This is a community for discussing colonialism, both historic and current, and its effects.
RULES:
Going to have to give this one a read. Sounds fascinating.
This is very interesting!
I myself have read a lot of Marxist Geography works, but never really attempted to synthesize or “interrogate” them with decolonial theories myself.
Not really the most though-provoking or interesting, but this quote stood out to me:
As further proof that Indigenous societies experience place and not space, Smith quotes Ernst Cassirer’s example of “natives” who can easily find their way through a landscape, but are unable to draw a map of it. With this wholly inadequate summation of Indigenous relationships to space, Smith states that the Western conception of space coincides with a “milestone in human history—the origins of philosophy, of conceptual thought which is no longer the direct efflux of practical human activity.”
I am not sure how a self-identified Marxist could even justify Eurocentric/bourgeois property relations, especially with regards to land, as anything close to a net good, by providing a stageist and ahistorical view of Indigenous Land.
However, the author did respond with a smart quip that did put a smirk on my face:
The ethical underdevelopment of the European philosophical tradition is written over with a modernist (in its limited European sense) celebration of philosophical advancement.
What is it with Colonialism that makes many Eurocentric Marxists simply ignore it?
The Thesis:
In my view, gentrification is the expression of an empowered, and highly normativized, bourgeois/settler subject. While the bourgeois/settler subject projects itself as autonomous, meritorious, and morally superior, at the same time, the fictitious nature of land markets, in which the bourgeois subject finds its realization, brings about a docility and organic conservatism. As property debt lays a claim on the future labour of owners through mortgages, investment risks, and consumer debt, a docile population is created. Bourgeois gentrifiers become prone to reactionary attitudes towards the economically different, the urban poor, and Indigenous people, who are viewed as not labouring and, on top of that, lowering the property values of hardworking bourgeois subjects through their cultural and informal economic expression. Disadvantage, and ultimately exclusion, is produced through bourgeois place-making strategies, economic practices, cultural values, and ideology. Liberal gentrifiers bring their sense of moral superiority into cross-class and cross-cultural social relations, manifesting as microaggressions (e.g., charity, condescension, and pity), symbolic violence (a depoliticized discourse that blames marginalized peoples for the conditions they experience) and as hate speech against poor and Indigenous people. Such attitudes espoused by gentrifiers are fuelled by intense and irrational fears of those who are cast out.
In line with their colonial worldview, bourgeois gentrifiers tend to have an individualized sense of spatial and moral entitlement that extends beyond the property they own privately to public streets, parks, urban spaces, and other rental properties. This entitlement is expressed through the desire to protect the morally superior sensibilities, property claims, and values of the deserving, wealthy incoming class through securitization, including neighbourhood watch-style sociality, the denigration of and infringement on low-income public and private spaces, and demands for surveillance and heavy policing that contribute to the vulnerability and further marginalization of poor, racialized, Indigenous, and disabled inhabitants of the city.
Police violence, coupled with neglect for the safety of poor people, inadequate diet, pesticide toxification, institutional violence, infestation, stigmatization, trauma, stress, poor medical care, addiction, vulnerability to violence, despair, depression, and alienation, have all taken their toll on poor people. From the perspective of the bourgeois settler subject, they have been targeted as un-aesthetic, non productive bodies to be removed from sight—in the case of Toronto, to be segregated or dispersed into the inner suburbs and other dangerous urban spaces that are more dangerous due to being out-of site and far away from supports and resources.
As a socio-spatial process in a landscape of uneven development, gentrification is constituted by a set of normativizing relational forces that relegate and reorder our bodies in space according to their ability to be integrated into capitalist economics. Necro-political spaces within the settler city exist within a continuity of the genocidal colonial practices of the imperial, and then Canadian state. Gentrification can be seen to have a homological relationship to colonialism in that while they may be viewed as different moments in the reproduction of capitalist relationalities, their logic has the same origin: the hegemony of the European bourgeois value system and its spatial logic of dispossession, displacement, segregation, privatization and seizure of wealth, and mobilization of the bourgeois settler subject against its necessary Other.
The explanation of the bourgeois/settler subject (of the settler city context):
Tuck and Yang clearly state that their purpose is not to solve the problems of non-Native productions of space, writing that “[d]ecolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless.” Recently, calls for a return of Crown Lands to Indigenous control have gotten louder. For Tuck and Yang, the repatriation of land also means the abolition of property and the rebalancing of relationalities, according to Indigenous paradigms and processes, not those of settler theorists such as Hern and Blomley, or myself for that matter. Tuck and McKenzie state: “decolonization is always historically specific, context specific, and place specific.”
[...]
The idea of giving up control of land to Indigenous nations strikes a blow to the heart of bourgeois/settler identity (as is evidenced by the total evasion of the issue by Smith and other Marxist geographer’s of gentrification). While discussions of the “who’s” and “why’s” permeate gentrification theory, there is seldom an articulation of the structural subject position of gentrification. I refer to this position as the bourgeois/settler subject using a slash to indicate their inherent connectivity. I use the term “bourgeois” to represent the foundational, historically ascendant system of capitalism: capitalism as a system of bourgeois power to which we all must conform. This power encompasses the bourgeois-labour relation and also reflects more clearly a colonial subject that encloses and possesses land and thus is implicated in coloniality. Property possession is in fact the condition of possibility out of which bourgeois/settler subject arises. I think about the bourgeois/settler subject as a naturalized and hegemonic mode of being, where the values of colonial capitalist society are adopted and performed despite an individual or group’s actual position within social hierarchies. The bourgeois/settler subject produces space in the contemporary urban context through gentrification.
Settler workers are collaborators in the production of bourgeois/settler space based on the system of value and property relations and partake in this process to advance their own economic interests, from as little as having a paycheck to as much as raising the value of their home (exchange or use) or having equity in the returns on that production of space (in the form of Colonialism or Gentrification). The bourgeois/settler targets spaces they consider rundown and empty (despite being occupied by their Other) and seeks to model them into their ideal image of a "good neighborhood", "good town", "good city", which is really just the bourgeois spaces of Europe.