Christopher Rufo, a “filmmaker” who briefly ran for Seattle City Council in District 6, is under the impression that he was dropping some serious knowledge when he recently claimed (using Marxist imagery) that the specter haunting corporations in cities is the paradox that corporations are tolerant and the left is intolerant. This paradox, he believes, has resulted in a crisis that may finally force corporations to abandon urban centers, which have a high concentration of mindless and unrepentant socialists.
But this is just pure nonsense. Worse still, It’s incompetent criticism dressed up to sound like it’s doing something deep. But for anyone who is well-informed, it is clear that Rufo has not read a single book on the subject of urban and 20th-century political economy. He has heard some things and, by a rude (or sense-immediate) formulation of feelings, says things that are hardly any better than a dog hearing something in the dark and barking at the unknown thing. And barking, as the French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) put it during an interview, barking is the “very stupidest cry, the shame of the animal kingdom.”
Here is Rufo’s woofing:
I never thought I’d say this, but I agree with every word Christopher Rufo writes here. 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/yy5N4aOS7F
— Spek (@spekulation) October 30, 2019
This is utter nonsense. Its historical framing is the stuff of crap. And yet it is the best reading from the side of the right of the council election that has captured national attention: Amazon versus the intolerant socialists.
Three things. First, read my post on the cosmopolitan types represented in the current election. In this post, you will find not Rufo’s paradox rubbish but a coherent framing that has several well-researched books to back it up. Second, any effort to read about urban developments over the past 50 years would make it obvious that, spatially, cities like Seattle were, until very recently, structured in an unusual way. Instead of the rich being in the center (the normal), they were in the suburbs (the historic anomaly). But go back to the pre-World War II cities, and we find the rich were often at the center. What we have witnessed since the 1980s is a reversion to an older production of urban space. There is, again, no paradox here.
But the third thing is the most important of all, and to understand it requires hours and hours of reading by sociologists, economists, and the critical theorists. For Rufo, I recommend he takes time from writing nonsense and making “documentaries,” and read Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. It was published in French in 1999, and its English translation occurred in 2005. Sadly, the book is long. Rufo will really have to sit down and very carefully read its arguments, which are not isolated. This text does not stand alone. It is one that connects with the findings of researchers at the Monthly Review, at the economics department in Oxford, and the critics of the University of Chicago’s human capital theories.
But what has been known to those who have read some or all of these books is that this major transition, described by Rufo as corporate America’s appeasement of the progressives, actually began to take form in the 1970s. And it wasn’t appeasement. It was a consequence of globalization in two forms: One that was urban (read my post on cosmopolitanism and Sawant for more on that), and the other that was international. The transition to the latter was announced in Richard Nixon’s closing of the gold window in 1971, and therefore the nation-based economic development mostly promoted in the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. (Read Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order—Steil is not on the left.) This meant the corporations—which were taking advantage of the low wages in other countries (the local economist Alan Harvey described it as “wage arbitrage”)—needed greater cultural sensitivity. This required a break from an older concept of culture (Eurocentric) to one that was just pure form (this, as Bill Readings wrote in the University in Ruins, resulted in the rise of empty expressions like “excellence” to replace loaded words like “culture”). This was simply corporate adaptation to a new cultural environment. It had nothing to do with the emotional charity of appeasement.
But at the same time (in the early 1970s), corporate America—which had been challenged by a sequence of resistance movements in the late 1960s—decided itself to abandon the father-centered (and white-centered) family capitalist model that was established at the end of the 19th century. (Max Weber described this form of paternal society in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.) Corporate America, in a geopolitical context informed by the Cold War (1947 to 1989), decided that what we now call identity politics was not at all the enemy. The enemy was and would always be class politics. It made this distinction and went with it. What’s of no matter is who you fuck or pray to; what matters is that you just play the game of the market as it’s constructed. (I use the word “game” in the same sense as the mid-century Cambridge post-Keynesian economist Joan Robinson.) These 20th-century developments are closely examined in the New Spirit of Capitalism. They also explain why Adolf Reed, one of the most prominent black American intellectuals of our time, claims that identity politics are essentially neoliberal.
There is no paradox here, Rufo. There is no betrayal of the left. There is a poverty of thinking due to an inadequate diet of reading. If you spent time with the harder books, you would know that the hand of urban corporate America was not bitten by the political animal it fed.
