Mark Phillips: The American Question

Mike Davis' City of Quartz includes an essay which sketches the history of ruling-class formation in Los Angles from the 19th through the early 21st centuries.

In "Power Lines", Davis shows how generational, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and business/strategic divisions among local bourgeois class fractions evolved, came into conflict, and were transformed from generation to generation, nearly always under the impact of large-scale capital migration from outside the region, from Comstock millionaires to the Southern Pacific railroad to Pacific Rim Zaibatsu. Davis demonstrates that throughout 150 years of conflict, there were few moments in which a single capital block can be said to have been hegemonic. More typical were lengthy periods of fragmentation into two or more competing ruling class fractions representing contrasting business strategies, geographical power centers, and often ethnic conflicts.

This is a "concrete analysis". There's no "simple contradiction" here between capital and labor. Instead there's a swirling, multi-sided, ever-evolving articulation of conflict, compromise, and transformation. The "specificity" (Louis Althusser) of the situation must be re-examined at each moment of its evolution. I cite this as a model for "concrete analysis" generally.

Davis specifically emphasizes the uniqueness of Los Angeles among major American metropolitan areas, suggesting that ruling class formation in other cities is simpler, with hegemonic class fractions more clearly dominating subordinate layers. I suspect though that Davis' methodology is the right one. From conflicts in local class formation to the emergence of statewide class/political blocks to the eventual playing out of these highly diverse and geographically distinct class developments inside national politics, there's no center to American ruling class hegemony. Instead there's an ever-shifting articulation of accumulated local and regional conflicts and compromises from which national policy eventually emerges, nearly always in conflict with competing strategies put forward by diverging ruling class fractions.

I believe that this is a basic, defining fact of American specificity with fundamental implications for oppositional politics.

Take as one simple example the practical implications for "revolutionary" politics. The European models which American "revolutionaries" typically envision are inappropriate to American circumstances. In America, there's no Bastille to storm. Instead, there are multiple, local Bastilles throughout multiple regions with their own semi-autonomous regional class formations and political circumstances. "Uneven development" carries geopolitical implications in America which are smoothed out in European countries in part by geographical compression, in part by the hegemonic dominance of leading urban centers such as Paris or London. American political professionals -- the real ones, not the ghetto left -- understand something like this when they say that "all politics is local". They're noting the strongly uneven and dispersed geopolitical character of American society. By contrast, the majority of American "revolutionary socialists" with their highly abstracted, highly verbal politics typically downplay concrete unevenness. IMO, this is one methodological fingerprint by which ghetto left sectarianism can be quickly identified -- if ever there's doubt in anybody's mind.

I'll note very briefly my personal reservation about Davis' book. In every circumstance in which Davis discusses something which I personally happen to know about in detail, he gets it wrong. Crowley wasn't a Satanist. Scientology is neither "black magic" nor "science fiction", but rather an updating of third century Gnosticism. It's not hard to get these things right. Instead, Davis accepts the dominant mythologies. I'm not sure what this says about the rest of his research.