The City That Care Forgot is a nickname for New Orleans that originated in advertisements for the St. Charles Hotel as early as 1910, and was popularized in a 1938 tourist guide produced by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. It was intended to capture the city’s “liberal attitude towards human frailties,” and “live and let live” sociability, but the sobriquet has taken on a new, paradoxical meaning in the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster.1 New Orleans has since been flooded with volunteers, celebrities, so-called YURPs (young urban rebuilding professionals), school reformers, and new residents, all promising to deliver a better New Orleans. This postdisaster movement of people and capital has revitalized the city’s tourism industry, and created new cultural hybrids and a blossoming film industry, but simultaneously deepened standing social contradictions, ushered in rent intensification, and renewed the dispossession and exploitation of the city’s working class. And herein lies a central paradox of the new New Orleans. The city is flush with care and concern, but now, after ten-plus years and six master plans later, many of the social problems that the city’s boosters and residents hoped to remedy in the immediate aftermath of the Katrina disaster have in fact worsened.

The city is smaller, slightly whiter, wealthier, but still majority black. There are fewer children, and about one out of four children in the metropolitan area lives in poverty.2 And yet the post-Katrina portrait is still more complex. According to 2015 US Census Bureau estimates, there were 95,625 fewer blacks in New Orleans proper than before Katrina. Corporate media’s annual reports on the state of the city over the decade since Katrina often told a tale of two cities, emphasizing the more roseate story of economic revitalization, the hopes and joys of returning residents and transplants, and the renewal of traditions, but at other times portraying the stagnancy and hardship of the city’s laboring classes.

The poverty rate in Orleans Parish decreased from 28 percent in 1999 to 23 percent in 2015, but still surpasses the national rate of 15 percent. During the same period, poverty in adjacent Jefferson Parish increased from 14 percent to 16 percent, and child poverty grew from 20 percent to 27 percent. And while some homeowners have fared well since the disaster—the number of homeowners without a mortgage increased from 35 percent in 2000 to 43 percent in 2015 and is higher than the national average throughout the greater New Orleans area—the story for renters has been more desperate. The median gross rent in Orleans Parish increased from $710 in 2004 to $947 in 2015, bringing the previously low-rent and still low-waged city proper and wider metropolitan region in line with the national median. The annual celebrations of progress and recovery have been marred by a persistent crime problem. There were 175 homicides in the city in 2016, the highest total since 2012.3 Included in that grim 2016 death toll were former Saints defensive end Will Smith, who was shot to death in a road rage incident, and Demontris Toliver, a twenty-five-year-old Baton Rouge-based tattoo artist who was killed on Bourbon Street during Bayou Classic weekend. We can find these dynamics of rising housing costs and increasing poverty, crime, and social precarity in every American city. New Orleans is not exceptional. Within this broader milieu, however, New Orleans may well be the most neoliberal city in the United States.

In the immediate wake of the disaster, when New Orleans commanded the attention of the nation and the world, many hoped a more just city would materialize. In an essay penned the week after Katrina made landfall, left-progressive intellectual Naomi Klein called for such a bold, democratic reconstruction. Sensing the various cabals sizing up the opportunities for recovery during those early weeks after the flood, Klein wrote, “New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries.”4 “Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly,” Klein continued, “the effort could be led by groups like the Douglass Community Coalition …. For a people’s reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making.” The Douglass Community Coalition was organized before Katrina by parents, students, and teachers to fight poverty and transform Frederick Douglass Senior High School, but its organizers would ultimately lose their fight. The school was closed through a right-sizing plan initiated by the Recovery School District, one of many casualties in the tidal wave of postdisaster privatization that Klein and others anticipated.

In the decade since Katrina, a spate of new organizations such as Common Ground Collective (CGC), the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF), the People’s Organizing Committee, and the New Orleans Survivor Council were created in the hopes of developing a progressive alternative to the rebuilding designs of the city’s ruling class. Other existing organizations like C3/Hands Off Iberville waged battles to save the city’s public housing stock from demolition and create a material basis for the right of return for displaced, working-poor New Orleanians. The kind of people’s reconstruction that Klein and many others envisioned, one that would have placed the voices and interests of native, working-class residents at the center of decision making and guaranteed the right to housing, education, and health care, did not materialize. Instead, the reconstruction of New Orleans has been an elite-driven affair where volunteers, homeowners, and activists have been mobilized around the rescue and expansion of the city’s tourism-entertainment complex, and where the advancement of real estate development interests and privatization of public schools, health care, and public housing have taken center stage.5

Why was the left so unsuccessful in crafting a powerful alternative to the agenda of the city’s business elite? A partial answer to this question can be found in the balance of class forces in the city after Katrina, where the very constituencies who might have written a different story of recovery—public workers, unionized teachers, and public housing residents—were banished from New Orleans. The city’s construction and service economy workforce was reconstituted in the wake of the disaster through a reserve army of nonunionized and at times undocumented migrant laborers, a pro-capital context produced by the Bush administration’s deregulatory actions in the weeks after the disaster.6 And although less has been written about the economic impact of volunteer labor, the thousands of students, church members, and activists who donated free labor to debris removal, home repair, and reconstruction added more downward pressure on construction industry wage floors, adversely affecting an already vulnerable, contingent labor force.7

As crucial as the imbalance of class forces was, another major factor in the failure of the Left in New Orleans is the prevalence of anarcho-liberalism. This political tendency is suffused with concern for the various problems intrinsic to capitalism, but it does not directly contest the demands that capital imposes on society and the environment, favoring instead the creation of bottom-up, voluntarist political alternatives. This neologism is gleaned from Bhaskar Sunkara, who provides us with an appropriate descriptor for a prominent strain of post-Seattle left politics and its political limitations.8 As Sunkara notes, anarcho-liberals share “an anti-intellectualism that manifest[s] in a rejection of ‘grand narratives’ and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action.” Like much American thinking of the age, anarcho-liberalism is haunted by Cold War antipathy toward socialism and by considerable amnesia regarding the place of centralized planning in the evolution of the US economy and the creation of the middle class after World War II.

