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Notes from
the Editors
Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the
Millennium
by John Bellamy
Foster
Sweezy v. New Hampshire: The Radicalism of
Principle
by John J. Simon
Statement to the
New Hampshire Attorney General
by Paul M. Sweezy
Happy Birthday,
Paul!
|
“Cities, after all, have a great
deal in common with cars. More and more, in fact, they often seem to be turning
into cars. There are deep mysteries here, impenetrable to the present shallow
state of human understanding. Somehow, we know not how, things
communicate.”
—Russell Baker, New York Times, March 8, 1973
In Marxist theory the treatment of technology has generally referred to
production, the means of production, the character of the labor process, and
related matters. This follows the example set by Marx himself in his justly
famous chapter on machinery and modern industry in Volume 1 of Capital
which occurs in the part devoted to the production of relative surplus value.
Neither there nor anywhere else in Capitalis there any discussion or
analysis of the impact of technology on consumption and via consumption on
processes of capital accumulation and social development.
The reason for this is not that Marx excluded consumption from a role in the
capitalist process. On the contrary, in the well-known Introduction to the
Critique of Political Economy," Marx wrote:
Definite production thus determines definite consumption,
distribution, exchange and definite relations among these different
elements. Tobe sure production, in its one-sided form, is in
its turn also determined by the other elements. For example, if the market,
i.e., the sphere of exchange, expands, production grows and becomes further
subdivided.1
It is evident from this and other passages in the Introduction that Marx
regarded production and consumption as dialectically interrelated aspects of a
single complex process. As in all such cases, change initiated in any part can
in principle—though it does not necessarily have to—ramify throughout
the whole, setting in motion either self-limiting or cumulative sequences of
change. Marx provided a classic description and analysis of a cumulative
sequence of change within the production process in a beautiful passage which
begins: "A radical change in the mode of production in one sphere of
industry involves a similar change in other spheres."2
The fact that Marx failed to analyze any such sequences involving both
production and consumption did not arise from any denial that they might exist,
or even that they actually did exist. In discussing the consequences of
machinery, he wrote:
The immediate result of machinery is to augment surplus value
and the mass of products in which surplus value is embodied. And, as the
substances consumed by the capitalists and their dependents become more
plentiful, so too do these orders of society. Their growing wealth, and the
relatively diminished number of workmen required to produce the necessaries of
life beget, simultaneously with the rise of new and luxurious wants, the means
of satisfying those wants. A larger proportion of the produce of society is
changed into surplus produce, and a larger part of the surplus produce is
supplied for consumption in a multiplicity of refined shapes. In other words,
the production of luxuries increases.3
Here was a clear example of an interaction of production and consumption
resulting from technological change, one which from some points of view was
certainly far from insignificant. The reason why Marx noted it only in passing
and made no attempt to analyze it in depth, as he did with the consequences of
machinery in the production process itself, was probably because he saw it as
affecting only the consumption patterns of the capitalists and their
dependents. As far as the working class was concerned, he believed that the
capitalistic use of machinery had had disastrous consequences, ruining
handicraftsmen and lowering the wages of factory hands by simplifying their
work and opening the way for the mass employment of women and children. By
comparison, the stimulation of luxury consumption by the capitalist class was a
matter of secondary importance which not only could but should be abstracted
from in studying the modus operandi of the capitalist system.
In the century since the publication of the first volume of Capital,
however, it is clear that technological changes affecting both production
and consumption and involving fundamental alterations in the consumption
patterns of the mass of workers, with far-reaching consequences for the
functioning of capitalism, have occurred in the advanced imperialist
metropolises of the global capitalist system.4 What is at issue here is what may be called the
political economy of the motor car which, so far as I am aware, has never been
subjected to serious analysis in the Marxian literature.
In the beginning the automobile was of course a mere curiosity, but
developed rapidly into a luxury good entering into the consumption of the upper
class. "As long as motor cars were few in number," Lewis Mumford
wrote, "he who had one was a king; he could go where he pleased and halt
where he pleased; and this machine itself appeared as a compensatory device for
enlarging an ego which had been shrunken by our very success in
mechanization."5 This was clearly the
situation which obtained before the First World War: in 1910 there were some
19,000 people for every car in the United States.6 During the next decade, however, the automobile
began to enter into popular consumption, the ratio of people to cars dropping
precipitously to approximately 11 to 1 by 1920. On the side of technology and
production, the decisive factor here was Henry Ford's introduction of the
low-priced Model T, involving (as both cause and effect) such cost-reducing
technologies as the assembly line and interchangeable parts.
