Comments Elsewhere

N.B.: if you have been reading recent news headlines, I think it is important to mention that the city of Detroit has not been destroyed over the past few days. The city of Detroit is not over, and the city of Detroit has not failed. It’s still right there, where it has been all these years; see, here it is: https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.331427,-83.045754&spn=0.349235,0.837021&t=h&z=11&lci=com.panoramio.all What has happened is that the single most confining and abusive and irresponsible institution within the city of Detroit — the city government which latched onto the city of Detroit and has tried to rule and exploit it for decades — the city government which has sold out Detroit to the auto cartel and to corporate developers at every opportunity — the city government whose attitude towards the people of the city has over the years ranged from one of constant low-level antagonism and hectoring to one of repression and open warfare — the city government which is now run by an appointed “Emergency Manager” installed in a last effort to loot the city without the normal political restraints, for the sake of institutional bondholders, before it came to this pass — has announced that it no longer wants to pay off the people and the institutions and the banks who paid in advances in the promise that they would later get a cut of future tax revenues. The government has taken over and inserted itself into so many parts of the city that this will make things rough, perhaps even rougher than they already were, although the reasons that are given for thinking that that is the obvious outcome often depend on some assumptions about the role of the government in Detroit which I think are probably false. (If it is hard to allocate more money to the Detroit police department, is that going to make life worse in the city? It probably depends on what end of the stick you find yourself on.) But Detroit is not the crisis of a handful of elected, appointed and installed government. Detroit is the Ujama Food Coop and the Masonic Temple, UAW Local 174 and the Reuther Library and the Tigers, Friday fish-fries and Paczki Day, the Red Wings and the Pistons, the Movement Electronic Music Festival and John King Books, the Eastern Market and the Afro-American Music Festival and the People’s Pierogi Collective, Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs, barbeque and fresh kielbasa, the Michigan Citizen and the Metro Times, the Rouge plant and Fifth Estate and the long history of displacement, homecoming, work, food, culture, strife, love and building that the city grows out of. Detroit is better, stronger, more resilient and much more important than the government’s budget. Detroit did not cause this crisis; the city government and the state government and the bankers and institutions they deal with, who dominate and exploit Detroit, did that. Detroit has not been ended and it will not be killed by this crisis, because Detroit never depended on the city government or the state government or the institutions they deal with to grow or survive or thrive; it depends on its people, the collision and seeping-together of its many cultures and subcultures and neighborhoods and scenes, on people’s work and their experiments and their craft and their solidarity and mutual aid. Detroit is its people, not its politics, and it will live on in those people over, above, beyond, and in spite of, the ongoing efforts of an “austerity” government to somehow bail out and save its political takeover of people’s space and public institution. Everyone would be better off at this point if the “austerity” government just took this as an opportunity packed it in and left the city entirely alone, rather than an attempt to somehow auction off, bail out and save the essential command-posts for its political takeover of people’s space and public life. But even without that, the city continues, and lives, no matter how much the politics falls apart.