Anarcho-liberals embrace a critique of capitalism’s excesses, but they reject state intervention and social democracy in a manner that converges with neoliberal ideology. This tendency is defined by an antiauthoritarian posture suspicious of formal leadership and the use of state power to achieve social justice ends, favoring instead spontaneity, horizontalism, and counterculture. Faith in public institutions and the possibility of transforming the body politic were casualities of the Katrina disaster with long-term implications for the city and the nation. Rather than placing demands on the state for social housing, worker protections, and other measures that might have improved the conditions of the most vulnerable New Orleans residents, anarcho-liberal emphasis on independent, private, and grassroots-led efforts fit well within the market-driven recovery advanced by Democrats and Republicans alike in the city.

The turn to anarcho-liberal politics is not unique to New Orleans, and residents in other cities and states share the same critical view of the liberal democratic process as being overrun by wealthy donors, party insiders, and lobbying organizations. The city’s reputation as a den of political corruption and graft, and the monumental failure of state institutions to guarantee basic protections to the most vulnerable New Orleanians during Katrina and the highly uneven recovery that followed, however, all fed cynicism toward government’s capacity to deliver, lending credence to anarcho-liberal claims that only residents themselves could rebuild neighborhoods and lives. For many in New Orleans and across the US, the Katrina crisis provided ample evidence that government was inadequate, if not antagonistic, toward human needs.

This essay takes up the question of what form of governance might be most appropriate to achieving social justice in New Orleans and, against both neoliberal and anarcho-liberal market logics, opts for the renewal of a left politics focused on building popular power and advancing working-class interests through redistributive state interventions. Because New Orleans is but one node within a broader landscape of real and imaginary places where anarcho-liberalism draws inspiration and opportunities for action, this essay travels from the fictional world created by filmmaker Benh Zeitlin to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) encampments, the worker-run factories of Argentina, evacuating farming villages in Cuba, and back again to the roiling social struggles in the Crescent City.

The first section examines the origins of anarcho-liberalism and its resurgence by way of antiglobalization struggles at the start of the twenty-first century and evolution through OWS demonstrations. Here I engage manifestations of anarcho-liberal politics within post-Katrina New Orleans, analyzing ideological expressions in the writings and political prescriptions of Rebecca Solnit. The second section examines how grassroots mobilization worked with, not against, the broader elite-driven processes of rebuilding in the city. In practice, celebrations of voluntary disaster relief communities and calls for bottom-up reconstruction are forms of self-help that shore up neoliberalization by diminishing the potential for collective power over public decision making.

To sketch an alternative to anarcho-liberal politics, one that begins with the local, urban capitalist class relations that shape daily life, the concluding section of this essay takes up the slogan of the right to the city, first authored by French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, but revived in recent years by activists and intellectuals, most notably David Harvey and Peter Marcuse. The right to the city is understood here, not as an individual right to access the city’s resources but rather as the collective power to shape the processes of urbanization and the right to determine how the surplus created socially through urban productive relations should be distributed. Unlike the anarchist sensibility, this perspective is guided by a more direct critique of the dynamics of urban capital accumulation, a process that affects us all as wage laborers and city dwellers. Moreover, the right to the city frame as developed by Harvey, Marcuse, and others encourages a politics that is squarely addressed to questions of building effective solidarity and social power, questions that must be answered by those who hope to craft a more just alternative to neoliberal urbanism in New Orleans and beyond.

The Origins and Limits of Anarcho-liberalism

Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 fantasy film Beasts of the Southern Wild was a runaway art-house hit, and in many ways it conveyed the prevailing anarcho-liberal sensibility that had taken root in post-Katrina New Orleans. Beasts of the Southern Wild was widely acclaimed during the summer of 2012. Its fans included President Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, and it garnered a slew of awards on the film festival circuit. Such praise was largely due to the precocious performance of six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in her lead role as Hushpuppy, which garnered an Oscar nomination. The film is set in a fictional rural community, the Bathtub, which sits beyond the levee walls of a nearby city, where marshlands give way to the sea.9 Perhaps inadvertently, the Bathtub recalls words of the antitax crusader Grover Norquist, who said he hoped to shrink the size of government to the point where it might be “drowned in a bathtub.”10 And like Norquist, the film celebrates the virtues of rugged individualism while vilifying government as invasive and ineffectual.

Like the other children in the Bathtub, Hushpuppy is taught to be fiercely independent. She and her father, Wink (played by local New Orleans bakery owner Dwight Henry) live in separate houses made of reclaimed materials, makeshift structures that evoke the slum aesthetic one might encounter in the informal settlements of Lagos or the hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Hushpuppy’s independence becomes all the more important as multiple disasters unfold—a major hurricane sweeps across the Bathtub; her father contracts a mysterious illness; and massive boar-like creatures called aurochs are unleashed by melting polar ice caps. This film is visually intriguing, and the folkloric dimensions are at times alluring, albeit underdeveloped. The strong performances by unknown, mostly black local actors lend an air of authenticity and believability to Beasts of the Southern Wild. These cinematic virtues, however, conceal the film’s more cynical, reactionary politics.

Like those elements of the OWS demonstrations that demanded greater democracy and economic justice for the 99 percent, but rejected the necessity of sustained organizing around a principled agenda, Beasts of the Southern Wild combines leftist social criticism with an antistatist politics that is essentially conservative. The film embodies an anarcho-liberal politics that is progressive in celebrating autonomy and popular protests, but hardly anticapitalist in any traditional sense. Revolutionary transformation of society is not a central aspiration, and, in practice, the localized forms of autonomy and protest that are encouraged are nonthreatening and fit comfortably within the established liberal democratic order.

The film celebrates wild freedom, but democratic government at a greater scale other than the primitive village form is demonized. As the film unfolds, and as Wink and Hushpuppy fight to maintain their lives and sense of home, emergency workers come to their aid, but such assistance is vigorously refused. And even after Wink is told that his life-threatening condition requires emergency surgery, Hushpuppy helps him and other residents to escape the storm shelter and return to the Bathtub. Those elements of the state designed to ensure social welfare, such as the national guard, flood control systems, hospitals, and emergency shelters, which all serve as critical lifelines in real disasters, are all depicted in Beasts of the Southern Wild as impersonal and corrupt, the enemies of the wild freedom that the Bathtub’s residents enjoy. Even the physical landscape of the nearby city is depicted as ominous—the levees protect the city, but flood the Bathtub.