Since 1920 the people/car ratio has further declined as follows:
1930—4.5; 1940—4.1; 1950—3.1; 1960—2.4; 1970—1.9. At
the present time, in other words, there are more than half as many cars as
people in the United States. The automobile has become a mass-consumption
commodity in the fullest sense of the term. And in the process it has
profoundly altered many aspects of social existence for all classes and strata
of society.
The most obvious manifestations of this process—which the late Paul
Baran and I have called the "automobilization" of society7—are traffic congestion and pollution, and
these are also the effects which have been most instrumental in focusing public
attention on the social and environmental implications of automobilization. But
congestion and pollution are essentially superficial phenomena, comparable to
the outward symptoms of a disease with deep roots in the organs of the body. If
we are ever to deal with the disease itself we must go beyond the symptoms and
study its etiology. In the present instance what we need first of all is to
understand the ways in which the automobile in the process of becoming a
mass-consumption good impinged upon and ultimately transformed the geography
and demography of the country.
Before the automobile age there was a sharp physical division between city
and country. The city was a clearly bounded built-up area beyond which there
was country (or in some directions a body of water). People who worked in the
city but lived outside of it had to rely on transportation by rail for getting
in and out. With the railroads limited to providing station-to-station service
and readily accessible only from relatively short distances on both sides of
the tracks, the areas available for suburban settlement were quite restricted.
They were for the most part inhabited by upper-income people and those who
catered to their needs, providing for a quantitatively small sector of the
bourgeoisie many of the advantages of country living in close proximity to the
urban centers.8
The coming of the automobile as such did not change this situation. In the
early years cars were expensive and unreliable so that only the well-to-do
could afford them and their upkeep. In addition, except for city and town
streets, roads were few and bad. Under these circumstances as far as the
suburbs were concerned, cars complemented the existing patterns rather than
changing them. Owned by the upper-income commuters and largely chauffeur-driven
(the chauffeur fulfilling the role of mechanic as well as driver at a time when
repair and service stations were all but nonexistent), cars expanded the area
within which commuters could conveniently live but introduced no new elements
into the picture. The 1920s saw the beginning of an extremely complex
cumulative process, culminating in what it has become usual to refer to as
today's "urban crisis." The immediately propelling forces underlying
this process were, first, the cheapening of the automobile; and second, the
extension of the road and highway network.
On the production side, the development of the automobile and the automobile
industry provides a classic illustration of the laws of capitalist
accumulation. Originally consisting of hundreds of small shops, mostly formerly
carriage-makers, using essentially handicraft methods, the industry was rapidly
mechanized and concentrated in a few large firms. In the process new
technologies were pioneered; and new forms and strategies of organization and
management were devised. The Ford Motor Company, under the sole control of the
first Henry Ford, was the perfect example of what Marx called concentration of
capital, expanding entirely through investing its own profits. General Motors,
on the other hand, also illustrates the centralization of capital in Marx's
sense, i.e., the combination of a number of separate enterprises into one, a
pattern likewise followed by Chrysler and American Motors, the other two still
surviving U.S. firms in the industry. During the fiercely competitive stage of
the industry's development, up to the early 1920s, prices declined in step with
costs. As an example, when the Model T Ford was introduced in 1908 its price
was $1,000; by 1924 it had fallen to less than $300, i.e., by more than 70
percent.9 During the same period per capita
national income in current prices more than doubled (from an average of about
$300 in 1908 to $660 in 1924).10 Obviously
the result of these changes was to open up a vast new market for automobiles
during this crucial decade and a half: the total number of passenger vehicles
registered in 1910 was about a half million and this had increased fortyfold to
20 million by 1925.11
All these cars would have had no place to go, however, had it not been for a
vast increase in the road network. As a very rough indicator of what was
happening here, the mileage of surfaced roads increased by 81 percent between
1910 and 1920, by 88 percent between 1920 and 1930, and by 97 percent between
1930 and 1940.12 At the same time of course
the quality and carrying capacity of the roads were greatly improved. In recent
years, indeed, it has been mainly through the upgrading of roads or the
construction of multilane freeways paralleling or replacing existing routes
that the capacity of the highway network has been expanded.
