could bring harm to the university. State legislators have already publicly threatened us with further cuts and reforms after simply announcing the upcoming vote. [And yet.]  If nearly all of us conclude that our leadership is failing, but we allow fear of reprisal to suppress our expression of that finding, then haven’t we already lost our academic freedom? If fear of the Board of Regents, the Legislature and the Governor stops us from exercising our responsibility in governance, then I am afraid we really have lost. What’s next? Will we allow fear to change what we teach or research or say in public? 

Continuation of a corporate style of governance, in which front-line workers are reduced and ignored while management is given princely rewards, is not a solution.  Reflecting on the situation at Ithaca College, Maura Stephens suggests reconfiguring the Board of Trustees, changing it from one in which the majority of current trustees have ties to corporate industry, and are appointed to the board by obscure methods. A board that was predominantly composed of elected figures from educational, religious, social service, and nonprofit backgrounds might have very different ideas about the direction of the university. An administrative pay scale that was linked to the pay of all employees and capped at a reasonable multiple of the lowest paid employees might encourage raising the pay of the lowest paid employees, as well as encouraging the hiring of administrators more interested in serving the public good of education.

 Those sorts of changes require a broader vision that is not yet on offer, and ultimately require changes beyond higher education alone.

In a reflection after the Wisconsin Madison vote, another faculty blogger observed

Like many of my colleagues, I have had no confidence in the current regime for over a year . . . But we are used to the slow process of shared governance. So we have been patient, assessing the situation, trying to actively participate in improving it: waiting it out. . . .
The terrible math of austerity is accompanied by a moral language that  . . .  elevates supposed fiscal values like the much-vaunted “flexibility” over non-market based, educational calculations. . . .
By voting no confidence, faculty lift up an alternative moral language to the one imposed by fiscal austerity....
Over the long course of the past year and a half, we have seen countless examples of democracy in action, in defense of the UW system and of public education in our state.
By voting no confidence, we side with the students, who know that austerity limits their futures.
A vote of no confidence is a vote for a democratic future.... It is at once a small, symbolic act and the beginning of a sea change: a hope for unity and vision against the regime of cynicism and cruelty.

for the Old Mole Variety Hour May 9, 2016

posts from kboo.fm/blog/1001 and other vanished places

Zapatista Resistance to Neoliberalism
Neoliberal Higher Ed One
Neoliberal Higher Ed Part 2
Poverty as a weapon of mass destruction

A Revolution in Happiness?
Young White Men with Guns
Mass shootings & Insanity Pleas
Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
on the relation between queer and immigrant movements
big babies

Medicare for All Oregon
Reviewing Capital 21
Pillaging Public Pensions
against work

labor day
Indigenous People's Day
Memorial Day
Happy Bastille Day
May Day 2015
Happy Labor day?

Don't Teach for America

Some movie mole reviews: links to reviews of Star Trek, Shift Change, No,  A Place at the Table, Persepolis
They Live  
The Glass Shield
Orange is the New Black
Carol
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Amy
Rosa Luxemburg (1986) 

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Dear White People
Alien 
Her
Heaven Adores You
Toy Story 3
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Orgasm Inc

audio: Well-read Red: Black Study, Black Struggle
Gentrification, Class Domination, & Racism
Migration & Climate
Democracy Rising against Capitalism in Greece
RDG Kelley on resisting war among the black underclass 

militarized policing in Ferguson and beyond

For the 18 August 2014 Old Mole Variety Hour.

There's been much attention of late to what's described as the militarization of the police. As Tamara K. Nopper & Mariame Kaba note in Jacobin, "discussions about America’s militarized police forces" seem to have suddenly become "semi-mainstream," appearing in media like The Economist and Business Insider . "In the wake of the police killing of African-American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the subsequent riots and protests, social media is littered with images of tear gas, tanks, and police in military gear with automatic weapons — all aimed at black people in the city."

Earlier this summer, the ACLU released a report on the militarizing of US policing, confirming the increasing and increasingly indiscriminate use of Special Weapons and Tactics teams. Under a program started in 1990 and escalated after 2001, local law enforcement agencies have been getting surplus military equipment--everything from battering rams and flash-bang grenades to helicopters and mine-resistant armored personnel carriers--Tanks, basically--of which Clackamas County has two! (It turns out, actually, that much of that "surplus" is brand-new, which suggests either that the Pentagon doesn't know how to estimate its own equipment needs, or that this is another strategy for subsidizing defense contractors. It's also apparently an outlet for the tear gas that's been banned as a chemical weapon in war.)