The film offers a soft critique of the perils of modernization and invites introspection on the kind of world we as citizens of an advanced capitalist society have created and its pernicious effects for people who inhabit places like the Bathtub. The development of massive industrial cities and extensive infrastructure around the use of fossil fuels has caused great ecological ruin, but after viewing the film, one walks away with the sense that the solution to our current crises is to return to preindustrial, quaint ways of living—we can simply turn back the clock, reject modern technologies like the Bathtub’s denizens, and live off the land (or sea) in small, autonomous communities. The forms of self-activity and independence that are cheered by fans of Beasts of the Southern Wild, however, are inadequate to address the looming environmental and social crises of our times. The film’s antistatist posture and fetishization of communalism and horizontality reflect prevailing modes of left political critique and action in the post-Katrina landscape.

The anarcho-liberal tendency that has achieved popularity in the United States today is, in practice, a departure from international traditions of anarcho-syndicalism, Italian workerism, and the French notion of autogestión (which is roughly translated as workers’ control over production) that were embedded in working-class struggles. By contrast, anarcho-liberalism’s intellectual roots in the US, particularly its rejection of socialist statecraft and celebration of self-actualization, can be traced back to the New Left counterculture of the 1960s, though its more immediate sources reside in the anticapitalist politics that first crystallized against corporate globalization during Bill Clinton’s presidency and resurged during OWS. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the USSR had a powerful effect on left politics during the 1990s, producing strands of anticapitalism leery of the socialism that was attempted throughout much of the twentieth century—the seizure of state power and initiation of nationalization and planning to abolish private property and redistribute social wealth.

We can see evidence of this antistatism in the ways that many OWS activists appropriated aesthetic and rhetorical elements of the left popular struggles that developed in response to Argentina’s 2001–2 economic crisis. As an industrialized nation with a large middle class when the crisis took hold and plunged half of its population into poverty, Argentina provides a more a direct parallel with the US economic crisis than other Latin American nations. The pursuit of factory occupations and autogestión in that country’s urban centers, however, was supported by a tumult of social forces that included the piquetero movement of the unemployed, some unions, existing cooperatives, Peronists, anarchists, communists, and various other left political parties as well as a mix of genuinely sympathetic and opportunistic politicians.11 After the Argentine crisis, the popular slogan “¡Ocupar, Resistir, Producir!” referred to the active process of occupying shuttered factories and firms, resisting eviction and restarting economic activity through cooperative ownership—a long and complicated process that, at its height, created some two hundred such recovered firms in places like Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Neuquén.

Within the US context, “occupation” came to mean encampments in public parks and plazas rather than the takeover of productive property. The popular assemblies in Argentina were most often rooted in actual neighborhoods and involved ongoing deliberation and organizing among various social layers. In contrast, the human microphones in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, Oakland’s Ogawa Plaza, and other public spaces across the country were momentary spectacles of democracy. Such acts may have been powerful experiences for their participants, providing a moment of solidarity and in-gathering. In retrospect, however, Occupy failed to engage middle-income and working-class citizens in a sustained manner beyond activist networks and the coastal urban centers. Moreover, the demonstrations did not advance a specific policy agenda that might have addressed the insecurity and suffering so widely felt amid the housing foreclosure crisis and economic recession.

The Occupy demonstrations helped to momentarily open up more space for public criticism of capitalism, but the expressed aversion to politics—such as, “No demand is greater than any other demand,” “We are our demands,” and other such slogans—could not be expected to generate much more.12 The language of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent was a vivid characterization of wealth inequality, but it fell short of providing an analysis of class relations that might have guided protracted political work and produced real solidarity. Most importantly, unlike Argentina, where popular responses to the economic crisis developed complex orientations toward the role of the state, which is multifaceted and can be repressive, instrumental, and benevolent, the Occupy demonstrations reflected a less discerning sensibility. Occupiers hoped to achieve societal transformation through counterculture and parallel institutions, rather than through the more arduous process of social struggle aimed at creating real popular power, and pushing state practices in a more progressive democratic direction. Rebecca Solnit’s writings on Katrina and disaster more generally may constitute the most representative illustration of this anarcho-liberal tendency and its limitations.

In her 2009 book A Paradise Born in Hell, Solnit celebrates the prosocial behaviors and altruism that flourish during moments of natural disaster and social crisis. Solnit’s account of postdisaster sociality provides a necessary antidote to corporate media framing of the Katrina disaster that too often resorted to narratives of black criminality and mass chaos—a perspective that appealed to right-wing antiurban and racist fears. In contrast to the wild rumors of murder and mayhem that circulated in the weeks and months after the city’s levee system failed, local residents responded in large measure with an outpouring of benevolence, sharing foraged food, medicine, and other supplies, improvising rescue squads, and shuttling elderly, young, and infirm residents to safety in makeshift flotillas of refrigerators, punching bags, doors, salvaged boats, and often on the backs of the able-bodied.13 Solnit celebrates these spontaneous mutual aid communities and more formal organizations like Catholic Charities and Habitat for Humanity that responded to pressing need in the wake of Katrina.

Foremost among these post-Katrina formations, for Solnit, was the Common Ground Collective (CGC). This organization was founded in early September 2005 at the kitchen table of Algiers resident and former Black Panther Party member Malik Rahim, along with his partner, Sharon Johnson, former Black Panther; a member of the Angola 3 political prisoners, Robert King Wilkerson; and two white Texas activists, anarchist Scott Crow and Brandon Darby (who was later revealed to be an FBI informant). In his endorsement of Crow’s 2011 book Black Flags and Windmills, anarchist and key intellectual figure of the OWS demonstrations David Graeber later described CGC as “one of the greatest triumphs of democratic self-organization in American history.”14 The group was drawn together by the immediate need to combat racist vigilantes and help disaster victims. Solnit sees the various projects created by CGC, their initial first aid station and later health clinic, food distribution center, tool lending station, and so on, as descended from the Black Panthers’ programs for “survival pending revolution,” which included free breakfast for schoolchildren, free groceries to poor residents, medical screening, and so on.

