Mixing sociology with anarchist studies on the side?

[herbertmarcuse]

Graeber has a section in Fragments about this, pages 3-7.  Start from "It does seem that Marxism holds an affinity with academia that anarchism never will" and read through "and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write".    Link to a PDF of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

Hats off for sharing this book and the friendly academic warning. Although to be candid, I have only recently have been exposed to some of the stuff by David Graeber, mostly from the few 50 minute Against the Grain Podcasts. Hence,I think I will be needing more time studying some of his writings before making any comments on the fruitfulness of his pose and style. And yes I took the last quote you provided extremely serious. As he says in full: "...At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run - and I don't mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either -- and that of course, is going to get one on far more trouble than anything one could ever write." (Graeber 7)  

Edited January 13, 2013 by herbertmarcuse

[gilbertrollins]

University professors constantly complain about the way things are run, and in fact in recent news have begun forming Unions to protect their salaries.

[herbertmarcuse]

Gentrification, that is, improving property, is a good thing.  The neighborhood I live in was recently ranked the most dangerous neighborhood in the country.  Fifty years ago it was an affluent Jewish neighborhood.  Neighborhoods change rapidly in cities.  It's not a simple matter of affluent neighborhoods spreading-from-center, pushing minorities further and further toward the edges of the city and eventually off the edge of the world.  

 

Anti-gentrification sentiments inspire protectionist economic policies -- or rather I should say local alderman in my neighborhood not letting Arabs and Whites open businesses because doing so "keeps money in the Puerto Rican community."  No -- preventing people from trading one another, like say whites or arabs setting up businesses and offering Puerto Rican consumers competitively priced goods so that they can invest those dollars saved into more productive margins like, say, their children's education -- is how you make everyone rich, Puerto Ricans and Arabs and Whites alike.  

After reading your comment, I assume your not a member of the RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH PARTY?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x4o-TeMHys0

[gilbertrollins]

Ha.  Zing!

 

It's funny, really.  People act as if supply and demand diagrams are a convenient illusion.  During the French Revolution bread prices went up.  The Jacobines in populist fervor put a ceiling on bread prices in response -- because the bread was too damned high.  Bread supplies diminished and more people starved.  Another example of how price controls help the poor.

Edited January 14, 2013 by econosocio

[jacib]

You can't talk about shifts in neighborhood succession in the 20th and treat it just like pure supply and demand, unless your model account for white people demanding to be far away from black people, both through restrictive covenants and red-lining and block-busting in the first half of the 20th century, and white flight in the second half.  Gentrification is not merely about improving housing stock; the way I understand it, it's definitely a post-white flight phenomenon (in this case, genritification can fairly be described as supply and demand, adequately if not completely, but the processes that lead up to it can't).  I can almost guarantee your formerly Jewish neighborhood went through a process like what's described in this really rad ethnography called Canarsie where in a really short time the neighborhood goes from being mostly Jewish and Italian (working class, lower middle class) to being mentioned in Nas songs ("Canarsie/You're living harshly").  Granted, in the long term I think it's definitely a good thing that the housing market is "freer" ("significantly less racist") but the whole process you describe of affuluent Jewish to most dangerous is almost definitely "animal spirits", not "invisible hands".

[gilbertrollins]

I never said gentrification was a product of supply and demand -- I said (not very clearly, and definitely polemically) that rent controls increase discrimination and incidentally corruption as well.  By imposing an artificial price ceiling, you incentivize landlords to accept payments to make up that differential in other forms.  The apartment is worth $1,200 market value.  The Committee for the End of Gentrification sets the rent at $500 and goes home satisfied they've made life better for poor black and brown people.  Mr. Poor And Black was willing to pay $1,200 with his three roommates for the apartment.  Mr. White And Affluent would have paid $1,000 to live there alone.  In a market without controls -- Mr. Black gets the apartment.  But now the racist landlord is indifferent between getting $500 from Mr. Black or Mr. White -- she is not indifferent between renting to black versus white people.  Mr. White gets the apartment.  This sort of thing has been documented in New York in excruciating detail since the 1950s.  

