Why Seattle Is Nonetheless Constructing Plenty of New Buildings – Slog

Where the streets have no memory … Charles Mudede

A month before the US plunged into one of the craziest presidential elections in history, Marc Stiles, a senior executive for the Puget Sound Business Journal, reported that Seattle had recaptured the top of the Rider Levett Bucknall Crane Index (RLB) for US. At that time the city had 43 cranes erecting towers and other large works in the city. (Los Angeles was second with 42 cranes; Washington, DC was third with 38, and Portland, Oregon was fourth with 27. Toronto, Canada’s New York City, topped the North American index with an incredible 124 cranes.)

These new projects in Seattle have only helped make Seattle, whose construction boom has already started its eighth year (the consensus is that it started in 2013), more and more unrecognizable.

The other day I walked to the bus stop next to Whole Foods in South Lake Union, I looked up a street I once knew (it’s next to the main Cornish College campus center) and found myself in the same state of astonishment as this grabs Ariadne (Elliot Page) during the “City Bending” scene in Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Inception.

Just as Nolan’s Paris completely severed its ties to reality in a dream state, Seattle in a hyper-state state of capitalist speculation is no longer tied to anything that can be explained with the standard interpretation tools available to almost any orthodox economic ideas in the university system and spread it in the mass media.

The answers to Seattle’s rapid transformation are not found in Adam Smith’s nearly 1,000-page book The Wealth of Nations, except possibly in a very brief section on rap callion programs for discounting bills. The answers are also not to be found in anything that came from the University of Chicago and other freshwater institutions (and most of the saltwater). The answer can be found in two obscure movements in economic history.

One is found in an economic genealogy that Smith, David Ricardo and even John Maynard Keynes emptied and replaced with one that began with Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits and Werner Sombart’s Luxury and Capitalism and Thorstein Veblens too Leisure class theory. The description of this different and mostly ignored (from right and left) genealogy of capitalist economy can be found in Noam Yuran’s What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire. Its key logic is that capitalism is not about the production and distribution of things that people actually need, but about the production of luxury. Because of this, much of the new Seattle doesn’t make sense to the majority of people living in Seattle. Our city is in the same area as the future hotel in space.

I just want health insurance, these muhfuckas have space hotels
– DAVID MUNSELL, WOODCHUCK VOM 3., 414. (@ davidmunsell333) March 2, 2021

But you have to combine Yuran’s luxury motif genealogy with Rose Luxemburg’s 1913 book The Accumulation of Capital.

This work connects two thinkers (one before that, Michail Tugan-Baranowski, and one after, Michał Kalecki) to form a triangle of economic theory, the impetus of which is the section on simple and expanded reproduction in Chapter 20 of Marx’s second volume of Das Capital. The basic idea (or monstrous idea) is that capitalist expansion since the Dutch Revolution has always taken the form of borrowing itself.

Now this could rightly be read as a perfectly reasonable thing. It’s like the law of supply and demand. This is how an economy develops, and so on. But when it is closely examined by Luxemburg and Tugan-Baranovsky, it turns out that it is just as fantastic as that beanstalk in the famous fairy tale. Capital from elsewhere is ultimately answered by the demand for capital. Capitalism only works successfully when it buys itself. When it sells itself. It tells itself to believe in yourself. And the more this itself believes who it is, the faster and faster it will grow. Capitalism is not about an external and an internal, but always an internal.

Seattle, where does this city come from? Charles Mudede

This is the new Seattle skyline. It is one that can go on as long as capitalism reflects the buyer. When this mirroring relationship exists, more and more buildings in this city will soar up and numb us like a flexible city.