Solnit is right to highlight these aspects of disaster sociality. The connection she draws between these disaster communities and the creation of a “beloved community,” a more just social order envisioned by Martin Luther King Jr., however, is ill conceived, and seems to forget that King and the thousands of citizens and activists who took part in postwar civil rights mobilizations saw federal intervention as central to their struggle to defeat Jim Crow segregation. Like others, Solnit rejects the older notions of left revolutionary change predicated on the seizure of state power and instead embraces the view that society might be transformed incrementally through the creation of parallel communities and institutions.15 Solnit offers what is by now a familiar account of what went wrong during the Katrina disaster: “The original catastrophe of Katrina … was the result of the abandonment of social ties and investments. Yet despite the dire consequences of this social withdrawal, the answer to Katrina on the part of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and many others has been more abandonment and privatization.”16 Solnit writes that Nagin and the city’s governing elites used the disaster to fire public school teachers, transform the city’s school district through charterization, making schools “less accountable to parents and taxpayers,” and demolish public housing stock.17 From this account of government failure, however, Solnit follows other actors in the post-Katrina milieu who do not call for a renewed struggle to create more effective governing institutions and a more just social order, but instead turn toward various forms of self-help as solutions to contemporary social problems.

Solnit’s analysis of these disaster communities conflates self-actualization of volunteers with the creation of community, and it ignores how public policy—health care, schools, public safety, and so on—are also expressions of community values, care, and basic respect for human dignity. In contrast to King’s vision of the beloved community, which sought state recognition and universal protection extended to black citizens throughout the nation, Solnit’s notion of the beloved community is limited in scale and temporality. She valorizes spontaneous and short-lived communities, while expressing deep cynicism about state power and bureaucratic organization, the antithesis of popular self-governance in her thinking.

Solnit does not seem to appreciate how the volunteer legions she celebrates were at times complicit in advancing the pro-capital recovery and reconstruction process. Her account does not discern in any critical way between the political motives and consequences of volunteerism in the region and the nature and objectives of progressive left organizing:

The volunteers are evidence that it doesn’t take firsthand experience of a disaster to unleash altruism, mutual aid, and the ability to improvise a response. Many of them were part of the subcultures, whether conservative churches or counterculture communities, that exist as something of a latent disaster community …. Such community exists among people who gather as civil society and who believe that we are connected, that change is possible, and who hope for a better earth and act on their beliefs.18

Solnit does not consider how undemocratic and exclusive these ostensibly empowering gatherings are in fact. She mentions some of the racial tensions that erupted between volunteers and local residents, as well as the ideological conflicts between interlopers who were committed to abstract anarchist values and those more settled activists and natives who needed to think through practical solutions and longer-term strategies. Still, her analysis misses the underlying class contradictions of volunteerism as a means of disaster management. Although there are always exceptions, volunteers are typically those with enough leisure, finances, and mobility to travel to disaster zones.19

Solnit characterizes the altruism that surges after disasters in terms of carnival, a familiar trope of post-Seattle anticapitalism, “a hectic, short-lived, raucous version of utopia” when social conventions and routines of everyday life are disrupted.20 The carnivalesque—for which New Orleans is a celebrated and potent signifier—is not always good, just, or egalitarian. New Orleans’s carnival traditions, far from ideal forms of democracy and openness, are rooted in long histories of class power, social hierarchy, racism, and at times violence. Moreover, the antiblack pogroms and routine lynchings of the Jim Crow era were characterized by a carnivalesque atmosphere where throngs of whites often donned Sunday attire, imbibed in social drink and good cheer, posed for family photographs, sometimes in front of a smoldering corpse, and created other macabre souvenirs of the fete. Popular control and unfettered freedom are not always consonant with radical democracy. Making inroads against lynching and black subjugation, indeed, creating King’s beloved community, required more than moral suasion, but state interventions like the mobilization of the National Guard to escort black students as they integrated Southern schools and federal marshals to open the ballot box to black voters. A more nuanced view of history and power relations would be helpful here, but these are deep flaws of the anarcho-liberal tendency.

To her credit, Solnit offers a glimpse of what effective disaster preparation and recovery looks like—a system that brings to bear the resources of the state while mobilizing elements of civil society. Her reading of the Cuban model, however, is rather selective. Solnit reports that during one 2008 hurricane, Cubans evacuated 2,615,000 people, as well as pets and livestock, through a system that combines “disaster education, an early-warning system, good meteorological research, emergency communications that work, emergency plans and civil defense systems—the whole panoply of possibilities to ensure that people survive the hurricanes that regularly scour the island.”21 Under the island’s civil defense system’s decentralized structure, neighborhood and village-level leaders are responsible for going door to door to make sure that all residents are accounted for and able to reach safe haven in advance of a coming storm.

Solnit celebrates the role of local people in coordinating evacuation but seems to forget that this effort is completely coordinated by the state and party apparatus. She also downplays the fact that the Cuban system features state-funded rebuilding, whereby residents with damaged or destroyed homes are provided with building materials and architectural plans for reconstruction. Such blueprints include a windowless safe room, located in the interior of the floor plan, and constructed of a concrete shell able to withstand hurricane-force winds. Unlike the spontaneous disaster communities she touts, which are limited in scale and impact, and often reproduce social inequality by virtue of their volunteer dimension, the Cuban model uses state power to redistribute social resources nationally and guarantee some modicum of universal protection to its citizenry.

A People’s Reconstruction Revisited

In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the phenomenon of disaster capitalism, concluding that “it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against,” and that the “ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state—in effect, to privatize government.” Klein’s analysis of the spread of neoliberalization is powerful, countering dominant narratives of consensual progress by recalling the actual historical violence of capital and the role of coup d’état and proxy wars in the advance of neoliberalism. As others have noted, though, her work overemphasizes shock and coercion at the expense of softer, more democratic political strategies employed by neoliberal reformers.22

Klein is one of the most influential left intellectuals of her generation, and her accessible writings have done much to popularize left critique of capitalism. But her overemphasis on White House patronage streams and the machinations of disaster profiteering firms like Bechtel, Halliburton, Blackwater, and the Shaw Group hides how, unlike the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, in US domestic politics the imposition of the neoliberal model has been achieved through more consensual means. Like Solnit, Klein misses how altruism, goodwill, and even social protests are mobilized in the process of neoliberalization.

