[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

[shag carpet bomb]

At 06:33 PM 4/1/2009, Carrol Cox wrote:
>What follows is from memory of a paper delivered in Chicago some years
>ago & I won't swear by the accuracy of my memory.
>
>About %40 of outside money (from wages, etc) that flowed into the inner
>city came, historically, form the sale of numbers. This activity was
>destroyed by the beginning of state lotteries. It was replaced by the
>sale of drugs. So businesses inside the inner city (groceries, bars,
>drug stores, cleaners, what have you) which formerly had been supported
>by the incomes of sellers of numbers now depended on the flow of funds
>from drug retail sales. Drug sales generate more violence than the
>numbers racket ever did.
>
>A personal memory. When I worked at Detroit Transmission Division of
>General Motors back in the summer of '55 there was one black worker in
>my department -- he operated the tempering furnace. He also sold numbers
>tickets in the factory. So he would have brought back to the black
>neighborhood not only his wages from GM but the money he got from
>selling tickets to fellow workers in the plant. No violence there. And
>one of the reasons there was no violence is because the cops didn't land
>on that racket the way they land on drug sales. That would have been
>because in all the large cities there were very respectable and powerful
>poltical figures linked to the crime sydicates that ran the numbers. For
>example, Jake ARvey in Chicago, who was an attorney for the 'mafia' --
>and also the man who mentored the politcal careers of Paul Douglas and
>Adlai Stevenson.
>
>Carrol

one crucial point, which I learned from Katrina Hazzard-Gordon who wrote 
about social dance formations in urban areas, connecting their particular 
forms to the political economy within which they emerged. (e.g., she writes 
about the demise of coupled/paired dancing that formed most of the street 
dancing in the 40s and 50s, with the individualized dancing that emerged 
later.)

On her argument, the legalization of gambling resulted in three things:

1. the loss of income in urban areas (people supplemented their incomes 
this way. It was perfectly respectable.)

2. the need for crime families to find other ways to make money -> the move 
to drugs. Gambling became a _state_ racket

3. With a state racket in gambling, extralegal forms of gambling became the 
target of police repression.

All of this forced the mafia to get out of the gambling business. 
Hazzard-Gordon sees this as an important framework to understand what 
happened to urban area.

Looking to see if Hazzard-Gordon's stuff was online, I came across this 
history: http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/97/03/Chapt2.html

In which we learn that the move to legalization gambling in the 20thc came 
with the Depression, "The antigambling mood changed as tremendous financial 
distress gripped the country, especially after the stock market crash of 
1929. Legalized gambling was looked upon as a way to stimulate the economy. 
Massachusetts decriminalized bingo in 1931 in an attempt to help churches 
and charitable organizations raise money. Bingo was legal in 11 states by 
the 1950s, usually only for charity purposes."

shag