Covid caused an unplanned experiment in NYC. My ACM is a discussion of: "What Lessons Can We Draw From the Time the Wealthy Fled New York?" a Truthout interview with the author of Feral City, Jeremiah Moss, published September 27, 2022.
The core of the book was written, Moss says, during Lockdown with editing work done later, trying to preserve the authentically of the emotions. My last ACM offering was a lot about emotion, so this is a theme for me. It’s the primary way I talk about Capitalism: how it makes me feel. I believe that talking about capitalism from an “inside Bizarro World” point of view helps to push against the capitalist agenda. They want to take and take from us so they have more.
This is Moss, talking about his writing process:
I was writing everything down right after it happened. So I’d come home from a bike ride or an action, after being in the intensity of it all, and I’d stay up late to get it down in raw form, when it was still fresh in memory. That writing came out fast, like the adrenaline rush you describe ... I wrote Feral City with a good deal of anxiety about getting it “right,” because I was writing about this massive shared experience, that was yet not shared equally, and also writing about other people, so I wanted to be careful.
What happened in New York City was unplanned. The experimental results are useful because enough of the total number of rich people went away, at least in the author's area, that one could valid observations of "this community with rich people" and "this community without rich people.” During the initial time period that the author documented — covid lockdown pre-vaccine — I was petrified, worried about the grocery clerks & all I depended on for comfort as I hermitted and hid from the plague. I still mostly hermit. Not being from NYC (not living in a megacity), I don't know how well Moss did his reporting ... but I think I can take it as true that lots of rich people left NYC and Capitalism "let go a bit". So it’s useful for an anticapitalist discussion.
The Truthout interview is, in essence, a book report, though I don't think I will read the book. I believe the interview shortform sketched the anti-capitalist aspect sufficiently. I must confess I have a problematical relationship to New York and other megacities. The megacity I'm familiar with is Chicago, plus a bit of Seattle. What I've read about megacities is that skyscrapers and luxury apartments and density, in general — they appear to be just too much carbon & climate impact. The density is, I gather, a harm multiplier. I also understand that "the big city" also has a lot of positive social impacts and social possibilities. But getting emotionally involved by reading a highly personal account of a city I fear is TOO BIG and is so vulnerable to sea level rise would not be good for me. I'd get nightmares. So for those particular reasons I'm not planning to read the book that's the subject of this interview I'm recommending. (I would like to be pointed toward good analysis of the topic of megacities & climate change & [for coastal megacities] their future due to sea level rise.)
Be that as it may, New York City is where this unplanned experiment happened. I'm glad Moss was there to document it. Per the interview, It's a telling decription of what happened when the rich went away scared, and then what happened when those rich come back, angry to see how "their" city had been changed.
Capitalism just sort of seized up, like an engine with no gas, and this opened a magnificent gap into which many of us could feel free and connected. That also freed us to feel love for one another. Because when you’re not swept up in the scarcity mindset of competition and production, you have much more capacity to give and receive love.
[Interviewer:] There’s so much camaraderie in the collective impulses toward pageantry and protest in this book, and yet you also know that “All the beautiful parts of this time will be taken away from us.” Tell us about this loss.
I’m still reeling from that loss as it continues at this very moment. The engine of capitalism started turning again when the city “reopened” in the spring of 2021 and it’s only gotten worse.
Within the interview, Moss defines "New People":
I ended up with New People, which I’m not satisfied with either. What I mean is that these people are a new kind of personality type in the city. They’re not New because they’re newcomers; they’re New because they’re not like the sort of people who’ve historically flocked to the city and, specifically, to countercultural neighborhoods like the East Village. They often don’t feel quite human. They feel android-like, manufactured, and this is because — I believe — their personalities have been engineered by the culture of neoliberal capitalism
Of course the New People, the gentrifiers, fled from covid. They are risk-adverse. When they are there, they want to be in control. They want to push out people who are different. And those who don't leave, they use the covertl violence of social enforcement and rely on the overt violence of police to control what they want gone.