In New Orleans, short-run cleanup entailed disaster capitalism of the sort that Klein describes, but the longer-run reconstruction process has been characterized by more benign and even benevolent actors—grassroots organizations, civic associations, and charitable groups like Phoenix of New Orleans, the Good News Camp, Catholic Charities, Habitat for Humanity, and many others. In her ethnographic examination of the privatized recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans, Vincanne Adams concludes that “the acts of witnessing and the affective surplus” produced during moments of catastrophe “have become themselves part of an economy in which affect circulates as a source of market opportunity for profit …. The affect economy we live within today makes use of affective responses to suffering in ways that fuel structural relations of inequality, providing armies of free labor to do the work of recovery while simultaneously producing opportunities for new corporate capitalization on disasters.”23 Faith-based institutions largely drove the recovery. Catholics alone contributed at least $7 million in postdisaster assistance to over 700,000 survivors. And of the top ten private charities investing in post-Katrina relief, six were faith-based.24 As part of an oral history project that has now been suspended, historian Christopher Manning reported that within the first five years after Katrina, such organizations mobilized over a million volunteers, drawn from church congregations, civic organizations, high schools, and universities.

These actors have helped to facilitate a process that I’ve described elsewhere as grassroots privatization, where neoliberalization is legitimated and advanced through empowerment and civic mobilization.25 These processes constitute, in fact, a people’s reconstruction of a sort, but clearly one that lacks the left-oppositional character that Klein and many others called for in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. Instead of a recovery and reconstruction process intimately shaped by the needs and interests of the great majority of New Orleanians and Gulf Coastal residents, the remaking of the region has featured the public and affective labors of volunteers, nonprofits, and activist organizations in a process driven by propertied interests, multinational hoteliers, private contractors, and real estate developers. What is left is the reality that anarcho-liberal critiques of capitalism’s excesses (e.g., sweatshop conditions, soil and water pollution, mass layoffs, poverty, etc.) and the attending calls for more democracy all provide legitimation to dynamics of accumulation, insofar as these lines of criticism and action avoid directly challenging investor class power and the state-juridical structures that secure property relations.

Unlike the dispensation of contracts to Bush campaign contributors during the first months after Katrina, grassroots privatization did not garner the same popular outrage, but it followed a similar logic of governmental outsourcing and the process of accumulation by dispossession, where formerly public services and goods—sanitation, debris removal, education, housing, public safety, and health care—were enclosed for profit making.26 Such activity furthers the reach of neoliberalization by cultivating consensus, often in unlikely corners of society. Occupiers, alienated citizens, liberationist clergy, New Urbanist planners, liberal academics, students, antipoverty activists, black nationalists, progressive architects and designers, and social conservatives have all embraced the allure of these strategies, but these measures lack the basic fairness, oversight, and wider economic impact that a public works approach to disaster relief and reconstruction might afford.

Grassroots privatization depoliticizes the process of reconstruction in a few notable ways. Volunteerism provides participants with an opportunity to express compassion without the risks associated with social protests or the depth of commitment required in protracted organizing campaigns. Volunteerism may lead to activism in some cases, but this is less likely within a context where problems that might be addressed through state power are routinely defined as personal or moral issues that can and should be rectified through individual initiative or technical and religious solutions. In her 1998 book Avoiding Politics, Nina Eliasoph examined the disappearance of the public sphere, understood here not as mass media but as what happens between people, the ways citizens talk about issues and discover common concern. Her ethnographic work focused on a suburban community in the Pacific Northwest and on spending time with her subjects in different social contexts—activist meetings, social activities, and volunteer settings—paying close attention to the character of everyday talk. What she found was strenuous disengagement. Her findings are disturbing, and her discussion of what happens in voluntarist settings speaks to the post-Katrina context. Although the act of volunteering most often brought citizens face-to-face with various social problems, the context of volunteerism repressed public-spirited conversation. Eliasoph found that volunteers “tried to shrink their concerns into tasks that they could define as unpolitical, unconnected to the wider world …. Volunteers shared faith in this ideal of civic participation, but in practice, paradoxically, maintaining this hope and faith meant curtailing political discussion: members sounded less publically minded and less politically creative in groups than they sounded individually.”27 I would add that the actions of volunteers are not then apolitical, but in fact politically conservative inasmuch as they preserve prevailing social relations.

Rather than confronting the processes of exploitation and uneven development at the center of the reconstruction process, volunteer-led rebuilding efforts coexist rather peacefully alongside local norms and power dynamics, in a manner that might be likened to theater actors who move from one scene to another, executing their lines faithfully while ignoring the heavy lifting and prop changes undertaken by stagehands. One clear illustration of this contradiction between volunteer moralism and progressive political action can be found in the first year after the disaster, when thousands of volunteers began pouring into places like St. Bernard Parish to do the work of debris removal, mucking and gutting homes, and providing emotional support to devastated residents. Many volunteers went about this work without engaging or contesting the blood-relative ordinance passed in St. Bernard that forbade residents from renting to anyone who was not kin, a measure that openly discriminated against blacks and Latino migrant workers in the largely white parish.28 This measure was ultimately ruled unconstitutional, but it succeeded nonetheless in discouraging resettlement in the parish and limiting the housing options available to both returning minority residents and newcomers. Of course, some volunteers are awakened to such injustices through their visits, but many are able to evade these local political realities, focusing instead on innocuous microlevel forms of help freed from the thorny choices and risks that must be made whenever we take sides in a political fight.

