Deconstruct Salt Lake is a revolutionary urbanist project oriented towards the Salt Lake valley. Like all other cities, Salt Lake is scarred by capital, the inhuman driving force behind capitalist society. Though it finds corporeal form in the capitalist class, the drive towards capital accumulation permeates far beyond individual consciousness, finding reification throughout society. Urbanism is marked by capital from the everyday lives of workers forced to labor and pay rent to the plans and schemes of a ruling class constantly working to perpetuate its own dominance over society. Throughout all of this the class struggle unfolds in space, both in workplaces and homes and in the development of the city.
Redevelopment projects, highway expansion, stadium construction—all these otherwise individual efforts find a rational through line in the logic of capital constantly seeking to valorize itself and accumulate more value. Just as proletarians only find work if it produces value for the capitalist class, so too does urban development only occur if there is value to be found. But while an individual enterprise can easily (falsely) appear to be the result of individual actors (owners and workers), producing a city clearly takes a whole society. In critiquing urban development, then, one is forced to contend with a unified mode-of-production. It is precisely this social-character of urbanity that demands deconstruction to both better grasp the roots of its unfolding and to conceive of its reconstruction.
This project puts forward two, interrelated north stars: class struggle and urban revolution. While class struggle is a fact of class society, today power is overwhelmingly wielded by the capitalist class. Working class power must be built and exercised not only to improve the lives of workers today, but more importantly to chart a course towards a fundamental break with capitalism, towards revolution. While we must not limit ourselves to the environment left behind by capital, revolution will necessarily be urban, occurring in urban space and playing out in the unfolding of the city. With this in mind, urban revolution stands as the ultimate goal of the urban proletariat’s struggle against capital in all its manifestations; the fight for society is the fight for the city.
“The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological, or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of the proletariat.” – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 179 [source]
If you are interested in this project or have any questions, reach out at deconstructsaltlake[at]riseup.net or on Instagram at deconstructsaltlake.
This project is dedicated to Mike Davis (1946 – 2022) who was a Marxist par-excellence. His work on urban studies has been a constant guide to this project and set a high standard for radical urban analysis.
“If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — you know, fighting.” – Mike Davis [source]