Corporate Power and Urban Crisis in Detroit
Corporate Power and Urban Crisis in Detroit

Author: Lynda Ann Ewen

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-03-08

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1400871972

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Lynda Ann Ewen offers the first thoroughgoing Marxist-Leninist analysis, based on primary research, of the structure and dynamics of class relations and corporate power in a major U.S. metropolitan area. She contends that Detroit's urban crisis is not a temporary aberration in a good system run amuck, but the logical result of years of social planning and the use of human and natural resources for the benefit of the few. In general, analyses of the problems in American society have endorsed capitalist ideals and assumptions. Nevertheless, these analyses and the reform measures that have accompanied them in the past decade have done little to alleviate the plight of the cities. To determine what action should now be taken, Professor Ewen focuses on the development of class conflict in the United States and its manifestations in Detroit. The author analyzes kinship and also ownership and control of the major firms in Detroit. The contradictions that led to the urban crisis, she concludes, are inherent in the fundamental nature of a class society, in which the social means of production are privately owned by an elite group who must produce profits at all costs. She argues that to protect its interests and prepare the way for socialism, the working class requires a grasp of its historical and present opposition to the ruling class. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Corporate Power and Urban Crisis in Detroit
Corporate Power and Urban Crisis in Detroit

Author: Lynda Ann Ewen

Publisher:

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780691639642

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Lynda Ann Ewen offers the first thoroughgoing Marxist-Leninist analysis, based on primary research, of the structure and dynamics of class relations and corporate power in a major U.S. metropolitan area. She contends that Detroit's urban crisis is not a temporary aberration in a good system run amuck, but the logical result of years of social planning and the use of human and natural resources for the benefit of the few. In general, analyses of the problems in American society have endorsed capitalist ideals and assumptions. Nevertheless, these analyses and the reform measures that have accompanied them in the past decade have done little to alleviate the plight of the cities. To determine what action should now be taken, Professor Ewen focuses on the development of class conflict in the United States and its manifestations in Detroit. The author analyzes kinship and also ownership and control of the major firms in Detroit. The contradictions that led to the urban crisis, she concludes, are inherent in the fundamental nature of a class society, in which the social means of production are privately owned by an elite group who must produce profits at all costs. She argues that to protect its interests and prepare the way for socialism, the working class requires a grasp of its historical and present opposition to the ruling class. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Whose Detroit?
Whose Detroit?

Author: Heather Ann Thompson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1501702017

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America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the inner city and its workplaces even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions. Using the contested urban center of Detroit as a model, Thompson assesses the role of such upheaval in shaping the future of America's cities. She argues that the glaring persistence of injustice and inequality led directly to explosions of unrest in this period. Thompson finds that unrest as dramatic as that witnessed during Detroit's infamous riot of 1967 by no means doomed the inner city, nor in any way sealed its fate. The politics of liberalism continued to serve as a catalyst for both polarization and radical new possibilities and Detroit remained a contested, and thus politically vibrant, urban center. Thompson's account of the post-World War II fate of Detroit casts new light on contemporary urban issues, including white flight, police brutality, civic and shop floor rebellion, labor decline, and the dramatic reshaping of the American political order. Throughout, the author tells the stories of real events and individuals, including James Johnson, Jr., who, after years of suffering racial discrimination in Detroit's auto industry, went on trial in 1971 for the shooting deaths of two foremen and another worker at a Chrysler plant. Whose Detroit? brings the labor movement into the context of the literature of Sixties radicalism and integrates the history of the 1960s into the broader political history of the postwar period. Urban, labor, political, and African-American history are blended into Thompson's comprehensive portrayal of Detroit's reaction to pressures felt throughout the nation. With deft attention to the historical background and preoccupations of Detroit's residents, Thompson has written a biography of an entire city at a time of crisis.

The Fifty-Year Rebellion
The Fifty-Year Rebellion

Author: Scott Kurashige

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-07-04

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0520294912

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"On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the nation fixed on Detroit as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. For mainstream observers, the "riot" brought about the ruin of a once-great city, and then in 2013, the city's municipal bankruptcy served as a bailout that paved the way for Detroit to finally be rebuilt. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half-century as a long "rebellion" the underlying tensions of which continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. Michigan's scandal-ridden emergency-management regime represents the most concerted effort to quell this rebellion by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions. The corporate architects of Detroit's restructuring have championed the creation of a "business-friendly" city where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify downtown while working-class residents are squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. From the grassroots, however, Detroit has emerged as an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. A quintessential American story of tragedy and hope, The Fifty-Year Rebellion forces us to look in the mirror and ask, Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy, or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy?"--Provided by publisher.

