occupational choices, networks, and transfers, arup mitra

(11): behaving in most rational way

(19): imp-- Harris-Todaro (rural poor will migrate) vs. Banerjee (m-class will migrate, b/c need resources for the move). Mitra's argument: from rural non-farm sector both the poor and middle-class migrate to urban areas.

(20): the semi-urban area

(21): declining land-man ratio pushes labour out

(21): industrial workers live in slums, too

(23): the push factor is very strong -- informal sector looks attractive, even when bad, b/c prospects in rural areas are worse

(24): strong preference to reside near work place in slum

(24): int--heavy dependence on kin/ethnic networks, to get job [implications for resistance? substantively different from other periods, strata?] here argument is yes--slum residents especially anxious to anchor themselves in the 'known'

(26, 79): consumption 'bias' against housing [silly to see this as anything but the effect of extreme poverty]

(27): supply of housing not kept pace

(28, 107-109): silly-- remit wages in order to keep kith and kin from entering the urban workforce [bizarre. and actually offers no evidence in the book. quite silly--classic prisoner's dilemma problem, this is, resolved in opposite direction]

(36): search for jobs is more urban-based, takes place once in city. for new migrants, job-search is conducted through networks

(38): against the 'overbunization' thesis--informal sector jobs as 'pull factors' [but push-pull are defined in relative terms. these are still terrible. people are being 'pushed out', in that sense]

(46): access to manufacturing jobs becomes available after a few years, when migrants develop their own access to information

(56, 139): imp-- longer-duration migrants are less likely to be in casual employment [but here there is the larger issue, with longitudinal conclusions--how do we know that everything about the waves of migration will be the same? the observations are not 'independent', in that sense, when extrapolating. you could well be measuring a different 'wave' wrt to ethnicity, something like that. the larger problem with 'mobility' framing is that, unless the job structure is changing or productivity increasing (for which no evidence is offered), mobility solves none of our problems]

(62): imp-- regular employment is more stable, but middling wages--self-employment is unstable, but yields higher earnings [not best interpreted as higher levels of stratification in the latter viz-a-viz the former]

(63): physical segmentation of the labour market

(65): imp--migration is rational, based on expectation of 'upward income mobility'. reduction of intensity of poverty [(1) clearly it would be rational even without expectation of upward mobility, given intensity of poverty in countryside; (2) no evidence of upward mobility in the data, really--since not clear what 'past' income refers to]

(67): int--relation of industry to informal sector can vary. on the one-hand, inverse model, where industry cuts workers, and they go to informal sector. on the other hand, proportional, where industry generates linkages that are served by informal sector.

(69): some support for idea that workers move from casual/informal to salaried employmemt

(72): kin/ethnic networks, again

(76-77): imp--evidence for upward mobility. [needs scrutiny--controlled for inflation? how long ago is "past"?]

(115): in sum--remittances sent w/ strong sense of reciprocation, capability of remitter, education, instability. household size hurts remittances.

(118): many reasons to stay at home (security of home, household responsibilites) for women, which is why they put a special premium on working close to home

(121): no occupational mobility in other studies [and given the problems in this study...]

(123): women more likely to work, after lived in city for a while

(128): confusion re: per capita consumption and salary

----

[1] implication for politics of this kind of migration. especially desperate --> especially tribal/clannish politics? as 'vote bank'?

[2] low-productivity and high-productivity = informal and formal. they seem synonymous, in this survey, but is there any reason that this is necessarily the case?

urban informality, ananya roy (2005)

(1): "My goal is not so much to evaluate these policies as it is to highlight some of the distinctive challenges and paradoxes that they present for planners. Three are of particular importance:

1. how planning modalities can produce the "unplannable"—informality as a state of exception from the formal order of urbanization;
2. how this state of exception can in turn be strategically used by planners to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of the urban poor;
3. and how dealing with informality requires recognizing the "right to the city"—claims and appropriations that do not fit neatly into the ownership model of property."

(2): "Such frameworks yield many problematic corollary propositions. The first is the equation of informality with poverty. Neither frame recognizes how informality might be a differentiated process embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion. Second, both frames conceptualize
informality, and poverty more generally, as caused by isolation from global capitalism... Third, within such frames it becomes possible to devolve responsibility for poverty to the poor themselves." [whatever we might want to say about her larger arguments, this second point is particularly important. holism is quite critical.]

(2): "As Jessop (2002) argues, at a moment of neoliberalism, when states are pursuing austerity policies, such models of neocommunitarianism legitimate the agenda of privatization." [absolutely]

(3): "Both forms of housing are informal but embody very different concretizations of
legitimacy. The divide here is not between formality and informality but rather a differentiation within informality." [informality as something that can be used by the wealthy/elite, too]

(3): this, really, is the key point-- informality not something 'outside' the state, but something in which it is wholly complicit: "This in turn means that informality must be understood not as the object of state regulation but rather as produced by the state itself... The planning and legal apparatus of the state has the power to determine when to enact this suspension, to determine
what is informal and what is not, and to determine which forms of informality will thrive and which will disappear. State power is reproduced through the capacity to construct and reconstruct categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy— such as in the American welfare efforts to sort out the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor." [recalls the left amendment to popular narratives about neoliberalism]

(4): critique of in-situ upgrading: "I have argued elsewhere that such an emphasis on the physical
environment is an "aestheticization of poverty" (Roy, 2004), one that equates upgrading with aesthetic upgrading rather than the upgrading of livelihoods, wages, political capacities."

(6): on principle, perhaps--but the example given is so obviously constrained by the geopolitical constraints in which it operates, that might as well, itself, be rhetorical: "The shift from aesthetic considerations to the politics of shit, I would argue, is a useful policy epistemology. It recognizes the importance of infrastructure but indicates that the provision and distribution of infrastructure is not a technical issue but rather a political process. The politics of shit also disrupts models of expertise, making it possible to generate knowledge about upgrading and infrastructure from a different set of experts: the residents of informal settlements."

(6): problematizing formalization: "The process of formalization is never as straightforward as simply converting informal documentation into formal titles. Usually there are numerous types of informal documentation, of varying legitimacy, and there are often multiple claims to a single plot of land."

(6): well-put--"But I will underscore Schaefer's blunt statement about the difference between wealth transfer and wealth legalization. De Soto's ideas are seductive precisely because they only guarantee the latter but in doing so promise the former."

(7): "Indeed, following Braudel (1982), it can be argued that capitalism itself is a system of monopolies rather than a free-flowing circulation of capital,'" a point that De Soto misses despite his declared affinity to Braudel."

(7): hmm--is it possible that this is more cute, than meaningful?--"I am now arguing that it
is possible to strategically use the state of exception to frame policy. There are two forms of exception that are worth noting: regulatory exceptions and regularity exceptions."