Of course, once police forces have all this new equipment they are eager to use it, and, unsurprisingly, they tend to use it disproportionately on people of color.

The ACLU report is titled "War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing," but Nopper and Kaba are wary of the notion that "the war on terror has come home" and of the connections some have been making between Ferguson and Gaza. They stress that "For blacks, the “war on terror” hasn’t come home. It’s always been here."
A recently released report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards, and Vigilantes calculated that "Every 28 hours in 2012 someone employed or protected by the US government killed a Black man, woman, or child!"

Nopper and Kaba note that

"Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Radley Balko, and others have explained that the militarization of US police can be traced back to the mid-1960s. For example, in 1968, urban police forces were able to buy new equipment and technologies thanks to funding from the newly passed Safe Streets Act. The social anxiety and fear engendered by the Vietnam War and [by] domestic urban rebellions led by black people provided license for the police to turn these new products on the marginalized populations of inner-city America.
SWAT teams, batterrams, and no-knock warrants . . . all predate contemporary hyper-militarized police forces. Black people have been the overwhelming targets of these instruments of war."

Yasmin Nair is similarly skeptical of the hashtag equation between Gaza and Ferguson, noting that easy analogies erase specificities and thus can make us less able to engage with and eventually end state brutality. But Nair also recognizes that there are some real, material connections between the two. For instance, the Anti-Defamation League and related groups have sponsored trainings in Israel for US police, including for police in St Louis. The militarizing of policing is a global development.

Nair has important things to say about the complex and varied ways that racism and capitalism intertwine. Nopper and Kaba have important things to say about the difficulty American culture has in naming what black people experience in America, and in empathizing with it in ways that are not narcissistic or voyeuristic on the part of whites. Nopper and Kaba point out that

The problem with casting militarization as the problem is that the formulation suggests it is the excess against which we must rally. We must accept that the ordinary is fair, for an extreme to be the problem. The policing of black people — carried out through a variety of mechanisms and processes — is purportedly warranted, as long as it doesn’t get too militarized and excessive.
Attention is drawn to the “spectacular event” rather than to the point of origin or the mundane. Circulated are the spectacles — dead black bodies lying in the streets or a black teenager ambushed by several police officers in military gear, automatic weapons drawn.

As Nopper and Kaba stress, in focusing on the excess, the overkill, of state power, we miss the ordinary, as though without the overkill there could be . . . the right amount of kill? But insofar as the function of a police force is to enforce the interests of capital and white supremacist social order, so the possibility that police might do their job with more subtlety is no real solution for people oppressed by those interests.

At the same time, there really has been an increase in visible authoritarian force, and we can understand it as part of the current neoliberal response to the crisis of capitalism. Militarized policing means not only moneymaking opportunities for those who profit off weapons manufacture and private prisons, but also an escalating response to rising dissent.

The job of the old mole is to persist in that dissent despite its dangers; to make the difficult connections among the varied forms of capital and state power, and among the diversely positioned groups those powers oppress, to support and join with those who refuse servitude and resist injustice, to burrow on.

Ways to help the people of Ferguson

For links to campaigns for Michael Brown's family, bail &  legal support for those arrested, food & supplies for protesters, and petitions:

https://breed7910.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/campaigns-for-mikebrown-ferguson/

WRR Feast and Famine, or Culinary Capitalism

 

 

 

For the Old Mole Variety Hour September 15, 2014

Coming to Portland this week is the series of food and drink events called Feast Portland.  It starts Thursday with  something called a "sandwich invitational," for which tickets cost $95, and  the weekend includes tastings, classes, and dinners, with events ranging from 55 to 200 dollars.

Net proceeds will be donated to two charities, Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon and Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign; the latter organization has corporate "partners" including Wal-Mart, Tyson, and Sysco.

In the situationist pamphlet Spectacular Time, number 6: Food, we read
 

The food industry has a problem--no matter how rich we become we can only eat so much. So if we cannot consume more food, we must be encouraged to consume more profitable foods.

It is difficult to see how everyday life is to be reinvented while the most fundamental requirement for the continuation of any kind of life remains a mystified commodity.

Once we have consumed the maximum amount of maximum profit food we are encouraged to buy the surplus as proxy consumers for those too poor to have a demand themselves; we give to charities who buy the market surplus to feed the poor.

Aid and charity --in the society of the spectacle--are necessary to maintain high prices and a stable market. Thus the money from charitable donations and taxes is recycled back into the hands of capital --which at the same time disposes of its previously worthless surplus production.

