Clint Eastwood and "Halftime in America"

If you watched the Super Bowl last night, you couldn't have missed the nationalistic theme running through all of the commercials for the "Big Three" US car manufacturers: Ford, GM and Chrysler. A particularly striking example of this was Chrylser's halftime advertisement which consisted of little more than a two-minute monologue by Clint Eastwood. View it here. A Chicago Tribune article described the halftime ad as follows:

Is what is good for Chrysler good for America?

The auto maker courted controversy and won kudos for a two-minute Super Bowl advertisement that was less a car sales pitch than a political message in a presidential election year.

Rugged Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood proclaimed it was "Halftime in America" in the spot that did not mention a Chrysler car or truck but intoned that the automaker's successful turnaround could be used as an example for the United States as it struggles with high unemployment and a slow economic growth rate.

"Detroit's showing us it can be done," Eastwood said.

Traffic on Twitter showed overwhelmingly positive comments for the advertisement. The "Dirty Harry" star and Academy Award-winning director spoke to Americans as if he were a football coach making a halftime speech encouraging his team to work together to win in the second half.

"This country can't be knocked out with one punch," Eastwood said in the ad. "We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it's halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin."

The beginning of the ad says little specifically about cars but describes the sense in which it is "halftime in America", adding that "people are out of work and they're hurting. And they're all wondering what they're going to do to make a comeback." Later, Eastwood adds that "the people of Detroit know a little something about [hardship]...they almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again." Eastwood also toes the post-political bipartisanship-consensus line, adding a few remarks impugning "the fog of division, discord and blame" which prevent us from "coming together as one".

What should we make of this? Various hysterical right-wingers are upset by the advertisement (e.g. evidently Karl Rove is "offended") since it appears to give cover to the Obama administration's bailout of the auto manufacturers in 2009 (which, of course, the Republicans would have carried out just the same had they been in power). Although some Obama apologists—as well as car industry higher-ups—will counter this charge by dismissing the idea that the advertisement is political at all, the right-wingers actually have a point here. The ad is deeply political. And it is also—despite numerous claims to the contrary—still very much a car advertisement. The politics go hand-in-hand with the hard argument to buy what Chrysler is selling.

The right-wingers are wrong, of course, to object to the content of the politics of the ad since they are basically right-wing politics (more on that below). If the Right thought twice about it, they'd realize that the message is in fundamental harmony with their outlook (even if it it appears to lend support to the "wrong faction" of the ruling class). But the claim that the ad has political significance is quite right. In fact, the ad is simply unintelligible unless it is set against the backdrop of political ideas of such as the Nation, of being "American", or the "National interest" and so on. If you weren't already familiar with these political concepts you would not have understood what was going on in the ad at all.

On the surface, the ad strikes a populist note. It begins by noting that lots of ordinary people are hurting, that the economy is bad, that jobs are scarce. All of that is, of course, quite true. But rather than connect the source of the economic misery of the 99% to the actions of the 1% (and the policies of their servants in Government), the advertisement takes a stridently nationalistic approach to these problems. Suddenly the 1% is no longer the culprit and its time for us to link arms with our wealthy rulers and unite for a "better America".

The basic premise underlying this nationalistic message is that all living in the US—the very richest and the very poorest—have the same basic interests. The idea is that everyone does well when the 1% does well, so we all have an interest in learning to love and trust the 1%. The only obstacle to success becomes, as Eastwood puts it, "division, discord and blame". The message is clear: stop complaining that the 1% dominates the political and economic system, stop creating discord and division by fighting against racism. Embrace your corporate overlords and unite under the banner of "the Nation" and then "we" can rise up together and "win the game in the second half."

According to Eastwood, America's "second half" is just beginning. It's time for "The Nation" to bounce back and start scoring some goddamn touchdowns. This sports metaphor transforms all US residents to equal teammates, all engaged in a common project, all agreeing that we want to "win" (as if it's clear what that means).