It should not be supposed that all this has taken place in a smooth and
continuous process. The dominant dynamic force has of course been the mass
production and sale of new cars, rising from around two million in 1920 to
eight million or more in the last few years (excluding truck, buses, and
imports). But since cars last up to ten years or more, the number on the road,
distributed in large part through the used-car market, cumulatively increased
to nearly 90 million by 1970; and it is the total number of vehicles rather
than new sales which generates pressure on the highways. This pressure has made
itself felt unevenly and has been responded to by various governmental units at
the local, state, and federal levels even more unevenly. At some times and
places traffic has built up far beyond the capacity of the available roads,
creating bottlenecks and intensifying pressures on the authorities; and at
other times and places building has outstripped the growth of traffic, only to
be overtaken in turn by the inexorable build-up of more cars and more traffic.
The foregoing account of the interaction between cars and roads is
descriptive in nature and fails to convey a sense of the enormous power of the
economic forces which have driven the process forward, especially in the last
25 years since the recovery of the automobile industry from the almost complete
shutdown forced upon it during the Second World War. The private interests
which cluster around and are directly or indirectly dependent upon the
automobile for their prosperity are quantitatively far more numerous and
wealthy than those similarly related to any other commodity or complex of
commodities in the U.S. economy. Here is a quick run-down.
(1) The automobile industry itself. The first, third, and seventh
corporations on Fortune's list of the 500 largest are automobile
producers, and the industry as a whole is easily the most profitable in the
economy.13
(2) Manufacturing industries largely dependent on the automobile. Three more
of the largest ten on the Fortune list (nos. 2, 6, and 8) are oil
companies. And by one researcher's count, altogether 22 of the 50 largest
(including the auto and oil companies already listed) "are in automobiles
and highways for the bulk of their income."14
(3) Service industries largely dependent on the automobile. Here we include
dealers, wholesalers of vehicles and parts, gasoline stations, and all sorts of
garage and repair facilities. In 1967 there were about a half million
establishments under these headings employing over two million employees. If we
assume that in most cases the proprietors also work, we would conclude that
something over 3 percent of the total labor force is employed in directly
servicing automobiles. And this does not count the numerous categories of
employment, such as motels and resorts, which are almost as dependent, albeit
indirectly.
(4) Users of highways for profit. After a rapid process of centralization,
there were 1,250 intercity trucking companies in 1968, employing nearly a half
million workers and carrying around 20 percent of the country's long-distance
freight. At the same time the Teamsters Union, which is the largest union in
the country with a membership of more than 1,700,000, is centered in the fields
of trucking and warehousing. In addition of course most big corporations have
their own fleets of trucks. And there are other types of commercial highway
users such as buses (urban and intercity) and taxicabs.
(5) Makers of highways, including an important segment of the construction
industry (about 11 percent of the total measured by value added in 1968) and a
large number (about 600,000 in 1969) of government workers (federal, state, and
local) employed in the planning, supervising, maintaining, and repairing of
highways.
(6) Last but not least is the automobile-driving public (in 1968 there were
101 million registered motor vehicles of all kinds and 105 million licensed
drivers). Though the increasingly severe problems of congestion and pollution
are now causing many of the country's motorists to have second thoughts, it is
nevertheless true that through the whole period of automobilization from 1910
right up through the 1960s, they felt more or less continuously restrained and
frustrated by an inadequate road and highway network. They therefore provided
massive and enthusiastic political support for road-building, culminating in
the launching in 1956 by the federal government of the multibillion-dollar
Interstate Highway System, backed by a device called the Highway Trust Fund
which ensured that all federal taxes collected on motor vehicles, gasoline, and
related equipment would be used to construct a vast system of
superhighways.15
This bare listing of the main components of what may be called the
automobile-industrial complex could, and in any thorough study should, be
complemented by an analysis of its structure and modus operandi.
Here it must suffice to note that these various interests are represented
by a large number of trade associations and other organizations which are amply
financed and staffed and are active on a full-time basis at all levels of
government as well as in the realm of propaganda and opinion formation. As
Jerome puts it, "The scurry work, the wheedling and coercion, the swapping
of favors and collection of political debts, is done by a large and complexly
interwoven network of associations and pressure groups."16 As would be expected, in other words, the
enormous economic wealth and power of the automobile-industrial complex have
been effectively mobilized and brought to bear at the political and ideological
levels.
