When Capital Threatens to Strike in Your City
With a resurgent left-labor movement and a new crop of progressive and socialist city council members, nervous Chicago real estate developers are hinting they’ll pull their investments in the city. To stop capitalists from undercutting left agendas around the country, we need to recognize when they’re bluffing — and how to stop them when they’re serious.
Shelby Bell / Flickr
In Chicago, the rise of fighting unions, resurgent social movements, and the election of six socialist aldermen to the city council has raised demands for progressive tax reform, rent control, and more affordable housing. But whenever such demands are raised under capitalism, capital will strike back.
Real estate investors are implicitly threatening to deploy the capital strike, one of the most powerful tools in the capitalist arsenal, to head off left policy goals by shifting their investments from Chicago for more putatively business-friendly urban real estate markets. The logic of such a strike is to pull investment from Chicago and curb economic growth, starving Chicago of tax revenues and hobbling the nascent push for social-democratic reforms — a trump card capitalists are always able to deploy, since they control the resources needed to make investments in jobs and basic human needs like housing. The democratic will of the people would be punished for not bending to capital’s will.
Understanding how capital levels such threats, and analyzing how seriously we should take them, is key for the rising municipal-level left movements throughout the United States.
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