But there's more to the sports metaphor: we are also encouraged to think that the interests of the 99% coincide with the interests of the ownership of the Big Three. As the Chicago Tribune article points out, the idea is that "what is good for Chrysler is good for America". Of course, it's no secret that from the perspective of the US auto industry, the "team" has not been doing well for the last 30 years. "We've" been knocked down and "beaten by competing teams". The obvious solution, then, jumps out at us: "our team" needs to get back up, unite, and pull off a come-from-behind win. "We" have to set aside our "petty differences" and stop "blaming" other "teammates" with all these complaints about the dominance of the 1%. "We" have to stop "pitting Americans against other Americans". "We" have to come together and "win the future" before the Chinese beat "us". This is a line toed by the Democrats every bit as much as the Republicans.

Of course, this whole nationalist message is rotten to the core. It rests on a fundamental fantasy: the myth of the "Nation", an imagined community of people who all more or less have the same basic interests, who all live in a closed society designed to enable everyone in that society to flourish equally. The only real threats to the "National Interest" are in-fighting and "attacks" from without. Thus a "strong" Nation pushes other nations around and demands unity at home.

Watch the ad and you'll notice that Eastwood, on behalf of the Chrysler Corporation, talks a lot about "us" and "we". But who does this "we" refer to? And who the hell authorized him, or Chrysler for that matter, to speak on behalf of everyone? Evidently the "we" refers to everyone who is properly considered "American" (we can leave aside for the moment the question of who decides who's "American" and who's not).

This idea of the "National interest" is part and parcel of this message of "let's all band together as Americans—regardless of class position—and pull together." The trouble, however, is that the idea of a "National interest" is a myth. The concept assumes that everyone who is properly called an "American", regardless of class divisions, shares some core set of interests so that what's good for the 1% is good for the 99%. It'd be nice it were true, but it's "radically false" as Noam Chomsky puts it:

The whole framework of discussion is misleading. We’re sort of taught to talk about the world as a world of states, which, if you study international relations theory, there’s what’s called “realist international relations theory,” which says there is an anarchic world of states, and states pursue their national interest. It’s all mythology. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. There are a few common interests, like we don’t want to be destroyed. But for the most part they have very different interests. Part of the doctrinal system in the U.S. is to pretend that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false.

The Chrysler ad pushes this radically false claim to its breaking point. It conflates the interests of the ownership of Chrysler with the interests of ordinary working people. It also pits those considered "American" against "foreign competitors" rather than against our own 1% right here at home. The effect is to make it appear as though those in power are benevolent parental figures—like NFL coaches—who just need our cooperation so that we can pull together and just fucking win goddammit.

Of course it's not hard to spin xenophobic, racist (esp. sinophobic and islamophobic) and anti-immigrant conclusions from this outlook. Moreover, the close identification of the interests of "the Nation" and the interests of Big Business, combined with this xenophobic element, is reminiscent of Fascism. This isn't to say that the Chrysler ad is fascist; it is not. It is an opportunistic employment of the language of the "Nation" to put a positive spin on the interests of the owners of the Auto Industry. But it is no exaggeration to say the basic drift of this nationalistic political approach, if taken seriously, points us in the direction of fascist politics.

The most insidious part of this nationalist argument is that gathers surface-level plausibility from its sober acknowledgement of the economic suffering of the 99%. It's not false that the people of Detroit have been hit extremely hard by the decline of the auto industry. But this decline isn't the result of anything the 99% did or didn't do. The decline, disinvestment, layoffs, and economic misery that has plagued the Rustbelt is 100% due to the choices of the 1%—at home and abroad.

The bottom line is this: the Chrysler ad turns our ire away from the 1% and, cloaked in the flag, advises us to love and trust our oppressors.

The fact that the Big Three are exploiting the economic misery of the Rustbelt in a multi-million dollar ad designed to strengthen their political and economic clout is more than just a little twisted. After all, the ultra-rich investors of the 1% who own the auto industry are the ones to blame for all of the Rustbelt's economic misery in the first place. They are the ones who decided to downsize, close plants, and disinvest—all in an effort to keep profits high so that they could continue to line their pockets. And let's not forget that even amidst declining profits, the owners of the Big Three have been doing quite well—at the same time that the living standards of everyone living in the Rustbelt have sharply plummeted. Even during their worst quarters as business owners, the owners still live in fabulous wealth, 100% insulated from the decline and economic misery forced upon millions of working people. They don't deal with the reality of hospital bills, unemployment, school closings, soaring crime rates, foreclosures and lots retirement. Even when things look "bad" for the industry, they live lives of plenty. It is sickening to think that these assholes can get away with selling themselves as humanitarians in the struggle to help "America win in the second half". They are the cause of the misery they say they want to help mitigate.

