Boothbay Developer's Zero-Sum Game
Local objections in the interest of protecting the newly installed grass carpet from grassroots entrepreneurs using the Boothbay Commons
Continuing the thoughts in my last post about the Boothbay Water District’s announcement of a potential water scarcity spun as a solution under development while the real problem (impending water scarcity) was not explained in any detail approaching adequate.
In another recent Boothbay Register article Ziagra and other officials assured us that large-scale workforce housing poses no sewage issues for the Peninsula.
As housing groups look for paths to homeownership and rentals for the Boothbay peninsula’s workforce, local utilities are just waiting for the word. Boothbay Harbor Sewer District Superintendent Chris Higgins, Boothbay Region Water District General Manager Jon Ziegra, and Boothbay Region Refuse Disposal District Manager Steve Lewis all said the residential expansion would have little to no effect on daily operations. Local utilities say large-scale housing development a non-issue
In that article, too, essential information is left out of the picture. We do not have large-scale employers on this peninsula and so the public purpose of promoting the construction of large-scale workforce housing is to attract the large-scale employer who will hire the large scale workforce to live in the large scale workforce housing, just as the point of the fifty-million dollar industrial training institution, aka school system, is to attract “well-heeled families” and a corporate headquarters culture. The real subject of the developer-led conversation is population replacement and demographic changes toward a more corporate and congested cultural design. The topic of discussion is not about people and why they chose this region. That’s what I am curious about. We need a welcoming survey for all people!
In the message delivered by Ziagra, progress, meaning continual building and development, is the assumptive bottom line from which all else follows, and all of that is decided and brought about systemically by large corporate interests.
The popular term of the day is to refer to those who work for a living, rather than living off of a passive income, as “the workforce”. Once workers were called the proletariat or the industrial armies but the workforce is a modern term that is more copacetic, free of past political associations. It is legitimized and made popular in the high altitudes of corporate negotiations between the state and its private partners and repeated on down the line as accepted branding of a political purpose.
I decided to look up the dictionary definitions of “workforce”, “proletariat” and “industrial army” to see what might distinguish them.
Workforce
the group of people who work in a company, industry, country, etc.:
The majority of factories in the region have a workforce of 50 to 100 (people).
“Workforce” is a term used in trade negotiations. “Workforce housing” is an incentive used to attract corporate headquarters, and sometimes, as in Martha’s Vineyard, it is an incentive to attract or retain the essential workers that the wealthy community needs but who cannot afford to live in a community where housing affordable to people who work for a living is non-existent. Affordable housing solutions are conceived of in large blocks to house the large blocks of workforce workers usually designed as a grid system composed of nearly identical units.
In the case of Martha’s Vineyard, living arrangements are controlled and managed by their employers. What kind of historical relationship is that? Feudalism? Not quite, in the feudalistic system, the landlords were the nobles who offered military protection as part of the arrangement. The only protection given by the employer to the worker in the Martha’s Vineyard affordable housing solution for essential hospital workers is a room for rent in a building owned and managed by the hospital.
Mirraim Webster Definition of feudalism
1: the system of political organization prevailing in Europe from the 9th to about the 15th centuries having as its basis the relation of lord to vassal (see VASSAL sense 1) with all land held in fee (see FEE sense 1) and as chief characteristics homage, the service of tenants under arms and in court, wardship (see WARDSHIP sense 1), and forfeiture (see FORFEITURE sense 1)
2: any of various political or social systems similar to medieval feudalism
Opening up the definition of Fee defines a situation, not unlike those of the hospital workers in Martha’s Vineyard.
Mirraim Webster Definition of fee
(Entry 1 of 2)
1a(1): an estate in land held in feudal law from a lord on condition of homage and service
The rooms for rent are made available to the workforce employees by their employer contingent on the condition that they are serving as employees of the hospital. This is a new solution by non-profit innovators who act as if occluded to the political reality they create, but are they really that blind?
What about the term, proletariat?
Proletariat the class of wage earners, especially those who earn their living by manual labor or who are dependent for support on daily or casual employment; the working class.
(in Marxist theory) the class of workers, especially industrial wage earners, who do not possess capital or property and must sell their labor to survive.
the lowest or poorest class of people, possessing no property, especially in ancient Rome. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/proletariat
Once the poorest class were people with minimal employment but today it is the “professional working classes” that are targeted by Simpson and Kale, of the Boothbay Region Housing Trust, incorporated as a non-profit on March 3, 2021, for solving the problem of “affordable workforce housing”. Some affordable workforce housing involves ownership, but I haven’t had a chance to explore that yet. Follow me to keep up to date on future research.
Definition of workforce
1: the workers engaged in a specific activity or enterprise the factory's workforce
2: the number of workers potentially assignable for any purpose the nation's workforce Cambridge Dictionary
The language in the definition treats the workforce as the property of the nation or the factory.
The term “industrial army” and “workforce’ are closely related.
The industrial army is a term that Marx and Engels use in the Communist Manifesto.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
Conditions may have improved today but the basics are still the same.
Since coronavirus brought working at home back into the mainstream, the voices of discontent coming from the workers of corporate culture are louder. My perspective is of course altered by joining Medium that gives voice to workers in corporate culture, whereas in the mainstream media is more apt to feature the self-branding of the corporate culture.
