A People's History of Detroit

Abstract

A People's History of Detroit is that rare book that is both richly detailed and compelling written. Authors Mark Jay and Philip Conklin first approached the questions animating this text as community members trying to make sense of the “twin spectacles of downtown boosterism and the high-profile SWAT raids” in the Motor City (p. 6). As they read deeper in search of the origins of this urban crisis, they discovered that their starting point continually had to be rolled back. From Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy filing, to the rise of neoliberalism, to the Great Rebellion of 1967, finally rewinding back to the reign of Fordism. In this reverse march through time, they identified that each era became a collision course between those in power and those without, due to the faulty logic of capital, specifically, a capitalist logic powered by the dialectical relationship between creative destruction and mythology.Modeling their volume after Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Jay and Conklin seek not only to celebrate activists and those who struggle against injustice, but also to comprehend the social, political, and economic structures that create the context of these people's lives. In this endeavor, they are quite successful. Through detailed documentation of Detroit's “creative destruction” they convincingly demonstrate that the city in its quest towards “progress” is constantly being “re-everything: revitalized, rebuilt, reborn, renewed, refurbished, revamped, restored, redeveloped,” at the expense of marginalized citizens (p. 11). More importantly, their description and exposure of capitalist myths offer a unique contribution, separating this text from other narratives of urban decline.Jay and Conklin argue mythologies are ideologies deployed to shift blame away from the wrong-doers and onto specific scapegoated groups. In the case of Detroit, the ensnared included Blacks, immigrants, union members, and Communists, depending on the context of the creative destruction. In arguing that “myths tell stories that map on to our desires about how the world ought to be rather than how it actually is,” the authors convincingly argue that these tales are needed to smooth over the dislocation and exploitation inherent in capitalism (p. 13).Chapter 1 critically establishes the political economy of the city, challenging the oft-repeated claim that there are “Two Detroits.” Rather, the significant racial, classed, and geographic disparities in the city are the intentional by-product of uneven development. A hefty sixty-five pages, this chapter powerfully demonstrates that “capitalism continually destroys the landscape it creates in order to make way for a new regime of accumulation” (p. 72). The remaining chapters support this thesis, each undertaking a significant moment in Detroit's history: the golden era of manufacturing (1913–1960); the 1967 rebellion; radical labor organizing (1967–1973); and the neoliberal Black urban regime (1974–2013), braiding creative destruction and mythology together.In each era, the capitalist class blames community members to justify their own actions. Under Fordism, it is black workers and immigrants, unwilling to assimilate and take up their patriotic duty by demanding equal wages and better working conditions. In the aftermath of the Great Rebellion, key stakeholders chose to present the uprisings as a battle between good and evil, moral and amoral, obscuring the years of significant organizing that occurred before, during, and after the rebellion. In the final two chapters, the authors document how corporate elites, federal and local government, and the new highly militarized police unit STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), conspired together to subvert the resistance of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Panther Party, and other less well-known community organizations such as the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization in their quest for parity in the city.A People's History of Detroit is a wide-ranging history tracking a quintessentially American city through the tumult and changes of the twentieth century. Yet it cannot document every struggle, and the authors demonstrate great self-awareness in acknowledging this limitation, offering reading suggestions for more in-depth exploration of the episodes they discuss. The significance of this book, however, is not in the details, but rather in the transferability of the critical interventions they are making in relationship to capitalism, creative destruction, and mythology. Centering on the concept of “resilience,” the authors poignantly lament the frequency in which that term is employed to reference differently abled individuals, trauma survivors, and post-Katrina New Orleans, opining in fact this is a back-handed compliment, meant to romanticize poverty and suffering. Jay and Conklin assert that we must collectively move away from the idea of resilience as an attribute as it exists solely in a system that “reproduces crises and continually asks the working classes to pay for the cost” (p. 224). In this call to action, the authors implore readers to see the illogic of capitalism in hopes of demythologizing and building toward a more just future.