Of course, the reasons for the decline of US auto manufacturing are complex, but it is no exaggeration to say that the decline has everything to do with ruling class missteps and anxieties about profitability, and nothing whatsoever to do with ordinary working people. But, predictably, the industry's owners have an interest in externalizing all culpability and blaming everything on "high labor costs" forced on owners by the UAW. Never mind that auto workers everywhere else in the world are better paid and enjoy stronger unions than in the US (we can also set aside the fact that the Chrysler ad evidently edited out Wisconsin pro-union signs from one of the clips in the montage). It's nuts to think that the Big Three would do anything except try to manage public relations to their benefit by hammering away at was once one of the strongest unions in the US.

The "high labor costs" argument is repeated over and over by industry ideologues in the Wikipedia article on the auto industry. The narrative coming from the self-serving owners of the auto companies is simple: If only those pesky workers had just given in to the owners' violent campaign against unionization back in 1937, then the Big Three would be sitting on top of the world right now!

But, of course, the answer to our economic woes, to mass unemployment, to the sharp decline of once prosperous industrial centers, isn't to put our faith in the 1% and the imaginary community of "the Nation". The answer is for ordinary working people to take direct control of our massive industrial capacity and put it to use meeting human needs and developing human being's capacities and talents.

For example, it is far from obvious that the US auto industry needs to be producing more cars right now. Set aside the fact that effective demand does not exist right now for an expansion of car sales. What's more, environmentally speaking it simply makes no sense to continue to manufacture tons of cars (most of which aren't even designed to last more than 4-5 years) in a world where global temperatures are rising and oil reserves are shrinking. Building millions of personal automobiles a year is wasteful, inefficient, and unsustainable. The workforce in Detroit would be far better employed building buses, train cars, wind turbines and other green technologies that the country desperately needs. Every single city in the United States has a substandard and inadequate fleet of public transportation vehicles. Equipping every city with a vastly enlarged fleet of modern, state of the art hybrid buses manufactured in Detroit would be a huge step forward for everyone. This would put surplus labor and surplus industrial capacity together to meet human needs in a sustainable way. It seems like a no-brainer although, to be sure, it is hardly a feasible short-term goal.

Of course, the owners will retort: but none of this is profitable. All of the research and long-term planning brushes against the grain of our stock-holder's demand for short-run profits. These measures would also require big capital investments up front, which could cut into short-run profit. What's more, these projects would require a larger paid workforce, but employing more people increases labor costs and reduces profit. Moreover, if we build buses and vehicles that are made to last, this will reduce yearly sales and cut into profits as well. The owners therefore have every incentive to resist doing this.

My response to the owner's complaints are simple: I don't care what they think, because we really have no use for them. They do nothing except skim off the top for themselves and keep willing workers from using existing capacity to meet human need.

It's true that profit-seeking owners have no interest in combining excess industrial capacity and excess labor to meet human needs. But that's not an argument against my proposal. That's an argument against private ownership of the auto industry. Cut out the owners 100% and let those on the shop floor hire new co-workers to work on this project with them. All of the worries about profitability melt away.

By letting workers run production democratically, pay scales become more egalitarian. By cutting out profiteers, wages may be raised and the working day can be shortened. In order to maintain high productivity alongside shortened work hours, more workers are brought aboard and employment levels soar. Previously unemployed workers are brought back into the fold. And instead of producing overpriced shit that we don't need, we would be able to efficiently meet human needs in a sustainable way. Rather than wasting surplus labor and surplus industrial capacity, both would be utilized their fullest extent.

