RIP Detroit, as the US goes socialist
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There’s many places you can visit with your limited time on earth — the Turkish riviera, Finland’s Ice Hotel, Mt Fuji, Wobbie World — but everyone who wants to understand the last century and this one, should see Detroit. Why? Because Detroit is the first modern urban ruin, the largest city that has simply been allowed to die. From the 1970s onwards, successive state and federal US governments allowed this once incredible city — home to some of the first skyscrapers, to an urban black culture that came north for jobs, of a prosperous working class — to choke and fall over. Warsaw, Frankfurt, Coventry — cities bombed into non-existence were put back together by their nations, often brick-by-brick. Faced with the far less challenging circumstance of industry moving out, the US turned its back on a city that had been the arsenal of the allied effort in WW2. It staggered, stumbled, tried to revive itself. Now with the bankruptcy of GM, it’s all over. From an urban population of two million in 1960, Detroit has fallen to around 650,000. With GM about to be consolidated, it will fall further — effectively below a level where it is really serviceable as an urban centre. Your correspondent was there in 2006, and it was bad enough. In the centre of the city, whole rows of skyscrapers were boarded up — 20, 30 storey buildings, some pre-WW1. Whole blocks were vacant, tumble weeded, because it was cheaper to pull them down and avoid property taxes. Whole suburbs were empty, vines and creepers reclaiming the mansions of old auto execs. Because no one was there to squat them. Geographers developed a new concept — “urban prairie” — as foxes and weasels not seen in the area for 300 years, reclaimed areas within 15 minutes walk of the city centre — around which you could walk for five minutes without seeing another human being, while the monorail, the “people mover” with perhaps three customers on the entire route, circled uselessly above, like stars round the head of a suddenly whacked cartoon character. With GM’s bankruptcy arrangement, by dint of the failure of American capitalism, the US has transitioned into actual socialism — though it may be a temporary holding pattern. Ownership of GM and Chrysler is shared between the Federal government and the United Auto Workers Union, and explicitly or otherwise, they are now directing the core industrial enterprises of America, the company whose director once said “what’s good for General Motors is good for America”. The bitter ironies of this are multiple. In the 1890s, after Marx’s death, Fred Engels pondered the possibility that socialism could occur without violent revolution. At some point he reflected, the contradictions of capitalism would become so great, its failure so obvious, that the capitalist class in sheer exhaustion and despair, would hand over the keys to the castle. In the 1970s, Sweden developed a variant of this called the Meidner plan. The trade unions and the state would achieve full socialism by using public capital and pension plan money to buy up the shares of heavy industry on the stock market. A variant of the plan was a major part of the Whitlam government’s strategy, advocated most vociferously in minerals and energy by Rex Connor and his amanuensis one P.J. Keating. Wonder what happened to that bloke? Bizarrely, the US has now implemented a variant of this to save its economy. One of the reasons the auto industry failed was because it was carrying so many social costs — because of the asinine system of employers bearing health care costs. In the fat years, the auto companies cut deals with the UAW guaranteeing health coverage for retired employees to death. When you add that to their hopeless refusal to design smaller, better cars, a disaster was inevitable. Now here’s the really funny part. There’s one place where an overextended auto maker was allowed to fail, to be subject to market discipline. Which one? Saab. Where? Sweden, the country that Republicans — lining up at the stimulus trough — wave as the dire example of socialist unfreedom. How did this happen? Though Sweden is not unexposed — especially due to its investments in former Soviet Baltic states — its private sector is leaner and more efficient because its social capital is so high. Poverty is at 4%, health is high, social costs are low. Businesses can operate efficiently because a stable social democratic civic order is in place. Meanwhile, in the US, the right is spruiking as an alternative to GM etc, the Toyota plants in the south — with unionisation practically illegal, a lack of health and safety protection, and a relatively good wage dependent on a 56-hour overtime week. In five years, when Mexico has stabilised cities like Juarez and Nogales, those plants will disappear across the border in a single week, leaving nothing behind, not even Detroit-style ruins. So let’s be clear. For decades we’ve been running an experiment — US style capitalism versus social democracy in Europe and Australia. And the experiment’s over. America failed. Social democracy delivers the greatest spread of prosperity, freedom, health, and stability. US capitalism delivers uncertainty, chaos, and collapse — which then has to be mopped up by full socialist measures. And if you want a demonstration of that, go to Detroit and then its twin city, Windsor in Canada, just across the water — it too was dependent on the auto industry. But decades of government investment in education and new industries have guaranteed it as a viable living city. We should send schoolkids to these two cities to show them what works and what doesn’t. No other argument would be necessary. RIP Detroit and much more. |
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8 Comments
I’m packing the anti-depressants (to counter the lack of sunlight) and heading to Scandinavia. Anywhere will do.
