“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.
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| 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.”
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| 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
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