POSTSCRIPT:

While doing a bit of research for this post, I wanted at one point to find some figures on how rich the owners of the auto companies are. First, I searched "Chrysler CEO wealth" in Google. The first 20 results were scary. They all offered different links to articles with the title "Business must address wealth gap, Chrysler CEO says". Next, I searched "Chrysler CEO rich", and the first 30 hits all had the headline "Rivals' UAW deals too rich for Chrysler, CEO says". It's not easy to stumble upon any facts about how much money the owners make. If you search "Chrysler CEO earnings" the first hit is "Chrysler CEO receives no salary for 2010: filing | Reuters". They have clearly invested a lot of money and energy manicuring their online image so that enraged citizens can't look up how much money they're raking in (much of it tax-payer subsidized) at a time when we Democrats and Republicans are harping on the "need" to tighten "our" belts and accept austerity. The ruling class is clearly worried about the class consciousness raised by the Occupy movement. We should see ever imaginable aspect of their public image as calculated moves to mitigate the effects of the political atmosphere created by Occupy.

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Does GM have a "Union Problem"?

If only. The UAW is a toothless, invertebrate shell of what it once was. Its leadership is a paradigm example of everything that's wrong with the labor movement: lifeless top-down bureaucratization, collaborationist "business unionism", lack of rank and file organization, etc.

Of course, that's not the way the bourgeois press sees it. No matter how weak, ineffective and powerless the union may have become, it is always the favored bogey man when the auto industry is discussed. This recent NY Times piece is no exception. The basic line argued in the article is that GM is "turning auto making on its head" by producing a sub-compact car, employing fewer workers and paying them half of the union wage. These measures are all billed as progressive and innovative, of course. And, according to the article, they even have the added "benefit" of having won the assent of the UAW who, we're told, is finally willing to "cooperate". Freed from the chains of workplace democracy, GM has finally found a way to spread its wings and do things its own way.

This "progressive" narrative draws on a number of false premises. I'll discuss only two.

The first is that higher wages for auto workers means worse cars (hence why lowering the wages of the workers in the production of the sub-compact car makes for a "better" product). The second is connected to the first: it is implied that the union impedes innovation and hinders the production of world-class cars (hence GM's foray into the hitherto unexplored US sub-compact market was only possible given the newly "cooperative" attitude of the typically stubborn UAW).

The "evidence" typically marshaled in defense of the first premise is that companies other than the Big Three make "better" cars because they aren't handicapped by a union that wins benefits, pensions, and decent wages for its members. This is, of course, false. European car manufacturing is a heavily unionized industry. In Germany, workers are paid more than their counterparts in the US and get 8 weeks paid vacation each year. And French auto workers unions have been known to show a bit of militancy now and again. Likewise, the Japanese auto industry is heavily unionized as well, winning health benefits and decent wages for its members while the owners of Japanese auto firms continue to do quite well. Korean auto workers are also unionized, as you may recall from this struggle a few years back. Note that none of the hacks in the US press who rail against the UAW ever make the argument that European and Japanese automakers are handicapped by their unionized workforces. That's because they aren't. (I note in passing that a similar phenomenon occurs in arguments about education policy, where pro-corporate anti-teacher zealots blame US teachers unions for everything wrong with public education while pointing (often unknowingly) to successful European schools that are, in fact, unionized). That these facts about auto unions elsewhere in the world aren't ever discussed speaks to the distorted picture propagated by our corporate-friendly media.

The second false premise is even more far-fetched than the first. It is more insinuation than cogent argument, since there is no plausible mechanism that could possibly explain how the members of the UAW are directly responsible for investment, design and marketing decisions made by higher ups. As everyone knows, workers don't make those decisions: they do what they're told. As with any other capitalist firm, GM and others are anything but internally democratic. They are hierarchically organized firms, with investors and their surrogates perched at the top, and workers at the bottom. All of the major decisions about investment and production (e.g. whether to close operations, whether to cut back, what to produce and how to market it, etc.) are made by the representatives of the ownership of the corporations in question. Just think about it: when Ralph Nader criticized GM for making unsafe cars in the 60s, it wasn't as if he was indicting the auto workers on the shop floor. He was clearly criticizing those who made the decision to place profit above the needs of human beings, i.e. the owners of the auto corporations. Were the UAW to ask for serious decision-making power in these matters, it would be sharply rebuffed. Yet, despite being denied the power to influence the design of automobile production, auto workers singled out and blamed for the bad design and business decisions made by their employer.