(8): important point to interrogate: arguing for 'scale-jumping', given that the local is intertwined with the global. but this is more bluster than substance -- it doesn't get to the core point, which is really the revival of radical political practice. "I would like to suggest that the issue of scale jumping is less about particular institutional actors like NGOs and more about a strategic engagement with multiple sovereignties.... Recently, Narmada dam activists have been pressing the World Bank, rather than simply the Indian government, for accountability." [she's aware of the pitfall, certainly. and i don't think she would go so far as to argue, at all, that these are anything more than auxiliary strategies. surely we are not abandoning the terrain of the nation for this petition-driven mishmash?]

(9): clear flaws: "They each require working through rather than against institutions of power—be it the market, or the state of exception, or supranational organizations that supersede national sovereignties. Is it possible to be subversive when there is such complicity with the system?"

(9): yes--"borrowing Krueckeberg's important insight, it can be argued that the more fundamental issue at stake in informality is that of wealth distribution and unequal property ownership, of what sorts of markets are at work in our cities and how they shape or limit affordability. In this sense, the study of informality provides an important lesson for planners in the tricky dilemmas of social justice.

the 21st century metropolis, ananya roy (2009)

(820): assimilating davis into those who see 'first world' cities as the model, and 'third world' cities as the error -- this is what she is inveighing against, but it's not clear, to me, that davis is doing anything wrong in outlining the gravity of the situation that confronts us. at the very least, this critique is way too easy, and meaningless: "Davis’s apocalyptic imagination of the Global
Slum is only the newest variant in the high-pitched narration of the crisis of mega-cities."

(820): a critique of neo-orientalism, she thinks (well, here we ought to bring in aijaz ahmed's splendid deconstruction of said): "As the parochial experience of EuroAmerican cities has been found to be a useful theoretical model for all cities, so perhaps the distinctive experiences of the cities of the global South can generate productive and provocative theoretical frameworks for all
cities."

(821): critique of sassen, though not particularly forceful or thoroughly convincing, i don't think...

(822): again--this is a 'sexy' suggestion, but it's unclear, to me, that this gives us very much, that is substantive. "It is not enough for one’s understanding of the 21st-century metropolis
simply to make visible the cities of the global South. It is not even enough to exceed the visibility of crisis and catastrophe. It is instead necessary to view all cities from this particular place on the map."

(822-824): trying to invert area studies, in a sense -- give it a different theoretical spin. but this is not an instructive technique. it is a mish-mash that threatens to eschew universalism, it seems. though it's worth noting she is aware of this danger: "How can regionally produced concepts be deployed as ‘strategic essentialisms’, simultaneously located and dislocated? How can the theories embedded in ‘area studies’ retain their geographic coordinates but also cross borders and travel as dynamic vectors of new theoretical conversations and exchanges?"

(824): important, critique of sassen--"Such forms of ‘worlding’ are crucial because they move urban theory from the mapping of ‘world cities’ to the historicized analysis of ‘world systems’. The global/world cities framework asserts a hierarchy of cities but is unable to account fully for the materialization of such a hierarchy, and even less so in relation tothe long histories of colonialism and imperialism. Space is a ‘container’ in these theoretical reports; its ‘production’ remains unexplained (SMITH, 2002). For example, TAYLOR (2000), following Braudel, rightly
notes that capitalism is a world of multiple monopolies and that global/world cities represent a ‘monopoly of place’. This is a refreshing recalibration of the rather
simplistic narrative of ‘agglomeration economies’."

(825): this, i'm sorry, is just jibberish, and theoretically (and especially politically) nonsensical: "Such forms of ‘worlding’ move one away from simple core–periphery models of globalized urbanization. Instead, one is left with what ONG (1999) terms ‘differentiated zones of sovereignty’. The 21stcentury metropolis arbitrates this geography of multiplicity and differentiation. And in doing so it is, as Abbas would have one imagine, a ‘para-site’. It is dependent on the circuits of global capital and yet it also produces and mediates these circuits."

(825): ok--"This is not to say that this analysis is not applicable to the cities of the global South. Indeed, it is highly relevant. The argument is less about transnational relevance and more about the scope and range of analysis."

(826): coming close to playing native informant--"By being embedded in the EuroAmerican urban experience, this theoretical work bypasses some of the key ways in which the production of space takes place in other urban and metropolitan contexts. Further, this ‘other’ experience has considerable relevance for EuroAmerican city-regions and can provide insights into hitherto unexplained processes in these cities. One such mode of the production of space is highlighted: informality. ‘First World’ urban and metropolitan theory is curiously silent on the issue of informality. Or there is a tendency to imagine the ‘informal’ as a sphere of unregulated, even illegal, activity, outside the scope of the state, a domain of survival by the poor and marginalized, often wiped out by gentrification and redevelopment. But a large body of ‘Third World’ literature provides a sophisticated and rather different understanding of informality."

(826): potentially interesting distinction, between political society and civil society -- "Similarly,
CHATTERJEE (2006), writing about Indian cities, makes a distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ societies. For him, civil society groups make claims as fully enfranchised citizens, a ‘bourgeois governmentality’ if you will. Political society on the other hand are the claims of the disenfranchised and marginalized, what APPADURAI (2002) has termed ‘governmentality from below’."

(827): i really have trouble understanding what is gained by this amendment--"The Africanist debates about agency, subjectivity, and politics defy the easy categorizations of power and resistance. Under conditions of crisis, the subaltern subject is simultaneously strategic and self-exploitative, simultaneously a political agent and a subject of the neoliberal grand slam."

(827): the postborder city?

(828): how is it more than this? this is absurd! she is getting off playing the native informant game. "It is surely an ‘evil paradise’ of ‘fear and money’, a ‘dreamworld of neoliberalism’ (DAVIS, 2006; DAVIS and MORK, 2007), but it is also an articulation of an Arab modernity where more is at stake than what DAVIS (2006, p. 53) designates as the ‘monstrous caricature of futurism’. It is the place at which the distinctions between the black economy and global finance capital are erased, where city and nature are violently fused, and where the feudalism of an emirate meets up with an open cosmopolitanism."

wacquant, urban outcasts (2008)

ghetto, banlieu, favela, etc. (1-12)

(1-2): key point--"urban marginality is not everywhere woven of the same cloth, and, all things considered, there is nothing suprising in that. the generic mechanisms that produce it, like the specific forms it assumes, become fully intelligible once one takes caution to embed them in the historical matrix of class, state, and space..."

(3): important--from the communal ghetto ("a compact and shaprly circumscribed sociospatial formation to which blacks of all classes were consigned and bound together by a broad complement of instituions specific to the group and its reserrved space"), to the fin-de-siecle hyperghetto ("novel, decentralized, territorial and organizational configuration characterized by conjugated segregation on the basis of race and class in the context of the double retrenchment of the labour market and the welfare state from the urban core, necessitating and eliciting the corresponding deployment of an intrusive and omnipresent police and penal apparatus.")

(3-4): important claim--"in the final analysis, however, it is the collapse of public institutions, resulting from state policies of urban abandonment and leading to the punitive containment of the black (sub-)proletariat, that emerges as the most potent and most distinctive cause of entrenched marginality in the American metropolis... the implosion of America's dark ghetto... [is] economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined: properly diagnosed, hyperghettoization is primarily a chapter in political sociology."