Let us now turn to the impact of automobilization on the development of
cities and the living patterns of their inhabitants. Decisive in this
connection has been the obliteration of the old sharp dividing line between
city and country. Drive from the center of an American city today in any
direction, and you will of course eventually come to open country. But you will
never cross a boundary clearly demarcating the one from the other. What you
will observe instead is a gradual thinning out of the density of settlement.
The old distinctive commuter suburb dependent on rail transport has been
swallowed up and incorporated into an expanded urban area.17 And in some places, particularly in the
northeast between Boston and Washington, expanding urban areas or metropolises
have run into each other.18 In such cases
your trip from one city center will take you through roughly concentric rings
of decreasing density into another set of concentric rings of
increasing density.
This obliteration of the old distinctions between city, country, and
suburb—often called "urban sprawl"—would have been
impossible but for the automobile which, with its complementary road and
highway network, has introduced what may be called a generalized factor of
mobility replacing the former limited and specific modes of mobility. The car
can go in any direction for any distance. The horse-drawn vehicle, on the other
hand, is necessarily short-haul, and both railroads and trolleys are
track-bound and therefore restricted to certain prescribed routes. These
specific modes of mobility impose a definite shape on both economy and society,
much as a skeleton may be said to impose a shape on a living body. With the
coming of the generalized factor of mobility, these constraints are removed and
radically new locational patterns become possible.
They become possible, but no particular new pattern is dictated or enforced.
What actually happens is therefore determined by other considerations. And here
we must, I think, give primacy to the overall process of capital accumulation
which both seeks out and responds to profitable investment opportunities on the
one hand, and creates new ones on the other. The point is that with greater
freedom of mobility, the shape of economy and society could adjust to the
pushes and pulls of the accumulation process more rapidly and completely than
would otherwise have been the case. And the likelihood of cumulative rather
than self-limiting processes of change was greatly increased. Moreover, the
possibility existed and was soon translated into reality that cumulative
change, once initiated, would take on a life of its own, often contradicting
rather than serving the economic and social needs which had given rise to it in
the first place.
Automobilization started somewhat later, but in the main coincided with the
transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism. The emerging corporate
giants, including those directly or indirectly dependent on the automobile,
were more profitable than their predecessors and were therefore able to grow
more rapidly than the smaller and more competitive sectors of the economy
(Marx's concentration of capital); and their huge financial resources gave them
the leverage to engineer an uninterrupted series of mergers (Marx's
centralization of capital). Technologically, this increasingly dominant
monopolistic sector of the economy was (and is) highly dynamic, manifesting a
strong bias toward more and more sophisticated, capital-intensive methods of
production. Moreover, the big monopolies, in their search for new markets, have
made available to other sectors of the economy advanced mechanical, electronic,
chemical and other sophisticated technologies which in turn have revolutionized
these sectors' methods of production. What is particularly relevant from our
present point of view is that in this way U.S. agriculture, in spite of the
fact that it does not readily lend itself to monopolization, has been rapidly
mechanized and chemicalized, leading to the relative depopulation of the
countryside and the crowding of displaced farmers, sharecroppers, and
agricultural laborers into the cities. As a result of this internal migration
as well as of natural population growth, the cities have experienced very rapid
expansion during the automobilization period. (In the half century from 1910 to
1960, the urban population increased from 42 million to 125 million,
approximately 300 percent; while the rural population increased 50 to 54
million, or only 8 percent.)
Urban growth on this scale would have involved a comparable increase in the
geographical size of cities even if the new residential areas had been of the
built-up, high-density variety. But given the general mobility factor
introduced by the automobile, the urban-sprawl pattern, involving a much more
than proportional increase in area, became both a possibility and a reality.
Where in earlier times the children of slum-dwelling immigrants had, as they
climbed the economic ladder, moved into compact neighborhoods within the
built-up city, now the tendency was increasingly to move to the fringes and the
formerly railroad-dependent suburbs. The slums in turn were filled up no longer
by immigrants from abroad (the First World War effectively put an end to this
kind of immigration) but by those expelled from U.S. agriculture, including
disproportionately large numbers of blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto
Ricans.
And now comes the final act in what may be called the drama of the car and
the city. The massive outflow of population from the old inner city brings with
it much more than a mere change in residential patterns. As people move out,
all sorts of economic activities move with them, and a process of obsolescence
and decay is initiated in the center. First to follow the population movement
of course are retail and service establishments. But these are soon joined by
manufacturers and wholesalers who on the one hand now find a labor supply and
cheaper land on the outskirts and on the other hand are repelled by the
deterioration in the center. The movement of residences comes first, but the
movement of jobs soon reinforces the movement of residences, which in turn
stimulates further movement of jobs, and so on in a self-reproducing cumulative
process.
