"Out of the oppressed worker, neoliberalism creates the free entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in his own enterprise. Everyone is both master and slave. The class struggle has been transformed into an internal struggle against oneself. Those who fail blame themselves and feel ashamed. People see themselves, rather than society, as the problem.”

(Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive)

I've long felt that one of the central myths of capitalism is this idea that anyone can make it. Sort of like living in a hockey town in Canada, everyone knows someone who did, just to make it feel almost accessible. The system is propped up and defended even by those it exploits because they buy into this myth.

I like what Han is saying here: that the neoliberal system has also solidified itself against resistance by making it a struggle against the self. Those who don't 'make it' under capitalism blame something about themselves. They're not working hard enough, they made a bad investment choice, their career just hasn't taken off yet. This is why I think capitalism thrives off our guilt.

That said, as we watch whatever late-stage capitalism is becoming, we can certainly see the way anger is being weaponized against others. This could be the result of rage being commodified and a primary driver in the attention economy. Docility somewhat goes out the window when anger sells so well.

"The major challenge to neighbourhood, as a demographic-physical construct as well as a viable social network, comes from organizations and institutions (firms and bureaucracies) whose routine functioning reorganizes urban space. The stranger to fear may not be the man of different ethnicity on the street corner, but a bank president or property management executive far from view.”

From Logan and Molotch.

My prof used to say something similar around how the person to fear is not the individual suffering from mental health illness on the corner but the executives in their big shiny buildings. This is why it's always important to be able to read the power dynamics of a community through the lens of who suffers and who benefits.

Places are not discovered, they're built.

I've been working through Logan and Molotch's 'Urban Fortunes: the Political Economy of Place' over the last couple weeks. It's been a bit slow (partially because I'm also reading through the Wheel of Time in my third attempt to get through the massive 13 book series); but I'm making progress.

One argument that they are making in the book is that how we define a place, how it comes to be, is a social construction largely based upon a tension between use and exchange values. Use values are all the ways the place you live in impacts your daily life, while exchange values is what that place is worth as a commodity. These values come about through all sorts of human efforts and activities, but the main point is that what makes a place a place is a constantly evolving thing driven by social action. It is through this social action that inequalities in class are both created and maintained.

"High status within the social hierarchy can bring access to the most desirable places (for residence or investment) and a guarantee of a rewarding future for whatever place one controls. At the same time a high status for one's geographical place means the availability of resources (rents, urban services, prestige) that enhance life chances generally."

You can really get a sense of how this all works out when you look at things through the lens of raising kids in a particular locale. Home values end up being directly tied to the quality of other aspects of society (better and more available green space, school sizes and quality, daycare, proximity to pollution, etc). Your income defines your ability to afford the place you raise your kids which has an impact on the resources available to your kids to help them lead healthier, happier, and more possible lives.

While none of this is a new idea, I think what matters here is to keep Logan and Molotch's argument in front of us: this is all made through social action. And as such, can be unmade.

I've been doing this self-guided urban theory reading course over the last little while (with a few intermissions) and this week's reading is from Jane Jacobs. I've read The Death and Life of Great American Cities before, but it's nice to revisit it. This morning I was reading from the chapter on the role of city sidewalks in assimilating kids into public life and was wondering if this is true anymore.

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn—if they learn at all—the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public responsibility for you."

Granted, I don't live in a large city, but it seems to me that the notion of public responsibility has so eroded that I'm not sure there's much left to be assimilated into. Something I write about often here is the dynamic between public and private life and the sort of collapsing of the two into each other. A big fan of Hannah Arendt, I like her idea that the public realm has become primarily about protecting private interests. This gives me a helpful way of understanding the loss of public responsibility for one another.

A while back I noted this idea of collective, or shared, responsibility in keeping kids safe; but it's interesting to also think about this as Jacobs did on the shared responsibility of helping kids learn public responsibility. Specifically, how this can't really be taught. It needs to be seen and experienced. But how can kids learn something that they can no longer see?

“The ideal of universal small property held those without property in collective check while it lured them on as individuals. They would fight alongside those who already had it, joining with them in destroying holdovers from the previous epoch which hampered the way up for the small owner.”

I started reading White Collar by C. Wright Mills this weekend, a book I picked up a few years ago and never got to. It's a bit of a social history on the American middle class and the rise of white collar work. I'm only just into it, but there's already some great nuggets in here. This piece (above) is notable to me, as it helps illustrate the myths that have propped up capitalism over here.

There was this emerging narrative in the 19th century that American was the land of small fortunes rather than 'great wealth' and that anyone could achieve this. This note here around the way the seeming accessibility of property ownership put those without property in solidarity with property owners do is a fascinating look at a myth that we are now seeing crumble. As the ideal of property ownership becomes less available to each successive generation and the division of wealth becomes more stark, I wonder if that solidarity will fully collapse.