(5): Black Belt ("spatial relegation... operate[s] on the basis of race first and foremost, modulated by class position after the break of the 1960s, and both are anchored and aggravated by public policies of urban triage and neglect)" vs. Red Belt ("it is just about the reverse... where marginalization is primarily the product of a class logic, in part redoubled by ethnonational origin and in part attenuated by state action") [i forsee two questions here, already: (1) what does it mean for race and class to be distinct logics? can race stand on its own, outside of class?; (2) how can we speak of the state at once effecting this, and also autonomous from it?]

(5): working-class banlieues in France heterogenous; in US, stark monotony to the ghetto.

(5): important claim--"specifically racial dimension of urban marginality in the American metropolis." and it is this specifically racial character in America, he is stressing, that tells us that state structures and policies play a decisive role in "the differential stitching together of inequalities."

(7): and further key claim, re: periodization--thesis of the emergence of a new regime of urban poverty... "post-fordist poverty... is fueled by the growing instability and heterogeneity of the wage-labour relation in the context of rising inequality; increasingly disconnected from the short-term cyclical fluctuations of the national economy and accentuated by the recoiling of the social welfare state; and tends to concentrate in defamed and desolate districts where the erosion of a sense of 'place'... and the absence of a collective idiom of claims-making exacerbate the experience and effects of deproletarianization and destitution."

(7): neoliberalism as a challenge to the possibility of citzenship (can we indict capitalism? because it doesn't seem like we're rehabilitating the fordist moment, either?) not promising that the positive project is van parijs and the 'basic income.' total cop-out.

(8-12): five recommendations

1. and foremost--clearer separation between "folk concepts" used by decision makers and residents and the "analytical concepts" that social scientists must construct.
2. situate it in time--"in the diachronic sequence of historical transformations... [not] to forget that urban space is a historical and political construction in the strong sense of the term..."
3. ethnographic observation as an indispensable tool (a surreptitious swipe at the others in the field, too)
   
4. distinguish between social condition, position in hierarchy of places, and function for broader metropolitan system
5. the degree and form of state penetration

(12): police fetishism--criminalization of a social problem

(12): hint at state responsibility for the fact of urban outcasts (this is important--again, because it raises the question of how the state can be both implicated in, and attenuating, the same process)

chapter one, the return of the repressed (15-39)

(15-16): the ideology of the fordist years (w. w. rostow and daniel bell)--'democratic' in tocqueville's sense; the meritocracy; poverty as the residue of past inequities. welfare state in europe, free-market with targeted assistance in the US.

(17): lyndon johnson promising an end to poverty by 1976

(17-18): very unkind, here, to Marxism, arguing that it couldn't make sense of the continued salience of race. but whatever.

(20): est. damage following rodney king riots--one billion dollars!

(20): question--can we say anything about this periodization? that all of a sudden fordist society woke to the shocks of the riots of the last two decades of the 20th century? does this not elide the upheavals of the 60s (civil rights movement, most notably)?

(22): 1980s and 1990s riots driven by two logics, to varying degrees depending on country: (1) a logic of protest against ethnoracial injustics; (2) a class logic pushing the impoverished working class to rise up against economic deprivation.

(24): violence is typically viewed as violence from below (the product of the pathologies of the underclass)--"yet, far from being irrational expressions of impenitent incivility..., the public disorders caused by dispossessed youthsin the cities... over these past dozen years constitue a (socio)logical response to the massive structural violence unleashed upon them by a set of mutually reinforcing economic and sociopolitical changes..."

(25): three types of violence from above, then:

1. mass unemployment; labor precariousness and deproletarianzation.
   
2. relegation to decaying neighborhoods (disinvestment, etc.)
3. heightened stigmatization in daily life as well as in public discourse

(25): and the structural argument, which is critical--"this return of the repressed... must be understood as the result of the uneven, disarticulating development of the most advanced sectors of capitalist societies..." [again, i am concerned that we are not going to be able to explain, properly, widespread discontent in the 'fordist' moment if our operative variable is neoliberalization]

(27): 'deproletarianization' as the "outright denial of access to wage-earning activities..." a rise in the unemployed; but also in the long-term unemployed, who aren't captured by these figures, remember.

(27): notion of the formation of an 'excess reserve army of labor' (citing cardoso!), which arises through this widespread exclusion from wage-labor.

(28): new immigrants in this economy, "tend to congregate in the poorer neighbourhoods of large urban centres..." what's more, their arrival has coincided with 'flight' from the city centres, thus resulting in greater social polarization [again, i think he would be the first to admit that we are dealing in generalities, here]

(29): unemployment in S. Central LA up to 60% in 1992

(29): 'territorial stigma', not to be underestimated

(30): "lastly,there is the curse of being poor in the midst of a rich society in which participation in the sphere of consumption has become a sine qua non of social dignity -- a passport to personhood if not citizenship..."

(30-31): important--the infra-political is taking the place of the actively political--"formal means of pressure on the state have declined along with the disruption and decomposition of traditional machineries of political representation of the poor."

(31-33): role/place of the police -- "whenever the police come to be considered as an alien force by the population they are supposed to protect, they become unable to fulfil any role other than a purely repressive one..."

(34): the problem can be criminalized, or politicized--it is the former in the US, the latter in France, and somewhere in between in the UK

(35): important--but even in France, he's noting, the commitment to address these issues politically does not go far enough (because they focused solely on "urban redevelopment/housing")--"it does nothing to attack its root causes: the fragmentation of wage labour feeding unemployment and casual employment." [there is an important implication, here, about the radical nature of the kinds of reforms that would work--which makes this universal basic income advocacy seem out-of-place]

(37): identifying, again, the epochal transformation of the economies concerned as cause of urban disorder--"deregulation of financial markets, desocialization of wage work, revamping of labor to impose 'flexibility.', social polarizatio of the cities, and state policies that have promoted corporate expansion over social redistribution...

(38): noting, here, that the African-Americans were the "exception" in the Fordist compromise; what are the theoretical consequences of this 'exceptionality'? -- but isn't this all highly dubious? a romanticizing of the conjuncture, for sure, no? but maybe we don't want to overstate the rejoinder, either?

chapter two, the state and fate of the dark ghetto at century's close (43-)

(43): 'slow rioting' of internal social decay and endemic crime

(44): the image of the "underclass"

(44): from war on poverty, to war on welfare -- and decline of black social movements.

(44): Moynihan calling for 'benign neglect', rather than the massive state intervention called for by the Kerner Commssion (though this is in 1968, don't forget. sort of undercuts the notion that the Fordist period had this resolved--though, at the same time, he has already made an exception for african-americans)

(46): critical--for all of this questioning of his periodization, he has made the point quite clear: the contemporary american ghetto (the "hyperghetto") is substantively distinct from the ghetto of the Fordist years (the "communal ghetto"), in ways already elucidated. and this makes sense, so long as we are willing to make this explicit (i.e., the perpetual failure of capitalism to resolve this question..) [this is quite aside, of course, from what we might want to ask about his picture of the communal ghetto, which seems overly romanticized--and this is important, for it serves as a point of comparison.]