The core logic used to advance local development actually makes a point for why we do not need the large-scale workforce housing or the fifty million dollar school. The reason we should build, we are told, is that “people want to move here” and the evidence for that is that people are already moving here at a faster than anticipated pace- bringing the possibility of a water scarcity sooner than was previously thought, without the help of large scale schools or housing developments, though some crucial information is missing from the Water District report. Considering that the Water District talks as if continual and aggressive development is a given, we don’t know if the twenty-year time frame is based on the developer’s targets for growth that the Water District assumes will continue unabated, no matter what, or if the assessment is based on the current rate of growth. What we know is that aggressive development runs into a dead-end if there is not enough water to support the community in twenty years. The story from the Water District is that they have a solution, which is another investment in a new water supply pumped in from somewhere else, not sure where. That comes across like a pie in the sky in a zero-sum game.
Maybe it is time to change streams, listen to other voices than those that have been leading us down the current path.
There is another group of people who work for a living who do not fit into any of the above language classifications because they work for themselves. They are grassroots entrepreneurs. In other times they have been called, the cottage industries, the gypsies, the itinerate craftsmen. Today they are also called digital nomads, gig workers, remote workers, all distinct in their own category but having in common that they are not the workforce property of large corporations, even if they are participating in that economy. They are independent contractors. They are the grassroots entrepreneurs found at the roots of the productive economy. They usually do not have the level of income security offered by corporate culture and so their source of income is a direct outcome of their productivity. There was a time when the source of wealth creation was said to be productivity but in the days of widely innovative wealth distribution systems, society has become uprooted from the fertile soil of productivity. In the quote above by Marx, he identifies this class as the patriarchal masters of the little workshops, such as were my parents. Today this sector is partially included in the concept of remote working which has not yet shaken itself free of the idea of remote workers yoked to the big factories of the industrial capitalists- but that’s a change that’s coming. The world will wake up to the fact that in the age of automation, the reasons that the monolithic corporate system became so powerful are no longer as relevant as they once were.
Concerns emerge for the grass caused by grassroots use of the Boothbay Commons, newly reinvented as the campus carpet connecting the public-private seats of local government.
In the Register, there is a recent article about a grassroots entrepreneur named Lester Spear. (Boothbay Common may be new location for Trucks A-Go).
Spear hosted an event on his property last year during the season of Gardens Aglow that included ice sculptures and mobile food vendor trucks. It was an innovative idea and successful enough to cause a local uproar about traffic parked on the side of the road. Perhaps complainers saw Spear’s event as causing problems for the massive amount of traffic caused by the unregulated un-taxed but very wealthy non-profit organization sponsoring the unruly traffic event.
The town then imposed a parking ban and suggested that Spear could move his event to the town commons, causing another uproar in comments in the Register. I joined in and said the commons is supposed to serve the use of the people and that it is a standard business practice to charge a refundable fee to cover potential damages. The trucks for this event should be no more damaging than the trucks of the farmers market or the crafts fair and other events that occur in the summer when it is much easier to damage the new grass carpet of what some now perceive to be the manicured campus of our public-private seat of corporate governance, rather than a commons intended for the use by the public. One complainer even suggested that there was too much traffic congestion around the commons to accommodate the use of the commons by the people, not in those exact words. I pointed out that the cause of the congestion is the roundabout which should be removed since the congestion the roundabout creates is only going to get worse in the future and never get any better. Talking about displaced blame, the congestion is not coming from the commons, traffic is backing up in the other three intersections around the newly installed decor in the middle of the road.
Was the complainer implying that an event on the commons would interfere with the hundreds of thousands of cars coming into town for a wealthy non-profit organization’s number one money-making event of the year, backing up around the four million-dollar tree placed in the middle of the road at the entrance to the commons so that there is no further room to accommodate traffic for an event that allows members of a modest taxpaying culture to make a living?
Given that these are common issues that have been worked out in practice many eons ago, and being that what Lester Spear is doing falls into the same category as other current usages of the public commons, the derogatory response typifies the way that grassroots entrepreneurs are treated within the community- not as entrepreneurs contributing to the community, but as public nuisances at best.
Lester Spear's idea has its roots in the Medieval Fairs that started up around churches with vendors who at first were selling what they produced, the antithesis of the “great factory of the industrial capitalist”
So this morning I was sitting here writing this very blog when the phone rings and it is Lester Spear, whose name I immediately recognize although I have never met or spoken with him. The first thing he asks is if I am in marketing. He said he doesn’t participate in those conversations but I got what he is trying to do exactly right. There are a lot of things to work out but he is thinking as I was thinking- that there should also be other vendors at the event. What a great idea for the community! We are invited. We no longer have a production facility so we will be selling vintage work and other creative products in other media and I hope to be able to use the event for networking to find three board members so that I can finally move ahead with the Museum. The biggest problem to solve is a protective mobile structure that is needed for an outdoor fair at that time of year, especially. We do not have one.
The fair hours will be coordinated with Gardens AGlow starting November 18- New Years Day. I am very excited about this event and hope all the details are worked out so that it can proceed- and yes of course I would love to do marketing for this event because it is right up my alley and I will have a lot more to say about it later.