Charities only attack the symptoms--if we really cared we would attack the disease.
 

In the summer 2014 issue of the magazine Contexts, we find an essay by  sociologist Shamus Khan called "Culinary Capitalism."  He writes,
 

There is, perhaps, no greater triumph of capitalism than the culinary realm. Consider supermarkets. Immediately upon entering we are confronted with produce. How refreshing; healthy foods for a healthy lifestyle! But take another look at that banana and recall the ... news about Chiquita providing 3,000 AK-47s and millions of rounds of ammunition to militias that murdered their farm laborers. Bananas are ubiquitous in grocery stores because they have one of the highest profit margins of any food product..... Even though bananas often must be shipped across the globe, it costs mere pennies to cultivate and bring them to market. Why? Armed insurgencies against workers help keep labor costs down ....

The pictures of green fields that surround you on the produce section banners are absent of farm laborers, who, brutalized by low wages and terrorized by foremen, are kicked out of our nation the moment they stir up trouble or have the misfortune to
physically suffer from their labor. There is a grave cost to our uninterrupted access to year-round cheap produce, and it is the laborers at the base of the production process who suffer it...

Next in our supermarket tour is the animal, far removed from any hint of the festering stench of the feedlot and the routinized violence of the slaughterhouse and sanitized for you in its plastic wrap. The cheapest way to feed livestock is through monoculture: the rotation of just two crops—corn and soy.

Countless acres of land have been ruined by this practice, but it’s cheaper. And the food makes the animals sick, but the pharmaceutical industry has stepped in to keep them alive long enough to pack on the pounds so that we can kill and market them quickly....

 

“But I buy locally sourced foods, ethically raised, from my local market,” you might protest. So do I. It’s nice to be able to afford this. What about the (cheap) food items the poor buy to feed themselves? The average person on food stamps receives $5 a day for food.

[And how  far away is that market?]

Capitalism provides the wealthier a way to buy moral purity by periodically participating in specialty markets. We don’t transform the system, but we do feel better about ourselves.

Responsible food shopping can be exhausting, so let’s not cook tonight. We’ll go out to eat. Perhaps we’ll go to an authentic Chinese restaurant... where a [meal] is put before me for a mere $5. Why so cheap? Probably because the workers have had their passports seized by their employers and will work for years paying off their migration debt in a modern form of indentured servitude....

Food can create community. It can also be a celebration of culture, artistry, and a daily enticement of the senses. But let us not forget that every time we eat we are implicated in the great capitalist triumph that is our food system. And that system is a deeply violent one.
 

For challenges to this we need to look not to events like Feast but to ones like last week's Justice Begins with Seeds conference.  We need to look not to charity but to activism, to  organizations of farmworkers like PCUN, to worker cooperatives including the Red & Black Cafe, to movements for food sovereignty around the world.
 

Gentrification and the Right to the City

The well-read red has been reading about gentrification, as well as seeing plenty of it.

Despite what we often hear in mainstream media, gentrification is not simply a cultural change in a neighborhood, and not simply a matter of individual choices.  Rather, it involves changes in property ownership driven by structural, economic forces and backed by state power.  As Ronnie Flores notes in Socialist Worker.com, "Gentrification is the result of capitalism, a system characterized by the relentless pursuit of profit." Drawing on the work of  Neil Smith, Flores points out that "When there's a wide enough gap between the current rent in an area and the potential rent that can be made if it were to undergo reinvestment, a project for gentrification is born. This "rent gap" is the mechanism underlying gentrification."

Similarly, Gavin Mueller in Jacobin observes that "Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations."

Focusing on the example of Washington, DC, Mueller points out that
 

The first installment of DC gentrification began as the smoke lifted after the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination. Large parts of the black areas of the city . . . were burned. With the fear of urban insurrection hanging in the air, property values plummeted, paving the way for local real estate magnates to snap up hugely lucrative portfolios.

Developers succeeded in getting the city government and banks to assist in their purchases, promising community projects, like homeless shelters and hospitals, that they rarely delivered before they flipped the property....

Currently the area’s fortunes are managed by the Downtown DC Business Improvement District [or BID]....

Among their tactics: implementing mandatory fees to price out small businesses; hiring non-union workers to pick up trash and check parking meters; encouraging crackdowns on poor and homeless residents to push them out. The Downtown DC BID was one of the first organizations to raise an alarm about Occupy DC’s encampment.... and ... to insist on a police response throughout the entire occupation....

