And rightly so. Bing’s plan of forcible relocation and destruction is a form of economically-motivated ethnic cleansing, especially since it is predicated on the idea of the city government taking that land and selling it off to real estate developers and speculators.

As we have said before, Detroit is becoming “ground zero” for these kind of corporatist social experiments. When the attempt to turn the Motor City into a “Cool City” failed 10 years ago, the capitalists and their managers scrambled for a solution. With shrinking population rates due to unemployment, the solution they came up with was to create what amounted to a “controlled Katrina” in economically-devastated American cities.

They would push these cities to the brink of economic collapse, gut municipal budgets and services, force massive population flight to other areas, and create a general atmosphere that the city had “failed.” Then, the city would be “re-invented” and “rebuilt,” minus the bulk of the poor and working-class population, as havens for the “middle class.”

While New Orleans may have served as the inspiration, it is Detroit that is becoming the model for a nationwide push to “downsize” America’s formerly industrial cities. After they are done there, cities like Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and other historical centers of the working class will face a similar fate. One might not be so paranoid to think this is a systematic attempt to diffuse the potential power of working people.

A city like Detroit, with more than 50 percent unemployed, with more than 50 percent living below the “official” poverty line, with infant mortality and literacy rates comparable to the Dominican Republic, with tens of thousands of people living without electricity or gas heat, and tens of thousands more having to work more than one job, having to hustle, or sell drugs or prostitute themselves just to survive, the city is ripe for a massive social explosion and upheaval on the scale of the 1967 Rebellion. No one wants that to happen, and few choose to speak about it, but it is on the minds of everyone these days.

What the working-class majority in Detroit wants is reconstruction, not destruction. Working people want to see their neighborhoods, industries and services, schools and recreation areas, and public facilities rebuilt and revitalized, not torn down and turned into tidy little rows of townhouses for “middle class” professionals working for one of the corporations in the Renaissance Group cartel of industrial and finance capitalists.

But there is a woeful lack of organization to get the job done. The existing coalitions and groups meant to tackle this or that issue facing Detroit workers are inadequate for the task. While they could serve as a transmission belt, it would take a more serious brand of political and economic organization to break the grip of the Renaissance corporatists.

The only way to defeat the corporatist attempts at “downsizing” is to defeat the system and class demanding it. That means a combined economic and political struggle to defeat capitalist rule, and replace it with direct workers’ control and workers’ rule. The Workers Party in America and WIIU are fighting for this. If you want to, too, then join us.