By Keegan D., Red Phoenix correspondent, Illinois.

Chicago has long been a city with a rich working class culture of music, food, art, and diverse communities. The city had several waves of both foreign immigration and domestic emigration. This was eased by industry and intersections of both rail and water routes. Chicago, of course, also has a dark history of capitalists taking advantage of different neighborhoods’ cultures for profit, while simultaneously forcing out the people who created said culture. This has been paired with unofficial segregation throughout Chicago neighborhoods and the Chicago suburbs. 

This makes sense to Marxists, who understand the bourgeois control over political apparatuses within bourgeois states. It is also been understood by many Chicagoans that both city and state government are corrupt in favor of the wealthy. Idealists believe that corruption is on its way out and will soon be a thing of the past, but unfortunately this is far from the truth. Even when the bourgeois political apparatus is pressured to reform itself to mitigate the effects of class struggle, it leaves itself loopholes to continue its exploitation. A recent tool used to further this goal has been the creation of TIF, or Tax Increment Financing, within Chicago and neighboring suburbs. 

The point of TIF is to increase capital investment in areas identified by city officials as unlikely to receive investment otherwise. TIF works by setting aside money received through property taxes for capital development. In a TIF zone, when a property’s taxes are collected that exceed the previous year’s taxes, the difference is given towards the “development of capital.” Money will supposedly be made by further increases in property taxes after the value of property increases in the wake of the new capital investment and development. 

This policy is a neoliberal approach to accelerate economic productivity. Its proponents claim that the policy has the dual benefit of providing jobs and improving living standards in previously underprivileged areas. This result is rarely achieved in reality. Even mainstream outlets like the Chicago Policy Review have criticized this because TIF zones are rarely necessary to increase economic investment, when compared to other developing areas without TIF. 

But this is only the tip of the iceberg for the TIF program’s negative effects. The real problem with the neoliberal plan of TIF is that it incentivizes capital from outside of communities rather than to spur genuine development from within. Large real estate firms, chain restaurants, and major retail chains could easily out-compete local shops as well as rapidly increase the cost of living. True, some few new jobs might be created. But the money earned will leave the community, extracted into corporate conglomerates which own most of the new TIF investment.

Not only will the TIF program fail to be reinvested into the community directly, but it will hinder developing social programs, including public education, which are mainly funded by property taxes in the Chicago area (as throughout the country). If all increases in funds from property taxes are redistributed toward capitalist development, then that money is siphoned away from social services. Another detriment of the TIF policy is that it functions as a tool for gentrification which primarily affects Chicagoans who rent rather than own their residences, especially in denser and lower income districts. When large real estate conglomerates can buy properties and quickly renovate to increase the value, they price out members of the community.

Moreover the city only loosely defines areas that are unlikely to revive capital investment. Several TIF zones were granted to relatively well-off regions that had plenty of potential for investment, both in the city and suburbs. Yet the city governments granted them simply to attract capital. This willingness to restrict the education and social services in proletarian communities across a spectrum of incomes represents the increasing contradictions between the proletariat and capitalists in this country. As capital attempts to offset the falling rate of profit, it will move to exploit further even those who were previously protected from capital’s worst abuses. The problems of TIF and bourgeois control of political apparatuses as a whole negatively affect everyone in the working class. 

Reforms have been offered endlessly. However bourgeois lobbyists who write policy simply find new loopholes for further exploitation. Working class people across the Chicagoland area need to organize within their communities. Better jobs and benefits won’t be won by inviting in major corporations. Rather, a true winning strategy involves the organization of the proletariat through militant labor unions and following the guidance of an anti-revisionist communist party. The successes of community organizing within the city of Chicago are clear: from the early union movement at the beginning of the 20th century to the chairmanship of Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, Chicago’s labor history runs deep and has proven successful for short-term gains. When liberal politicians claim that the solution is to invite capital in to reap profit and gentrify historic neighborhoods, remember that they do not do this for anyone’s sake but their own. The bourgeoisie and their political apparatus are two components of the same system. Even honest reformers get caught in the mud of the reactionary right wing and face an army of corporate lawyers if they attempt to move against capital. Chicago’s culture and future must be won by the numerous and diverse proletariat that call the city home.

Categories: Economy, U.S. News