Calculating Property Relations

Chicago's Wartime Industrial Mobilization, 1940–1950

Robert Lewis, Deborah Cowen, Nik Heynen, Melissa Wright

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820350110
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Humangeographie

Combining theories of calculation and property relations and using an array of archival sources, this book focuses on the building and decommissioning of state-owned defense factories in World War II–era Chicago. Robert Lewis's rich trove of material—drawn from research on more than six hundred federally funded wartime industrial sites in metropolitan Chicago—supports three major conclusions. First, the relationship of the key institutions of the military-industrial complex was refashioned by their calculative actions on industrial property. The imperatives of war forced the federal state and the military to become involved in industrial matters in an entirely new manner. Second, federal and military investment in defense factories had an enormous effect on the industrial geography of metropolitan Chicago. The channeling of huge lumps of industrial capital into sprawling plants on the urban fringe had a decisive impact on the metropolitan geographies of manufacturing. Third, the success of industrial mobilization was made possible through the multi-scale relations of national and locational interaction. National policy could only be realized by the placing of these relations at the local level.

Throughout, Lewis shows how the interests of developers, factory engineers, corporate executives, politicians, unions, and the working class were intimately bound up with industrial space. Offering a local perspective on a city permanently shaped by national events, this book provides a richer understanding of the dynamics of wartime mobilization, the calculative actions of political and business leaders, the social relations of property, the working of state-industry relations, and the making of industrial space.

CHAPTER 1

Calculation and Industrial Property

An industrial site is a calculative good. The very character of the capitalist factory and its associated appurtenances is embedded in a calculative understanding of the world. This was the point made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 when they noted that the triumph of industrial capitalism was fixed “in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.”¹ For them and others, capitalism and political governance are inherently calculative. Marx’s factory owners seek ways to extract surplus value and intensify the labor process. Michel Foucault’s prison wardens and Christian thinkers make calculations about the workings of the human body. David Harvey’s financiers produce reckonings about the profits to be made from investing excess capital in urban places. James Scott’s state officials use calculating techniques to make the world more legible.² In all cases, public and private institutional agents are located in a world of calculative deliberation or reckoning. While these calculations are not always rational, they are always concerned with measuring the world. Calculative action is the search for a way to interpret, bound, and rationalize the world. The representation of the world as calculative makes a complex world more understandable by creating boundaries that distinguish objects from one another and by allowing actors to interpret and rationalize objects and actions. Calculation is typically understood to have numeric outcomes. The agents involved with the factory, for example, are concerned with devising numerical calculations to questions about its operation. How much does that land cost? How many workers will be needed on the production line? How profitable is the factory? How much should be invested in new machinery? Should workers be paid by the piece or by the hour? In such cases, the answers are always numeric.

Calculation, however, does not begin or end with the number. The “icy waters of egotistical calculation” may well be concerned with numerical answers to sociopolitical questions, but it is also concerned with the ways that industrial entrepreneurs, military leaders, and politicians interpret the world outside the number. Without this, the number could not exist. Calculation requires interpretative positions that precede and follow the quantitative response. The numeric answer, whether it is how many workers are required or the cost of land, is rooted in the social relations of industrial property. A simple question about how many workers are needed requires information about, for example, the labor market, government legislation, and industrial competition. The cost of industrial property is embedded in, among other things, questions of local economic policy, land-use zoning, and transport facilities. All of these concerns entail a qualitative understanding of the factory world, labor markets, and industrial property markets. Without an interpretative understanding of the world, calculative agents would be unable to render the world as knowable through the number. In other words, calculative action is both quantitative and qualitative.³

Working through the literature on calculation, property relations, militarization, and wartime metropolitan history, this chapter argues that the construction and dismantling of the state-owned defense factory during World War II was predicated on these two mutually constitutive sides of calculation. The industrial site was a calculable good that was fixed as part of America’s industrial mobilization program and the postwar defense program.

Calculation and the Industrial Site

As Marx and Engels’s comments on the rise of “icy calculation” in bourgeois society suggest, the idea of calculating agents has been key to the understanding of the development of capitalist society. Writers such as Karl Polanyi, Sidney Pollard, and Max Weber have pointed to the rise of the intertwined processes of capitalist commodity markets and the need for the state to intervene in the regulation and management of these markets.⁴ As one part of this, property markets became inscribed into a new order of capitalist market calculation and rationalization that developed simultaneously with the growth of bourgeois power over everyday life. Land had to be valued, measured, and used in such a way to minimize the contradictions of the private market and the disorder that came with the incompatibility of politics and the economy. This order consisted of building a structure to safeguard property rights while allocating land to appropriate use in the marketplace. As Harvey notes, “Capitalism cannot do without land price and land markets as basic coordinating devices in the allocation of land to uses.”⁵ The land market, however, is more than a coordinating device of land allocation and use; it is also a relation in which calculative agents work to give order to capitalist property rights.