(47): key--America's black belt... "is the product of a novel political articulation of racial cleavage, class inequality, and urban space in both dominant discourse and objective reality." (and not simply economic, ecological change...)

(47-48): going to concentrate, here, on the external conditions of this development (and makes the reasons explicit)

(48): takes a swipe at cornel west, for using the idiom of the 'underclass' [there is the odd nativity game going on, which might just interact with wacquant's arrogance in interesting ways]

(49): three caveats, before looking at the ghetto

1. "not simply a topographic entity... but an institutional form... a distinctive, spatially based, concatenation of mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control..."
2. not something to be exoticized
3. ghetto does not suffer from disorganization, but differential organization [reminds me of Simmel, no?]

(51-52): blacks as only group to have undergone ghettoization (others lived in ethnic clusters)--"total, involuntary, and perpetual segregation"

(52): (1) spatial decentering and institutional differentiation of the ghetto [what does this all mean, exactly?]; (2) the scale of the involution.

(54): important--"yet the most significant brute fact of everyday life in the fin-de-siecle ghetto is without contest the extraordinary prevalence of physical danger and the acute sense of insecurity that pervades its streets." "this is a "reasoned response" (both in the sense of echo and retort) to various kinds of violence from above."

(55): males in bangladesh over age 35 had a higher probability of survival than their counterparts in harlem in 1990s

(58): involution following the trend of increasing joblessness (from about half of the population employed in south side in 1950, to more than 77% of those above the age of 16 left w/o a job in 1980)

(58-59): the rise and fall of the communal ghetto (first, blacks of all classes were put together; than as 'white flight' opened up some space, the petty bourgeoisie, etc., fled)--"by the late 1970s, the urban colour line had effectively been redrawn along a class fracture at the behest of the government."

(59): in sum, a three-fold movement that has resulted in the present conjuncture

1. "the out-migration of stably employed african-american families made possible by state-sponsored white flight to the suburbs"
2. "the crowding of public housing in black areas;"
   
3. "the rapid deproletarianization of the remaining ghetto residents."
   

(62): "oppressive as it was, the traditional ghetto formed 'a milieu for negro americans in which they could imbue their lives with meaning." [come on, we are broaching the outlandish here--this is not necessary for the larger argument, as far as i'm concerned]

(63): 82 percent of adults without a savings account in the late 1980s (the wealth gap is extraordinary, in general, let's not forget)

(64): informalization, here too as survival strategy (in other words, need to pin-down what is happening here vs. third world--is the mike davis narrative distinction overstated, in a sense?)

(66): yes--this is the other side of the entrepreneurial coin (don't let them forget it!)

(67): drug economy as a "subterranean welfare system"

(69): important--as far as "causes" of hyperghettoization go:

1. the transition of the american economy from fordist system of production for a mass-market, to more open/decentralized/service-intesnive system geared to increasingly differentiated consumption patterns (70-75)
   
2. rigid residential segregation, deliberate stacking of public housing in urban areas (75-80)
   
3. widespread retrenchment of an already miserly welfare state. (80-83)
   
4. turnaround in federal and local urban policy; 'planned shrinkage' of public services in historically black districts. (83-88)
   

(71): the ghetto no longer plays the role of reservoir of cheap industrial labor, as it did in a previous era (owing to deindustrialization; suburbanization of opportunities; shift to 'higher-education' jobs; continued racial segmentation of low-wage labor)

(74): the "stigma" that accompanies being associated with the ghetto

(75): this claim is confused, no? "the perpetuation of the exclusionary mission of the ghetto is first and foremost the concrete expression of the persistence of the 'colour line' in the metropolis even as it became overlaid by a class divide to produce a dual structure of black entrapment composed of a (sub)proletarian core and a middle-class periphery" [but all the same--descriptively this is all very valid; it is just fields' point about mistaking explanandum for explanans...]

(78-79): very useful account of how state was complicit in the ghettoization by focusing on massively subsidizing middle- and upper-class housing in the suburbs, and also by fostering public housing authorities within the bounds of the historic ghetto (kerner commission: 'federal housing programs concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos wehre there is already a critical gap...').

(79): wow--"to this day, the united states remains the only advanced country in the world without significant state support for low-income housing in the world without significant state support for low-income housing, despite the glaring fact that nowhere have private developers bulit for the poor--in 1980, publicly owned or managed housing represented about 1 per cent of the US housing supply, compared to some 46 per cent in england and 37 per cent in france."

(80): "contrary to popular neoconservative rhetoric, the last quarter of the century was not a period of expansion and generosity for welfare but one of blanket retraction..."

(82): total abandonment/disinvestment by the public housing authorities

(82-83): regressive fiscal policies, on the part of the revanchist state

(84): nixon undoing the minimal interventions of johnson's war on poverty

(84): a window into our earlier discussions--"the political isolation of the cities, in turn, reinforced their role as entrepreneurs at the expense of their mission as social services providers, further fragmenting the revenue base on which the financing of public institutions rests..."

(84): planned shrinkage--recalls 'gentrification'

(85): public schools as custodial institutions, rather than educational institutions

(88): infants born in the poorest black districts of chicago are three times more likely to die than those born in wealthiest white districts; black men aged 15-45 die at six times the rate of men in white affluent neighborhoods

(89): grave mistake, following portes, has been to impute psychological reality to social phenomena -- "transform sociological conditions into psychological traits [of individuals"

(90): taking on william julius wilson for ignoring the role of the state and the decline of public institutions (he focuses instead on the disappearance of work)

(90): accusing massey of ignoring the distinctions between segregation and ghettoization, the communal ghetto and the hyperghetto.

(91): important--"it is this policy of state abandonment and punitive containment that best explains..." [it is unclear how much work we want to attribute to this, exclusively--in part it seems like he has to distinguish himself from the rest]

chapter three, the cost of racial and class exclusion in 'bronzeville' (92-118)

(92): in the mind of the neocon, poor as a "formless aggregate of pathological cases."

(93-94): in sum: "...the central argument of this chapter is that the vague and morally pernicious neologism of 'underclass' and its behavioral-cum-cultural slant mask a phenomenon pertaining to the macrostructural order: the ghetto has experienced a crisis not because the macrostructures of the family and individual conduct have suddenly collapsed or because a 'welfare ethos' has mysteriously taken hold of its residents, but because joblessness and economic exclusion, by rising to extreme levels against the backdrop of rigid racial segregation and state abandonment, have triggered a process of 'hyperghettoization'--in the sense of an exacerbation of the exclusionary logic of the ghetto as an instrument of ethnoracial control."

