Resumen de “The Destructive Character”: The Recapitalization of a Shanty Town into a Suburb (after a Brief Emancipation)
In Pardeesville, Pennsylvania, migrant laborers constructed a shantytown at the periphery of a coal-company town in the late 19th century. For the first half of its existence it represented an exceptional space excluded from paternalist care, but also exempt from surveillance and infrastructural development. It housed a flexible labor force for the mechanized industry increasingly central to its operations. The collapse of the anthracite industry in the 1940s brought the withdrawal of company ownership and a brief period of employee ownership. Following the town’s emancipation from capitalist control, residents developed forms of communal self-organization adapted from the survival strategies of an earlier era. By the 1960s, however, regional government pursued efforts to recapitalize the postindustrial landscape, guided by national ideologies of redevelopment and renewal. This governmentalizing process radically altered the material landscape, bringing with it neoliberal economics and its corresponding subjectivities.