The study of calculation today centers on two main approaches: Foucauldian and political sociology. Although there are obvious overlaps, especially in the prominence given to state practices and rationality, there are important differences between the two approaches. Foucauldians build on Weberian ideas of measurement, rationalization, and bureaucratic control to determine how the politics of the number underpins the modern world. Numbers make an object representable, something that can be calculated and worked on by government. As Rueben Rose-Redwood has recently noted, this literature draws on governmentality “to examine how a governmental power is exercised through the deployment of political technologies of calculation.”⁶ From this perspective, objects as different as markets, shellfish, and slum housing are rendered calculable through devices that function to serve government purposes.⁷ This position has obvious strengths, most notably the close attention given to calculative technologies, the emphasis on rationality as a key component of political practice, and the importance of calculation for political and moral purposes.

A second strand rooted in the political sociology of objects takes a more expansive view of calculation. From this perspective, the Foucauldian position “makes politics too much of a technical and instrumental matter and places too much emphasis on rational state control.”⁸ In contrast, political sociology seeks to unpack the tension-filled, contingent relationships that characterize calculation. Rather than Foucault’s polished sheen of human action and the determinative direction of governmentality, Michel Callon and others focus on a range of calculative agents who operate across the blurred boundaries between objects and behavior. Rather than working through the imperatives of governmentality, political sociology emphasizes the specific apparatus of the calculative act.⁹ Most importantly, as Callon emphasizes, the qualitative side of calculation is based on framing the objects as distinct from one another. It is only when a thing is disentangled from other objects that it can be successfully calculated. As Callon and Fabian Muniesa note, “Calculation starts by establishing distinctions between things or states of the world, and by imagining and estimating courses of actions associated with those things or with those states as well as their consequences.”¹⁰ Objects are not unconnected or isolated; they can only be understood in relation to other objects.

The political sociology position extends the political economy view of the state, markets, and class by bringing calculative politics to an analysis of industrial property. An object such as industrial land or a factory becomes calculable only when it is framed as different from other objects by individuals who have the authority to demarcate boundaries between entities. With the rise of industrial capitalism, the state and business established the boundaries of industrial property that clearly separated it from other forms of property, allowed for the building of an allocative system of value and use, and ensured that it functioned in a way that was both rational and calculable. In developing and defending boundaries between objects, individuals drew on preexisting networks while creating new networks of individuals, groups, and institutions, as was evident as manufacture moved from proto-industrialization to proprietary and corporate capitalism. In the case of industrial property, this required an ongoing assessment of the principal players in the property market. By the twentieth century, the key actors were the federal government, the courts, the military, the real estate industry, financial institutions, and industrial companies. Finally, numeric calculation is inextricably interwoven with the nonnumeric. The number is qualitative. The pricing of property, for example, is relational and can only occur once the value of land is calculated in regard to the social, political, and economic relations in which it exists.

The mutually constitutive character of calculation can be demonstrated in the case of wartime industrial property. The advent of war in Europe in 1939 forced the American state, the military, and business to rethink the place of private industrial property in industrial mobilization. Preexisting notions of what constituted industrial property were no longer viable. Private interests could not effectively incorporate the demands of full-scale industrial mobilization into their production operations. The state had to intervene. As property is a malleable “system of laws, practices and relations,” it can be reworked to accommodate new social, political, and economic conditions.¹¹ While there is a degree of fixity to property relations in any society, they are open to change in times of stress and crisis, as was the case during World War II when unprecedented demands were placed on industrial production and, by extension, industrial property. As this study shows, the result was the emergence of a new calculative object: the government-owned defense factory.¹² During World War II the government-funded industrial site and factory became framed as different and separate from other industrial property. A network of calculating actors from government, the military, and industry created a production space centered on a new form of property relations.

The government defense factories built between 1940 and 1945 were primarily distinguished from private production spaces by the source of financing and ownership. Defense factories were created by mobilizing and realigning preexisting networks. To be framed as a defense factory, and as different from other factories, it had to be made a legitimate object and delimited from other property. As such, the government factory was part of a network of relationships that included specific groups and excluded others. The key agents that underpinned the factory as a calculable object during World War II and the immediate postwar period were federal policy makers, military officials, and business executives. The agents of the military-industrial complex delimited the factory as a calculable object and by so doing opened it up to monetary, legal, political, and other forms of calculative actions.

This suggests that the social relations that underpin the framing of an object have to be stabilized for effective calculation to take place. As Dan Slater explains, calculation relies on the creation of “a stable and reliable context in which objects and obligations are clearly mapped and can be intersubjectively recognized.”¹³ The framing of an industrial site as an object financed for the most part by the state and not by private interests during World War II depended on the building of reliable encounters and the development of appropriate behavior between those operating in the emerging network. One example of this would be the signing of legally sanctioned and non-arbitrary contracts between mobilization agencies and industrial engineering firms to build defense plants. Another would be the contested but nevertheless directed meetings between different interests to determine resource allocation among the competing arms of the military. In all cases, calculative relations had to be fixed, demarcated, and workable.

