On the USACE's Charleston Sea Wall Proposal
How should we South Carolinian and Southern democratic socialists respond to the Army Corps of Engineers’s “Downtown Charleston" /“Historic District" (what the whole of the pre-1960 West Ashley annexation old city on the Oyster Point Peninsula below the Neck- both Downtown and Uptown- is referred to as these days) sea wall proposal?
We should start off with acknowledgment that the project proposed is a project for the real estate-owning resident and absentee gentrifier Bourgeoisie, as well as the proprietors of Charleston’s tourism, technology, and outlying race to the bottom manufacturing (for whom “Downtown"/the “Historic District" is something of a gaudy showcase, and wining, dining, and gladhanding center) industries- of the imperialist race to the bottom of and native comprador interests
that have over the past few decades transformed the overwhelming majority of the pre-1960 Annexation city and significant portions of the city at large and metropolitan area into something of a Garden and Gun gated community and playground for both the native lapdog capitalists of the Low Country and the wealthy of the larger Western World. It is not a project purposed for the defense of the city’s native greater working class (just consider the blueprint exclusion and reported initial total lack of consultation of the populations of a couple of the Neck’s less affluent communities, as well as the lack of commitment on the part of the Corps of Engineers to anything more than “investigation" of how the proposed sea wall might affect West Ashley and James Island), and would not even be on the table if the aforementioned post-Hugo gentrification boom driven by the investment of outside capital and demographic influx of outside capital C Capital had not taken place. Any protection of the rapidly-gentrifying areas of the peninsula with large numbers of native greater working class people living in them is planned with an eventual total gentrification/ethnic cleansing/cultural genocide of these areas into areas identical to those they border in mind, and for the moment protection of flanks of the cherished property of the wealthy. It is an extremely blatant demonstration of the fact that the state is a general committee of the bourgeoisie.
On the other hand, we know that the city and the metropolitan area neighboring it at large, with its historical value, its remaining native greater working class population, and the potential for the return of its displaced peoples to their old neighborhoods and homes in a more just future, is immediately threatened by anthropogenic global warming- in the sense that sea level rise in itself threatens the city and makes it far more vulnerable than it would be to weather events, and in the sense that Atlantic tropical storm systems will become more numerous as the planet continues to warm.
We democratic socialists are not advocates of do-nothingism, of green primitivism, or of fatalism and simple submission to furies of nature. Some sort of major environmental remediation project is necessary. Socialist environmental policy is a humanism that both strives to ensure the survival of familiar landscapes and ecologies and ensure the planet will remain hospitable and provide for posterity. We South Carolinian and Southern socialists must come up with and present a counter-proposal, a counter-proposal that is not simply a project for the colonial and native lap dog bourgeoisie and their precious and chic property as their precious and chic property on the peninsula, but a proposal for the people of the South’s metropolitan coastal areas, including the people of Downtown, Uptown, and the Neck, the immediately outlying areas, and the larger Low Country. A proposal that calls for the erection of structures and institution of anti-flooding technologies capable of defending all of the Oyster Point Peninsula and the Neck, West Ashley, and so on, throughout the remainder of this Century, and, again, a proposal that is a component proposal of a proposal to protect similarly threatened urban areas along the coast of Dixie, whether they be massive centers of commerce and production, ritzy centers of rapid gentrification and opulence, or neither of these things!
What the people of South Carolina, the South, and humanity at large, need is an environmental policy that protects humanity and human heritage at large, not simply the most economically vital or favorite locales of Capital. A public debate of this sort in favor of such a series of projects must take place. It is the responsibility of the forces of democratic socialism to aggressively advocate such a project, such a radical reform towards a maximalist agenda, as part of the pre-Revolutionary struggle, as part of the campaign to reveal the state as a tool of class oppression and develop class consciousness.
-Strom McCallum
(Republished from my blog)
