The idea that contemporary American lawn-care standards are the result of brainwashing is politically naive. There's nothing voluntary about lawns. Lawns are an essential tool in contemporary capital's violent urban labor control strategy.

Most American cities have mandatory lawn-care standards in their muni codes. Such laws allow cities to unilaterally bring yards up to code and bill residents for the work. Whatever the purposes behind such laws in the past, now one function is to force people into the cash economy. (1) There are dozens of laws like this, requiring residents to clear sidewalks, paint fences, shovel snow, plant specific trees, and so on.

Anyone who has enough money can pay other people to do this work, but people living on the financial edge either do it themselves in addition to job, self, and family care responsibilites or else the City does the work, bills the resident,(2) adds interest, and so on. This is too much of a loss for many people, so they make sure the damn work gets done.

If they don't, the unpaid bills pile up and the City will confiscate the property to pay them. If the residents won't leave the cops will make them leave. At this stage of American capitalism lawn care standards are enforced at gunpoint except, of course, for rich people.

QED

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(1) I believe this is akin to what @HeavenlyPossum calls a "tollbooth", but I won't speak for them.

(2) Or possibly the landlord. I feel like this is variable across cities and also probably subject to modification in lease terms.

#DownWithLawns #ClimateChange #Environment #Anarchism #Capitalism #Lawns #BillHeavey #Tollbooths #WageLabor #LaborControl

The US Civil War can be fruitfully seen as a dispute between capitalists over which was the more sustainable system of labor control. Northern capitalists won, which proves they were right about the nonsustainability of slavery.

Slavery isn't sustainable compared to coerced wage labor, but while it works it's way more profitable. Which doesn't mean they wouldn't chain you up in their fields and factories tomorrow morning if they could pull it off. They can't, but that's the only reason they don't.

#Slavery #WageLabor #WageLabour #Capitalism #Labor #LaborControl #CivilWar #USCivilWar #NineteenthCentury #Abolition