 

The same social forces that corral people together in bins of preferences, mores, and structures that create fashionable restaurants where everyone is dressed curiously alike are the same social forces that corral people into segregated neighborhoods.  The best we can do is encourage social mobility.  The economic version is "entry and exit."  And it works.  Encouraging people to respect competition and variety among social institutions, and movement of individuals among them and within them, is the best way to encourage social innovation.  It keeps social institutions from forming monopolies, and keeps them fluid and dynamic in form.  We're not going to end hierarchy, nor are we going to end people saying, "Which Joe?"  "Black Joe."  "Oh, right yeah.  Call Joe, he'll love this."

 

I have no problem with people in a free society persuading one another to respect, tolerate, and live next to other races.  Let's have more of that.  I have a problem with rent controls and the state of the current welfare system broadly.  The three most salient historical instances of institutional racism -- slavery, the war on drugs, and housing projects -- were all sold on the premise of "protecting" someone.  And all three of them worked directly to exclude black and brown people from legitimate markets.  And that's what you get with "protection," just about every time -- the exclusion and oppression of one group at the expense of another.

 

I find it incredible that otherwise wicked smart academics often espouse the belief, against such staggering evidence, that government "protection" of black and brown people will "protect" them from the detriment of the market.

[gilbertrollins]

PS -- white flight is reversing -- and in a magnitude that would make you pass out.  Nobody lived in downtown Chicago twenty years ago, because of white flight.  They add thousands of units down there every year.  If you want to enrich the ghetto -- legalize drugs.  Until then not an army of social workers and social planners triple its current size will change a thing.

[jacib]

PS -- white flight is reversing -- and in a magnitude that would make you pass out.  Nobody lived in downtown Chicago twenty years ago, because of white flight.  They add thousands of units down there every year.  If you want to enrich the ghetto -- legalize drugs.  Until then not an army of social workers and social planners triple its current size will change a thing.

It's crazy how fast it's reversing.  This I agree on (and actually most of what you said in theory, too, I just don't really care about rent control).  And it's also crazy that it's a very cohort based thing--YOUNG white people are moving, and it seems like they plan on staying there.  My friends who live in Brooklyn keep telling me which neighborhoods they're priced out of, and how neighborhood X used to be all strollers, but now the kids who live there are older, and the next neighborhood inland is all strollers (which also pushes the hipsters and artists out another bus stop).  20 years ago, it was all like 90% minority, 10% Hasidic Jews.  This was of course where the Crown Heights Riot happened in 1991.  My friend, a "stylish young professional", moved into a place in Crown Heights about a year ago. She's taken to posting on Facebook all the of the changes in the neighborhood--the number of new bars and ethnic restaurants, the fact that three yoga studios have opened around her in the past year.  I lived in Chicago for a while years ago, just as they were like building all these condo buildings I think around Roosevelt and S. 18th St, you know like the area just South of the Loop.  I'd pass by them if I was ever coming up from the South, and I'd just think "Who'd want to live here?  There's nothing around here."  I had to look up the name of that area: "The Near South Side". because no one ever, like, talked about it or anything.  It remember buying something on that 7-11 on Roosevelt years ago and looking East and just thinking it was nothing but condo construction and no real people.  Now look at it, totally different, full of people living (in sterile, probably pretty boring condos) with services agglomerating around them and stuff.  It's just crazy how fast these whole neighborhoods are becoming majority white.

 

Anyway, I don't normally think about things in terms of equalibria, but like it just goes to show you: there was one equalibrium (racist housing policy) that was disrupted by the civil rights movement and block busting which led to white flight but like, if I had to bet money on it, I'd bet we were headed for a new equalibrium with a lot whiter inner cities and poor people increasingly pushed out to outskirts (like Europe!).  Apparently, an emerging topic is suburban poverty now, not just urban poverty.  Anyway, I don't know, I just feel like this just further emphasizes what a weird process we witnessed with white flight.

[gilbertrollins]

South Loop is pretty douchey, but it's come up fast.  I haven't seen any stats for Chicago or especially cross sections of other cities -- but the idea that white=rich seems pretty outdated to me.  There are tons of colors with money in Chicago: Yellow, Brown, Black, Mocha, Mochiatto, Skinny Tall Late with Soy, etc.  

 

Nobody pushes the poor, except for the government when they, say, make having a home contingent on forfeiting rights to the privacy of one's own blood samples for drug tests.  

 

If people in a voluntary market move to different locations, we're talking about a considerably different process than government-imposed housing plans, and even a different process than deliberate exclusion of minorities from markets through red-lining.  