That is, they are blamed for doing things they are denied the power to do. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" kinda deal. It's nothing more than a lazy externalization of culpability by the capitalists who own the auto industry.

So once you set aside these two false premises underpinning the ruling class narrative about union sabotage, what's left?

Well, for one, we're left with no good argument against the UAW. All we're left with is naked class interests. On the ruling class side, it's obvious why the UAW is "bad". It cuts into profits, it is still strong enough to at least attenuate the rate of exploitation of its workers, and so forth. It would be much better from the perspective of auto Capital if the workers were divided, atomized, and unable to collectively bargain at all, since this would make for much lower wages, no benefits, no pensions, etc. And, of course, every cut to workers pay is an earning for the ownership. Keep in mind we're not talking about folks that are barely making ends meet. We're talking about multi-millionaires fighting tooth and nail to make a couple extra million by screwing workers.

On the working class side, however, the situation is much different. In it's heyday, the UAW was able to set the bar for the entire US working class in terms of wages, benefits, pensions, and job security. Auto workers were able to achieve a modest level of economic security, retire at a reasonable age, and enjoy reasonably good health benefits (though, to be sure, US-style for-profit health insurance is perilous even if you have "good" benefits). Moreover, shop floor safety was dramatically increased while the employer's tyrannical control of time was challenged by workers. From the perspective of any working person, these are all extremely good things to have. Of course, all of these benefits depended upon the strength of the union to exact these compromises from the ownership. None of these gains for workers were won with sweet-talk, moral suasion, or "cooperation". They were won by way of struggle. Thus, when the strength and militancy of the union recedes, so does it's ability to defend the decent wages, benefits, and so on that it won in the past. Thus, we see that the so-called "American Dream" of earning some measure of relative economic security as a worker rests precariously on an unstable compromise between capital and labor.

The same is true of the welfare state writ large: the reformist, Keynesian phase of capitalism that persisted from 1945-1973 was the result of strong labor movements combined with high levels of capital accumulation. When the global economic system went into crisis in the early 1970s, the ruling class pulled out of the compromise and began an all-out broadside against labor in an effort to drive wages down to restore profit rates to pre-crisis levels. Smashing labor was only one prong of this ruling class strategy that would come to be known as "neoliberalism". Other prongs included slashing business regulation, privatization, liberalizing trade, cutting taxes for the rich, smashing the welfare state, and cutting social expenditure.

The bottom line here is this. Capitalist production is production for profit. Not profit for all, but profit for capitalists. Thus, when inevitable contradiction surface (e.g. between the need for stable working-class employment and the ruling class need for high profitability), we shouldn't be surprised. Nor should we assume there are simple solutions that can resolve such contradictions within the basic framework of capitalist production. In such cases we need to think outside the box: What should the basic function of the auto industry be? What should it's basic goals be? Who should get to decide? Any honest appraisal of these questions leads us quickly out of the ideological straitjacket imposed by capitalism. For example, if society has an interest in the production of hybrid buses and wind turbines that can be manufactured by auto workers... and auto workers have an interest in secure employment with decent wages and fair conditions.... why should there be any need for capitalists at all? Why can't society and auto workers decide, together, and without the interference of the vested interests of capitalists, how to move forward in a way that works for all concerned parties? Put in this way, it becomes obvious that the owners are nothing more than tyrannical parasites who perform no useful social function. After all, why couldn't workers elect managers and self-govern production themselves while determining pay-scales collectively through some democratic procedure? Answer: because this means dethroning the capitalists who own the auto industry. And no ruler wants to be removed from their perch- they won't go without a fight, no matter how much everyone else wants them gone.

The moral of the story here can be reduced to a left-wing slogan popularized during May 68 in Paris: "The boss needs you, but you don't need the boss" (see above for the picture).

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Detroit and Bourgeois Coldness

Capitalism is an inhuman system. It is a system in which the demands of capital accumulation act as the steering mechanisms for investment, employment and production. Resources are haphazardly shuffled around in the pursuit of profitable investment opportunities. Human needs as such are not registered by the system's internal logic. The call to rectify historical injustices (e.g. slavery and its afterlives) registers as little more than noise to an economic mechanism that only speaks the language of profit. Accordingly, where there are no short-term profits to be made, there is no investment or employment. As G.A. Cohen puts it, "The same system that overworks people in the interests of profit, also deprives them entirely of work when its not profitable to employ them."