Alas Wobbies World died some years ago. Now we have to take our kids to Gumbaya Park to get that 7th rate theme park experience.
Great article Rundle. I can’t help but feel not at all sorry for them though. The big US manufacturers have been pumping out rubbish cars for years and years, not one of them worth their weight in lead. The GM(?) exec getting up at a conference last year and declaring that the “push towards fuel efficient and hybrid cars caught us completely by surprise” absolutely beggared belief. He didn’t notive that Japan had been doing pretty well selling little, fuel efficient, simple cars?
And you are right, it is a total failure of the Capitalist system. The same GM-GM went on to plead that people kept buying them, so how could they know they wanted anything different? Inconceivable! It’s a miracle they lasted this long. The Japanese recession in the early 80s or so is probably the only thing that saved them.
Orin, are you familiar with the D-Gen’s Piss Weak World skit? No sign of it on Youtube.
Orin, I can also suggest the pathos-ridden Phillip Island ‘attraction’, with all the famous landmarks of the world - can’t remember the name. Leaves Wobbies World for dead.
Guy found Detroit to be on the way to ruin back when he visited in 2006, but it was already there when I went through in 1979. As an outrageously pampered Australian baby-boomer it made an impression that stays with me today. I was visiting the father of some American-Australian friends, people who I still refer to as the Detroit Refugees. He was a Detroit cop and gave me an extensive tour in his patrol car—almost the only way to see parts of this city! To drive for seemingly endless miles down Telegraph Avenue (the scale of the US never fails to get to me: it seemed about three times the width of the Gold Coast highway and as long but was just a suburban main road) and it was like those pictures of bombed out Chechnyan cities.
Worse, because as Guy says, it was all abandoned. What was just a few years prior had been the industrial centre of the richest country on earth. Burnt out, boarded up or bulldozed empty blocks—mile after mile after mile. (The only comparable spectacle and more accessible to visitors without the need of a squad-car, is to go up the Arch in St Louis and look over at the devastation of East St Louis on the other side of the Mississippi.) And the once beautiful Detroit inner suburbs filled with Queen Anne, Tudor or Georgian houses, perhaps repros but gracious and made of real brick and timber unlike modern tack. These, too, were often burnt out or looked like it, though many were occupied but suffering from years of no maintenance despite ostentatious cars out front.
Downtown had the surreal and fantastical Renaissance Centre, a misguided attempt to bring some life back to the city, but symptomatic of the problem: a giant mall of high rises that rose out of the old city like a glass Camelot and protected by giant blank concrete walls from the surrounding shabbiness and danger of the old downtown. Inside, like any other nondescript mall in America except crawling with an unusually high density of security guards.
Another American friend with neo-con tendencies has harped on, for about a decade now, of how it is obvious the Europeans and especially those socialist hellholes like Sweden, will surely fall into terrible chaos when their excessive taxes feeding social welfare/retirement benefits get overwhelmed by their aging population. My response was exactly yours: even if some of these Euro states have promised too much and may have trouble delivering, they have an abundance of the most critical element of all, social capital and the evidence all around that it works.
Detroit is a very depressing place with (ironically for Motor City) sh-t roads; cracked concrete freeways filled with scared white folks driving fast in huge SUVs to and from the outer suburbs. The inner suburbs are dominated with black and poorer white folks (in buses or driving smaller, older and often Japanese cars), with a lot of visibly decaying housing, much of it still occupied. Both parts of the population seem to largely ignore each other, unless their paths cross over a shop counter often with cringeworthy “have a nice day” style greetings (or couldn’t-give-a-toss disinterest, the hallmark of retail and service industry teenagers everywhere!). Crossing the tunnel under the Detroit River to Windsor is like entering another world. Although the two cities are clearly visible to each other across the water, the contrast is startling. The first thing you notice is that the road is no longer shaking your car to bits, then you see trees and greenery, and people doing things like actually walking without the aid of a Hummer. Canadians of all creeds seem to smile and shake their heads when discussing the US, whilst their American neighbours appear oblivious to just how crap their world actually is. They genuinely seem to think it really is the best country on the planet! God bless ‘em.
Randy Newman said it well on Little Criminals with a song called Baltimore:
http://www.asklyrics.com/display/Randy_Newman/Baltimore_Lyrics/170900.htm
also on YouTube one version here: Great pathos if that’s the right word for it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rcSb8LgPQc
and note
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore,_Maryland#Economy