It might be supposed that this would result in a more or less even and
continuous settlement of the space occupied by the outward movement, with
densities declining in direct proportion to distance from the center, so that
there would after all be a reasonably clear demarcation between built-up area
and open space beyond. But this is not the way it happens in a regime of
private property in land such as that which obtains in the United States.
Typically, large amounts of land are held off the market and out of use by
investors (or, if you prefer, speculators), as a result of which the
development process often has to leapfrog over areas of open land.19 And in addition densities are kept down by
zoning ordinances prescribing minimum sizes for residential lots in parts of
the metropolis, usually farther out, controlled by upper- and middle-income
whites determined to exclude the poor and the black from their neighborhoods.
The consequence is that the city comes to sprawl over an area much greater than
mobility and economic factors alone would dictate. By now, according to Hans
Blumenfeld, "the overall density of American urban areas is about one
fifth to one sixth of the density prevailing a century ago, when walking was
the predominant mode of transportation."20
This means that an enormous amount of transportation of goods and people has
to take place day in and day out just to keep the life of the city going. Much
of this is commuting in the traditional sense of the term, i.e., movement of
people living in the outskirts to and from work in the city center (this
obviously creates all sorts of special problems because it is concentrated in a
few hours in the morning and evening). But much more in the aggregate is of a
different character: goods being supplied to economic units scattered all over
the urban area; children going to and from school; shoppers getting to retail
outlets and back home again; people getting together for social purposes; and a
new and increasingly important kind of commuting, i.e., the going to and from
jobs by workers who both live and work in the outskirts, which may involve
relatively short trips in the same section but also may involve long trips from
a section on one side of the city across the center to another section on the
other side (with all possible variations in between). Except in the case of
traditional commuting, which lends itself very well to the use of public
transportation, almost all of this movement now takes place by private
automobile. An impressionistic notion of how vast the volume of travel by
private automobile has become can perhaps be derived from the following two
items culled from recent issues of the New York Times: (1) According to
a Gallup Poll, 81 percent of all American workers travel to and from work by
automobile. (May 30, 1971); (2) The Associated Press reports that
"American housewives average about 100 miles each week just in family
chauffeuring and errands around town." (January 23, 1973). With the number
of cars, the urban population, and the area of sprawl all steadily expanding,
it is no wonder that pollution and congestion are coming to be experienced as
the manifestations of an acute urban crisis;21 or that the general factor of mobility which the
automobile was in its golden age is increasingly turning into its opposite.
One final point needs to be made in this highly sketchy survey of the
interrelation and interaction between the car and the city. When we speak of
traditional commuting (outskirts to city center and back), we are talking
primarily about a small number of cities which are both big and also old in the
sense that they had railroad-dependent suburbs in the pre-automobile
age—chief among them New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San
Francisco. In addition, these are cities with highly developed business centers
not directly related to production, embracing national or regional corporate
headquarters, banking and insurance, shipping offices, and so on. While there
has been considerable outward movement of such functions, on the whole the
advantages of keeping them together, in a compact area within which rapid
face-to-face communication is easily maintained, are so great that these
central business areas have grown with the overall growth of the metropolis. As
a consequence, too, other economic and cultural activities which are
encompassed in the concept of "downtown"—hotels and restaurants,
theaters and concert halls, museums, elegant department stores and specialty
shops—have survived and even flourished.
Where these conditions are found, the city retains much of its traditional
structure and character, despite the ubiquitous sprawl and the decaying slums
and ghettos between downtown and the outer residential areas. But where these
conditions are not found or are found in a relatively undeveloped form—and
this is the case with most cities which have experienced most of their growth
during the automobile age—there has been a strong tendency for the old
urban structure to break down and a new one without historic precedent to take
its place. The process of sprawl has brought with it a decentralization of most
of the functions usually associated with downtown, with resultant emergence of
a multiplicity of subcenters, each offering some of the services of
downtown—shopping areas, branch banks, motels, restaurants,
cinemas—but without any of its character or magnetism. When this stage has
been reached, the city as a meaningfully organized and structured form of
civilized living has disappeared in favor of an amorphous aggregate of people,
dwellings, cars, roads, and economic units jumbled together in a more or less
continuous and potentially ever-expanding geographical area. Los Angeles is the
obvious prototype of this kind of urban area. It was vividly characterized as
long ago as 1959, in a perceptive series of articles by Harrison Salisbury in
the New York Times, as follows:
Here, nestled under its blanket of smog, girdled by bands of
freeways, its core eviscerated by concrete strips and asphalt fields, its
circulatory arteries pumping away without focus, lies the prototype of
Gasopolis, the rubber-wheeled living region of the future.