Enter Detroit. For many, Detroit is synonymous with urban decay, failure, economic misery, and crumbling infrastructure. Large parts of Detroit are in such bad shape that they appear as though they've been bombed out. Think Europe post-WWII. As TNR notes, "Unemployment in Detroit stands at a staggering 28 percent. And, in key measures of economic vitality in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan regions, Detroit finishes dead last." Moreover, as we've recently learned, 25% of the population of Detroit left the city in the last 10 years. The population is now roughly 700,000 (identical to its 1910 levels, before the auto industry really took off), down from its peak in the 1950s at nearly 2,000,000. Of course, population loss is but one of the many problems facing Detroit and, indeed, it is more a symptom than a cause.

What is the problem? The basic problems are the decline of manufacturing due to capital flight and rapid suburbanization over the last 50 years, but especially after the early 1970s. Why did this happen? Who is to blame?

Global capitalism went into serious crisis in the early 1970s. The long post-WWII boom during which living standards grew modestly for many had come to an end. As David Harvey has pointed out in various places, from a ruling class perspective the crisis of the 1970s was caused in part by the "excessive" power of organized labor. Labor was "too powerful" and was able to bargain too effectively. In other words, labor's power was getting in the way of profitability insofar as trade unions were able to win decent contracts with relatively high wages, good benefits, pensions, and all the rest of it. The power of labor and social movements meant that the state was, relatively speaking, under pressure from below to meet some degree of human needs it had ignored in the past. Moreover, the relative power of the nation state in the global system meant that it was not easy to move capital around globally.

The big problem for the ruling classes in this situation was that they were being taxed too heavily and made to negotiate with labor on terms that were far too close (for the taste of the ruling class) to equality. Mind you it was never anything like "dual power" between labor and capital --capital was always firmly on top-- but even this modestly equitable arrangement was not to the liking of capital once a global recession set in and profits were down across the board. Something had to give.

One strategy was to loosen up immigration. This was passed in the US in the 60s in order to try to undercut the bargaining power of organized labor thus driving down wages. It didn't work. Thus the ruling class pushed for the "liberation" of the financial institutions so that they could more easily move capital all over the globe. This enabled off-shoring and outsourcing so that capital could get access to the global "reserve army" of labor. This enabled it to avoid dealing with the social power of labor in the advanced capitalist nations. And, of course, another strategy was direct assaults on organized labor (e.g. Thatcher vs. the Miners, Reagan vs. Air Traffic Controllers), many of which were very successful in breaking the back of the labor movement for years to come.

Also, suburbanization (which is bound up with this process of de-industrialization) played a role. There is a strong racial and class element to the growth of suburbs. Roughly speaking, suburbanization and all its attendant spin-offs (cars, refrigerators, interstate highways, etc.) underwrote a large degree of the post-war economic growth from 1945-1973. This meant depopulating urban areas (where there were relatively few places to absorb large amounts of surplus capital) and reconfiguring large swaths of people in low-density, single-family homes. Of course, Federal law as well as extra-legal coercive enforcement mechanisms ensured that this new reconfiguration would be closed to black people entirely. Federal law also consolidated and reinforced racist attitudes and norms by staking the value of white homeowners' property on there being near-zero levels of black people living in proximity to them (Federal law used a home appraisal system when subsidizing mortgages in which an "A" or "B" rating could only be given in the event the area surrounding the house was less than 2% black... more than that was automatic cause for a low rating). In the context of widespread struggles against racism in the 60s and early 70s, many racist whites decided to flee to the all-white suburbs. To be sure, "white flight" was also a result of the devastating effects of de-industrialization. But there could have been no "black flight" since black people were barred by racist laws, white violence as well as various economic barriers from leaving the city for the suburbs.

Now this is the context in which we must understand Detroit. Due to economic factors (both nation-wide and global), the ruling class saw fit to abandon manufacturing investments and move their capital elsewhere. Suburbanization further accelerated population loss and capital flight, at the same time undermining the city's tax base.