 

The important point about urban development is that the poor benefit most from it -- because they value the next margin of consumption more than the wealthy -- the next pair of shoes a poor guy buys means more to him than the next (10th? 15th?) pair of shoes a rich guy buys.  And urban development has in the long ran increased the absolute income of the urban poor for two centuries.  

 

I don't see a great deal of empirical support for the romantic idea that modern cities are progressively corrosive socially and economically.  Black and brown neighborhoods aren't poor because there are no white people there.  They are poor because of the economic-growth stunting crime that's endemic to taking people's property rights away and forcing them into a situation where they have to form quasi-militaristic organizations just to do business.  

Edited January 15, 2013 by econosocio

[jacib]

the idea that white=rich seems pretty outdated to me.  There are tons of colors with money in Chicago: Yellow, Brown, Black, Mocha, Mochiatto, Skinny Tall Late with Soy, etc. 

I mostly agree with everything you said, except when it comes to the South Loop, white=rich.  But I mean the whole north side is filled with a lovable hodgepodge of white working class, many of whom are Eastern European as hell.  What other state would elect a dude name "Blagojevich"?

 

I think pretty much the history of urban sociology (at least the Chicago school) is the whole idea that the city is not corresive, it's right and natural.

[gilbertrollins]

I think pretty much the history of urban sociology (at least the Chicago school) is the whole idea that the city is not corresive, it's right and natural.

 

If you agree with me, I have no reason to be obnoxiously polemical and long in response, and I won't know what to do with myself in that case.  I'm reading Simmel's old essay on urbanization right now.  That guy was prescient.  His whole idea that the mind searches for changes in patterns and conventions, has a limited budget of attention/energy to process those, etc is a page right out of modern cognitive psych and behavioral econ.  I don't agree with a lot of what he's saying, but he's got that knack for articulating social intuitions really well.  He was pretty heavily influenced by Freud and nascent psychology, no?

[jacib]

He was pretty heavily influenced by Freud and nascent psychology, no?

I actually have no idea. I do know that if you come in saying you love Simmel it will earn you points with a large group of folks. Most of the really creative senior sociologists I know have a huge soft spot for him. Network people love him because he was apparently the first to think of network structure--the reason we say "dyad" and "triad" are because Simmel did. I don't know who influenced his ideas though.

[gilbertrollins]

Yeah a lot of what he wrote is very psychological.  I'm reading the famous essay on cities before bed, in bits.  He updates the Marxian idea that cities and money are congruent to rationality/calculativeness, which all of them depersonalize people.  I think that's totally incorrect, but the guy's got an incredible way of weaving the relevant intuitions together formally.  

 

He draws on Frued some in Philosophy of Money, I think.  Not sure how much.  Freud had some crazy idea about money being archetypal of the infant's fascination with its own shit: "I made this!"  Greed is I think in his view a fixation with our own creativity -- money is indeed "filthy lucre."  Or something like that.  It's just amazing how deeply just about every social thinker after 1860 was influenced by Marx.  Such a big mess to clean up!  Ha!

 

I don't dislike sociological literature.  I'm taking a grad poly theory course at my home school this semester, where we're going through all of Capital V1 and other essays (going to be lots of fights, can't wait).  I like Goffman a lot.  I like the agency/structure debate.  I'm in love with Victor Nee's work at Cornell on Chinese growth and institutions.  Most everything I've read on institutions in sociology actually anticipates the thinking I was doing on them as I worked through what was wrong with the new institutional account in economics -- it's like reading people who finally agree with me.  I like tons of sociology.  I just think tons of it is wrong.  Same evaluation applies to economics.  

Edited January 17, 2013 by econosocio

[ohgoodness]

Seeing how this thread has developed. I just thought someone should post a link to Boltanski and the new pragmatics:

http://nome.unak.is/nm-marzo-2012/vol-7-n-3-2012/54-conference-paper/349-the-economic-sociology-of-late-capitalism-the-contributions-from-boltanski-thevenot-and-chiapello-2

[Panama Slim]

This has been a very enlightening discussion.  Thanks to all participants!

[herbertmarcuse]

Panama Slim:

 

By the way I really enjoyed the photos on your blog. I've always considered doing a little photography while expanding my career possibilities in sociology.By the way,are you familiar with some of the work by Kyle Cassidy?

 

http://www.kylecassidy.com/

 

take care,

 

HM