The search for stability among a set of competing interests puts immense pressure on all those involved in calculating property markets. The hierarchical character of capitalist relations ensures that the choices are controlled by a group of political and business leaders who typically work together in some form of alliance. Almost without exception, those making calculations about industrial property were middle- and upper-class white men. There were few if any women or people of color in government or industry who played a significant role in the mobilization or disposal of industrial space. While women and visible minorities populated the production line and the administrative offices of the mobilization and disposal agencies, they did not play a direct role in calculation. It was a world dictated by white men who already had powerful positions within government, the military, and industry. These calculative agents sought to use state-industry relations to their own ends and to create a stable object—state-owned industrial property—that could be worked on by members of the military-industrial complex.

Regardless of the character and strength of any alliance, the decisions to be made about any particular event or object have to be ranked in order of importance. The ranking of these self-interested agents involves making quantitative and qualitative judgments simultaneously. After a list of possible options has been created and ranked, agents must identify and describe the actions that turn these options into material effects. The options available to an English nineteenth-century capitalist for extracting more profit could be to sweat more work out of the laborer or to install new machinery. In the case of the twentieth-century financier, the options may be to invest capital in Los Angeles office property or the New Delhi subway. In all cases, the agent has to list and then prioritize options. Once the options are ranked, the factory owner or financier can attempt to operationalize the decisions. A successful calculation involves framing the object in such a way that a clear way forward to its implementation can be discerned. These decisions, all of which involve a numerical effect, require qualitative deliberation. Played out on material landscapes, these deliberations create spaces of calculation. In the same sense, industrial sites are calculative spaces; they are a focus of specific class-based social relations that determine who controls and oversees the creation and use of this particular type of industrial space.

Industrial spaces of calculation are defined by four elements.¹⁴ In the first place, they are material and tangible objects—land, buildings, machinery, roads—operated on by calculative agents such as real estate agents, planners, bankers, company managers, and union leaders. The imperatives of war, government policy, and business opposition to industrial mobilization forced the state to consider alternatives to privately funded defense plants. Calculating that America had to get involved in war production, the Roosevelt administration, after consulting with military and business leaders, had worked out the basic lineaments of industrial mobilization by the summer of 1940. Central to this calculation was the decision to move ahead with the construction of government-financed defense factories. Working with a range of private sector actors, including industrial executives, real estate agents, and industrial engineers, the state directly invested more than $17 billion in industrial facilities and indirectly underwrote another $6 billion. By the end of war, the state had built an assemblage of factories, roads, utility lines, and machinery geared to constructing the largest war machine the world had ever known.

A second element of these industrial spaces is that they are defined and ordered by legal structures and practices. These establish the basis for actions by agents on industrial sites, from providing the legal basis for the character and extent of property rights and labor relations to the power that government agencies have over what takes place in industrial sites. In the case of the construction of World War II factories, legislation introduced after 1940 gave the federal government and the military the right to create publicly financed and operated industrial space.¹⁵ This legislation, which covered a range of issues such as prices, labor, raw material, and housing, gave the state broad authority over most areas impinging on industrial mobilization and the building of defense factories. Similarly, the surplus property and industrial reserve acts passed between 1944 and 1948 laid the basis for the disposal of federally owned industrial buildings and the incorporation of private property into the national security system. As calculative action, government legislation established the parameters and legitimacy of what could be done in specific contexts and by whom.

A third feature is that calculative agents must follow the procedures that determine which objects are to be worked on and outline the way things are to be done. The creation and operation of industrial sites, for example, involve rules and practices about the purchase of property, the construction of factories, the allocation of scarce resources, and the working of the production process. Along with passing various pieces of legislation, the federal government and the military implemented a range of powerful agencies that oversaw the locations for defense factories, determined which corporations would operate government-owned factories, coordinated the construction of industrial facilities across the country, and channeled resources from one area to another. Federal agencies such as the National Defense Advisory Commission and the Defense Plant Corporation and military ones such as the Army and Navy Munitions Board established the procedures and practices that mobilized the political calculations about industrial mobilization.

Finally, calculative spaces are shaped by monetary issues. Agents involved with industrial sites assess the cost of their int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Calculation and Industrial Property
• Chapter 2 Industrial Sites and Wartime Mobilization
• Chapter 3 Mobilizing Chicago’s Wartime Industrial Property
• Chapter 4 Chicago’s Wartime Industrial Sites
• Chapter 5 War Factories and Industrial Engineering
• Chapter 6 The Disposal Regime: Factories and National Security
• Chapter 7 Disposing of Chicago’s War Factories
• Chapter 8 The Site Politics of Defense Factory Disposal
• Chapter 9 Property, Calculation, and Industrial Space
• Appendix Wartime Factory Expansion
• Notes
• Manuscript Sources
• Index