None of these problems are "internal" to Detroit. As I say, they are national and global factors. And for this reason, the solutions to Detroit's woes cannot be wholly internal; they must come from without. Cities don't rebuild themselves, nor do jobs materialize out of thin air. These things require capital investment. Private investment, so long as we're in a capitalist system, is essential. But large public investments are necessary here as well- what Detroit really needs is a Marshall Plan.

As TNR notes,

"Institutions developed at the height of Detroit’s postwar prosperity remain--and provide the city with advantages that similarly depressed industrial cities cannot claim. It has educational institutions in or near the city (the University of Michigan, Wayne State) and medical institutions (in part, a legacy of all those union health care plans) that are innovative powerhouses and that currently generate private-sector activity in biomedicine, information technology, and health care management. And there is already a smattering of examples of old industrial outposts that have reacquired relevance. An old GM plant in Wixom has been retrofitted to produce advanced batteries. There’s a new automotive-design lab based in Ann Arbor."

This is just to say that the infrastructure and productive forces in Detroit, dilapidated though they are, are nonetheless developed to a relatively high degree given the city's past. The biggest problem is that this productive capacities lies misused or unused entirely.

What Detroit needs is a massive influx of public funds. Some will say: but how could we afford this? This is a silly question. We can afford to blow shit up and kill people in the Middle East every day of the week, but somehow we're supposed to believe that we can't rebuild things and help people here at home? This isn't even to speak of the fact that our society still produces enough of a surplus to fund both the imperialist adventures and a far more ambitious domestic spending agenda (that's just to say how large the surplus is, not that we shouldn't want to end the wars).

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Detroit is indifference. This has both racist as well as capitalist overtones (to the extent that we can disentangle the two). The racist dimension lies in a tendency for whites to gawk at black misery in such a way that poor blacks become dangerous, dark "others". This tendency undermines bonds of solidarity between whites and blacks, since many whites tend to see black misery as "their problem" and not a social problem of wide significance to all. Black people aren't seen as fellow compatriots in many respects, so when a city as heavily black (81%) as Detroit is in deep trouble many whites see that as a problem that doesn't concern them. This was true in post-Katrina New Orleans as well as in other cases. There is a profound lack of solidarity here: the suffering of the black population of Detroit is not internalized and identified with enough by whites. What's needed is a Left politics grounded in uncomprising solidarity.

The capitalist dimension is similarly dehumanizing. Capitalist investment is blind to human needs as such. It only aims to maximize profit. So human suffering that cannot be exploited profitably simply doesn't register. The system doesn't take note of it- and capital is not invested to assuage it. As far as the "Free Market" is concerned, Detroit is invisible. It doesn't matter how talented or deserving residents are- capital investment is not an ethically sound process in which the deserving get their just deserts. It is thoroughly impersonal, and has no regard for human development. This is reification at work- the tendency to see ensembles of social relations and even human beings as mere exchangeable objects to be exploited when its profitable or cast aside when its not. This is what Adorno called "bourgeois coldness". Clearly it is to blame if we're to understand why the people of Detroit have been allowed to undergo such steady decline and misery for the past 40 years.

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Unions are responsible for auto industry failures

This is one of my favorite of the outlandish statements repeated by conservatives as if it's common sense. 

Let's talk about the shockingly absurd implications of it:

1-That the auto industry has failed because of some failure of low-level labor, rather than because of seriously poor corporate decision making. (note that no one is blaming the bank tellers for the problems of the financial sector)

2-That guaranteed higher-than-average wages, job security, and benefits hurt worker productivity.

3-That guaranteed low wages and no benefits would make people work harder. 

4-That cutting benefits, job security, and wages, (killing the unions) would be worthwhile if it meant having a stronger auto industry in the United States--essentially that making an industry "competitive" is more important than empowering workers to live in reasonable conditions.

Obviously, all four implications are completely absurd, both logically, and as an indication of our social values. While I'm not sold on any kind of "bail out" for anyone without adequate federal regulation/control attached, I'm certain that anyone who suggests breaking up automotive unions is the solution to an ailing industry is really not a credible pundit. 

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