A short essay by Curtis Price
I have been re-reading a book called "Fragmented Societies: A Sociology of Economic Life beyond the Market Paradigm" by an Italian sociologist named Enzo Mingione. It's a very weighty book (nearly 500 pages) and he is wide ranging in his scope. One of the threads he discusses concerns Naples. Naples, of course, is the hustling city par excellence, having had such an economy for nearly 300 years now.
I think in the U.S., parts of many cities are being 'napalized' and it would be interesting to study some of the lessons from Naples, which has been coping with a huge informal and non-guaranteed economic base for a much longer period of time. Part of the difficulty is that I think many people in the U.S. are recoiling from thinking such trends might become more widespread here. There is still the hope that permanent, well paying jobs can return, particularly if political pressure is applied. They should indeed fight for this. But I think it is important to avoid using the call for jobs as a sort of maginot line: a seemingly impregnable defense that, once penetrated, has no back-up. So I think we must seriously examine the survival strategies of the very poor in Naples and the Third World so that people here are not just reacting to the larger economic trends and restructuring -- but perhaps can be pro-active and conscious regarding the growth of the informal economy and the demise of large scale opportunities for unskilled workers.
So the Arabber peddler issue in Baltimore, far from trying to preserve a quaint custom from the past, may actually be a model for the near future and it is important to fight any limits on this type of small scale entrepreneurship. The biggest opposition will come from small businesses who are understandably very hostile to micro-enterprises. They have obtained laws restricting street vendors, even attempting to limit the items they can sell to goods that are non-competitive with those offered by the stores. Lexington Market in Baltimore, by the way, is very hostile to street vendors and the rents are so high that it is very difficult for street people to make the leap into stall ownership.
An issue, of course, will be to avoid the competitive pressures of a race to the bottom: desperate layers of disadvantaged people being driven to undercut the positions of the more secure in a struggle for survival that involves high degrees of self-exploitation. But that is an argument really for developing models now that can reduce these pressures as much as possible. At any rate, this is an open-ended question with no immediate conclusions in sight.
- Curtis Price is editor of STREET VOICE and at present "constructively unemployed". His E-mail address is <cansv@igc.apc.org>.
STREET VOICE is a Baltimore broadsheet distributed on the streets outside soup kitchens, shelters, drug treatment programs and in public housing projects. It is also the name of an informal network of people loosely involved, on an ad-hoc basis, on issues affecting homeless and very low income. people.
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