Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not "Supply and Demand"

By Shi Sanyazi

There is a widely accepted belief among the journalists, think tanks, and politicians who animate the housing discourse that a lack of housing supply is the source of tenants’ present conditions (ever-rising rents, primarily). It follows that these thinkers advocate for a variety of policies which will, in their eyes, allow the market to “self-correct.” Once the supply of housing has met the demand, they argue that rents should go down (just like in the graphs we drew in high-school economics class!).

We shouldn’t deny that the idea has a comforting appeal. It offers a neat, ostensibly “common-sense” solution that all sides — developers, landlords, tenants — can theoretically get behind. It’s very easy to say: “match supply and demand and rents will go down — that’s just how markets work.” It’s more difficult to admit the inconvenient truth. 

The truth is that — especially in the era of algorithmic price-setting and increasingly financialized, corporate ownership of rental housing — our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand. 

Landlords, developers and their financiers are classes with class interests — namely, making the fattest profits possible. They are highly organized and have historically been willing to wage war on anyone who challenges their bottom line. Real estate capital’s return-on-investment depends on their capacity to out-organize and overpower tenants. 

Tenants' class interests — community control over our housing and the basic need for shelter — are, by definition, the opposite of real estate capital’s class interests.

The “supply crisis” narrative is deficient because it makes no attempt to reckon with the class relationships which define the housing market. The assumptions this narrative makes about the behavior of the housing market hinge on ignoring the structural imbalance of power between tenants and landlords, developers and their financiers. 

Landlord’s profit margins are determined by their level of organization (aided nowadays by political corruption, algorithmic financialization and consolidation of the rental housing stock) and the state’s ability to enable their exploitation with neglect, violence, and the threat of violence. Developers similarly ensure their profits by working in tandem with local governments and the police to forcibly remake neighborhoods to their liking, displacing working-class Black and brown communities. Lurking in the shadows, backing the landlords and developers, is the ruthlessly efficient and sophisticated arm of finance capital.

If we understand real estate capital as an organized class pursuing its class interests, and if we take the “pro-housing” argument at face value (i.e; increased supply will decrease rents), then we would expect real-estate interests (whose profits would be cut into if rents decreased) to oppose their policy prescriptions.

It’s quite curious then that the real-estate lobby and their political bedfellows openly support “pro-housing” non-profits and propagate their political lines. Powerful lobbying groups like the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and the National Multifamily Housing Council revel in parroting “pro-housing” talking points. From REBNY’s 2022 testimony on Mayor Adams’ housing plan: 

New York is facing a housing crisis. A key driver of this crisis is the lack of housing production and inadequate supply to meet the needs of our growing and diverse city.

They go on to — shocker! — recommend the city and state remove regulatory barriers to development and continue to subsidize their lucrative construction projects. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that NYC Mayor, Eric Adams, agrees: he’s pledged to administrate a “city of yes,” arguing bluntly in The Economist that “although many factors contribute to the problem, at its core we have a housing crisis because we are not building enough housing.” NY Governor Kathy Hochul’s housing proposals echo the same logic. For what it's worth, Adams and Hochul have both been consistently showered with real-estate donations.

So, despite the promise that building more housing will bring down rents, the real-estate lobby embraces the prospect of building more housing! Why? Because the “supply crisis” narrative is an idea working in defense of their class interests.

Do we really believe that landlords and developers will actively support a reduction in their profits? Do we think they’re going to resign themselves with a deep sigh and a “well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles?” How naïve can we possibly be? As James Baldwin once wrote of capitalism, to imagine these leeches ceding power and profits willingly demands “yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin Birth.” 

Landlords and developers have no interest in solving the housing crisis because the permanence of that crisis is the condition of their wealth and power. This understanding has serious practical implications. 

In other words, if we understand our conditions to be a result of class struggle (rather than a market imbalance), it becomes quite clear that our conditions will be determined by our level of organization as tenants and our ability to wage struggle against the force that commodifies our need for shelter: real-estate capital.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone

This conclusion is the same as that at the core of all consciousness-raising movements, indeed at the core of all anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal movements (see, for example, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa; the Combahee River Collective; or the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil). It's the same conclusion which the legendary anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon came to:

[Political education] means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone.

When we get organized, we have the capacity to transform our conditions. Will we win collective control over our cities? Will the threadbare protections we have left be rolled back? Will we stagnate? It’s up to us! 

Through militant organization, tenants wield — and historically have wielded! — a tremendous amount of power. Every concession from the landowning class; thus, every victory for tenants, has been won through this organization. 

The first rent control laws in New York City were passed due to pressure created by waves and waves of militant rent strikes (not to mention the fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution that these strikes helped inspire). Great Depression-era tenant activism — which included the successful efforts by the Communist Party to reverse evictions of working class tenants — was the impetus for New York City’s first public housing projects (FDR himself said that the concessions of the New Deal were driven by a desire to “save our system, the capitalist system…”). Mass agitation by Black organizers led to the passage of Fair Housing laws (while the real estate lobby was organizing against them). The COVID-19 eviction moratorium in New York was fought for and repeatedly extended due to pressure from organized tenant unions.

These are all tenuous and often contradictory reforms (public housing in the US, for instance, often deepened racial segregation), class truces which politicians negotiated in exchange for relative peace and quiet. The goal is not to aspire to reform, but to highlight that these reforms were not enacted because of our participation at the ballot box, nor passed by a benevolent state, nor advocated for by benevolent landlords and developers — they were fought for, collectively, in the streets and hallways and lobbies of our neighborhoods. 

Tenants are and always have been the protagonists of the struggle for control over our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities. 

OK. With that in mind, we can move on to addressing the core claim — that the “housing crisis” is caused by a supply deficit — in detail. Through this, we can highlight that the “housing crisis” is not “fixable” with “policy.” Our conditions as tenants are determined by our level of organization and effectiveness at waging class struggle.

The “supply crisis”

An imbalance between supply and demand is not the source of tenants’ present conditions. The real source — as has been the case since capitalism violently imposed its will on the world four centuries ago — are the private property relations which enable the exploitation of working people by the landowning class. Present-day gentrification is just one chapter in the centuries-long story of displacement, enclosure and imperialism which has marked the penetration of capital into indigenous and working class communities. So long as these relations remain intact, our struggle will persist. 

This is not to say that we should never build housing. There’s no doubt that under the collective governance of the working class (god-willing), the supply of housing would be responsive to migration and other fluctuations in demand. The disagreement stems from a core question: who is building housing and for whom are they building housing?

The alternative to the current arrangement, wherein tenants have next to zero democratic control over their communities, is to organize towards a world where tenants themselves collectively control and direct the development of safe, beautiful, ecological housing. 

That’s the polemic response — let’s dive a little deeper. As we work through the details, let’s keep the argument in mind:

Tenants’ conditions are determined by the balance of class power, not “supply and demand.”

This section is divided into a few parts to make it a bit more digestible. 

Mind the rent gap!

We can start by exploring the process of gentrification, where we can very clearly observe how real estate capital wields its class power to mold cities to its liking. Notably, its class organization has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, as the rental housing stock has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. It can be quite challenging nowadays to figure out who your landlord actually is, as they usually hide behind a maze of shell companies, LLCs and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). An army of supers and management companies further distance landlords from tenants, acting as convenient buffers for the corporate owners and private equity firms pulling the strings.

As a result of this consolidation, private equity firms, mega-developers and corporate landlords execute rent hikes, serve evictions, illegally (and legally) deregulate apartments and in sum, cause displacement, in an increasingly coordinated manner. 

In our organizing, more often than not, we work with tenants in buildings owned by a landlord with hundreds to thousands of units in their portfolio. (The average apartment in New York City is part of an 893 unit portfolio.) When we visit other buildings in that portfolio, we’ll usually find the same issues, whether disrepair, harassment, skyrocketing rents, and (illegal and legal) deregulation. 

(If you are interested in researching the owner of your building in NYC and kick-starting a tenants association in your building, JustFix is an incredible asset.)

To streamline gentrification, mega-developers, corporate landlords, and private equity firms utilize sophisticated algorithms to identify “rent gaps.” A rent gap is the difference between the rent currently being paid by tenants and the rent that could be potentially charged in the same location if the current tenants were evicted through legal or illegal means. PropTech companies like Skyline AI and RealPage are accomplices in this plunder. Their business is that of identifying apartments which are “‘inefficient’ in the rental market in relation to their total cost, before teaming up with the largest property investment companies to make an offer.” 

These advanced techniques (enabled by troves of data collected by big tech firms) allow investors to target optimal neighborhoods for gentrification with pinpoint accuracy. It shouldn’t surprise us that at a neighborhood level, there is a direct correlation between concentrated corporate ownership and gentrification. 

Naturally, real estate capital’s drive to extract as much profit out of our cities as possible does not care much for pesky renter protections like rent-stabilization and public housing. In fact, the relatively low rents in rent-stabilized apartments and public housing (as compared to market-rate) make them even more appealing, in the sense that they present even larger rent gaps to “close.” 

From a private equity firm’s perspective: Imagine a rent-stabilized building which rents for an average of $800/mo per unit, in a neighborhood where rents are averaging $1500/mo per unit (and climbing!), or are where rents are primed to increase to that price (in accordance to the precise calculations of algorithms from RealPage and Skyline AI). To a private equity firm, the building represents an opportunity for superprofits. To the building’s working class, usually Black and brown tenants, the building is not an investment opportunity — it’s home, a small pocket of resistance to the waves of real estate capital engulfing their communities. But if the private equity firm can evict the current residents, destabilize the building, and slap on a gentrification mask — then they can charge many times as much in rent and make a fat profit. All in a day's work for the vampires sucking our cities dry. 