Although volunteers were typically praised in periodic news coverage commemorating the disaster and marking the city’s progress, the presence of a seemingly bottomless reservoir of unwaged labor undoubtedly devalued migrant wage labor in qualitative and relative terms. Why would homeowners want to employ wage laborers if mercurial students and devout church members could complete the same work for free? Donated labor was both free and devoid of the relations that might trouble the conscience of homeowners and triumphal narratives of recovery. In turn, volunteer laborers relished the homeowners’ expressions of gratitude and tales of pluck and resiliency. For both homeowner and volunteer, this relationship holds great, mutually affective rewards, more desirous than the often publicized conditions of hyperexploitation and vulnerability associated with Latino male construction labor.

The use of secular and faith-based nonprofits to facilitate rebuilding also carries little guarantee of constitutional equal protection, and, as noted above, these arrangements most often facilitate the reproduction of social inequalities. As Adams makes clear, “The idea that citizens should have a right to recovery assistance just because they are citizens (and have paid insurance or taxes for this sort of recovery help) becomes easily replaced by the notion that disaster recovery is not itself a civil right but a moral choice, or even a measure of one’s commitment to one’s faith.”29 Additionally, postdisaster reconstruction undertaken by private, charitable groups has often benefited those sectors of the population who are more articulate, educated, and socially integrated. This is true for volunteers but also, in the case of New Orleans, for those recipients of nonprofit aid who are better positioned and able to negotiate the labyrinth of application procedures and subcultures of relevant nonprofit organizations.

The use of volunteer labor also bore negative consequences for working-class renters, since most NGO- and church-oriented recovery targeted single-family homes, reinforcing the bias toward homeowners reflected in the state of Louisiana’s Road Home program and other initiatives. More troublesome still, the political elite’s commitment to public housing demolition, a process that was conceived during the late 1980s in the city and well underway by the time of the Katrina crisis, made it more difficult for some residents to return, greatly diminished the availability of affordable housing stock, and contributed to the skyrocketing rents that came to define the city by the time of the tenth anniversary.30 The common antiracist framing of the disaster and the dynamics of reconstruction that defined both liberal media coverage and much academic work in the ensuing years has largely failed to account for this discrete, local class conflict between public housing residents and private real estate interests, precisely because this struggle is not reducible to institutional racism or essentialist assumptions about black-white conflict.

The reconsolidation of the city’s elite and the construction of new means of legitimacy out of a historical moment when the class contradictions of the city were so dramatically and painfully exposed is one of the more fascinating dimensions of Katrina’s reconstruction. Although journalists and academics made much of the open expressions of class contempt and racism offered by the likes of restaurant owner and real estate broker Finis Shellnut and Louisiana congressman Richard Baker in the immediate wake of the Katrina disaster, such comments have overshadowed the more subtle interplay of elite prerogatives, racial brokering, and participative strategies that have defined the character, priorities, and trajectory of recovery and reconstruction in New Orleans.31

This process of reconsolidation has been fraught with internal political division, personal rivalries, economic competition, and public scandal, but elite consensus has congealed around a renewed agenda of neoliberalization and a revitalized tourist-entertainment industry. What has emerged is a multiracial recovery-growth regime, a historical bloc that advances the real estate interests of those like Shellnut, Joseph Canizaro, Pres Kabacoff, the restaurant and hospitality industries, and various other institutions and players that constitute the city’s tourism zones, along with the varied interests of the more affluent and more organized neighborhoods, with postdisaster newcomers often playing a critical role.

Black public figures like jazz trumpeters Wynton Marsalis, Irvin Mayfield, and Kermit Ruffins, famed restaurateur Leah Chase, public officials like Ray Nagin, former HANO board chair Donald Babers, and one-time recovery czar Edward J. Blakely, among others, have been crucial at various junctures in projecting the image of multiracial, inclusive recovery. Most of these figures publicly demanded a racially just-rebuilding process, asserted the centrality of the black presence to the city’s culinary and musical traditions, and defended the right of return for all residents in the abstract, adding a sense of internal dynamism and a veneer of democratic inclusion to the neoliberal project. This combination of liberal notions of racial justice and neoliberal politics has been missed in some analyses of the post-Katrina milieu that do not appreciate the historical origins and role of black political leadership in the city since the end of Jim Crow.

Popular and academic treatments of New Orleans since Katrina have typically relied on potted narratives of racial segregation that miss the city’s unique and complex social history and neglected the ways that black political incorporation during the 1960s and ’70s not only ushered in four decades of local black rule but transformed the local tourism industry in ways that diversified the city’s touristic identity and expanded black commercial elites’ share of local economic growth. The process of postsegregation black incorporation was shaped by the Great Society interventions of the community action agencies, antipoverty programs that actively recruited and cultivated black politicos, and the nationwide demand for black power emanating from civil rights struggles, which encouraged the pursuit of black ethnic politics.32 Despite internal class contradictions, historical tensions between Catholic Creoles and Protestant blacks, competing elite factions, neighborhood turf battles, ideological differences, and political intrigue, local blacks consolidated power during the early 1970s under the liberal, pro-integration regime of Moon Landrieu, and ultimately gained control of City Hall with the election of Ernest “Dutch” Morial in 1977.

During the same period of black incorporation, the renaming and development of the Municipal Auditorium site into a park honoring the late jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong marked the beginnings of the liberal integration of the city’s public tourist identity. The development of the park was met with opposition, especially by whites who detested bestowing such an honor on one of the city’s most famous expatriates.33 In the decades since the debates over Armstrong Park, the Tremé neighborhood, black parading and brass band traditions, Mardi Gras Indian subculture, and Vodou have all become some of the most identifiable aspects of the city marketed and commodified for tourist consumption. Under the leadership of Morial and subsequent black governing regimes, the city also saw the expansion of tourist niches tailored to black consumers, events such as the 1980s-era Budweiser Superfest tour and other major concerts, the annual Bayou Classic collegiate football game, the Essence Music Festival, and national conventions of black professional and social organizations. The commonly heard post-Katrina assertion that New Orleans is the most African city in America would have made little sense to visitors during the immediate post-World War II years and would have been rejected by those in power, because that postsegregation identity is the result of a decades-long transformation of who governs the city and who participates in its place branding.

