Chicago’s Economic Disaster Zones
Chicago vividly exemplifies the deepening inequalities and destabilizing conditions that accompany major shifts in the global economy. Chicago was, for decades, the first and often last stop for millions of Black people driven from the cotton fields and lynchings of the South into urban sweatshops. But starting after World War 2, and even more drastically over the last 40 years, those jobs have been moved in search of fresh blood—people who can be even more viciously exploited.
From 1967 to 1990, Chicago’s manufacturing jobs shrank drastically—from 546,500 to 216,190. Manufacturers who have stayed in the Chicago area have tended to automate their plants and restructure, with greatly reduced work forces that often require more sophisticated skills that have been denied to Black and Latino workers.1 These new jobs are often in suburbs far from the sections of Chicago where Black people have been forced to live, inaccessible by public transportation and hostile to Black people who try to move into them. What is left in the inner city is massive unemployment, or minimum-wage service jobs that do not pay enough to survive.
And since 1970, the wage gap between whites, on the one hand, and Blacks and Latinos, on the other, has increased radically. In the Chicago metropolitan area average wages for Blacks for all occupations dropped from 66 percent of the corresponding wages for whites in 1970 to 56 percent in 1990. That is, at the end of the sixties, African-Americans in the Chicago area made about 2/3 of what whites made, and now they make only 56 cents for every dollar whites make. Latinos, on average, earned 64 percent of whites’ wages in 1970 and by 1990 that was down to 50 percent!2 These changes in the economic base of society have rendered hundreds of thousands of young Black and Latino youth in Chicago, as in cities across the country, a pool for the lowest paying jobs, or in many cases “superfluous” to the system, to be pushed to the side or locked up in jail (where the system is working at finding ways to exploit them in near-slavery conditions). At the same time, the past decades have seen massive importation of drugs into the inner cities with at least the knowledge and acquiescence of government agencies like the CIA, and through imperialist-controlled networks that bring in drugs from U.S. occupied Afghanistan or the U.S.’s closest South American ally—the druglord regime in Colombia. At the bottom end of this process, inner city youth, without other options for survival, get caught up in the drug trade.
In these ways, the workings of the capitalist-imperialist system of exploitation backed up around the world (and at home) by the massive police and military might of the United States have put hundreds of thousands of people in Chicago alone in desperate conditions. For many, especially youth, crime is, as one bourgeois economist put it, “a rational choice.”
1. Moberg, D., “Chicago: To be or not to be a global city,” World Policy Journal, (1997), cited in “Chicago: the Global City” by Pauline Lipman, substancenews.com, February 2005. [back]
2. Betancur, J. J., & Gills, D. C., “The restructuring of urban relations,” The collaborative city: Opportunities and struggles for Blacks and Latinos in U.S. cities, (2000), cited in “Chicago: the Global City.”[back]