Real estate capital also pushes this class agenda through legal action. For instance, New York City landlords are currently suing to wipe out rent regulations which protect around 1 million tenants from naked exposure to the “free market.” This case will go to the revanchist Supreme Court, who will likely rule in favor of the landlords. Once again, we can plainly observe that our class enemies are organized and aggressive!

It’s not an accident that in our organizing we encounter and experience consistent patterns of harassment, disrepair, and neglect in rent-regulated buildings. In New York City, deregulation is most commonly allowed upon vacancy, so it follows that landlords and speculators doggedly pursue vacancy via eviction. Some of their choice strategies include: buyouts, fake eviction notices, illegal refusal to renew leases, intimidation, neglect, intentional disrepair, cutting off heat, electricity and water, calling the police on tenants, and direct harassment. There are technically legal protections against strong-arming tenants out of regulated apartments, but they’re rarely enforced. Like other tenant’s rights (or, for that matter, any right “granted” by the state), protection from harassment is generally only realized when enforced by organized tenants. 

It’s also not an accident that the real-estate lobby and their politician friends have intentionally neglected to fund the upkeep of New York City’s remaining public housing stock. After all, NYCHA’s repair backlog (many tens of billions dollars) makes for a very convenient political device. When it came time to justify the “Preservation Trust” — nothing more than a scheme to privatize and commodify that remaining bastion of working class affordability — NYCHA’s repair backlog was cynically presented as evidence that public funding is no longer feasible. When challenged by outraged NYCHA tenants, conservative and “socialist” politicians alike argued that we have no option but to turn to the private sector to save NYCHA. As Holden Taylor writes: 

The line of reasoning put forth by the policy wonks and “socialists” advocating for the trust is, as usual, one of pragmatism and practicality. The Trust is the only way to get money for repairs, they say. This boils down, to butcher Rosa Luxemburg’s aphorism, a framework of “Privatization or Barbarism,” as these experts claim that the only alternative to the Trust is the status quo and the ever more crumbling infrastructure and dire quality of life that define it. Again, this is a failure of imagination. It is the socialist’s responsibility to push past the status quo, to fight for socialism, not merely a different form of marketization.

These observations about de-regulation and the privatization of public housing also help us to understand why the minority of left YIMBYs — who argue we should pair market solutions with an increase in social housing and tenant protections — are so woefully misguided. There is no way to guarantee that any housing we build will stay affordable when landlords, developers and finance capital have demonstrated they will wield their class power to commodify every inch of the city they can get their grubby hands on. Even our supposedly “socialist” elected officials are liable to bend to the will of real-estate capital without an organized mass movement to back them. The sober reality is: the remaining sources of off-market housing are being eroded because we are not sufficiently organized to protect them. The only way to protect those apartments and reverse the trend is through organized struggle. 

For instance, in 2020, organized community groups resisted the illegal eviction of tenants at 1214 Dean St. in Crown Heights. By occupying the stoop and physically resisting the eviction, the tenants eventually forced the city to buy the apartments and convert them into publicly-funded, affordable housing.

Build, baby, build! What could go wrong?

It doesn’t matter how “market optimistic” you are (as one reporter recently described the “pro-housing” non-profit Open New York) — when we let developers build freely, they will always be incentivized to build market-rate housing because those are the developments with the juiciest profit margins (and often the juiciest subsidies). This is not a neutral outcome. Building housing which people in surrounding neighborhoods cannot afford is the one of the first steps in the process of gentrification. 

In response to residents’ concerns about displacement, politicians will often promise that developments will meet the needs of communities because they contain 10% or 20% affordable units. This logic is premised on the idea that flooding a working class neighborhood which desperately needs cheap housing with, for instance, 900 market-rate units and 100 “affordable” units (which, due to the way affordability is measured, are often not actually affordable to those who most desperately need them), will produce anything but an influx of wealthier people who will displace the current residents. Just the announcement of permits for new market-rate developments can set off a frenzy of speculation, as investors look to sink their grimy fingernails into the imminently gentrifying neighborhood. 

The rise in the median income of an area (which inevitably accompanies market-rate development in working class neighborhoods) is often the impetus for steep hikes in the median rent. Which is to say: when people have more money, landlords generally raise rents (and rents usually rise faster than income — a few studies to reference: here, here and here.) Income inequality ensures that rising median rents disproportionately displaces working class tenants, as Francesca Manning explains:

While some people’s income is increasing at a rate to keep pace with rising rents, a large group of people’s wages are stagnating, falling, or rising far too slow to keep them housed … households that live in high-income [areas], whether or not they are themselves high income, end up paying a higher and higher percentage of their wages in rents.

In locales where market-rate development is not profitable, developers will not develop unless subsidized. This is a prominent form of “organized abandonment,” the movement of capital and social services away from populations and geographies deemed surplus and/or no longer profitable. Working class Black and brown communities are the first victims of this abandonment. These communities are faced with either: investment and gentrification; or disinvestment and abandonment. It’s russian roulette, except all of the chambers are loaded. Flint’s working-class Black population is one such example of a community which has been systematically abandoned by capital and the state.

Even with an understanding that developers will always build for profit, some will maintain that new housing supply at the top-end creates downward pressure on the market and “filters” units down to working class tenants. This is not an effective strategy, especially with the urgency that present conditions demand. Even when a filtering effect can be observed over decades, it is usually outweighed by the more immediate effects — sharply increased rent burdens and displacement  — that market-rate development set in motion. It’s important to understand that the “housing market” is not a single, unified market, but rather a series of income-level based sub-markets. Increased supply at the top end of the market can simultaneously stabilize rents for high-income tenants and increase rents for low-income tenants.

The “filtering” theory makes more than a few dubious presumptions. Three more are:

1. that new apartments will be occupied by warm-blooded humans;

2. that tenants are able to move constantly to and from apartments in the name of market equilibrium; 

3. that landlords who were recently collecting rent from a wealthier tenant will suddenly have a change of heart and lower their rent to accommodate the new, lower-income tenant who is moving into the “filtered” apartments.

1) ignores the reality, which is that many of these apartments are destined to be bought for investment purposes. At least a hundred thousand units in New York City are investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich. As Raquel Rolnik writes, luxury real estate in places like New York City has increasingly become a “safe-deposit box for the transnational wealthy elite,” rendering many new apartments un-filterable.

2) and 3) are even further divorced from reality. I’m not quite sure where the filtering theory nerds are finding landlords willing to grant day-to-day leases to allow for this kind of flexibility — nor where they find landlords willing to sacrifice their bottom line for the sake of market equilibrium. 

To this point (that supply and rents are not necessarily, or even likely to be correlated), we can briefly look at two of the metropolitan areas which produced the most housing in the last decade (2010-2019): Raleigh, NC and Austin, TX. Both of these cities maintained a ratio of 1-2 jobs per new housing unit, which mainstream economists consider to be “healthy.”

In Raleigh, housing construction kept pace with population growth from 2010-2019. Did rents stabilize or go down in accordance with the magic supply and demand graph? No! They rose 53%, miraculously spurning the ironclad economic law of supply and demand.

In Austin, between 2010 and 2020, new housing production actually outpaced population growth (25.5% to 21.7%). According to the “supply crisis” narrative, rents should have gone down or at least stabilized, right? You’ll be shocked to learn that between 2010 and 2020, rents in Austin increased by 93%. Historically Black enclaves like East Austin have rapidly gentrified in spite of the growth in housing construction. The supposedly common sense relationship between housing supply and median rents is, uh, not so apparent to the average tenant in Austin.

The shock troops of real-estate capital

Class power requires enforcers, and real-estate capital’s war on working-class tenants is no different. The police are intimately involved in the process of displacement. 

The police are, after all, the most visible manifestation of the violence which undergirds private property relations. When you don’t (or can’t) pay your rent, you come face to face with the enforcers of the private-property relation: the court sending a Marshall to serve you with an eviction notice, and the police forcefully and violently executing that eviction if you resist. Landlords rely on the police to backstop evictions, which is the most fundamental mechanism for the reproduction of privately-owned housing. Without the threat of eviction, the landlord's power would evaporate, as we experienced during the COVID-19 eviction moratoriums. The state’s power is also felt implicitly: even if a tenant association is interested in taking a radical action like resisting a fellow tenant’s eviction, they understand that the state will almost certainly intervene on the side of the landlord, and can therefore be discouraged from acting. 

The process of eviction is nothing less than the state using their monopoly on legal violence to privilege the landlord’s right to exploit us over our human need to have a roof over your head. 

Gentrification relies on the same violence to function. In its infancy, gentrification is marked by the violent projections of private property relations onto working class communities, which solidify in physical form as the police. Cops consistently step up broken windows policing in neighborhoods which are gentrifying, further exposing working class Black and brown communities to the carceral state. Broken windows policing is the proverbial stick to the carrot of tax abatements, rezoning and developer incentives which open the floodgates for real estate capital. 