Los Angeles is no longer a city as the term has been
conventionally defined: Sam S. Taylor, general manager of Los Angeles traffic,
calls Los Angeles a "mobile region."
For anyone looking toward the future, toward the end result of
the full autofication of the American metropolis, Los Angeles is the phenomenon
to analyze most carefully.
When Lincoln Steffens went to the Soviet Union just after the
Bolshevik Revolution, he proclaimed, "I have seen the future—and it
works."
Today's visitor to Los Angeles might paraphrase Steffens and
say, "I have seen the future—and it doesn't work." (March 3,
1959)
Since that was written a great deal has happened, and it seems less likely
today than it did then that the future lies with Gasopolis. The recently
created federal Environmental Protection Agency has even proposed that, in
order to cope with the smog problem, automobile traffic in Los Angeles should
be cut by 80 percent through gasoline rationing. This was, to be sure, more for
its shock effect than because the EPA or anyone else expects it to be taken
seriously (one estimate is that an 80 percent reduction in auto traffic in Los
Angeles would mean the loss of 400,000 jobs). Still, this, like the already
noted change in the public attitude toward the Interstate Highway System, is
one of many indications that urban development in the United States is entering
a new period in which increasingly serious efforts will be made to transform
the automobile from the master to the servant of people.
Any attempt to elaborate on this theme would take us far beyond the confines
of an essay aimed at elucidating the role of the automobile in the genesis of
the present urban condition.22 I will only
say in conclusion that while I believe certain palliatives to be possible, at
least in principle, within the framework of the present monopoly capitalist
system, I do not think that fundamental changes in the structure of cities and
their relation to society as a whole can be effected without a radical change
in the social order. In what I have called the traditional commuter situation,
it should certainly be possible to bring about a great improvement in public
transport both into and out of the inner city and also within the inner city.
This, perhaps together with certain restrictions on the use of cars in the
inner city, might do much to relieve congestion, particularly of the rush-hour
variety. But it would leave untouched other kinds of movement within the
metropolis which are much less susceptible to facilitation through improvement
of public transport.23 And it would do
nothing to check, let alone reverse, the sprawl process.
To accomplish these ends, and at the same time to eliminate congestion and
pollution and in other ways make the city a better place to live, it seems to
me an absolutely necessary (though far from sufficient) condition that the
causal link between the location of economic activity and profit anticipations
has to be decisively broken. Only if a rational job pattern is planned and
assured for years ahead will it be possible to develop new residential
communities with appropriate population densities and efficient public
transportation systems both within and between them. And this requires not only
public ownership of land but also socialization of the entire investment
process so that production can be guided not by profit but for the satisfaction
of the people's needs.
NOTES
- The Introduction in question was first published by Kautsky in 1903 and is
not to be confused with the Preface to the 1859 work The Critique of
Political Economy. It is actually the Introduction to the Grundrisse der
Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf), which was not published in
full until 1939. The quotation is from the East German edition of 1953, p. 20.
- Capital, vol. 1 (Kerr ed.), pp. 418-422.
- Ibid, p. 486.
- In these notes I am drawing exclusively on my personal experience and
acquired knowledge of conditions in the United States. But I believe that what
is said applies, in the main, to the other imperialist centers in Western
Europe and Japan.
- Quoted in William V. Shannon, "The Untrustworthy Highway Fund,"
The New York Times Magazine (October 15, 1972), p. 121.
- Unless otherwise stated, all figures come from the Statistical Abstract
of the United States, various years.
- Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1966), p. 241 and
passim.
- I grew up in a suburb of this kind. Several years before the First World
War my family moved from New York to a suburb across the Hudson River in New
Jersey. Our house was around a mile in one direction from the town and the
railroad station, about as far away as the commuters then lived. In the other
direction, between our house and the River (which, except for the underwater
Hudson Tube between lower Manhattan and the Newark/Jersey City urban area,
could only be crossed by ferry in those days), there was more than a mile of
untouched woodland. The spread of the automobile and the building of the George
Washington Bridge across the Hudson totally transformed the region and its
relation to the city in the manner analyzed in the text.
