Red Star: What makes the Nazis?

The suburbs are uniquely suited to produce isolated, scared, racist, reactionary people. Despite increasing diversity, residential suburbs linked to cities primarily by car began as a way to create a class of white people detached from the urban centers. Suburban development entrenched segregation, through school funding measures, housing laws, zoning laws and access to government and private loans. Suburbia is apocalyptically unsustainable, but that’s a whole different question — one whose answer lies primarily in sustainable urban development and policy intervention in the suburbs.

Suburban life, particularly since the decline of organized labor, makes people particularly susceptible to racist propaganda. The forces that once held this in check, from the local union to the neighborhood school to the library, are in decline or increasingly transformed into spaces that reproduce capitalist working relations.

What made the working classes revolutionary were the relationships between people. They traveled to work on the same streetcars, buses and trains, attended the same religious institutions, suffered the same poverty and found the same relief as other workers. They lived in the same apartment buildings, barracks and villages as their co-workers. They lived, worked and died in the company of brother workers. This lived class experience created a basic revolutionary consciousness. These relationships are the ground upon which socialist movements are built.

Suburban life, with its long commutes, dying social institutions and meagre public space, creates an atomized life. It’s not really a social life, if you don’t work the land or work and live with others. It’s not connected to nature, in that seclusion in a car and maintenance of a lawn make for a sterile and antagonistic relationship with all that grows. It’s often not even reality, given the degree of mediation through phones, radios and televisions. All of this creates a life where people interact with power structures alone. Talk radio is probably the best example of this, as itallows right-wing agitators one-on-one access to people with long commutes. This access is one-way: an authoritative voice booming from the console of a tiny plush cell telling you all your problems are caused by the individual behavior of individual antagonists. Suburban life, lived individually, produces a world view where individual behavior is responsible for broader economic and political problems. In the absence of other people, relating only to media, it’s easy to come to believe that ‘drug users cause poverty,’ instead of the obvious ‘poverty causes drug use.’ It makes it even harder to correctly identify the forces that create poverty and inequality.

Colleges are more progressive political spaces because they have common social life. Dorms, dining halls, mass-lectures, common transit and public spaces reproduce some of the social relations of the working classes, which is why students and workers have often had a tenuous alliance. This is just one reason why people who have a college education tend to be a bit more progressive than unorganized suburban middle-class whites who don’t, or who are far-removed from their days in the classroom.

Don’t forget the social in socialism.