In the process of gentrification, homeless tenants (homeless people are tenants in that they do not control their housing; the struggles of housed tenants and homeless tenants exist along the same spectrum of precarity) are brutalized and disappeared. Eric Adams’ assault on homeless tenants which we have resisted over the past year is inseparably part of this same project. He is not uniquely evil either; his predecessors De Blasio and Bloomberg similarly utilized the NYPD to terrorize homeless tenants and remake the city to the real estate lobby’s liking. Connecting the struggles of homeless tenants to housed tenants — not just in solidarity, but as a movement united in opposition to the same forces of real estate capital — is a crucial task.

As many have compellingly argued, including her own family, Breonna Taylor was, at least in part, a victim of state-sanctioned gentrification. Breonna was murdered in the Russell neighborhood, which was being explicitly targeted for gentrification by the city of Louisville. Before and after her murder at the hands of the state, there was an observable “sharp increase in public nuisance cases, with 84% of those cases occurring in Louisville’s predominantly Black western half, which includes the Russell neighborhood.” As the Root Causes Research Center explains:

… the forces of property and police converged in Russell to acquire the remaining property for the redevelopment of Elliott Ave through the collaboration of the Louisville Metro Develop Louisville Office and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s Placed Based Investigations Squad (PBI). Increased pressure from the Louisville Mayor's Office to acquire these properties led directly to the rapid employment of PBI. The PBI Squad, then, employed a concept they were barely familiar with, to create the false evidence needed for the "No-Knock Warrant" that led to the murder of Breonna Taylor.

Gentrification is a process which travels along the existing contours of racial capitalism. Working-class Black communities (including homeless tenants) are the first to encounter — and the first to resist — the rusty knife edge of displacement. 

In sum: Gentrification is initiated by speculative, algorithmically-backed, financialized development and landlord harassment; enabled by racist police violence, tax abatements, developer incentives and capitalist urban planning; and resulting in displacement and harm (sometimes death) for the working class Black and brown communities who stand in its way. Gentrification is, in other words, not a natural phenomenon, not an unavoidable but necessary process, but rather one front in real estate capital’s organized class war on working class tenants.

Does this evidence point to a solution which gives more freedom to developers and landlords? No. Gentrification can only be stopped by collective control of our buildings, neighborhoods and cities. After all, it's highly unlikely that communities would displace themselves if and when they win control over their space.

One glimmer of hope we can look to for inspiration: In Los Angeles, after being confronted with rent increases of up to 200%, the tenants of Hillside Villa organized, militantly — in Spanish, Cantonese and English, no less. In 2022, their organizing paid off: they successfully pressured the city to buy their building on their behalf, thwarting their landlord's attempt to fatten his profit margins and placing their housing under some level of community control.

Ransom, manipulation, collusion

Organized real-estate capital demonstrates every day that it will protect its profits by any means necessary — regardless of “market equilibrium.” Outside of the strategies we’ve already covered, some of their choice tactics include market manipulation, legal action and collusion.

For instance: CHIP — a New York landlord advocacy group — is currently keeping 20,000 rent-stabilized units vacant (an act that is particularly malicious considering that over a hundred thousand New Yorkers are homeless, including thirty thousand children). In total, over 60,000 rent stabilized units are currently vacant across the city. Why? As a threat! A show of force! An act of organized class war! CHIP has openly stated that they won’t put these apartments back on the market until the state legislature repeals the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act, which limits their ability to jack up rents after making necessary renovations. It’s a “ransom!”

As Karl Marx himself pointed out (and others have more recently argued), the tendency of the landowning class to withhold their land from the market, and to threaten to withhold land from the market, is intrinsic to capitalism. Holding land off the market is not an irrational action for landlords — it is a rational, profit-maximizing strategy that is employed everyday by landowners across the world. This tendency is why, seemingly paradoxically, increases in vacancy rates do not always correspond with reduced rents.

This tendency explains why property owners will always fight vigorously against any regulation which would restrict their ability to keep units vacant. For example, in response to a newly passed vacancy tax which would fine landlords for failing to rent empty apartments, organized San Francisco landlords (through lobbying groups representing thousands of property owners) are suing the city, arguing they have “constitutional and statutory rights to keep their units vacant if they so choose.” Constitutionally speaking, they’re correct — the Supreme Court will always protect property owners “right to exclude” — but that’s only because the Supreme Court is designed to codify and protect private property relations.

According to the most recent statistics (from 2021), there are around 250,000 (officially) vacant units in New York City. Importantly, the vacancy rate does not include the hotel rooms which sit empty while homeless tenants beg for change just outside their doors, nor unreported warehoused market-rate apartments, nor the hundred thousand or so units which are kept as investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich.

While in any context, there will be some vacancies, to really understand this number we have to understand which apartments are vacant. Low-cost apartments are at near-zero vacancy levels while the vacancy rates  in high-cost apartments remain extraordinarily high. Tracy Rosenthal of the LA Tenants Union sums up this disparity bluntly: “There is no shortage of housing except for poor and working people, which the market has never and will never provide.” 

In their 2022 report, the Community Service Society of New York echoes Rosenthal, writing that many of New York’s vacancies can be attributed to “long-term overproduction of luxury condos/co-ops as investment vehicles.” They sum up their findings neatly:

There is very little available housing at low rents, but a lot available at rents most New Yorkers couldn’t possibly pay. At the same time, more and more apartments are going unused, not because nobody wants them – clearly there’s plenty of demand for housing – but because their owners are keeping them as pieds-a-terre, Airbnbs, investment properties, or warehoused rentals.

One example of this phenomenon, from Madden and Marcuse:

On January 16, 2015, a limited liability corporation named P89-90 bought a single penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan for $100,471,452.77 … the luxury tower that it tops, branded as One57, is not likely to be a particularly sociable environment. Chances are that none of the building’s ninety-two condominium units will be their owner’s sole residence. In fact, many of the apartments in One57 will remain empty. They will be held as investments or as vanity homes for people who do not lack for places to live. One57 is not high-rise housing so much as global wealth congealed into tower form.”

In recent years, the rental housing stock has become increasingly concentrated in larger and larger portfolios controlled by private equity firms and corporate landlords. In New York City, around 9 in 10 apartments are owned by corporate landlords. 

One important implication of this trend: the more organized and concentrated ownership is, the easier it is for landlords to collude and fix prices — a task made significantly easier due to the rise of algorithmically-informed price-setting. Services like the now infamous RealPage — which uses advanced data to help landlords charge the highest possible rents for their units — openly boast about their role in driving the staggering rent hikes of recent years. A ProPublica investigation revealed RealPage has “recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.” RealPage and other similar services are a potent tool for cartel style market collusion, a fact which has not escaped the ire of the Department of Justice's antitrust lawyers. 

A common “pro-housing” argument is that increased supply gives renters more options, thus allowing us to play landlords off of eachother and secure lower rents. Again, this line of thinking ignores the sordid reality, which is that landlords will flex their class muscle to keep rents high — and that without organization, tenants have no power to contest their ever-worsening conditions. What good is a market equilibrium if the landlords are almost certain to collude, warehouse apartments and keep rents high regardless?

Landlord’s profit-maximizing behavior plainly highlights the irrationality endemic to capitalism. Well, let's amend that: it's quite rational for those who own the property. For the rest of us (the vast majority) — not so much. A system which distributes (and chooses not to distribute!) housing based on the profits that will accrue to its owners is a system which is incapable of ending the precarity which defines our lives as tenants. 

The “housing crisis” is not so much a crisis as a permanent feature of urban capitalism, an unavoidable consequence of developing and distributing housing as a commodity to line the pockets of the few, rather than organizing housing around the social need for shelter. Framing our experience as a “crisis” insinuates that it is an aberration from the norm, an aberration which can be “solved” with policy fixes, new legal protections and, most insidiously, the market. The system is not in crisis; the crisis is the system!

It's all about class power? Always has been.

What we’re observing here is the all too familiar dissonance between capitalism’s economic theories and its economic realities. Despite what free-market proselytizers and “market optimists” alike want us to believe (as if there’s any functional difference between the two), capitalism is a system whose outcomes are ultimately determined by the balance of class power. Landlords, developers and financiers, who are single-mindedly driven by a desire to extract as much profit as possible out of tenants, do not submit meekly to the “laws” of supply and demand. 

To imagine that rent prices hinge on supply and demand rather than class power is completely ahistorical. Time and time again, capitalism has demonstrated an inherent tendency towards monopoly, cynical market manipulation and organized class warfare. 

Understanding the balance of class power as the condition of our exploitation is simultaneously key to grasping that our exploitation can only be limited and abolished through the exercise of our own class power as tenants. We’re engaged in a class war which only one side is consciously fighting. Our choice as tenants is whether or not we want to fight back.

If the future came on a platter…

The common sense which commands our collective reflexes does not permit us to think of revolution. After all, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

So it’s natural that we’re derided as unrealistic for striving towards the abolition of the landlord class, and by extension the abolition of capitalism — but are we the unrealistic ones?

Our critics (liberals!) — on all issues, not just housing; think climate change, for instance — position themselves as “realistic” for arguing that handing the reins to organized capital will alleviate the conditions of the working class. Don’t we have hundreds of years of experience telling us that the exact opposite will happen? We can look to our cities as they are right now to understand that control of our buildings and neighborhoods by profit-motivated landlords, financiers and developers is a disastrous arrangement.

There’s nothing realistic about giving capital the freedom to roam where it wants and praying that it will magically change course and defy its five hundred year history of ravaging indigenous and working class communities for profit.

It's nonsense. Don’t listen to these people — they are the ones being unrealistic. 

