"A New Terrain of Accumulation"

 “Defying Displacement - Urban Recomposition and Social War” by Andrew Lee, 2023

The author is an anarchist housing activist who runs down the main causes of homelessness, poverty and conflict in the rentier housing sector. He worked in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto and Philadelphia.  His disgust at the forces of Big Tech, its employees, including universities like Stanford, is obvious.  The problems are: “Affordable housing” plans that aren’t.  Gentrification.  AirBnBs and holiday lets.  Empty second, third or fourth homes.  Corporate ownership of housing and trailer parks by outfits like Blackrock. Mega-projects that displace residents.  Empty city and privately owned houses due to foreclosure.  City governments that change ordinances and zoning in order to clear the way for real estate ‘development.’ Intentionally pricing workers out to the peripheries of cities, increasing their commutes.  Pandemic ‘remote work’ gentrification that affects some small towns, as white-collars move away from big cities. And through it all – displacement of the original neighbors by more well-off professionals, business owners and managers, mostly light-skinned. 

All of this relates to the capitalist nature of society, where land ownership is private property and class and color castes are intrinsic to society.  Capital connects the production sector and the rentier economy, as low wages and labor exploitation price people out of housing. Lee slights the struggles of waged and precariat workers to focus on geographic struggles. 

Political Terms

Lee’s talks about various battles against these symptoms of private ownership and the housing 'market.' He sometimes equates ‘white’ with a petit-bourgeois or professional class or strata, which reflects an identity approach.  It is clear that chosen minority working-class communities are the targets of gentrification and that the real estate collapses in 2001 and 2008 hit minority communities the hardest.  But ‘white’ workers and artists have also been displaced and pushed to the edges. Class encompasses them all, as most minority people are working class at various levels. 

Capital will use any method, from literal slavery to debt slavery, neo-colonialism, rentier and financialized economics, so-called ‘neo-feudalism,’ prison labor and police to aid in supplying surplus value.  Lee does not point out the connection and writes as if these were separate economies. 

Avoiding the working class is usually the doorway to reformism by substituting other forces.  Whether it is the ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie; the ‘patriotic’ bourgeoisie; the lumpen-proletariat; the peasantry; a vague ‘community,’ housewives, youth, a certain ethnicity, the ‘poor,’ even the professional strata and sometimes a ‘Party” - all substitute for a working-class thrust.  In this case Lee shows how the peasant struggle in China was led by workers displaced from the cities; as was aid to the Zapatistas and Castro’s guerillas.  Now that the majority of people live in urban areas across the globe, national independence was formally granted for most and rural guerilla struggles are few, the main locus has shifted to urban areas.  This gives actual Marxists encouragement, as their first inspiration was the Paris Commune.  Lee centers the city as the site of the coming revolution, not waged workplaces in that city.

Lee’s recommended tactics are Land Trusts, squatting, blocking freeways, square encampments, rent parties, stopping evictions, cultural defense of landmarks and old neighborhood names and defending tenants and unhoused ‘villages.’ He never mentions political engagement, electoral work or voting. He cites the pellet-gunning of Google buses, destruction of gentrifiers’ property and opposes the antics of the upscale YesInMyBackYard (YIMBY) redevelopment crowds.  He understands that a home is more than a building, but contains memories, many relationships, history, personal labor and the like. Losing it is more than just physical displacement.

San Jose homeless camp grows for every increase in rent

Precarity and Dispersal

Lee’s main point is that the dispersal of large worksites of the working-class out of cities, to be replaced by small businesses and isolated white-collar and service workers, pushes urban labor and struggle toward new forms of organization by geography.  Precarity through subcontracting, high turnover and the legal fraud of ‘independent contractors’ makes stable labor concentration in one place even more difficult.  This was a lodestone of older Marxism.  Lee disparages the Google workers association, saying it is no union, claiming they get stock options so they are materially invested in Google.  Yet some unions also have this benefit.  The working classes have a broad range of strata, from top to bottom, and the idea is to get them to work together if possible.  This organization might be closer to a professional association, but Google has a range of jobs like every other corporation.

Lee seems to think that all unions are business unions and hence treacherous, while saying we should investigate “…it’s use as a node in the class struggle…”  reflecting unionism’s dual nature.  Instead Lee creates a straw man:  “The tribunes of left-wing orthodoxy contend that to look for the class struggle beyond the workplace (and unions) is impossible…”  Not sure who the hell ever said this.  It is clear though that he wants to move away from workplace organizing. 

Lee’s experience in how a Google mega-project was carried out in San Jose is indicative of how capital, government, NGOs and unions sometimes collaborate.  The project would take 150 acres of land, including ‘condemned’ housing and businesses and introduce 20,000 new tech employees to the area.  Google gave millions to non-profits as a sweetener and was only partly opposed by the local Working Partnerships of the AFL-CIO and a local community group Silicon Valley Rising.  The City Council voted for it after a year of secret meetings and arrests of mostly Latino opponents at Council meetings in what he calls a ‘managed democracy’ charade.   This is similar to mega projects like stadiums in other cities, where actual democratic input is managed, ignored or repressed. Evidently not one council person was opposed to a project which would raise housing costs and displace residents.  Nor does Lee consider this. 

Lee treats Google’s tactics to be counter-insurgency methods, but applied to domestic political issues.  The role of the police in real estate commodification is less understood, but he contends they increase their activities in minority neighborhoods slated for gentrification with killings, arrests and harassment.  This was the case in the Breonna Taylor shooting in Louisville and even Cop City in Atlanta fits this profile.  This is all part of a class war in a “new terrain of accumulation” where for the community, “representation is substituted for power.”

Atlanta's Cop City removes humans and trees

Theories

Lee does discuss the situation abroad a bit - tourist and expat-driven gentrification in cities like Barcelona and privatization of apartments in Old Havana for tourist or small business purposes.   He has no words on U.S. climate displacement and ‘shock doctrine’ redevelopment or international migrants and refugees, which are also forms of removal.  

A useful book looking at present incidences and battles around neighborhood commodification and gentrification, but it also contains sectarian thinking around labor organizing and electoral work. Nor does he mention socializing the land - a basic step taken across the world, or communes and cooperatives.  He has a capsule history of DSA and social-democracy and the bourgeois ‘campism’ of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, equating the latter with “Leninism.”  He then endorses ‘the metropolis’ – echoing the autonomous current in Italy led by Antonio Negri and insists cities now rank above capitalist nations as power-centers. He seems to think that the Tech giants are primarily rentier forces, not based on surplus value extracted from workers across the globe. He attacks, like Kropotkin, Marx for thinking primitive accumulation ended – when no Marxist thinks that, not even the first Marx.  It is called ‘combined and uneven development.’ Like most anarchists, the book ends with a polemic against a confabulated view of Marxism.

Lee does question the anarchist verities of nostalgia for the Spanish anarchists, Emma Goldman and the IWW – much as some Marxists can’t quit talking about 1871, 1917, the 1930s or 1949.  At least he demands a modernization of a materialist analysis, which is sorely lacking in modern socialist and anarchist groups.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box in the upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “How to Kill a Neighborhood,” “Capital City,” “Cade’s Rebellion,” “Tales of Two Cities,” “Minneapolis 2040 Housing Plan,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Balinese Political Art,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “Planet of Slums” (Davis), “Hinterland,” “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Shock Doctrine” (Klein), “From Factory to Metropolis”(Negri) or the word ‘gentrification.’  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / May 10, 2024