As in other cities, black political elites in New Orleans have fallen silent during debates over the privatization of public housing and public schools and often have openly supported revanchist policy.34 These voices alone, however, did not confer legitimacy on the neoliberal recovery-growth regime, especially given the widespread discontent and suspicion that permeated the post-Katrina environment. Rather, the support of NGOs and even some progressive activist organizations has been crucial to securing broad public support for privatized reconstruction.

As sociologist and longtime public housing advocate John Arena has noted, even those organizations expressly committed to a grassroots-led reconstruction have often succumbed to the overarching dynamics of corporate-centered recovery and reconstruction. The PHRF’s executive director, Kali Akuno, submitted a grant proposal to the Venezuelan government in hopes of securing funds for the creation of a community bank and land trust in the Lower Ninth Ward. Arena notes that this attempt at advancing a “people’s capitalism” reflects the accommodation of left progressive forces to the neoliberal recovery model. “The request was not about how the Bolivarian Republic could assist local groups to pressure and confront the state in the midst of its neoliberal restricting agenda,” Arena writes, “but rather how to build a nonprofit alternative.”35

For Arena, and others like myself, the true test of progressive left politics within the context of post-Katrina New Orleans centered on protecting and expanding those aspects of public policy that would have established the material bases for the right to return for all residents. The fights to protect existing public sector jobs and create transitional employment for returning residents through public works, to reopen Charity Hospital and continue its long tradition of accessible health care and service to New Orleanians, to save Iberville and the remaining Big Four public housing complexes from demolition, and to preserve and improve the city’s system of K–12 public neighborhood schools each constituted crucial battlefronts in the post-Katrina context.

Within this context where the beneficent use of state power has been greatly diminished, private and collectivist alternatives like worker cooperatives and community land trusts seem especially appealing for many. Worker control over selected firms or individual factories or local community ownership of select buildings is certainly an advance over conditions of exploitation. These can have the immediate effect of improving the living conditions for those workers and tenants fortunate enough to have access to these collectivist projects, and they can also have a demonstration impact in cities, pointing the way to different postcapitalist modes of living, where the power of capital is supplanted by that of associated producers and planning guided by use values rather than profit making. If these alternative projects are not connected to broader popular struggles aimed at contesting capitalist power in other spheres of activity, they are bound to function as modalities of neoliberalism, yet another niche within an elaborate and dynamic process of accumulation. Within the US context, carving out such spaces of economic autonomy has most often been launched by those who have lost faith in traditional union organizing and the possibility of achieving social justice by directly contesting the power of capital through statecraft and policy.

Sadly, many of the most outspoken progressive left activists in national media and on the ground in the city demurred on these critical fronts. It is still amazing and deeply unsettling that no major national demonstration was staged in solidarity with Katrina evacuees, nor any national mobilization of resources and bodies to defend the last remaining public housing complexes from demolition. On one level, the dearth of popular attention and mobilization can be attributed to the hegemony of antiwelfare sentiments and the difficulty that American publics have in perceiving more impersonal, systemic motors of inequality, especially when compared to racist offense.

These battlefronts entailed issues that would have secured the right of return for many working-class residents, but effectively confronting these very issues of public policy required a more nuanced, dialectical view of the American political process than the antistatist approach taken by anarcho-liberals. Within recent times, the state within the US has come to function largely, but not exclusively, as an executive committee of neoliberal reform, but when a longer, more international-historical view is taken, we see moments when working-class social movements have forced the state to reflect the popular democratic will, and when concrete social good was achieved through social democratic and socialist regimes. Though not without limitations, the renewed discourse of the right to the city, with its emphasis on popular democratic control over the urbanization process, may provide an alternative to the anarcho-liberal impasse because of its capacity to bridge the local character of political life and a left politics focused on building popular power and achieving redistributive policy.

The Right to the City and Anticapitalist Struggles

French Marxist Henri Lefebvre first coined the “right to the city” slogan amid the May 1968 events in Paris, where thousands of students and workers initiated a wave of university and factory occupations, public demonstrations, and general strikes that momentarily contested the power of the French ruling class. In his 1968 pamphlet Le Droit à la Ville, Lefebvre describes the right to the city as “a cry and a demand” that “cannot be conceived as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.”36 This slogan has experienced a rebirth within the past decade. Antieviction organizations such as the Right to the City Alliance have looked to Lefebvre’s writings for inspiration, and a number of critical urban theorists have made good use of Lefebvre’s work in their analysis of the contemporary urban malaise. The slogan, however, has also been appropriated by centrist and bourgeois political forces who have excised its anticapitalist content, adopting the slogan as a banner for poverty-reduction and slum-upgrading projects that have been in circulation for some time.

The United Nations and the World Bank have both adopted Right to the City platform planks, but as David Harvey warned at the 2010 World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, “the concept of the right to the city cannot work within the capitalist system,” a point that did not go over well with the reform-minded audience.37 Such reformist appropriations of the right to the city run the risk of assimilating demands for social justice to market logics, and runs counter to the left-critical position offered by Lefebvre, Harvey, Marcuse, and others asserting the slogan.

At the heart of their arguments is a more radical demand that citizens should have a collective right to shape urbanization, a popular democratic power that contradicts the current state of affairs where capital determines working conditions, wages, health care access, education, infrastructure, land use, housing and real estate value, leisure, and the character of everyday life. I agree with Harvey and others who wish to maintain the anticapitalist intentions of Lefebvre’s initial formulation and see the right to the city as a useful way of orienting a working-class-led, left politics in a highly urbanized US society. American cities have been especially vulnerable to the volatility of neoliberal world making since they were both critical nodes of capitalist growth and federal investment during the Fordist-Keynesian era and, as a consequence, have been severely impacted by welfare state rollback and austerity.38 Hence, urban space constitutes both the central battleground for struggles against neoliberalization and the site where left popular forces are most concentrated and organized, and stand the greatest prospect of political success. If the slogan “right to the city” is to mean anything, then it must mean the difficult practice of contesting the very powers that now dominate the urbanization process, and, in contrast to the anarcho-liberal tendency, it must also mean taking up the equally daunting task of building more just forms of governance.