And yes, to organize towards community control of our buildings and neighborhoods is a tremendous, daunting task. But let’s remember that we don’t organize simply because we believe in a political program. To struggle, to think — to really think! — to learn, is nothing less than the process of being alive. To not be in the struggle is a much more demoralizing proposition.

So let's get to it! Landlords and developers, and the financiers that back them, are tremendously well organized. To beat them, we have to turn to the only method by which we have historically won: that is, through our militant organization. If history has taught us anything, it's that we can only win by out-organizing our class enemies. 

Check out the Autonomous Tenants Union Network to see if there’s an existing organization in your area. In New York City: the Crown Heights Tenant Union, the Ridgewood Tenants Union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense and Tenant Union Flatbush; nationwide, the aforementioned Los Angeles Tenants Union; Tenants and Neighborhood Council (TANC) in the Bay Area; Stomp Out Slumlords in DC; and many more are doing incredible, principled work. 

You can find some resources and thoughtful reflections on tenant organizing here, here, here, here, here and here.

I like to think of this essay as a small contribution to uncovering the shape of the conjuncture, as Stuart Hall would call it. There is, of course, much more to be uncovered (and much more that has already been uncovered!), such as: the relation of tenants in the imperial core to the global anti-imperialist movement; how the tenant movement can resist settler-colonialism and aid the struggle for indigenous sovereignty; feminism and the tenant movement; the homeless industrial complex; and the ideology of homeownership, to name a few.

None of this work is easy. But, as Eduardo Galeano reminds us: “If the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.”

Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men

[Pieter Bruegel the Elder : The Harvesters (oil painting from 1565)]

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

“I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to purchase and inhabit the earth.”

—Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1550[1]

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

—Karl Marx, 1867[2]

The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”[3]

Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.

The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift from commons-based to private-profit-based farming was not accepted easily — in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.

Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded as king by Edward VI, then only nine years old. For the next six years, actual political power rested with a regency council, headed by the Duke of Somerset until 1549, and by the Duke of Northumberland from late 1549 until Edward’s death in 1553.

Somerset and Northumberland were strong protestants who wanted the English church to move farther from catholic doctrine and practices than Henry had allowed. To promote that, the law outlawing heresy was repealed and censorship was relaxed, beginning a period that has been called “the first great era in the history of English public discussion.”[4]

Liberal protestants took advantage of that opening to campaign vigorously, not just for religious reform, but against sin and corruption in society at large, particularly the erosion of traditional economic values. Their powerful condemnations of greedy landlords and merchants circulated both as books and sermons addressed to the wealthy, and as inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides that were sold in city streets.

They don’t seem to have acted as an organized group, but their speeches and writings clearly reveal the presence of a strong current of anti-capitalist opinion in England in the mid-1500s. Because they focused on the common weal — common good — historians have labelled them the commonwealth men.

Cormorants and greedy gulls

R.H. Tawney’s 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains the best account of the complex connections between social and religious criticism in Tudor England.

“It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.

“In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine.”[5]

The great sin they condemned was covetousness — the desire to accumulate ever more wealth. Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, condemned landlords’ greed in general, and enclosure in particular, in a sermon preached before the King and other worthies.

“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. For what here before went for twenty or forty pound by year, (which is an honest portion to be had gratis in one lordship of another man’s sweat and labour) now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year. … Too much, which these rich men have, causes such dearth, that poor men, which live of their labour, cannot with the sweat of their face have a living …

“These graziers, enclosers and rent-raisers, are hinderers of the King’s honour. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.”[6]

Those views found support in the country’s top ruling circles. The Book of Private Prayer, prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and other officials of the established church in 1553, included a prayer “For Landlords.”

“We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of those that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they remembering themselves to be Thy tenants may not rack nor stretch out the rents of their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines. … Give them grace also … that they … may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house and land to land, to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their lands, tenements and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[7]

One of the most vehement critics of greed and exploitation was the London-based printer and poet Robert Crowley, who offered this explanation for the 1549 peasant rebellions.

“If I should demand of the poor man of the country what thing he thinks to be the cause of Sedition, I know his answer. He would tell me that the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I can not tell who; men that have no name because they are doers of all things that any gain hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly devoid of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.

“Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition! They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons! No custom, no law or statute can keep them from oppressing us in such sort, that we know not which way to turn so as to live.”[8]

Condemning “lease mongers that cancel leases on land in order to lease it again for double or triple the rent,” Crowley argued that landlords should “consider themselves to be but stewards, and not Lords over their possessions.”

“But so long as this persuasion sticks in their minds — ‘It is my own; who shall stop me from doing as I like with my own as I wish?’ — it shall not be possible to have any redress at all. For if I may do with my own as I wish, then I may suffer my brother, his wife, and his children toil in the street, unless he will give me more rent for my house than he shall ever be able to pay. Then may I take his goods for that he owes me, and keep his body in prison, turning out his wife and children to perish, if God will not move some man’s heart to pity them, and yet keep my coffers full of gold and silver.”[9]

Back to the feudal

While no one can doubt the sincerity of their criticism of the rich, the commonwealth men were also “united in denouncing the rebels, whose sin could never be justified even if their grievances could.”[10]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose denunciation of wealth accumulation is quoted at the beginning of this article, also, in the same sermon, condemned “unlawful assemblies and tumults,” and people who “confound all things upsy down with seditious uproars and unquietness.” “God in his scriptures expressly forbids all private revenging, and had made this order in commonwealths, that there should be kings and governors to whom he has willed all men to be subject and obedient.”[11]

Speaking of the 1549 rebellions, Latimer declared that “all ireful, rebellious persons, all quarrelers and wranglers, all blood-shedders, do the will of the devil, and not God’s will.” Disobedience to one’s superiors was a major sin, even if the superiors were themselves violating God’s laws. “What laws soever they make as concerning outward things we ought to obey, and in no wise to rebel, although they be never so hard, noisome and hurtful.”[12]

Immediately after condemning landlords as cormorants and greedy gulls, Crowley told the 1549 rebels that they had been misled by the devil: “to revenge wrongs is, in a subject, to take an usurp the office of a king, and, consequently, the office of God.” The poor should suffer in silence, awaiting royal or divine intervention.

Like the nineteenth century “feudal socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized three centuries later, the commonwealth men were literally reactionary — they wanted “to roll back the wheel of history.” “From the ills of present-day society this group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills.”[13]

As historian Michael Bush says, the commonwealth men “showed concern for the poor, but accepted the need for poverty.”

“Without exception they subscribed to the traditional ideal of the state as a body politic in which every social group had its place, function and desert. … They pleaded with rulers to reform society, and proposed various means, but not by changing its structure. Their thinking was paternalistic and conservative. Although they censured the nobility, it was for malpractices, not for being ruling class.”[14]

English protestant reformers in the mid-1500s “inherited the social idea of medieval Christianity pretty much in its entirety,” so their views were “especially antithetical to the acquisitive spirit that animated the emerging society of capitalism.”[15]

In the 1500s, Tawney wrote, “the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages.”[16] What shocked and frightened the commonwealth men was not just poverty, but the growth of a worldview that repudiated “the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves.”

“That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”

The wolf-pack creed they were fighting, Tawney commented ironically, was “the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.”[17]

A Losing Battle

The commonwealth men were eloquent and persuasive, but they were fighting a losing battle. The aristocrats who owned most of England’s farmland and controlled the government could tolerate public criticism and ineffective laws, but not anything that actually threatened their wealth and power. They blamed the 1549 rebellions on the critics, and quickly ousted the Duke of Somerset, the only member of the regency council who seemed to favor enforcing the anti-enclosure laws.

What remained of the commonwealth campaign collapsed after 1553, when the catholic Mary Tudor became queen and launched a vicious reign  of terror against protestants. Some 300 “heretics,” including Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake, and hundreds more fled to protestant countries on the continent.

Capitalist practices already had a strong foothold in the countryside in the 1540s, and they spread rapidly in the rest of the century, without regard to what Christian preachers might say. “Forms of economic behavior which had appeared novel and aberrant in the 1540s were becoming normalized virtually to the point of being taken for granted.”[18]

For landowners who wanted to preserve their estates, that shift wasn’t a choice. It was forced on them by changes beyond their control.

“Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1640 prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose approximately sixfold. … [This] put an unusual premium on energy and adaptability and turned conservatism from a force making for stability into a quick way to economic disaster. Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were, and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”[19]

As a result, the trends that Latimer and his co-thinkers opposed actually accelerated, and their vision of a reborn feudal paternalism was replaced in ruling class thought by what historian C.B. MacPherson calls “possessive individualism” — the view that society is a collection of market relations between people who have an absolute right to do as they wish with their property.[20] That view has remained central to all variants of capitalist ideology, down to the present.

Parliament never passed another anti-enclosure bill after 1597, and the Stuart kings who succeeded the Tudors in 1603 only gave lip-service to protecting the poor from enclosure. “Commissions were issued from time to time for the discovery of offenders, but their crimes were pardoned on payment of a money fine. The punishment of enclosers had degenerated into a revenue-raising device and little else.”[21]

As Christopher Hill writes, in the century before the English Revolution, ruling class attitudes toward the land changed radically. “No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[22]

But only the rich had decided that land privatization was a good idea. The poor continued to resist that weird undertaking, and for some, the objective now was communism.

To be continued …

Notes

I have modernized spelling, and occasionally grammar and vocabulary, in quotations from 16th and 17th century authors.