- David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and
Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge
University Press, 1969), p. 442.
- Calculated from Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial
Times to 1957 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 2nd Printing, 1961),
pp. 7, 139. The figure for 1908 is not exactly comparable to that for 1924
since the relevant National Income is the average for the years 1907-1911.
- Ibid, p. 462.
- Ibid, p. 458. The increase was down to 42 percent for the decade of
the 1940s owing to the drastic curtailment of new construction during the
Second World War, and comparable figures do not appear to be available for 1960
and 1970.
- A ranking of U.S. manufacturing industries by ten-year average rate of
return on capital (for the decade 1949-1958) shows Motor Vehicles and Parts
first with 28.2 percent, while the second ranked industry trails with 23.2
percent. B. C. Minhas, An International Comparison of Factor Costs and
Factor Use (Department of Economics, Stanford University, 1960), p. 80.
- John Jerome, The Death of the Automobile (New York: W. W. Norton,
1972), p. 112. The title of Jerome's book, for better or worse, reflects
wishful thinking more than fact, actual or prospective.
- The following passage from John Jerome's lively study, cited in the
previous footnote, illustrates the change in the public attitude toward
roadbuilding which is now under way. Back in 1956, he points out, the
roadbuilders exulted in the magnitude of their works: "How the press
releases rolled! Four hundred square miles of pavement! One and a half million
acres of new right of way! Excavations to bury Connecticut knee deep. Sand,
gravel, and stone to build a wall around the world fifty feet wide and nine
feet high. Concrete enough for six sidewalks to the moon …. [B]y 1971,
local lawsuits or local government action had halted the construction of
Interstate projects in fifteen major American cities …. It had become
virtually impossible to gain acceptance for a new Interstate in any urban area,
and many rural segments of the plan … were in trouble…. The sea
change in the American mood is precisely characterized by the Bureau of Roads'
press releases. When the Interstate was initiated, consumption of a million and
a half acres of right of way or four hundred square miles of forest was fit
material for boasting; now it has become a shameful admission." Ibid,
pp. 105-106. This changing public attitude doubtless portends other
significant changes in the period ahead. This is a subject, however, which
falls outside the scope of the present essay.
- Ibid, p. 113.
- It is true that what are now sometimes called exurbs, lying 50 miles or
more from the city center, have some of the characteristics of the older type
suburbs. But there are no structural features such as were imposed by
dependence on rail transport which protect them from being swallowed up in
their turn. This indeed seems likely to be their ultimate fate as long as
population continues to grow and there is no basic change in the socio-economic
system.
- The Boston-Washington region—which includes New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore, as well as a number of lesser but still large cities—has
been subjected to intensive study by the French geographer Jean Gottmann
(Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, New
York, 1961). Gottmann naturally has to deal with the automobile in many
contexts, but he appears not to be aware of its decisive role in the dynamics
of the process under study, a fact which is perhaps best explained by the
book's total lack of any coherent theoretical framework.
- In the language of North American urban planners, "developed"
land is that which is actually used for any urban purpose (including parks),
while all other land within the urban area is "open" or
"undeveloped."
- Hans Blumenfeld, "Criteria for Judging the Quality of the Urban
Environment," The Canadian Architect (November, 1972), p. 47.
- This is without taking into account the social and environmental pathology
of the decaying inner city.
- Let me add that this limitation of scope has also precluded more than
passing allusions to the qualitative aspects of that condition. In particular
the differential impact of automobilized urbanization on various income levels
and social groups has been almost totally omitted. The poor who cannot afford
cars and the elderly and handicapped who are unable to make use of them
regardless of their income are either effectively immobilized or confined to
very limited and usually decaying areas. This adds a tragic dimension of
helplessness and misery to millions of already blighted lives.
- In making judgments of this kind one is likely to be influenced by one's
personal experience. I live in the New York metropolitan area in what used to
be an old-style suburb. With a suitable improvement in the commuter railroad
service and the inner-city subway-bus-taxi network—both of which are now
in bad shape—I can easily imagine that I would hardly ever be tempted to
drive into the downtown area. On the other hand, I also find it hard to imagine
even an elaborate public transportation system which would satisfactorily
substitute for the private car in the various other kinds of movement that are
necessary for everyday living in the metropolis.
This essay
first appeared in Monthly Review, vol. 24, no. 11 (April 1973).
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