(en) US, WSA Ideas & Action - Incapacity, White Supremacy, and the Destruction of Detroit By Mike Kolhoff

The destruction of Detroit continues according to the plans of Michigan?s 
Teapublican-controlled state government. Their racist intentions are obvious. They want to 
drive out the existing African American population, and replace it with one more to their 
liking. The recent proposal by Governor Snyder to offer financial incentives to encourage 
high-tech workers to relocate to Detroit is only the most blatant, while cutting off WATER 
to thousands of current residents is certainly the most despicable. The parallel to the 
post-Katrina depopulation of New Orleans is brought to mind; New Orleans, that other major 
American city with a majority African American population. ---- Disaster capitalism is a 
euphemism for pillaging and looting, and it has hit its stride in Detroit. The $175 
million in tax breaks given to Marathon Oil to expand their refinery was supposed to mean 
good jobs for local people. Instead, only 15 local people got any of the 200 jobs created 
by the expansion.

Meanwhile, just a few days after the announcement of Detroit?s bankruptcy, governor Snyder 
announced that approximately $250 million in taxpayer money would be spent to help a 
billionaire build a new for-profit hockey arena in the city.

The attack on Detroit is an odious expression of the reassertion of white supremacy. It 
clearly presents the racist roots of the hard right turn of the Republicans under the 
so-called ?Tea Party? banner. In the same way that the racist Republicans (and Democrats) 
of Louisiana were asking ?why rebuild New Orleans?,? the racists of Michigan are fighting 
any attempt to help Detroit that doesn?t involve brutalizing and removing the current 
population.

The recent re-opening of Belle Isle Park by the emergency dictator further underscores 
their plans. Now policed by Michigan State Troopers (the governors private paramilitary 
force), their first action was to target any and all African American drivers entering the 
park for searches and tickets, the purpose being to deliver the message that they weren?t 
welcome there.

The working people of Detroit are the people getting punished, and like the working class 
of Memphis or Miami, it is multi-racial. But as in both of those cities the people 
occupying the most precarious positions are usually not white, and are by overwhelming 
majority the direct subjects of white supremacy. The pro-capitalist African American 
middle class, committed as they are to the dull fantasy of boot-strap ?entrepreneurialism? 
that has infected that class forever, has proven itself as corrupt and selfish as any 
other bourgeoisie. But the attack on the working class that began in earnest after 1980 is 
only the backdrop for what is happening in the Motor City.

Detroit in the 1950s was the engine that drove the automotive economic wave that seemed to 
lift ALL boats. Well-paying jobs were plentiful and available to everyone, whatever their 
race. The fact that, even in this prosperity, African Americans in Detroit were still 
treated like sub-citizens, denied equal access to housing, to credit and education, and 
were regularly abused by the Detroit police, is what fueled the outburst of rage that 
became the 1967 insurrection. This was not in the former Confederacy, it was in the heart 
of the industrial Midwest, serving as undeniable verification that the civil rights 
reforms being demanded in the Southern states could only raise African Americans to the 
level of ?legal equality?; alone they would do nothing to destroy the structure of white 
supremacy that continues to rule, seriously challenged but still as powerful as it is 
hateful. And white supremacy sinks ALL boats, now as it did in the last century.

Two anonymous critics of my last Detroit article complained that I focused too much on 
white supremacy, implying that it would alienate white workers. I believe the low-waged 
white workers of Detroit understand what?s happening to them better than that. There are 
surely many racists in Detroit, and even the headquarters of two nationwide white 
supremacist organizations, but these people are not worth appealing to, and make up only a 
tiny fraction of the white people in the Motor City. Most white people are well aware that 
their city is being targeted out of racist vengeance.

One anonymous critics even complained that there was ?no syndicalist analysis at all? in 
the article. This is true, and I apologize. To satisfy the need for a syndicalist 
viewpoint on Detroit I give you the following quote from Georges Sorel in 1906:

?Before the working class could accept this dictatorship of incapacity, it must become as 
stupid as the middle class, and must lose all revolutionary energy, at the same time that 
its masters will have lost all capitalist energy. Such a future is not impossible; and a 
great deal of work is being done to stupefy the worker for this purpose.? (from: 
Reflections on Violence)

We now live under a ?dictatorship of incapacity?. The non-response of the Michigan labor 
movement to this and other outrages would say that we are. Sorel was writing in reference 
to what a total disaster it would be if the social democrats ever achieved their goal of 
taking power via the ballot box. Are many workers now as ?stupid as the middle class?? The 
limp propaganda of the labor movement and the electoral left has consistently termed the 
war on workers as an ?attack on the middle class?. And truly many workers, whatever their 
job or income, happily self-identify as ?middle class?. Sad to say, it would seem that 
many workers have been thoroughly stupefied.

As for capitalist creative energy, that is over and done. Contemporary capitalism is only 
concerned with extraction, not creation. I?m reminded of that hokey science fiction movie 
?Independence Day?, concerning a race of aliens that roamed the universe destroying 
planets by stealing all their resources. These aliens represent degenerate capitalism in 
its most destructive form. When the president asks the alien if there can be peace between 
them, the alien says there can be no peace. Then the president asks: ?What do you want us 
to do?? to which the alien replies: ?Die?. When we think of humanity, we can no longer 
include degenerate capitalists in that group; they are an alien species concerned only 
with its own prosperity and preservation.