Andy Battle

“New York 2140: Climate Change and Gentrification in Tomorrow’s Ruined New Yorks”

Ruins, from the perspective of capitalists, are sites where exchange value has collapsed. At the same time, the infrastructural residues of once-productive landscapes present opportunities for those who wish to live outside of the logic of the commodity society. In the latter half of the twentieth century, large swaths of New York City were ruined as sites for capital accumulation and its distinctive forms of social reproduction. Reinvestment was accompanied by a series of political clashes theorized as the “revanchist” city. As climate change proceeds, the prospect of a newly ruined New York City becomes more concrete. This article explores the prospects for ruination and reinvestment through the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose 2017 novel New York 2140 depicts a struggle over the regentrification of Manhattan following a series of catastrophic climate events. In the novel, Robinson posits a dialectic of social struggle that resolves into a kind of post-apocalyptic social democracy. The ending of New York 2140 reflects the impasse in which thinkers and militants who are trying to think about the problem of transition find themselves in an era without a clear revolutionary subject, where reform appears less as a confident triumph than the last-gasp effort to avert total catastrophe.

“On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City”

This article explores the roots of deindustrialization in one of New York City's most important industries, the manufacture of clothing. Capital flight, in the form of “runaway shops,” began as early as the teens, when the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILG) established itself through a series of key battles. The handmaiden to runaway shops was the reemergence of contracting, whereby the assembly of garments was disaggregated in terms of time, space, and legal identity. I trace efforts to combat these dynamics through their culmination in what I call the “New Deal settlement,” a stabilization of the industry across what contemporary analysts called the “New York Production Area.” This settlement, I argue, was at once geographical, political, cultural, and economic. As soon as the New Deal settlement emerged, manufacturers began working to collapse it, dispersing garment work to places like northeastern Pennsylvania, where manufacturers enlisted the wives and daughters of unemployed anthracite miners to sew their garments. Factory owners, sometimes linked to organized crime, sought to establish a new regulating capital rooted in relationships of domination, protected by authoritarian local governments. This account offers an alternative emphasis to that of Robert Fitch, whose influential account emphasized “a conscious policy” to deindustrialize the city, overseen by the real estate industry. Instead, I show how deindustrialization was rooted in significant ways in the dynamics of competition themselves, shaped at each stage by particular social relationships, state policy, and world politics.