Power Failure
Power Failure

Author: Diana Dillaway

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Published: 2009-12-04

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1615922377

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At the turn of the 20th century, Buffalo, NY, was one of the world''s great industrial cities. In 1901, it played host to the prestigious Pan American Exhibition, which attracted millions of visitors to the city; its thriving downtown area was graced by buildings and mansions designed by some of the country''s best architects; the city was the third largest producer of steel and, with the largest inland port, was a hub of commerce at the end of the Erie Canal.Today, due to financial distress and decades of mismanagement, the city has been put under the supervision of a financial control board. Population drain and an inability to attract new business have brought the city to the brink of financial collapse. The question on everyone''s lips is, "What went wrong?"Community development expert and Buffalo native Diana Dillaway analyzes the history of planning and decision making in Buffalo that led to the current malaise. A member of the Wendt family, whose great grandfather founded one of Buffalo''s oldest manufacturing businesses, Dillaway has used her access to the city''s most powerful political, economic, and community leaders to reconstruct the factors that created the city as it exists today. She examines the most divisive debates of the past, including strategies for downtown and neighborhood development, planning for a rapid transit system, and battles over the location of a proposed university campus and a professional football stadium.A consistent theme is the protection of the status quo and turf battles among the WASP business and financial elite, ethnic Catholic communities centered on neighborhood parish life, and the Democratic machine with its entrenched patronage system. She finds that the only people interested in change were African Americans, whose efforts were consistently thwarted by a multi-term mayor who diverted community development funds for his own pet projects.At a time when Buffalo is trying to build a brighter future, Dillaway''s insights, revelations, and prescriptions for change comprise urgent reading for community leaders and citizens alike. Power Failure speaks to issues of leadership and power facing every city and local government today.

Dancing in the Street
Dancing in the Street

Author: Suzanne E. Smith

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001-05-02

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0674043839

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Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.

Business Elites and Urban Development
Business Elites and Urban Development

Author: Scott Cummings

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1988-04-07

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780887065781

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Written in a non-technical, narrative style, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with current trends in urban development. During the Reagan era, responsibility for urban planning and development was transferred from government to private business. This private sector hegemony over urban development differs markedly from the liberal policy initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s. Through a series of case studies, this book examines these shifting trends and shows that private sector efforts to revitalize America’s central cities have not been uniformly successful. The contributors, who are among America’s leading social scientists, utilize neo-Marxist urban theory to explain the conditions under which private initiative enhances or erodes downtown redevelopment.

Urban Planning and Cultural Identity
Urban Planning and Cultural Identity

Author: William Neill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-10-23

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1134512856

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Urban Planning and Cultural Identity reviews the intense spatiality of conflict over identity construction in three cities where culture and place identity are not just post-modernist playthings but touch on the raw sensibilities of who people define themselves to be. Berlin as the reborn German capital has put 'coming to terms with' the Holocaust and the memory of the GDR full square at the centre of urban planning. Detroit raises questions about the impotence and complicity of planners in the face of the most extreme metropolitan spatial apartheid in the United States and where African-American identity now seems set on a separatist course. In Belfast, in the clash of Irish nationalist and Ulster unionist traditions, place can take on intense emotional meanings in relation to which planners as 'mediators of space' can seem ill equipped. The book, drawing on extensive interview sources in the case study cities, poses a question of broad relevance. Can planners fashion a role in using environmental concerns such as Local Agenda 21 as a vehicle of building a sense of common citizenship in which cultural difference can embed itself?

The Power Structure of American Business
The Power Structure of American Business

Author: Beth A. Mintz

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1987-06-30

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780226531090

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Mintz and Schwartz offer a fascinating tour of the corporate world. Through an intensive study of interlocking corporate directorates, they show that for the first time in American history the loan making and stock purchasing and selling powers are concentrated in the same hands: the leadership of major financial firms. Their detailed descriptions of corporate case histories include the forced ouster of Howard Hughes from TWA in the late fifties as a result of lenders' pressure; the collapse of Chrysler in the late seventies owing to banks' refusal to provide further capital infusions; and the very different "rescues" of Pan American Airlines and Braniff Airlines by bank intervention in the seventies.

Detroit
Detroit

Author: Joe Darden

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2010-06-18

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1439905002

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Examining the genesis of modern Detroit as a hub of wealth and poverty.