(94): wow--in 1980, 38% of poor african americans in the largest ten cities lived in ghettos (where 40% live below poverty line), compared to 22 percent in 1970 and only 6 percent of whites. [but again: ethnoracial exclusion cannot be your explanation for this--this is what you must explain]

(97): important--here we have a more useful explanation: "the most powerful vector behind the irresistible economic pauperization and social marginalization of large segments of the population penned in the segregated heart of chicago is a set of mutually reinforcing spatial and industrial changes in the country's urban political economy that converged during the 1960s and 1970s to undercut the material foundations of the ghetto by stripping it of its traditional role as reservoir of unskilled labour."

(98): but does he want to say that it is this, plus ethnoracial discrimination? which is true, of course, but not perhaps theoretically interesting... how do we want to frame this?

(98): blacks traditionally relied on manufacturing and blue-collar employment--its end, then, has led to 'labor market exclusion'

(101): what does this mean, though? that organizational changes in the economy "have combined with the black rejection of the caste regime through the Civil rights movement to break up the social structure of the traditional ghetto and set off a process of hyperghettoization."

(102): violent crime, drug consumption, etc., have all reached qualitatively different proportions in the hyperghetto

(104): "thus, when we counterpose extreme-poverty areas with moderate-poverty areas, we are in effect comparing the historic heart of the ghetto, born in the industrial era, with it postindustrial periphery."

(105): "the first major difference between the historic core of the ghetto and its rim areas pertains to their class structure. a sizable majority of the residents of the peripheral zones of the black belt are integrated into the wage-labour economy..."

(108): contours of the 'welfare trajectory'

(110): and particularly for the jobless, who have been locked into welfare dependence by lack of opportunities

(111): "thus, if the likelihood of tapping public aid increases sharply as one crosses the line between the employed and the jobless, it remains the case that, at each level of the class structure, welfare receipt is notably more frequent at the core of the ghetto than at its rim, especially among the unemployed and among women."

(112): wow--wealth table

(114): lower social capital--"all in all, then, the concentration of poverty at the core of the crumbling ghetto has the effect of systematically devaluing the social capital of those who live in its midst."

(116): most male companions have jobs, even though the vast majority of males don't--"being unemployed radically devalues men..."

(117): he's noting general economic growth in the rest of chicago, but a fracturing of that economic fate from the fate of the ghetto--we can ask about sassen's global city observation, here

chapter four, west-side story (119-132)

(119): important--"the united states can rightfully lay claim to being the first society of advanced insecurity in history. not just because it engenders... levels of lethal criminality incomparably greater than those prevailing in other postindustrial societies..., but in the sense that it has elevated insecurity as an organizing principle of collective life and a key mode of regulation of individual conduct..." (privilege as enjoying a social position outside this web of insecurity)

(122): 1/3 of the built environment in north lawndale are unsound/unfit for human habitation

(124): the US 'semi-welfare state'

(124): key--"this is to say that welfare recipients--who are forbidden to work for pay on pain of seeing this miserly aid withdrawn [in 1990, standard aid packaged in chicago fell 16% below survival threshold]--are sentenced to a long term of state poverty. by the same token, they are fated, whether they want it or not, to turn to the informal economy, legal and illegal, which has experienced spectacular development of late."

(126-127): wow; violence--"residents of the five african-american police districts in chicago... are eleven times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the... residents of the two white districts covering the north and south-west sectors of the city..."

(128): come on, what's the point of a hobbes citation?

(129-130): police corruption

chapter five, from conflation to comparison--how banleues and ghetto converge and contrast (135-162)

(135-136): critical--"...two profoundly different processes and scales on the two sides of the atlantic... [1] the cumulative incidence of segregation, poverty, isolation and violence assumes a wholly different intensity in the United States. [2] on the other hand, and this is the more crucial point, banlieues and ghettos are the legacies of different urban trajectories and arise from disparate criteria of classification and forms of social sorting: sorting operates first and foremost on the basis of class position... in the first case, and of ethnoracial membership in a historically pariah group... in the second. [3] finally, the french red belt and the american black belt have been the object of diametrically opposed political constructions and bureaucratic managements in the 1980s and 1990s. this is to say that the chasm that separates these two sociospatial constellations is not only of a quantitative order but pertains more fundamentally to the sociohistorical and institutional registers." [a place, clearly, to problematize the race/class confounding]

(137): "i wish above all to urge the utmost caution in the transatlantic transfer of concepts and theories pertaining to the articulation of racial domination, class inequality, and the structuration of space..."

(141): as in the US, linked in france, to "the relentless rise of unemployment and assorted forms of underemployment linked to the 'flexibilization' of the labor market..." [but he is pushing back against the equation in general, so this isn't to be taken out of context]

(145): "we will now demonstrate that such assimilation is in several respects fradulent, even dangerous. it proceeds simultaneously from ignorance about the black american ghetto and its historical trajectory (especially in the period following the civil rights revolution and the great riots of 1965-1968) and from an incomplete and incorrect diagnosis of the french working-class banlieues."

(145): noting, first, though that there are surface-level similarities (social morphology (145-147), and lived experience (147-150)

(146): remember--these areas have experienced de-population, not other way round

(147): between '68 and '84, la corurneuve lost 10,000 of 18,000 manual labor jobs. "ghetto and banlieue are thus both territories ravaged by deindustrialization."

(150): but this is all a "surface convergence..." there are five key differences:

1. disparate organizational ecologies (150-152): enormous difference in size, which expresses also the fact that the american ghetto really is a self-contained city, whereas the french banlieue is more of a 'residential island'
2. racial cloistering and uniformity, vs. ethnic dispersion (152-155): "whereas the popular banlieues of france are fundamentally pluri-ethnic zones where a multiplicity of nationalities rub elbows..., the US ghetto is totally homogeneous in ethnoracial terms..."
3. divergent rates and degrees of poverty (155-156)
   
4. criminality and dangerousness (156-158)
5. urban policy and the degredation of daily surroundings (158-160): "parlous state of housing stock and public infrastructure."
   

(150): interesting, gesturing towards reality/possiblity of a latino hyperghetto (this requires that we re-assess, no, the notion that ethnoracial domination is a cause?)

(152): wow--97 percent of black women marry black men, which is very different from the situation in france

(153): critical--"the ghetto is above all else a mechanism of racial confinement, an apparatus aimed at enclosing a stigmatized category in a reserved physical and social space that will prevent it from mixing with others and thus risk 'tainting' them..." [another excellent place to problematize race/class--this is the purpose of the ghetto!?]

(155): con't--"the confinement of blacks inside the ghetto is the expression of a racial dualism that cuts across the gamut of institutions of US society and is barely inflected as they climb up the class ladder: increasing education and income did not significantly lower the isolation of african americans from whites after the 1960s..."

(155): con't--"racial basis of their exclusion... explains why ghetto residents experience poverty rates and degrees of destitution with no equivalent in france..." [do we accept this? i think not--he is, again, confusing explanandum and explanans. or, rather, he's caught in a tautology--what's your evidence for racial exclusion. segregation. what's your explanation for segregation? racial exclusion. and on, and on, and on]

(159-160): important--in france, a different, more meaningful attempt at state support for these communities--"bear[s] witness to a collective will and sense of political responsibility that is diametrically opposed to the attitude of 'benign neglect' adopted by the american authorities..."

