BOOKS

Capitalism and the city

The Pig and the Skyscraper - Chicago: A History of our Future by Marco d'Eramo; Verso, London and New York, 2002; pages 472, £20 (hardback)

FIRST published (in Italian) in 1999, two years before four hijacked planes shattered American illusions of invulnerability and changed the world, this book explores capitalism in America - the land where it stands exposed in "all its naked force". The author, an Italian journalist and writer, uses Chicago as a prism through which to track, analyse and comment on the history of U.S. capitalism in all its complexity.

Chicago, argues the author, lies at the epicentre of America's supersonic, "red in tooth and claw" capitalist development. In the 19th century the city came roaring into existence across the span of just 30 years. Built on the grain trade, railroads, lumber and the mass slaughter of animals, it forced forward the frontiers of production for profit, achieving in its early 20th century stockyards the "acme of centralisation and capitalist-style rationalisation" (not a scrap of pig or cow was wasted). This city not only invented futures trading but also began "buying and selling the future before it existed". Aided by a trolley-car system whose growth was more rapid and capitalistic than that of any other American city, Chicago's better placed residents moved out to the suburbs, seeking the quintessential American capitalist ideal: the single family dwelling, set among lawns and trees yet never too far from urban amenities.

In Chicago's centre, skyscrapers soared upwards, "costly monuments to the overinflated egos of their patrons". Into its maelstrom of industrial turmoil poured wave upon wave of immigrant labour: the Irish, the Germans, the Poles, later great inflows of blacks from the post-Civil War south, fuelled by hope while frequently deployed as scab labour in the Chicago bosses' savage all-out war on the unions. For this city, too, was the crucible of the U.S. labour movement - the place where the battle for the eight-hour working day was waged with spectacular bloodshed in the 1880s, where the Haymarket massacre of May 4, 1886 became the impulse for establishing May Day as a holiday for workers around the globe. (Today, ironically, American workers are perhaps the only category in the 'developed' world to be denied this entitlement.)

The challenge before the author lies not only in capturing the dense texture of this story but also in relating it to his central theme: Chicago as a metaphor for American capitalism, as an unrivalled distillation of a larger experience, as a 'reality check' on the present and a window on the future. There is, d'Eramo argues, something about this megalopolis, unstoppably spreading on the banks of Lake Michigan, that reaches to the core of capitalism understood as a system:

In the falling to ruins of entire quarters, in the bankruptcy of once-potent financial dynasties, in the brutal contrasts between luxury and misery, stunning beauty and appalling squalor, Chicago is living proof that there is no such thing, nor has there ever been such a thing, as a design of capital. There is only a logic of capital, a logic that is highly singular, illogical to the end, and yet at the same time solid as iron.

It was in response to the dictates of this 'iron logic' that Chicago rose with such prodigious speed as the railroad companies, funded by East Coast robber barons and London bankers, propelled their way across America in the 19th century. Faced with the 'tyranny of fixed costs' (roughly two-thirds of a railroad line's expenses went to cover running costs and to pay back loans), companies sought to cut the throats of rivals using every weapon at hand: embezzlement, fraud, price-fixing, monopoly agreement. And nowhere was this war waged with greater ferocity than in Chicago, the terminus for the Eastern railroads and the departure point for the Western lines. As a result of fixed costs, d'Eramo argues, the city became the 'natural gateway' to a market reaching from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from Canada to the Caribbean: "the logic of capital was to transform the whole geography of the Midwest, natural and human".

The 'iron logic' was also merciless: today, Chicago's glory seems built upon ghosts, "the long-abandoned stockyards, the railroads whose tracks lie eaten away by rust, and the boundless woods of the Great Lakes, now deforested". Yet the ruthlessness coexisted with human vibrancy; in the midst of the dog-eat-dog competition, the squalor and deprivation that characterised Chicago in its 'glory' days there was experimentation, cultural vitality, hope, celebration of life.

In order to convey something of this richness, the book makes deliberate use of contrast and variety: descriptive passages that carry the reader into the physical reality of the city are juxtaposed with philosophical musings; economic analysis yields to explorations of music or architecture. The author's playfulness and love of wordplay are evident in his chapter titles: 'Class Struggle in the Sleeping Car' tells how George Mortimer Pullman, sleeper car pioneer, became one of those "rare capitalists who made their fortune selling a more costly product"; 'Sky Grazing' takes an irreverent look at Chicago as the city that invented the skyscraper, "a levity funded by the world's biggest butchers and sausage manufacturers". In 'Bronzeville: the End of Hope', d'Eramo ponders the time when Chicago was the 'Land of Hope' for black working people in the south about to migrate northward, when its celebrated Bronzeville neighbourhood pulsated with music, night-life and the expectation that prospects would improve. Such hopes, the author concludes, "have now vanished into a grey fog of fatalism. It seems today as though the nation's racial problem is felt as a burden, an inescapable national misery, a chronic bitterness and hostility that is neither peace nor war".

At times, such discursiveness, and the author's readiness to head down any interesting by-way, seem to threaten the overall purpose. But just when you think everything might be unravelling, d'Eramo gives a tug and pulls the threads taut to his central theme. In his introduction to the book, the Marxist political ecologist Mike Davis salutes the ambition and audacity of this attempt to "grasp the whole in world historical perspective". Occasionally, the author appears to overreach his material to draw premature conclusions; an example is his statement that "the union movement in Europe appears to be in its death throes", a view challenged by the 2002 experience of ascendant union militancy and mass strikes across the continent. Overall, however, this kaleidoscope of a book, with its ability to surprise at every turn of the page, to excite the reader with a fresh insight, a new way of seeing, is to be strongly recommended. For anyone concerned to understand the rapacity of American capitalism, to gain a full-frontal view of capitalism without a g-string", this is compelling reading.