A review by ralowe
Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State by Samuel Stein

3.0

samuel stein ambushed me with the trump patrilineal anti-praisesong, how wide a variety of reasons is needed to take a plastic bag off one's head? i now know that trump's grandfather made a fortune off running brothels during the gold and silver rush; i now know that trump's dad ran segregated subsidized housing; i now know that the individual-1 trump himself used tax cheats to build a tower in manhattan. i frequently against better judgment do this thing i hate where i still doggedly use the word "neoliberalism"ќ as if it's either qualitatively or philosophically different from "capitalism."ќ i mean, all bets have been way off before and after chattel slavery. all that, and yes, stein's *captial city* should be read to gather and assess the post-industrial change of a civic object as lifeworld for persons into the discrete identity of an investment for abstract and disinterested profit drives breakneck-veering into a return to some kind of feudalism: trump demonstrates this principle. but is neoliberalism crudely collected as feudalism or as the road to? overall, this is a pretty good book; although, i am likely never to really be able to get what stein means by "planner"ќ and "planning."ќ i was thrown by the sudden appearance of fred moten and stefano harney from *the undercommons* in the text. i'm not convinced that the chosen instances of the terms converge. stein is attempting to redeem a bureaucracy whereas i recall harney and moten mandating its liquidation. if stein desires this then an explicit declaration of such is owed the reader. there's a mild problematic that occurs around the activist notion of the assumed un-activist public reception of the term "gentrification"ќ; stein calls the word "clunky"ќ which is"_ i mean"_ sure. at the same time, it always feels like a kind of cop-out to reject liability to commit to a kind of essential organizational, conceptual and physical labor. the book's only major weakness involves these insistences to be in solidarity with civic planning decision-makers; this in a current political moment where people are starting to imagine altogether separate concentrations of power beyond the allegedly all-encompassing system. let's go!