(161): important--admits "the historical specificity of the ethnoracial division of US society..." [about this there's no disagreement, just about the work we can make this do--i.e., does it take on a life of it's own, essentially]

chapter six, stigma and division, from the core of chicago to the margins of paris (163-197)

(163): the 'new poverty' and its contours--"all of these phenomena can be observed, to varying degrees, in nearly all advanced societies."

(166): purpose here is to evaluate the thesis of "transatlantic convergence" through a cross-national comparison

(168): again--"to simplify: relegation operates on the basis of ethnoracial membership reinforced by both social class and state in the fin-de-siecle black belt, whereas it proceeds principally on the basis of class and is partly mitigated by public policy in the red belt."

(169): important--'public taint', following bourdeiu, which "allows us to identify the main factors accounting for the muted social potency of ethnoracial categorization in the red belt..." [this is interesting--must follow this to make the c-arg complete]

(171): i am not following this claim, though--what does it mean for joblessness to produce 'taint'? discrimination on the basis of address, association. [but let's be careful to understand this as consequence, as 'ideology'...]

(179): important--talking about a triple disjuncture between objective conditions and this ideology of intolerance--reasons it 'weighs more heavily in france, than in US'

1. in france, institutionalized social inferiority stands in violation of french notions of unitary citizensihp; much more acceptable to americans
2. US has much more individualistic conception of causation (no one being penalized, really)
3. "a third and perhaps the most crucial difference between Red Belt and Black Belt relates to the nature of the stigma they carry: this stigma is essentially residential in the former but jointly and inseparably spatial-cum-racial in the latter." [ok, this is perfect place to tease out the shortcomings of this distinction--so clearly this is a consequence of the way in which these communities have formed, not a cause of their distinctive formation]
   

(182): critical place to question--ghetto as a "specifically racial formation"--"designed to encase a bounded category that has spawned a society-wide web of material and symbolic associations between colour, place, and a host of negatively valued social properties."

(184): and here, too--"negative representations and sociofugal practices then become articulated to set off a deadly self-fulfilling prophecy through which public taint and collective dishonour end up producing that which they claim merely to record: namely, social atomism, community 'disorganization' and cultural anomie."

(185): preliminary response--i suppose my position would simply be that the more theoretically coherent claim is to suggest that their homogeneity explains the severity of ethnoracial domination, rather than ethnoracial domination explains their homogeneity--and then the task is to understand homogeneity (and through that, one can understand ethnoracial domination, too)

(186): seeing 'race' everywhere in the ghetto--in the 'objectivity' of space?

(188): he is saying in france you have a perception that is youths arrayed against society, rather than it being racialized (but insofar as he is being descriptive, ok; insofar as he is appealing to folk concepts, he is forcing himself to ignore possible paths toward 'racialization'?...)

(190): noting racism in a british working-class town -- well what of american exceptionality, then?

(193): key, explaining lack of this ethnoracial notion in france--not just (1) the comparatively heterogeneous character of the Red Belt, but (2) also the notion that ethnic difference is not a legitimate idiom in the french state [are we sure that this can do the work we want it to? how can you perform a notwithstanding le pen?], and (3) the notion that there is much more assimilation going on in these areas than in the US.

(196): argument that in france, the social schism between these communities and the working-class is narrowing, whereas in the US it is getting greater and greater...

(198): "racial separation... radicalizes the objective and subjective reality of urban exclusion..."

"Over the last two or three decades, there have been a number of cities where the population keeps growing and growing, uncontrolled. With that, the infrastructure is not keeping up with the population, and that has resulted in cities becoming very densely populated," she told Al Jazeera... That allows the aedes mosquito, which likes to live among humans, to thrive and breed and multiply in this kind of environment."

notes on capital
chapter 25: the general law of capitalist accumulation

(763-764): a passage critically important to the question of marx's position on absolute immiseration. ceteris paribus, marx is suggesting that periods of buyoant capitalist growth will lead to increased wages, precisely because growth in capitalist demand for labor-power will outstrip the natural growth of its supply. KEY, again, to note that this explains the narrative of the apologists, without becoming it. for first, this eventuality is highly contingent, and can be combated by variegated tactics on the part of capital (in particular, agitating for artificial growth in labor supply through immigration). secondly, it is periodic--in other words, prone to the contradictions of capitalism, more generally. (note, it may make less sense to separate these two points theoretically, than it does in terms of the presentation. that question, perhaps, depends on how one wants to understand the relation of systemic ebbs and flows to class agency). perhaps most importantly, marx is also calling attention to the contradictions immanent in expansive capitalism--namely, that it cements more widely labor's "enslavement to capital... accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat" as oppressed soul.

(766): in passing, it needs to be made explicit that this discussion for the need of an ever-larger permanent "underclass" is a direct response to malthus' "principle of population." (see FN 6)

(769): on the golden chain in the golden age: "a rise in the price of labor, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-laborer has already forged for himself [sic] is loosened somewhat."

(769): in essence, marx is demanding that we orient our analysis around "the absolute law" of capitalist production: the production of surplus-value. in this sense, the imperfections of the apologists' narrative can themselves be systematized and made coherent. the abiding question, of course, is how we retain this analysis in the face of the alleged success of Capital in the golden age. in other words, that question, again, of whether capitalism has proved more resilient than marx imagined. though i think 1968 often puts paid to those questions, no?

(770): constructing the rate of accumulation as always the independent variable--in this sense, while exploding malthus' principle, marx is, more generally, endeavoring to demonstrate the contingency of all dynamics putatively "natural."

(771): lambasting the currency school, but revealing, in the process, the contingency of his own analysis. for it is certain that monetary phenomenon have become more central to the dynamics of 21st century capitalism--how do we integrate that fact into his argument here? and still, i am tempted to suggest that his scorn here can show the way toward more holistic analyses of the monetary world.

(771-772): the critical passage: roughly, marx is suggesting that the process of capital accumulation, and the process of the growth of the working-class, cannot be theorized independently. rather, the latter follows the ebbs and flows of the former. in the sense that, if capital accumulation proceeds swimmingly, capital requires (by demanding) more laborers at factories (more hands needed to utilize additional capacity, to valorize the additional capital). if, however, profits are low and accumulation is stop-start or stagnant, capitalism corrects itself--a comparatively smaller amount of "paid" labor is needed as a consequence of the slow-down, and wages fall (because labor supply now exceeds demand). [reminder: this is all a "special case", in that marx has not introduced the notion of the decline in the composition of capital]

(772): "just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand."

(773): this commitment to complicate the relationship between the extent of the means of production and the increasing productivity of labor--this assertion that the decreasing organic composition of capital is both the cause of as well as the consequence of the increasing productivity of labor--affirms harvey's attempts to foreground marx' refusal to theorize these dynamics in strictly causal terms. the dynamism of a dialectical framework, if invigorated by history and science, refutes the tired positivism of the liberals.

(776): the endlessness, the limitlessness: "every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."