[1] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 196. The date 1550 is approximate.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 742.

[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 2001), 178.

[4] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), xiii.

[5] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Angelico Press, 2021 [1926]), 140-41.

[6] Hugh Latimer, “The First Sermon Preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549,” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

[7] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 81-2.

[8] Robert Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 132-3.

[9] Robert Crowley, “An information and petition against the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 162, 157.

[10] Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 159.

[11] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 192, 193

[12] Hugh Latimer, “The Fourth Sermon upon the Lord’s Prayer (1552)” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) https://ccel.org/ccel/latimer/sermons/

[13] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, (International Publishers, 1976) 494, 355.

[14] M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Edward Arnold, 1975), 61.

[15] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), 248.

[16] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 135.

[17] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 146-7.

[18] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 202.

[19] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1965), 188, 189-90.

[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962).

[21] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.

[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.

The False Narratives Around Rent Control

[Photo Credit: Caelie Frampton via Flickr]

By Ashvin Pai

Republished from Michigan Specter.

The landlord-renter dynamic is one of the most complex and interesting social frameworks of modern capitalism. It is arguably the most divisive and inflammatory economic relationship present today. One can virtually guarantee that every renter has had a landlord they hated and conversely, every landlord, a tenant they despised.

In purely monetary terms, the rental housing market is one of the largest in the United States, netting in well over $100 billion in 2020, with most of this value managed by giant real estate companies (Ann Arbor’s own McKinley manages a $4.6 billion portfolio with over 34,000 apartments). It is in this backdrop, with these stakes, that the policy of rent control is being judged for its worthiness. It should come as no surprise, then, with so much capital threatened by affordable housing policies, that rent control has been the target of a relentless smear campaign.

Rent control, a robust package of policies aimed at increasing housing stability for the poor 一 including things such as restrictions on condo conversions and caps on rent increases 一 has historically enjoyed massive support among urban renters. However, for almost 75 years, status-quo economists have enthusiastically maintained the stance that rent control is a failed policy. These views have proliferated so widely into the public opinion that current conversations around rent control, liberal and conservative alike, treat it as an issue on which economics has reached a universal consensus. However, to put it mildly, the premise of this discourse 一 that economics has “proven rent control wrong” 一 is wildly inaccurate. Indeed, rent control, as a policy to promote housing stability for the poor, is an effective and efficient one that must be adopted.

A cursory search of rent control in the news reveals the critical nature of current conversations around the policy. Many mainstream news outlets have published pieces actively arguing against the policy when it gains popular support in communities. For example, in 2019, when London mayor Sadiq Khan called for progressive housing policies, the BBC released a fact-check article claiming “standard economic theory is that rent control does not work” and cited a Stanford study in a claim that “[rent] controls helped accelerate gentrification.”

In the United States, when several rent control laws seemed poised to pass in New York and California, The Washington Post published an op-ed in which author Megan McArdle argued that “every economist agrees that rent controls are bad.” In a similar vein, the recent ‘No on 21’ campaign, in opposition to California’s Prop 21 housing amendment, garnered the endorsement of 28 local newspapers including the Pasadena Star-News, Orange County Register, and Los Angeles Daily News, whose editorial boards all published the same opinion that rent control reduces homebuilding and land values, and forces properties off of the rental market.

The San Francisco Chronicle went even further, saying that rent control was “overwhelmingly rejected by experts and refuted by research.” The ‘No on 21’ campaign itself, which ultimately received a cease and desist letter for misleading voters, was funded by real estate giants Blackstone, Essex, and Equity Residential among others. Unsurprisingly, Prop 21 was rejected by California voters in the 2020 election.

Understanding that there is a large corporate and political interest in blocking rent control policies is easy enough. Using a technical analysis to point at specific points where these arguments go wrong is a little more difficult. The fact of the matter is that opposition to rent control has a long-standing economic tradition, with many famous economists from Milton Friedman to Assar Lindbeck coming out against it. It is upon this perceived economic consensus which rent control opposition stands. Reading the articles mentioned above, it becomes clear that while they offer some specific arguments against rent control, the real message they are pushing is essentially the same: economists have found the answer for rent control 一 it doesn’t work.

This begs the question, Where can one find this economic consensus? There is certainly some truth to this claim as economic papers, studies, and essays against rent control policies date back almost 75 years. Many people cite Friedman and George Stigler’s 1946 Roofs or Ceilings? as the original work that kicked off rent control opposition. Through the lens of free market analysis, Friedman and Stigler make a theoretical argument against rent ceilings, concluding that rent ceilings allocate space haphazardly, use that space inefficiently, retard new construction, and cause future depression in residential building. The next big study, Edgar Olsen’s 1972 ‘An Econometric Analysis of Rent Control’ continues in a similar vein, developing a more complex mathematical model to derive several inefficiencies surrounding rent control. Most notably, Olsen asserts that rent-controlled housing deteriorates suboptimally; that is, rent-controlled housing deteriorates faster than in the absence of controls and that only a free housing market can attain the optimal path of deterioration.

Several empirical rebuttals of rent control exist as well. The majority of these center around the effects of rent deregulation in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1990s. The most widely cited may be David Autor’s 2014 study, which empirically found that the removal of rent control caused a property appreciation of $2.0 billion between 1994 and 2004 in the Cambridge housing market. Henry Pollakowski’s 2003 study of Cambridge’s deregulation found to a similar effect that a significant amount of post-deregulation investment 一 16 to 24%, in fact 一 would not have occurred without deregulation. Pollakowski even claims that rent deregulation helps the poor as housing investment is not relegated to high-income neighborhoods, but instead equally spread across all socioeconomic boundaries.

For some time, studies of deregulation in Cambridge were the only empirical analyses of rent control and oppositional economists found that they were relying too heavily on theoretical arguments. This call for more empirical research led to Rebecca Diamond’s 2019 analysis of rent control in San Francisco, arguably the study most widely cited in the modern rent control discourse (referenced in both the BBC and ‘No On 21’ campaign articles mentioned above). One of the biggest conclusions of the study was that “rent control contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco’’ by incentivizing landlords to convert existing rental properties into condominiums. Many saw this as the final nail in the coffin for rent control, whose advocates often tout it as a policy to keep gentrification at bay.

Fortunately, despite these studies, political support for rent control is still alive and well. Perhaps even more importantly, that this political support remains IS justified. This is because, upon closer inspection, there exist several issues with the conclusions that the studies mentioned above have reached. That the conclusions of these studies have glaring issues is no light matter; these are some of the most widely cited pieces in the modern policy discourse surrounding rent control, and are authored by highly respected economists.

They say that the beginning is the most important part of the work. Thus, it only seems natural that a criticism starts there as well. Enter Friedman’s Roofs or Ceilings? While Friedman’s theoretical rebuttal of rent control may prove convincing to some, the truth of the matter remains there is little empirical evidence to back up his conclusions. Consider, for example, Friedman’s claim that rent control policies cause a slump in housing construction.

Much evidence suggests that this is simply not the case. In a report on the effects of rent control from 1978 to 1994, Berkeley, California’s planning and development department found “no evidence that rent control had any effect on construction of new housing.” More broadly, data indicates that, between 2007 and 2014, the cities in California’s Bay Area with rent control “produced more housing units per capita than cities without rent control.”

These results carry over to the East Coast as well. John Gilderbloom’s 30-year survey of over 70 New Jersey cities with rent control found that, in the period between 1990 and 2000, moderate rent controls had no significant impact on new constructions in the rental market. Conveniently, Gilderbloom also refutes Olsen’s analysis that rent control results in faster-than-optimal housing deterioration. In the same New Jersey study, it was found that there was no significant relationship between rent controls and the percentage of housing with working plumbing — widely accepted as a reasonable indicator for rental housing quality.

In Roofs or Ceilings? Friedman claims that his arguments against rent control are hedged in the interest of alleviating the housing crisis. In his view, the removal of rent controls would help the housing market perform more efficiently, in turn, helping the individual find the housing they desired. Thus, one could reasonably assume that if rent deregulation did not help the poor find affordable housing, Friedman would be against it.

So what actually happens when rent controls are removed? One only has to return to the example of Cambridge, Massachusetts to see the stark effects of ending rent controls on housing stability for the poor. Immediately following rent decontrol, tenants of previously controlled units saw a sharp increase in rents. This was accompanied by a significant increase in residential turnover, the number of transactions on the housing market, as people were no longer able to afford to live in their homes.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that these transactions were happening primarily between poor individuals and large real estate speculators as housing investment in decontrolled units more than doubled on an annual basis — a far greater injection of capital than individual purchases could possibly contribute. So in Cambridge, at least, rent deregulation did not result in a more equitable housing market that helped the common person — the outcome Friedman was supposedly advocating for.

However, for some odd reason, proponents of rent deregulation ignore this and continue to dogmatically equate increased housing investment with economic success. Referring back to Autor and Pollakowski’s praises for deregulation, one finds that they are built on this exact premise, treating housing investment as the foremost metric to be concerned with rather than equitable housing or long-term housing security — the actual problems that common people in the housing market face. That such a blatant false equivocation is so unscrupulously made (most notably when Pollakowski cites equally distributed housing investment as evidence that deregulation helps the poor) is incredibly concerning and raises questions about the supposed good-faith standing of these studies, especially when their ultimate denunciations of rent control are made with no hesitation.