Harvey’s extrapolation of the right to the city is firmly rooted in Karl Marx’s labor theory of value and, as such, emphasizes the contradictions stemming from extensive social cooperation within highly urbanized, capitalist productive relations. Lefebvre characterizes the city as an oeuvre—a work in progress.39 The contradiction here rests in the fact of broad-based social labor responsible for the city’s continual remaking. The process is at once collective, because as workers, visitors, consumers, and citizens, we all contribute in manifold ways to the constant remaking of the urban form, its technological and social complexity, and economic and cultural wealth. And yet, at the same time, a small minority of politicians, investors, and developers shapes that future in ways that reproduce their power and the conditions of social precarity and exploitation essential to furthering the process of accumulation. Although the right to the city is presented in the liberal language of rights, Lefebvre, Harvey, and others are really calling for working-class power, the right of the great majority to determine urban processes through popular control.

Unlike Solnit’s beloved community, which is predicated on self-actualization through small groups, the right to the city as articulated here celebrates the vast potential for creativity and freedom that is afforded only through the social complexity of metropolitan life. As the architecture critic and urbanist Lewis Mumford once wrote, “Within the city the essence of each type of soil and labor and economic goal is concentrated: thus arise greater possibilities for interchange and for new combinations not given in the isolation of their original inhabitants.”40 In a similar vein, Harvey notes that the right to the city is not merely the individual liberty to access urban resources. Rather, it is a “right to change ourselves by changing the city,” and it is by definition “a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.”41 This “freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is,” according to Harvey, “one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”42 This concept shifts focus from recognition and inclusion within the established capitalist growth coalitions that govern most contemporary cities toward the possibility of an egalitarian urbanity where the interests and passions of living labor determine the course of public life, the shape of the built environment, and how the wealth produced through extensive cooperation is distributed and consumed. Unlike the anarcho-liberal tendency, the socialist right to the city outlined here insists on a return to politics and struggles over the distribution of social wealth and the development of policy that will ensure a freer, happier mode of existence for the greatest number.

Popular left forces in New Orleans were weakened during the immediate years after Katrina with the mass layoffs of public employees and public school teachers, and the mass evictions of public housing tenants. In the intervening years, however, new bases of opposition have taken shape; older forces have regrouped, and there are promising signs of struggle throughout the city. In the wake of public housing demolitions, activists and residents have waged fights against rent intensification and for affordable housing. Others have sought to defend the rights of workers through traditional labor organizing. UNITE HERE Local 2262 and the Teamsters local successfully unionized nine hundred workers at Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in 2014, and UNITE HERE more recently succeeded in organizing the Hilton Riverside.43 Advocacy organizations like Women with a Vision and the Sex Workers Outreach Project have worked to create better conditions for sex workers, who constitute a central but socially dishonored labor force in tourist economies globally. In 2011, Women with a Vision succeeded in ending the draconian practice of placing convicted sex workers on the sex offenders’ registry, a policy that further stigmatized the working class, minority, queer, and trans escorts and performers, and undermined their right to gainful employment and civic life.44 These struggles and others being waged against noise ordinances, stress policing, and rent intensification constitute the bases for a more just New Orleans, one that reflects the needs and interests of the working-class residents who make the tourist city run day in and day out.

Marking the first anniversary of the Katrina disaster, New Orleans native and political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. warned, “Unless current patterns change, the struggle for New Orleans’s future may be a more extreme, condensed version of the future of many, many more people as the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces government to a tool of corporations and the investor class alone.”45 How much have we learned from the Katrina disaster and the intervening financial crisis of 2008? Some lessons have been taken to heart but not nearly enough. Public officials displayed considerably more savvy and urgency in managing late 2012s Hurricane Sandy crisis, but the 2017 south Louisiana floods that devastated communities from the Florida parishes across the greater Baton Rouge area and on westward to Acadiana proved once again that state and national approaches to flood protection, rescue, and rebuilding are woefully inadequate. Likewise, while the tragedy of Katrina sparked serious public debate and urgent planning to restore coastal wetlands lost to industrial pipelines and shipping channels, the political influence of the energy sector, the automotive industry, and other interests have undermined progressive reform and regulation. The experience of New Orleans should have also forever washed away that leftist canard that worsening social conditions alone will deliver the death blow to capitalism, and not the more difficult task of building popular support for alternatives. As Klein has brilliantly detailed, moments of crisis and social disruption can provide opportunities for capital to extend its power and produce even more dire conditions for many citizens.

Solnit contends that what “begins as opposition coalesces again and again into social invention, a revolution of everyday life rather than a revolt against the system. Sometimes it leads to the kind of utopian community that withdraws from the larger society; sometimes, particularly in recent decades, it has generated small alternatives—cooperatives, organic farms, health care projects, festivals—that become integral parts of this society.”46 “One of the fundamental questions of revolution,” she continues, “is whether a change at the level of institutions and systemic power is enough or whether the goal is to change hearts, minds and acts of everyday life.”47 This is not a helpful question. It poses a false opposition between institutionalized power and quotidian life that obscures the complex interdependency, social relations, and bonds of trust that constitute contemporary societies. Governing institutions and systemic power have tremendous bearing on the character of daily life, that is, the quality of the built environment, basic water utilities and other infrastructure, ecological integrity, traffic, biomedical technology and health care access, and individual mobility in the literal and economic sense. What kind of society will the small alternatives touted by Solnit and many others actually generate? A society that looks very similar to what we already inhabit where some classes enjoy relative freedom, material comfort, healthy environs, longer lives, and personal security while others are left to fend for themselves.

A close examination of the experience of New Orleans should challenge those who abide the anarcho-liberal sensibility. The city’s rebirth demonstrates that the kind of people’s reconstruction we have seen is not enough. Like so many other well-intentioned projects, without substantive power, a bottom-up reconstruction can be appropriated and deployed to pro-capitalist ends, reproducing inequality in its wake. And perhaps most importantly, the experience of New Orleans might still force us to develop a revitalized leftist perspective on statist planning, one that does not succumb to the missteps of the past but is capable of abolishing poverty and producing a more just society, where care and altruism are not only expressed voluntarily within daily life but reflected as well in democratic public institutions.