(776-777): here, an exposition of the contingent relationship between the proccesses of accumulation and concentration. concentration, marx is arguing, is not a necessary result of the process of accumulation; rather, it can be interrupted and repelled by the intervention of alternative dynamics. though he admits the tendency to concentration (in the sense that these increases in individual capitals are the very bases of the corresponding capitalist enterprises), they meet with limits. here he names two: (1) "the degree of increase of [presumambly others'] social wealth," which i interpret to refer to the competition of other capitalists as well as, perhaps, the increasing demands made by a progressively better-fed, clamoring under-class. and (2) "the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production"--in other words, the impact of laws of inheritance and intra-familial competition on individual capitals. none of this, it must be said, contradicts the general readiness to associate accumulation with concentration (see the succeeding paragraph), but, again, it opens up the general theoretical framework to challenges by specific histories (and, in a sense, immunizes it from the entrepreneurial sorts who, while seizing on these various opportunities (or 'moments), inveigh against the "awful universalisms" of marx' analysis). NB: it would be important, i think, to assess all this with more recent theories of monopoly capitalism in mind.

(777): in fact, here marx seems to suggest an alternative term, centralization, in order to refer to the "transformation of many small into few large capitals." while i have always understood this as concentration, this passage defines concentration, instead, as something akin to the consolidation of capitalist relations--i.e., the concentration of the means of production, which begin as scattered in a medley of capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production (the intermediate forms, let's say), in the hands of individual capitalists. centralization refers to "the next stage", in a very definite sense, where "capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place." needless to say, this triplet of accumulation, concentration, and centralization is critical (but also confusing, given the tendency to use the second to signify the third). (see 779, where engels clarifies the definitions: centralization as concentration in fewer hands, concentration as "another name for reproduction on an extended scale")

(777): barriers to entry, economies of scale--it's all here.

(778-779): further discussion of the triplet. important to complicate my primitive observations above.

(780): centralization as pooling of capitals, not simply cannibalization: "the world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway"

(781-782): the dynamics underlying the creation of a "relatively redundant working population"--have to better understand what is necessary and what is contingent in this process. but it is all here, of course.

(782-783): marx here highlights how the pejorative consequences of capitalism's dynamism--the "violent fluctuations"--conspire to produce, "temporarily", a surplus population. importantly, though each of these moments is individually fleeting, their systemic origins means that the assemblage of redundancies they represent is emphatically permanent. it is in the failure to substantively theorize the latter fact, i think, that lies the rub.

(783): the tragedy of simple reproduction: "the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing"

(784): repudiating, again, malthusian attempts to pinpoint a 'natural' law of population increase. this is, of course, monumentally obvious--one cannot understand the relationship of man to nature (or, rather, humans to their reproduction) without history. but critical to re-assert against the population planners.

(784): the latent question, i suppose, remains: how does one understand the fact of this necessity of an industrial reserve army while also appreciating the fervent honesty of these ideologues fixated on population control? as always, i suspect this is not really a question for the economists, but rather a topic to be tackled by the theorists of conscoiusness. why do well-meaning people hold--really hold--patently mistaken beliefs?

(785-786): here marx mentions the relationship between the formation of this reserve army and the industrial cycle, but not in much detail. there is some confusion, i think, over what he identifies as the independent variable--though perhaps we're moving past causal-talk, in general? (there is much to close-read here, i think--especially in conjunction with volume III)

(786): clearly, these pages lay the groundwork for theorizing emigration in capitalism: while a source of bolstering this reserve army, of course, it interacts in complicated ways with the sanctitiy of identities which sustain capitalist hegemony by feeding forms of false-consciousness. indeed, in the latter dynamic, contradictory forces are at play: on the one hand, the immigration of non-nationals threatens the stability of that national identity (through diffusion, assimilation, cross-national solidarity)--this may be a boon for workers, in a long-term sense, but in the short-term it surely appears as any number of individual injustices ("they're stealing our jobs!"). in this way, it helps divide and rule. on the other hand, the restriction of immigration, marx is pointing out, threatens the very fabric of capitalist production--the existence of a reserve army is foundational to the healthy functioning of the system. this bewildering skein of competing considerations (along with whatever i have ommitted), of course, implies a masterful agency, the likes of which it would impossible to track, i suspect (this, in a sense, is the abiding impression of this section--there is an overriding logic to the system's operation which is at once rational and efficient yet also decidedly destructive and violent (NB: even the former is not at all the neoclassical narrative)).

(788): under capitalism's watch, the 'natural' limits to population growth are malleable, moulded to its aims.

(789-790): overwork and enforced idleness as twin symptoms of the same systemic patterns.

(791-792): an explicit critique of bourgeois analysis, arguing that the ideologues extrapolate from a local rise in wages to claim the infallibility of capitalist production, whereas the pattern really needs to be theorized and understood in the context of its place in the overall assemblage (i.e., its definitively local origins and ramifications--which sphere of production, etc.). in other words, "local oscillations" are mistaken for universal, timeless trends.

(793-794): there are here some interesting (though fragmentary) observations on the process of working-class 'awakening'--not chronologically, exactly, but more systemically. marx speaks also of the role that the iron, objective laws of capital play in stifling this tendency to subjective organization. and where these alliances can't be stifled objectively (and this industrial reserve army formed naturally), he alludes, Capital calls summons the Iron Fist ("forcible means"). (see also 808)

(796): Marx deploys these concepts in order to theorize the migration of masses from rural to urban areas, as "capitalist agriculture takes possession of agriculture." Needless to say, this is immensely relevant to the present plight of the Third World--in fact, the whole dialectics of technology (as presented in this and earlier chapters) presage the approach most suited to tackling the corporatization of rural areas today. We simply must be directly concerned with labor absorption.

(797): "along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth"--it is important to note here that Marx's theory of modern poverty (pauperism under capitalism) is inextricably linked to this fact of the necessity of a relative surplus population. Can our classless neoclassicals even compete?!

(798): a summary of "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation"

(798): underlying all this is the uneasy question of what an "actually-existing" socialist society might do with the question of population.

(799): an explicit normative appraisal of the situation of the worker in capitalist society: "it follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." the objections to this claim seem obvious. yet, in marx's defense, one has to (a) situate this in the context of the importance of dialectics to his general argument, and (b) clarify that he is here employing a much more holistic normative measures than GDP/capita allows. Yet perhaps it is important to complicate his observation, not simply empirically but also theoretically?

(799, FN 23): this prefigures the implications of development-of-underdevelopment analyses, insofar as Marx is here emphasizing the 'modernity' of misery and poverty--it is not that these are symptoms of backwardness waiting to be swept away, but rather that they are emphatically 'modern' phenomenon which are indelible features of a modern capitalist economy.

(800): some words from an apologist, who celebrates the parasitism of his ilk: "'it seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident... that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions" (Rev. J. Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-Wisher of Mankind).

