8 - Organized negligence

Summary

Previously we noted that Friedrich Engels used the term “social murder” to describe premature deaths amongst urban workers caused by industrialization. Engels might be forgiven for rhetorical excess. However, the structural violence his term implies has a long tradition of analysis in Marxist political economy.

In 1982, geographer David Harvey published The Limits to Capital. In seeking to understand the process of urbanization within a capitalist context, Harvey wished to update some of the basic explanations of capitalism provided by Karl Marx. For our purposes, the book is important due to its attempt to think through how mobile circuits of capital shape and affect built environments and neighbourhoods. Harvey (1982: 397) described part of this process as an “organized abandonment” of locales by capital.

Harvey took an example of organized abandonment from his then place of residence, Baltimore. “Redlining” refers to a historical practice of using covenants to exclude Black people from owning property in planned neighbourhoods. Redlining can also take more subtle racist forms, such as denying – or massively increasing the cost of – financial services for people living in a particular postcode that just so happens to be predominantly populated by Black people. Harvey’s point was that this abandonment of the neighbourhood by finance was anything but haphazard. Rather it was organized via institutions that had mastery over the transmission line from local populations through the state to capital. Organized abandonment is almost always poverty-inducing and, in short, maintains destitution and therefore squalor.

Another geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, mainly known nowadays for her work on prison abolition, updated Harvey’s thoughts in the 2000s to refer to neoliberal state reorganization specifically. Glossing many of the processes that we described in the previous two chapters, Gilmore (2008) connects organized abandonment to crisis-led restructurings of the economy. More recently, Brenna Bhandar (2018), a critical legal theorist, has used the term “organized state abandonment” to describe the conditions that led to the Grenfell Tower fire. Bhandar speaks incisively of the “abandonment of the state’s responsibilities” to provide safety and security for its citizenry, noting how such abandonment reignites hostility towards the poor and working class, as well as more recently arrived migrants.