Similar inaccuracies extend into the aforementioned Diamond study of rent control in San Francisco. That this study in particular contains said inaccuracies is especially important as it has become one of the most widely cited in recent years by advocates of rent deregulation. One of the biggest claims Diamond makes is that rent control fueled gentrification in San Francisco by incentivizing landlords to “[convert] existing rental properties to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium housing.”

However, this critique ignores the fact that, historically, constructing new low-income housing without government subsidies is a largely unprofitable venture. In other words, with or without rent controls, landlords have no incentives to provide affordable housing when they could be making much higher profits catering to wealthier demographics. Thus, claiming that rent controls are somehow an incentive for condo conversions makes absolutely no sense as, in a deregulated market, these landlords would skip straight to condos anyway. The deeper insinuation that rent control contributes to gentrification is demonstrably false as well. Indeed, it seems the opposite may be the case; when Boston neighborhoods repealed their rent control laws in the mid-1990s, they saw a multitude of socioeconomic changes that signified gentrification, including a significant increase of rents and home prices.

Notwithstanding, even if rent controls act as an incentive for landlords to convert to condominiums, this observation is still not a valid critique of rent control laws. This is because rent control advocates have always proposed restrictions on condominium conversions as a feature of their policies. Thus, Diamond’s findings only suggest that there exists a political climate around rent control which allows for landlords to game the system through loopholes such as condo conversion — a political climate that studies such as hers feed into. Indeed, the hard data of the study itself shows that “beneficiaries of rent control are between 10 and 20% more likely to remain at their [home address],” and that rent controls helped protect populations from personal shocks that required them to change residence. In other words, even this incredibly popular study, which presents itself as a critique of rent control, conclusively found the policy accomplished its main task of increasing housing stability for poor renters.

Another theme present among critics of rent control, academics and news outlets alike, is that they misunderstand what the purpose of rent control is and what specific policies it entails. Historically, rent control has not been proposed as a simple price ceiling on rents, as Friedman critiqued it. A 1988 article in the Harvard Law Review defined rent control as “a regulatory scheme combining rent [regulation], a warranty of habitability, eviction restrictions, a moratorium on condominium conversion, and residential zoning restrictions,” emphasizing that “the full scheme [was] necessary to ensure rent control’s efficacy in a gentrifying market.” Even today, many rent control advocates don’t even focus on absolute rents, rather placing more emphasis on controlling rent increases. Thus, an analysis of rent control as a simple price ceiling is a pointless exercise. (Somewhat ironically, rent control is often used as the default price ceiling example in introductory economics classes.)

Furthermore, even with all these policies, rent control’s main aim is not to create affordable housing or improve housing quality for the poor, the grounds upon which Olsen, Autor, and Pollakowski took the most issue. Rather, rent control advocates envision it as a policy to ensure housing stability and protect people from being forced out of their homes by price increases. In his testimonial to the Jersey City Council, J.W. Mason, assistant economic professor at the City University of New York, said exactly this, advocating for rent controls on the grounds that renters “have a reasonable expectation of remaining in their homes in terms similar to the ones they experienced in the past.”

By no means does this mean that rent control ignores housing creation or housing quality. It may well be that with increased housing stability, renters will gain more political power against landlords and real estate companies. This increased political oomph could very well be the catalyst for higher ambitions of more affordable and quality housing. However, because these aren’t the main goals of rent control, critiques of the policy along these lines are fundamentally flawed.

When judged on its own terms, it becomes clear that the data on rent control is overwhelmingly in its favor. In terms of benefiting its intended constituency, rent control is generally successful. A study of rent control in Santa Monica found that lower-income tenants experienced a significant reduction in shelter costs, gaining proportionately more from the rent control law than their higher-income counterparts. Additionally, there was no significant evidence supporting an argument that rent control had unintended effects of providing disproportionate benefits to middle- and upper-class renters.

Rent control also effectively protects against forced mobility. A literature review done by Manuel Pastor, Vanessa Carter, and Maya Abood found that home mobility driven by factors of force can be countered through rent stabilization measures. Of course, some economists, such as Friedman, have seen low levels of mobility among renters as an inefficient allocation of housing. This view ignores the numerous external benefits of housing stability. Housing stability has wide ranging beneficial effects on communities; much research has been done linking evictions with higher levels of anxiety, depression, and trouble making social ties.

What’s worse is that already marginalized communities experience these types of evictions at higher rates; in Milwaukee, black women account for only 9.6% of the population but make up 30% of evictions. The curbing of forced evictions through rent control policies clearly has the potential of greatly improving mental health and alleviating financial stresses for already struggling communities. Additionally, housing stability has many effects on the academic success of children, with findings suggesting a significant negative relationship between residential moves and high school completion. Conversely, housing stability has a significant positive correlation to increased school attendance for children. With these facts in mind, it quickly becomes apparent that the effects of housing stability lie beyond solely the monetary realm, creating cascading effects which results in healthier and more vibrant communities.

These effects don’t take much time to manifest themselves either. Because rent control targets the private housing market, it can take effect on a large amount of housing with very little cost in very little time. Furthermore, it is extremely cost-efficient for governments to implement; both Berkeley and Santa Monica’s rent boards do not rely on general city funds and as little as 26 full-time staff are able to oversee over 25,000 units.

This low-cost implementation means that rent control is significantly cheaper than other affordable housing policies. For example, Berkeley’s rent control program was able to stabilize 19,000 units for just $4 million dollars. In comparison, it would have taken $20 million to provide housing vouchers for a little over 2,000 units, and $220 million to build or rehabilitate 2,000 units. This type of data makes it unrealistic that a lack of government funds is a reason to not implement rent controls. The implications of this argument are quite stark; in the eyes of policymakers, allowing the housing crisis to go on is seen as justifiable and even desirable because it results in less government spending.

As the housing crisis grows worse, the need for policies such as rent control becomes more immediate. However, with this urgency, one can expect a greater oppositional narrative and an increased effort to execute the smear campaign against affordable housing. The current perception of economic consensus around rent control as ineffective is flawed at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Much of the traditional literature all the way from Friedman to Diamond misunderstands the aims of rent control, makes false equivocations which result in flawed conclusions, and isn’t backed by empirical data.

Despite this, the message that rent control is a failed policy is being continually pushed out to the public in the language of these studies and essays. Economists such as Mason, Levine, and Gilderbloom, among others, are thrown by the wayside in the desperate appeal to authority that decontrol advocates invariably resort to. It is dangerous to pretend that there are no political motivations to these decontrol studies when they have such clear flaws.

It is dangerous to pretend that the free-market economics criticizing rent control aren’t ultimately biased toward what is best for giant real estate corporations. With the large successes that rent control has had in creating housing stability, it is important that the false narratives around the policy be challenged whenever they are brought up. The data is clear: rent control works.

Seven Theses on "Re-opening the Economy": Further Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

1.  The economy is not—and never was—closed or shutdown.

At the peak of the global economic shutdown, it is likely that less than 50% of the economy actually shutdown. And for most of the initial “lockdown” period, much much less than 50% of the economy was inactive. Unskilled workers, sometimes having their hours cut, sometimes increased without overtime pay, magically became “essential workers.” While there is national and regional global variance, this is nearly universally true. Of course, many millions—if not billions—have lost their jobs around the world. Some of these are entertainment or hospitality/comfort service workers, but many are truly essential care and educational workers. The real backbone of the capitalist economic system has been endangered, hyper-exploited, or otherwise cast off. The stock market thrives all the while. Maybe, just maybe, we should actually shutdown this foundationally unjust world order.

2.  The cure is worse than the disease.

The shutdown—and this weird post-shutdown partial shutdown period—has caused enormous harm to countless people. Actually, we could count them, but the people who make those decisions about what to count (and what counts) don’t care enough. It is because of the literal insanity of our system that people are literally being driven insane, into the depths of emergent and exacerbated mental illness. People are killing themselves because of the responses to COVID-19. But that isn’t because we shut down, but rather it is because of how we shutdown, without coming close to addressing long-preexisting social inequities that were barely below the surface—if below the surface at all. This is no cure at all. The most vulnerable are either dead or more vulnerable; the safe and secure are, for the most part, at least as safe and secure as they were before.

3. The disease is worse than the cure.

An economy isn’t a thing that is capable of caring. In the midst of a mass pandemic where likely well-over a million people have already died, we should care about something that has never cared about us? How could it? Economies are systems that reflect the distributions of power and then the character of the values and priorities of that society. The responses to COVID-19 are perfectly in-line with the systemic values of capitalism. As the infamous graffiti reminds us, capitalism is the virus. A COVID-19 vaccine won’t change that. There is a vaccine for capitalism, and it is up to all of us to find it (really, to create it, in practice) together.

4. Yes, the economy is more important than your grandma.

And it always has been. It is more important than you too! It shouldn’t be though. It doesn’t have to be, but if we look at the absolutely wretched state of elder care in the US and around the world, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear actual alive human beings—elected officials and policymakers no less—suggest that grandparents should be willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of capitalism. Think about that. These people have been made completely fucking psychotic. Then again, before COVID-19 too many of us accepted this basic logic on a daily basis.

5. We really should compare this to the flu.

Not that COVID-19 is as serious as the seasonal flu—a mistaken thought I had and quickly abandoned in early March 2020. And yet, seasonal flu is an enduring civilizational challenge that we too easily accept as intractable, beyond what we’ve achieved thus far with the existing vaccination protocols. We have, occasionally more than 50% effective, vaccines that people need to take every year. Still, we have hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from the flu. Perhaps millions are saved, yes. But how many billions of dollars are made by the health care companies that make and distribute these vaccines? Vaccines that—while better than nothing—are still wildly inadequate. There are political-economic lessons we must learn from how the flu is treated, and we must refuse to allow the same things to happen with COVID-19, a much more serious problem.