When the gentrifiers and the tourists and the New People left there was freedom for all the different and poor people to reoccupy public spaces that they had been driven from. While covid was dangerous being able to reconnect with community was joyful for Moss and for many of the people he talked with. The interview also discusses the loss felt when New York "re-opened" in spring 2021, and the New People, angry at what they found, had control reasserted and capitalism roared back in.
I'm going to end this section with another Truthout quote, this time from William Rivers Pitt, from one of last columns:
I remember vividly the early weeks and months of the pandemic — when health care professionals wore garbage bags and used Lysol-soaked masks because protective gear was unavailable, when the register kid at the grocery store looked at you from behind plexiglass with the deeply frightened eyes of one being called “hero” when he had to be there to make rent — and the way the world came together to support them as best we could with song and supplies and our own devoted practices of self-protection.
That, as it turns out, was more of a menace to the status quo than any pandemic could be. People started wondering about all manner of things that had been virtually off-limits for generations: The disaster zone of our health care industry, workers’ rights and the galling supremacy of capitalism. Even more destabilizing was the idea that all those people could get together and demand the kind of changes we as a society have needed since before the country was born.
Takeaway: telling stories
Anything that shows rapid positive change is a story to hold close and tell to others as appropriate. Here at ACM we know capitalism isn't natural, and this unplanned experiment is one more proof: when the control freaks left there was more freedom, less alienation. It's good news of a fashion that leaders have to lie more about wars and other obscenities ... it means some of the telling-truth-to-power has been heard. It all underlines that we do well to have good stories ready to say when someone starts speaking the talking points of the ruling class.
I don't know how much of New York City was changed the way Moss describes. But it was enough that some people, probably a significant number, got relief from capitalism for a while.
A rant
This is me ranting, not Truthout authors. I hate billionaires. I mean hate, class war hate. They will kill, they do kill. The climate destruction they don't care about. Their need to collect houses and flit around the world via massively polluting transportation as if the globe is all within walking distance as they collect their precious experiences. They always want fresh non-local food from wherever they fancy on demand & they think they own us, that they should own us. I hate that Jeff Bezos' business plan includes built in high turnover because (according to him) longevity makes for lazy employees. How they want servants to serve them but care not one wit for the safety or comfort of those workers living conditions or work dangers. Fie on covid, get back to work, capitalists must profit. Argh!!
And I have incomprehension anger for the merely rich who are wilfully unaware. For a personal example: someone in a facebook group of a large social organization I belong to shared a coping-with-covid article near the start of Lockdown. (We only participate online any more; we used to do travel out of town for events 6 or more times a year and I was in denial about all the petrol consumption for edutainment we were generating because my partner doesn't have my climate anxieties.) The person who shared the article had minimal participation because of age and fragile medical condition, though she used to be active. She shared it with a note about how here's how you can stay safe even if you are immunocompromised.
The routine involved having a personal car, lots of space in your home, few people living in your home, working from home (if, indeed, working at all), ability to control/restrict how much contact you have with other people out of your pod, plenty of water for washing and sanitizer for surfaces, and — if going out in your car to get supplies — using lots of chlorine wipes. So the person who wrote the article (and the person who shared the article) both had a specific definition of "you can stay safe" that was not at all universal, though they (by context) meant the "you" to be universal. IOW, it was a rich person talking to other rich people. Everyone else doesn't count, apparently. Slow burn, slow burn. I don't think I replied — as I said, I was in the middle of being a petrified hermit (I'm retired with a livable pension, everyone should have a livable pension, or have such in their future). If I replied anything it was a wish for the safety of grocery clerks, & it didn't get a return comment.
She isn't a bad person and she's in her 80s and rather self-absorbed with her health issues. By now it's months between one post and the next. I interacted more with her, usually via facebook, 15 years ago. But I wonder if she was ever aware.
An Anti-war rant (because this is me)
If not for the bloated War Dept, and bloated war spending, and preparation for war spending — also other bad priorities such as police, incarceration, oil subsidies & so on — USA could have had Medicare or All (or better) and would have done a better job with covid.