(812): prefiguring, in fragmentary form, the relationship between capital accumulation and space--between development and slum-dwelling. the "developing" city has no place for its poor. (in the pages that follow, he explores this in depth--needless to say, on the "planet of slums," the underlying theoretical framework and consequent empirical investigation are both immensely relevant.)

(815): this continues, as Marx substantiates again the claim that the liberal doctrine of equal rights masks the deep asymmetries at the heart of capitalist society: while the rich displaced by railways and industry receive comfort and compensation, the poor working-classes are indicted for crowding in alternate locations as a result!

(822): lest anyone need be reminded, Marx is under no illusions that the industrial working-class is uniform; here he speaks explicitly of an "aristocracy" of the working-class. though this isn't exactly the michael albert objection, this observation suffices, i think, to show that albert battles a straw-man.

(827): whole working families live worse than sailors, soldiers, and even prisoners (this is Belgium, where the State has not yet interfered with the freedom of Capital).

(833): important section for exploring Marx and the agrarian question--other than the fact that he explicitly complicates the narrative of linear progress (not just by highlighting its non-linearity but also by demonstrating its space-less-ness), he here very directly excoriates the effects of 'labor-saving' technologies on the agricultural populations of 18th and 19th century England. (see particularly 848-849, where all this is tied directly to the concept of the relative surplus population--"there are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements")

(840): reminder that the study of migration is not as simple as the study of the exodus from country to city, but also must theorize the changes occuring within rural areas (be it intra-rural migration or reconfiguration of rural areas)--again, this only re-emphasizes, against the lie of the modernists, the fact that everything is "modern" (backwardness, rurality, etc.).

(861-862): all this is applied specifically to Ireland and the mass emigrations of the mid-19th century--Marx is tracking the growth of the relative surplus population, and the consequences of this process for the average Irish laborer (much of this is the story of the transition, in Ireland, from arable to pasture land--to a less labor-intensive method of production. as Marx puts it, "the revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration").

(866): the comparative argument here (between the distinct roles of the surplus agricultural populations in industrial England and agricultural Ireland) begets a further comparison, for the contemporary third world. in Ireland, Marx argues, though the relative surplus population accumulates in the towns, it is constantly needed in the fields (at harvest time or boom time). crudely put, the story of the contemporary third world is not too distinct, with one exception--the agricultural revolution having proceeded farther (the corporatization of farming, etc.) in this day and age, we see instead a burgeoning informal sector (and mass under and un-employment). the similarities are striking, of course: as in 19th century ireland, the relative surplus population in towns across the third world plays a dual role, depresing urban wages while also filling shortages at harvest time (having said that, one needs to think about where, specifically, this labor comes from at harvest time--this can further complicate the schema, requiring a distinct appraisal of emigration to larger and smaller cities). in sum, i suppose, one again needs--as Marx has demonstrated throughout this chapter--a concrete assessment of hard data pertaining to a particular place and time.

displacement for the olympic games:
Everything we have been told about the Olympic legacy turns out to be bunkum. The Games are supposed to encourage us to play sport; they are meant to produce resounding economic benefits and to help the poor and needy. It’s all untrue. As the evictions in London begin, a new report shows that the only certain Olympic legacy is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
(...) They found that "there is no guaranteed beneficial legacy from hosting an Olympic Games … and there is little evidence that past Games have delivered benefits to those people and places most in need."(3) Tessa Jowell must be aware of this as well – she wrote the forward to the report. A paper published by the London Assembly last month found that "longterm unemployed and workless communities were largely unaffected [by better job prospects] by the staging of the Games in each of the four previous host cities"(4).
(...) But far more damning than any of this is the study released last week by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. In every city it examined, the Olympic Games – accidentally or deliberately – have become a catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment. Since 1988, over 2 million people have been driven from their homes to make way for the Olympics(5). The games have become a licence for land grabs.
(...) The 1988 Olympics in Seoul are widely considered a great success. But they were used by the military dictatorship (which ceded power in 1987) as an opportunity to turn Seoul from a vernacular city owned by many people into a corporate city owned by the elite. 720,000 people were thrown out of their homes. People who tried to resist were beaten up by thugs and imprisoned. Tenants were evicted without notice and left to freeze: some survived by digging caves into a motorway embankment. Street vendors were banned; homeless people, alcoholics, beggars and the mentally ill were rounded up and housed in a prison camp. The world saw nothing of this: just a glossy new city full of glossy new people.
(...) Even before the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. But the Games gave the clique of white developers who ran them the excuse to engineer a new ethnic cleansing programme. Without any democratic process, they demolished large housing projects (whose inhabitants were mostly African-American) and replaced them with shiny middle-class homes. Around 30,000 families were evicted. They issued "Quality of Life Ordinances", which criminalised people who begged or slept rough. The police were given pre-printed arrest citations bearing the words "African-American, Male, Homeless": they just had to fill in the name, the charge and the date. In the year before the Games, they arrested 9,000 homeless people(7). Many of them were locked up without trial until the Games were over; others were harassed until they left the city. By the time the athletes arrived, downtown Atlanta had been cleared for the white middle classes.
(...) The old pattern resumed in Athens, where the Olympics were used as an excuse to evict 2700 Roma, even from places where no new developments were planned.
(...) In Beijing, 1.25m people have already been displaced to make way for the Games, and another quarter of a million are due to be evicted.
(...) The International Olympic Committee raises no objection to any of this. It lays down rigid criteria for cities hosting the Games, but none of them include housing rights(10). How could they? City authorities want to run the Games for two reasons: to enhance their prestige and to permit them to carry out schemes that would never otherwise be approved. Democratic processes can be truncated, compulsory purchase orders slapped down, homes and amenities cleared. The Olympic bulldozer clears all objections out of the way. There can be no debate, no exceptions, no modifications.
(...) None of this is an argument against the Olympic Games. It is an argument against moving them every four years. Let them stay in a city where the damage has already been done. And let it be anywhere but here.

making a "world-class" city for the world cup:
It is clear that in their desperate drive to produce "world class" cities, both the city and the province have decided that the easiest way to achieve this is by simply expelling the poor. However, organisations of the poor are arguing that a world-class city is one that cares for the poor and makes policy decisions in consultation with them.

on the much-maligned "why?" in Casablanca:
Security forces in Morocco have continued their search for potential suicide bombers in Casablanca, a day after two brothers blew themselves up near the US consulate.
(...)Mohammed Vall, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Morocco, who visited the area where al-Raidi lived in a single room with her seven children said: "The slum we visited contained only a few thousand people, but there are many such slums in Casablanca. Several hundreds of thousands of Moroccans live in areas like this and these are a breeding ground, analysts say, for fundamentalists."
(...) In Casablanca's slums, many people are unemployed and families of up to twelve people are left to live in a single room.
(...) "We went looking for the reasons behind what they did and found the details of their arrests, their poor treatment at the hands of the police and the suffering and poverty of living in such a place."
(...) "If there is any relationship with al-Qaeda it is one of influence from distance. There is no proof of any coordination in terms of planning. Even the explosives used are of limited strength, unlike those used this week in Algeria."