6. Don’t let them bring evictions back.

We should be paying more attention to the fact that right now, in many places (but, perhaps, most notably in the US), evictions are effectively non-existent. As banks, landlords, and local sheriffs still try to find a way to evict people, we should fight to get the prohibition against eviction accepted as a new political norm—even if the result of such a struggle is a compromise that simply makes it harder for people to be evicted.

7.  Physical distancing is new. Social distancing has been going on for a while. Since the late 1700s probably.

With the urbanization associated with the industrial revolution people have, over the past several centuries, lived increasingly close to one another. Physical proximity has increased along with the development and spread of global capitalism. During that same period, humanity has become increasingly socially-isolated. Family ties are less. Friendship bonds, while they may be maintained in more mediated form through social media, are perhaps stronger and more significant than ever before. Still, these bonds are not as powerful or enduring at this stage of historical social development as family bonds were prior to the advent of global capitalism—however oppressive and violent they indeed were. COVID-19 has merely exacerbated a problematic sociological pattern that was already with us. One wonders whether social ties will experience a jump in strength once COVID-19 is under better control, epidemiologically and medically speaking (likely only possible once mass vaccination is achieved).

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is the founding curator and editor of LeftHooked, a monthly aggregator and review of socialist writing, published by the Hampton Institute, where he is also a contributing editor. He is a visiting assistant professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. Bryant is also the politics of culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power and co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (originally published with Brill and now available in paperback with Haymarket Books).

In Defense of Tenants: An Interview with Omaha Tenants United

By Devon Bowers

This is a transcript of a recent email interview I had with the organization Omaha Tenants United about their beginnings and the activism the group engages in. Catch them this month in Heartland News, which is running a front page story on OTU and allowing them to write monthly updates from then on out.

Talk about how the organization formed and the work that you all do.

A group of us were aware of housing issues like tenant mistreatment and gentrification, and were inspired by other socialist organizations that help tenants, like those in Seattle or Philadelphia. From initial meetings where we discussed housing issues and read the state tenant-landlord statute, we came up with potential items to organize around. We began to focus particularly around the issue of "slumlords," or low-rent, low-maintenance landlords who skirt legality and mistreat tenants, largely getting away with it due to non-existent local enforcement and a tenant population of marginalized and low-income people, like refugees or immigrants.

We met our first tenant through Feed the People, an organization devoted to food distribution some of us were members of at the time. Since he had moved in to his apartment six months earlier, he did not have hot water despite repeated maintenance requests, with the landlord saying it would cost thousands of dollars and weeks of work. We met with the tenant, and after we went over portions of the state tenant statute and discussed the tenant's options, he made the decision to take a more direct approach to resolving his dispute with the support of our organization. We drafted a demand letter citing the various parts of the statute that the landlord was infringing upon, and demanding that steps be taken to resolve the issues or face escalation. The tenant then signed the letter, and we went together to his landlord's office to deliver it. The landlord wasn't home, but after hearing about the large group who delivered the letter, he contacted the tenant, angrily demanding to know what was going on. The tenant sent him a picture of the letter and explained our involvement. Less than 24 hours later, a maintenance crew repaired what turned out to be only a broken gasket, and the tenant had hot water.

We built our approach on this experience. We try to establish contacts among the working-class people in our neighborhoods, and learn from them about the situation of tenants in the city, particularly tenants of slumlords. Through this process we identify situations we can help resolve through forming demands of landlords, and stepping in to back the tenant up in a confrontation or meeting. It's important to our mission that we serve to empower the tenant themselves rather than be seen as performing a charitable service. Our first tenant, mentioned above, was shocked when we proposed delivering the demand letter as a group with him. He had assumed that we would deliver the letter ourselves, and was delighted to take for himself the action of delivering his demands to his landlord with our support. Typically, non-profit organizations who work in working-class communities are seen as doing things for working-class people or on their behalf.(just to clarify, we're not a "non-profit" in the 501c3 sense, nor do we have any desire to be. We merely use that phrase to draw a line of demarcation between how we operate and how many other organizations do (especially 501c3 nonprofits) and the perceptions surrounding them) We want to work with tenants to support them in doing what they are already capable of doing, and through this process, we hope that the tenants will learn more about their own power and the power of an organized working-class community.

Recently, we helped a tenant win a big fight against one of Omaha's most notorious slumlords in which we occupied the slumlord's office with about 20 people and were able to get over $1,000 in made up move out fees waived and $500 of the tenant's deposit back. (Do you want us to go into greater detail about that here? We recently did a long write up on that story at our Medium which I highly recommend reading. Not sure if you want to just link that or if you'd like us to make additional comments on it here. Definitely the biggest victory we've been a part of so far.

What problems do many of the tenants deal with? Would you say that the legal system is biased in favor of landlords?

A recurring problem is a lack of proper maintenance in a tenant's home. A landlord will only put in to a building what they can get out in profit, and a slumlord, already working with crumbling buildings and tenants paying low rent, lacks motivation to make any repairs at all. Living in such a building often comes with the mentality that "well, at least the rent is cheap," and slumlords take advantage of the expectation that better maintenance is just something that one has to pay more for, rather than a housing right. As a result, many tenants are living in conditions that are not merely uncomfortable, but actively dangerous to their health.

The legal system is definitely biased in favor of landlords. While there is a state statute that outlines a tenant's rights and what a landlord owes them, the only enforcement to be found is in the courts, which tenants with low income and little time cannot afford. In addition, city housing laws were drafted essentially directly by the landlords themselves, and even the ensuing weak laws are not enforced. The statutes are also written in an obtuse, self-referential way that is not easy for a busy person to understand, much less take action based upon. As a result, after reaching some familiarity with the statute, our strategy has been to outline areas in which an offending landlord is in infringement of the statute, because while a tenant can't necessarily afford to go to court, the landlord knows that it is better for them to concede a small maintenance request than to go to court for a case they most likely know they will lose.

How do landlords utilize pricing for their own financial benefit (ie increasing prices in Silicon Valley to kick out current tenants and price gouge techies?)

Gentrification is a continual problem in the city. Landlords will redevelop housing, and/or demolish and build new housing, raising the prices, which cause working-class people to be kicked out of their own neighborhoods. Occasionally a slumlord will allow a property to deteriorate to the point that it is considered "blighted," attracting public funding for redevelopment. Slumlords have used the money they've drained from working-class tenants in dilapidated buildings to redevelop or bulldoze those buildings to make way for a higher-paying demographic.

How do you help people understand that landlord-tenant relationships are not alright and are predatory?

People we talk to already understand that they are being mistreated by their landlord, and that their friends and neighbors are too. But this is seen as the way things are. We don't need to show them that landlords are exploitative, but we can help them to fight back, showing them that it doesn't have to be that way.

It's a matter of class consciousness. The relationship between landlords, particularly slumlords, and tenants, is one of the most obvious examples of class struggle we have. These landlords are profiting by charging working-class people to live in places that they would never sleep in themselves, a property that they rarely maintain, for the most part receiving passive profit for owning a place where others take shelter. It brings up the question of private property. Anyone can see this is unfair, and we try to systematize it when we have conversations with tenants. We don't want to get caught up in individualizing the systemic injustices to a given landlord, focusing on how they are evil individually; rather, we try to have conversations in terms of landlords as a class, and us, the working people, as a class that can fight back through organizing together.

First and foremost, we are an anti-capitalist organization that believes the renter-landlord system, and more generally private property as a whole, should be abolished. In the meantime however, we recognize the need to help tenants get what they can under the current system. We hope these experiences empower our fellow tenants and other working class people to begin to fight back and get organized so that the way can be paved for more fundamental revolutionary change.

Explain the day in the life of someone who is battling their landlord.

For a tenant working with us, a large part of it is about just getting to know us. When we're essentially doing cold calls (knocking on doors of places we know have problems, there's a natural hesitancy from people when random strangers walk up to your door asking about your living conditions, let alone trying when they're trying to convince you to take a big step in actually confronting your landlord about them. So we make sure to take a lot of time attempting to build a relationship with the people we interact with. This helps us build trust in each other, and feel more confident working with each other. Ultimately, we of course want to get them confident enough that they're willing to take the steps needed to get their problems resolved.

Since OTU has kind of blown up, however, we've received a big influx of people reaching out to us with issues they're already having via our Facebook page, so this eliminates some of the initial awkwardness and need for agitation, since they're obviously already agitated enough to feel the need to reach out. At this point, we set up a time to meet in a semi-public place, and learn about their situation in greater detail. Here you sometimes sort of face the opposite issue that we do when cold calling. The people who reach out are typically already pissed off and wanting to do something fast. We really have to be careful to not over promise anything, or lead them to believe that we can just magically help them fix things.

We like to be sober and honest about what our odds are, and if it's something that we might not have the capacity to deal with, we have to be honest about that and be willing to say no to certain cases. In either situation - whether it be a cold call or someone who has reached out to us - we try to be sure to walk people through exactly step by step what all of their options are, so they aren't blindsided by anything later on. We try to explain some possible outcomes, and how we would respond from each one. Based on where the tenant is at in terms of willingness to act, and based on what the situation is, we try to formulate a plan and proceed from there. While many people would maybe like to go straight to the big confrontation method like we did in our story about notorious local slumlord Dave Paladino, we generally try to escalate as necessary.