 A powerful capitalist class of bankers, real-estate developers, and investors is driving gentrification, using a mixture of huge loans (to which only they have access) and government funding to push land values higher.

This leaves DC’s professional class with a choice. If their household income is in the six-figure-range, they can generally secure mortgages in gentrifying neighborhoods, buy property, have low-wage workers fix it up for cheap, and [reasonably hope to] ride those property values into a secure position in the middle class. Or they can pay exorbitant rent until they move back to Peoria. Not much of a choice. If they buy, they’re putting everything on the line, albeit a line that, in [DC], has only gone one way in the past decade....
 

Tying up your assets, your middle-class future, in home values does something to people. It alters their interests. It sutures a professional class, of liberal and even progressive beliefs, to the rapacious capitalist expansion into the city. The people who move to gentrifying areas tend to have liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan sympathies. But they are aligned materially with reactionary and oppressive city restructuring, pushing them into antagonism with established residents, who do nothing for property values....

This produces racism. Racism isn’t just a bad feeling in your heart, as a liberal believes when she insists that she isn’t at all racist. It’s a force that emerges from the pressures of maintaining one’s own position, and the resentments that spring forth from this process. It produces fear and hatred of the poor for being poor, for having any pretense of being on equal footing with the propertied. It is a hatred for the potential threat to the property values which underpin a tenuous future among the professional middle class: blackness.

This bubbles up into everyday life in all sorts of ways. ...

Mueller describes the discomfort--the rage and fear--shown by a nice white man in response to the noisy black and brown kids in the neighborhood.
 

Young black bodies have been mass culture’s symbol for irrational, savage violence for decades, for centuries. And so the whites fear them, and this fear can manifest as anger, as callousness, as hatred. And yet, Washington’s rate of violent crime against whites is lower than the national average. White skin is quite literally a protection from harm. But it doesn’t insulate your property values. That requires extra vigilance.

Noting that really the teens of color "have much more to fear from the whites living alongside them," Mueller continues,
 

We can leverage state violence against them — we can call the cops. On message boards, police officers urge gentrifiers to report any “suspicious activity,” which includes legal activity such as walking, talking, and standing. Smoking weed in the alley? Call the cops. A group of teenagers talking loudly? Call the cops. Litter? Call the cops, just whatever you do, don’t actually approach people! State repression is the solution to all problems....

The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and [soccer fields]. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? ....

“What choice do I have?” ask the liberal gentrifiers, if you press them a bit. “This is the only place I can afford to live!” This sums everything up perfectly, puncturing the bubble of individual choices that make up liberal politics.

You have no choice; everything’s been decided ahead of time. If you want the American dream of a middle-class life with a home you own in the city in which you work, you have few other choices than to join the shock troops of the onslaught against the urban poor. Align with big capital and the repressive state in the conquest of the city, and maybe you’ll have enough equity to send your kids to college.

Sure, you may feel a bit of guilt, but when it comes down to it, you’re still calling the cops at the slightest provocation. After all, it’s not just trendy bars and cafes at stake — it’s the yuppies’ privileged position in ruling class administration, one of the dwindling means towards any semblance of economic and social stability in this time of crisis. ...

Marx called the violent expropriation of the poor from their lands “primitive accumulation.”

But as Mueller notes, it is not "a one-time sin, in the distant past"; it "accompanies capitalist development every step of the way, wherever valuable land meets valueless humanity."

Because of this,  David Harvey has suggested calling this process instead "accumulation by dispossession."

Harvey is among those who have taken up the work of Henri Lefebvre, whose 1968 text on The Right to the City has provided a name for movement against the projects of  urban dispossession and neoliberal gentrification.

Harvey notes that

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.

The  World Charter of the Right to the City, that came out of the World Social Forum in 2004, seeks to promote the

just distribution of the benefits and responsibilities resulting from the  urbanization process; fulfillment of the social functions of the city and of property; distribution of urban income; and democratization of access to land and public services for all citizens, especially those with less economic resources and in situations of vulnerability.

In the US, the national  Right to the City Alliance affirms "that everyone, particularly the disenfranchised, not only has a right to the city, but as inhabitants, have a right to shape it, design it, and [put in practice] an urban human rights agenda."

Here in Portland, the Right to the City Coalition  "commits to empowering working class people in Portland’s political process" and promoting a progressive vision different than that of "Portland’s current elected leaders who are primarily responsive to big business."

Their next meeting is Sunday November 9 at 3pm at Concordia University's Library.  Check their website for more, at  righttothecitypdx.org.

[image above by Mark Nerys for Portland Right to the City]