In 1998 Sociologist Nina Eliasoph ended up at the important question Conor Dougherty wends to today in “Twilight of the NIMBY,” New York Times 2022: Why do smallholders organize myopically (“Close to Home” Eliasoph characterized it.), even when they know their personal troubles–their lack of capacitating security, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore‘s insightful conceptulization–are continuously generated by enveloping institutions and incentives organized and maintained for the primary benefit of powerful interests, for financial and military leaders?
The question languishes because elitist reflexes have long provided a too-easy, ready-made answer: Smallholders are small thinkers–unfit to govern.
Abolitionists, however, have the valid answer: Unmoderated, militarized American labor repression (see Alex Gourevitch 2015 ) leaves American smallholder communities balkanized and politically ineffectual, reeling backwards, ever Old and In the Way, reproducing inequality and smallholder decapacitation when they need to organize to make an egaliberte difference.
In short, there’s too much damn policing and there’s not enough labor rights. American institutions spend all day and all night dismantling nonelite organizing, communication, and collective action capacity, all our lives long. That’s why, inter alia, aging immigrant waves are reduced to channeling their constrained political capacities into competitively shafting newcomers, both American youth and new immigrant waves. In the American governance model, US smallholders labor away in variously pleasant and unpleasant corners of a large prison yard, frequently pausing to shiv each other; and that’s also why the world’s expropriators and exploiters plow their money into the US. In the Anglo imperial tradition, it’s a refined military-commercial system, administered by a political class, for securing global elite class stability and vast, endless, profitable smallholder dehumanization, disruption and destabilization.
…
The comms professionals leading the Dem Party to exchange patronage with the military and the ultra rich have long made the choice to leave rural Americans, with their outsized vote, to conservatives.
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/04/deconstructed-chloe-maxmin-rural-america-dirt-road-revival/
References
Eliasoph, N. 1998. Avoiding Politics. Cambridge.
Gourevitch, A. 2015. Police Work: The Centrality of Labor Repression in American Political History.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 