This means first setting up a meeting with the landlord, the tenant, and maybe two OTU representatives max to read off the tenant's demands in a more low-key setting and seeing how the landlord responds. There's of course always pushback, but we give the landlord a deadline by which we expect these changes to be made. If they're not made in the amount of time given, we escalate things from there. The important part is that at all steps in the process, the tenant is taking the lead.

We don't want to get out ahead of the tenant and get them into a situation they don't feel comfortable with, and on the other hand, we don't want to hold back the tenant or discourage their own initiative, even when we may have to be frank about a situation or explain how being too rash might jeopardize the entire process. We take a lot of influence from Mao Zedong and movements inspired by him that apply what is known as "the mass line", which essentially means everything we do is informed and enacted in a way that is "from the masses, to the masses."

In what ways can people learn more about your organization?

You can find us on Facebook at Omaha Tenants United. We also have Medium, where we'll be publishing our longer-form material summarizing our work and stating our positions on things. We will have our Points of Unity out soon which explain our beliefs that we expect people to uphold in order to join. While we are a multi-tendency organization, we do ask that anti-capitalism be at the forefront of one's politics (amongst other things), and that people are willing to regularly commit time to disciplined work.

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

By Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

On the 16th track of Immortal Technique's Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying "gritty roots" that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

"To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?"

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US - a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America's relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the "broader society," one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from "opulent and relative" wealth, to expose the irony of "homeland security," a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes - sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as "bountiful wealth," American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed "middle class."

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of "relative and bountiful wealth" throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the "alt-right," a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump's pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern "industrialized" setting, and in spite of Mumia's sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac's poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

"You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gonna be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, "Damn, he did this, he did this," just be like, "Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?" That's what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just tryin to make somethin."

Pac's story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge - all of which should be applied while moving forward. The "psychic fuel" that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which "generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry" is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability - not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.

Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the "shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism)." Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it's an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, "the attenuation does not change the substance." As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the 'hood under Trump is the same as the 'hood under Obama, which was the same as the 'hood under Bush, which was the same as the 'hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.

"It's like an open-air prison and it remained packed"

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu's The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We're not well
We're not well
We can't tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po' man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae's Block Party , the 4th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don't wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It's hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that's still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf - that's bullshit man
That's how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c'mon man

Grae's second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, "chill with rich white folks." Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae's commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the "rags-to-riches," so-called "American Dream" is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It's every man for himself
That's why the black community is lackin in wealth, there's no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system's corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don't even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world's goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren't up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that's as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that's what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody's Every Ghetto , the 2nd track on Kweli's 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae's track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac's poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli's bridge builds on Grae's Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I'm good walkin' in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It's like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin' but straight facts

Kweli's initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin'
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain't rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America's settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one's for Basquiat
They be brushin' with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin' duckin' shots
Every home ain't got a Pops
Every man ain't sellin' rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin' cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin' like "oh God"
Illegally thievery think us peelin' off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That's why we scream out "nigga we made it"
It's an odd future they ain't know we was all some creators
Somethin' from nothin' was told Kings walk and man you frontin'
For the people and by the people but them over money
I'm on my Viola Davis here, workin' for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I'm on my Viola Davis, it's what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I'm spittin' Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that's what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain't just the Brooklyn way, it's universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle

"Keep it movin' on"

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America's capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of "freedom" and "liberty." For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through "hard work." These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as "the only alternative." The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism's internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences - capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz's 2010 track Keep Movin' On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers' role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements - all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that's disastrous
They said it's due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain't give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can't pay the electric bill. It's total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it's a sin of Satan
I'm losing my patience over here. I'm sick of waiting
And I ain't never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can't do nothing else. I should've stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me "Keep it movin' on"

"Kill my landlord"

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it's being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. " As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That's up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent." In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. "A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process," explains Matthew Desmond , "or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways" to boot the families, such as "paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week" or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup's 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I'm humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I'm sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn't work he still hasn't checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup's classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I'm chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I'm another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I'm moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo'ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation's getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike's to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I'm a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I'm thinking of place to stay
While I'm staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family's face
While they're sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I'm looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn't hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I'm in cuffs for the crimes I've committed
Maybe I'll go to jail, heh, or maybe I'll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I've got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I'm living in the street and I'm down now
Don't you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You'll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you're not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we're fixing to impose rent control
We didn't vote on it, this land wasn't bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy's ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I'm done, we're done with what you've done
For twenty-five score we've got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in "foreign" communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to "kill" the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who's the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I'm trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there's something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can't trust 911
Son of a gun, I'm the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America's not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it's a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I've got a little message for you
I'm going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord

How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique's 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as " a war versus us all ":

The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn't the end; it's the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn't just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That's because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations' workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What's next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We've already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We're seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.

Immortal Technique's subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA's dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President's speeches!
I'm baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don't really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That's just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan's election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech's lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about "protecting freedom" or "defending us." Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and "Muslim extremism" are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington's 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech's message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington's thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits it here . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the "war on terror" has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech's second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples' interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
'Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fighting for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fighting for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I'd be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. 'Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the "clash of religions" narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur'an
But that's stupid, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I'd turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn't be fighting for a Christian nation
I'd be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn't fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I'd be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America's fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party's four-decade-long Southern Strategy and the rise of Donald Trump's presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, "devils that run America like 'Birth of a Nation,' a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don't give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don't give a fuck about none of our kids
That's why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like "Birth of a Nation"
Affirmative action ain't reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations

Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of "fake news" has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump's constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump's favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing "anonymous groups" to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as "instruments of Russian propaganda" during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor's note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump's presidency. As if Trump's personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of "fake news" and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake - which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

"…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist."

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media's full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as "the deep state" or "invisible government" through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion." Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique's 2003 track, The 4th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It's like MK-ULTRA, controllin' your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin' for freedom and fightin' terror, but what's reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington's clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin' the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu'ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin' to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech's exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I'm facin' assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin' offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz's track, Keep Movin' On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain't the smartest motherfucker but I'm not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain't realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don't have anything now. I'm left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove 'em wrong
Now I'm homeless and I'm cold without no food thas' warm
I keep asking myself, "What did I do that's wrong?"
And the government telling me, "Keep it movin' on"

Tech's closing comments on the 4th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz's verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of "we," as if "we" have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn't speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it's serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they're fair and balanced
When they're some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don't get the contracts to make money off 'em afterwards
We don't get weapons contracts, nigga
We don't get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read... read... read

Tech's final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

"… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism - the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right - I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy."

"Fake news" is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of "fake news," the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs', Soros', Gates', and Buffetts' of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it's Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn't do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.

The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the "lesser evil" in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that's emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike's 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official "war on drugs," this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike's second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like 'leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the "war on drugs" helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than "employees of the country's real masters," serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism's capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the "international Western power structure (capitalism)," calling upon "anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth."

Echoing Killer Mike's track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological "radical-left-wing agenda." In reality, Obama's administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America's imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this "right-wing propaganda" and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking "who you gonna blame" now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it's all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain't nothing subliminal to it, that's how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US' global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1's verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it's the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See the game they run.
Give a fuck if he's cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I'll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain't kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye 'This ain't living.'

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1's analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
He's sitting in the White House, so who cares if he's black?
And why's there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain't yours, it's theirs, give it back!
You're just another puppet, but I'm not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't change shit, house nigga's fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco's track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as "manufactured consent," which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child's future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks."
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering 'bout such and such.
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homey, that's the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit.
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either.
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1's earlier reduction of Obama as just another "neo-colonial puppet" doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won't say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn't build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state's are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women's misleadership class (Hillary), etc..., because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You , which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What's my reason for being, I'm ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR's "black misleadership class" as nothing more than "fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities)."

What y'all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y'all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don't got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I'm here to represent this

Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx's class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X's famous "the ballot or the bullet" speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include "action on all fronts by whatever means necessary." Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in "slave-catching" and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to "serve and protect" capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community's especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA's seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo's Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo's track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don't pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don't sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I'm sick of walking, I'm sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I'm sick of barking
I'm sick of spitting written sentences listeners don't get
Don't get, don't get, don't get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I'm staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I'll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang 'em and dangle 'em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon' play this, for Sandra Bland we gon' stand
I'm still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people's arrest, people's trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we've been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill's Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya'll can't handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that "In God We Trust"
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge's favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism's version of "justice" is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we've become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding "American values" and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America's history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to " kill Sam":

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I'm the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it's ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I'm lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it's sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain't fly
So now I'm settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Here's why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let 'em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, "please don't kill my mother, " so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn't have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can't stick together
And it's odd..
Broke us down, made us pray - to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I'll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you're givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'mma blast
Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It's a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr's 1998 track Robbin' Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to "squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers." Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizing the illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we're getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that's right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that's why the demons are leery
It's our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory... Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn't kickin rhymes I'd be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God's always been militant, and ready for war
We're gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where's the safe at? Let's make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory... my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it's too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain't doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We're taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can't even come near, if you ain't got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah... by my Robin Hood Theory