Resisting the Authoritarian City, Block by Block

“When people are fighting displacement, they’re fighting for their class interests,” says Andrew Lee.

Kelly Hayes

21 Aug 2025 — 32 min read

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What does gentrification have to do with authoritarianism? In this episode of “Movement Memos,” I talk with organizer and author Andrew Lee about how displacement, surveillance, and “quality of life” policing function as tools of social control — and why housing struggles are class struggles. “Anti-displacement fights are interesting,” Lee says, “because of the revolutionary implications of what’s really an incredibly modest demand.”

Music by Son Monarcas and David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is repuplished here with permission.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. This week, we are talking about displacement and how organized communities are resisting the violence of gentrification. We will be hearing from organizer and author Andrew Lee, whose book Defying Displacement, provides some necessary context for Trump’s attacks on unhoused people. While the violence playing out in Washington, D.C., is part of an authoritarian process of consolidation, the aggressive policing of Black and brown people, and the cruel displacement of unhoused people are practices that have been normalized around the country in a bipartisan manner. We can’t have an honest conversation about what Trump is doing to unhoused people in the nation’s capital without talking about displacement, which Andrew calls “the leading edge of confrontation with the contemporary ruling class.” Trump is presently sharpening that edge, in the same way that he’s sharpening other tools that officials in both parties have developed and deployed over the years. So, what does this mean for our organizing and our resistance? We’ll get into it.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. This is a tough time for independent media and movement journalism, but the truth is a front of struggle, so we are throwing down hard to stay in the fight. You can help us by donating and by spreading the word about our work. From sharing episodes and articles on social media, to leaving positive reviews wherever you get your podcasts, all of your efforts matter, and we are grateful for your support. Truthout only exists because of the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us, and for all that you do.

And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Andrew Lee, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Andrew Lee: Thank you so much, I’m so excited to be here.

KH: How are you doing today?

AL: I’m doing well. I’m doing really well.

KH: Glad to hear it. For members of our audience who might be unfamiliar with your work, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

AL: I’m a person who organizes and writes against political and economic displacement. I’ve been a part of anti-gentrification campaigns in the so-called Silicon Valley, and Philly, where I’m currently based. I’m on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. I work on strategy for a formation called Decolonize Philly, and I’m the author of a book called Defying Displacement.

KH: Well, thank you so much for making the time to talk with me today. In your book, you write that struggles against displacement are “the leading edge of confrontation with the contemporary ruling class.” How is that edge being sharpened now amid authoritarian consolidation, tech oligarchy, and the advance of the global right?

AL: Anti-displacement fights are interesting because of the revolutionary implications of what’s really an incredibly modest demand. When you’re fighting against displacement, what you’re saying is, “Let me keep living in substandard housing. Let me keep sending my kids to underfunded schools. Let me keep paying exorbitant rent to an absentee landlord. Just don’t raise that rent to three times what I could possibly pay. Forget about improving or empowering my disinvested community, I just want my community to not be obliterated.”

And yet, and yet, in gentrifying cities, when people make this incredibly small demand, they find themselves fighting the most powerful institutions in our society: elite universities, global corporations, unified city governments, the police. All of these institutions come together because this modest demand poses such a threat to the entire system of private property and racial capitalism if it were actually going to be fulfilled. And as you say, that edge is being sharpened as we speak.

As of this recording, we’re just a few days into Trump seizing control of the D.C. police and deploying the National Guard. Trump has talked about violent crime, carjacking as reasons for sending in the National Guard to these cities, but really, the proximate cause for this unprecedented deployment was him seeing unhoused people on the street as he was being driven to a golf course. This might be the first time in U.S. history where the military is deployed domestically to do “quality of life policing,” something that I’m calling “military gentrification.”

Authoritarian consolidation, it allows for an intensified militarized version of something for which there’s actually bipartisan elite support. We can see that from what California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, did last year, weaponizing state agencies for an industrial scale effort to “dismantle” unhoused encampments across the state. Just like Trump is deploying the military to dismantle encampments in D.C., we’re seeing a heightening of these same tensions and pressures that we’re already building across the country and across the political spectrum.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying about militarized gentrification, and how we are seeing a militarized version of something that already had bipartisan support. This is really important for folks to understand, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom attempts to style himself as a primary opponent of Trumpism. Newsom is so enthusiastic about displacing unhoused people that he has literally taken up that work with his own hands. When we look at the escalations in policing we are seeing in D.C. right now, with checkpoints and soldiers and FBI agents patrolling the streets, we are talking about the ramping up of racist state violence in a city where Black people were already ten times more likely than white people to be arrested. Pouring more and more money into police budgets as essential services have been slashed over the course of my lifetime has been a bipartisan priority. So, we have to be honest about how we got here. Because we can’t get out of this mess with this same politics that helped deliver us to this moment.

Now, in cities around the country, and at the national level, both parties have doubled down on policing as a singular response to effects and symptoms of extreme inequality. In your chapter on terror, you document the role of police in displacing communities. Under Trump, we are looking at a level of financial destabilization that could leave many of us vulnerable to displacement. In the context of authoritarianism, do you see intensifying housing insecurity as a strategy of control?

AL: Yes. I think housing precarity weakens our attachment to place, and to place-based power, and it also weakens our connections and our solidarity with one another, right? It prevents us from building power where we are if we’re always being threatened with having to move. It forces us to work more hours at exploitative jobs to pay the rent. This intensifying housing security is absolutely a way to destabilize working-class communities, but at the same time, housing instability itself is problematized by the state and the national security apparatus as a source of instability. We have institutions like the World Bank, the World Economic Forum saying that income inequality, gentrification are going to be major risks for social stability into the 21st century, especially in large gentrifying cities because when people are being evicted and criminalized and gentrified and displaced against all the odds, against all those forces I just mentioned that discourage political action, people end up fighting back.

KH: Your description of displacement as destabilizing for the working class, but also potentially destabilizing for the ruling class, since it gives people a reason to fight, reflects the short-sightedness that I think really defines this era of inequality. We aren’t talking about people with a coherent long-term vision for anything. In Trump’s White House, you have the apocalyptic politics of Christian Nationalism and techno-fascist cults. But even in the business world at large, short-term profits are prioritized over the habitability of the planet itself. In Silicon Valley, people found companies based on products that don’t exist yet, that they may or may not ever manage to develop, in the hopes of getting a high valuation and becoming billionaires — solely because other billionaires bought their hype. I recently read a piece where Luke Kemp, a professor with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, who has studied the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years, said we are actually following a really well-worn pattern, in terms of how narcissistic elites bring about the collapse of civilizations. He said, “As elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

So, that seems to be the path we’re on, because that’s the only path the hoarding class knows how to pave. It’s not about human nature, but the nature of elites. Our only real hope in the face of that is to create more egalitarian systems. But the conditions that compound our misery are often marketed to us as solutions. We see that with policing, and we see it with attacks on immigrants and trans people. This is why scapegoating exists — to keep us from asking the right questions.

So, with so-called “quality of life” agendas driving surveillance, evictions and criminalization in many cities, what do you think is really being enforced and who’s being targeted?

AL: Right. Certainly not quality of life. I mean, you’ve asked “quality of life,” for whom? Is it quality of life for people who are being criminalized? Is it quality of life for people who are forced into relocation centers or concentration camps? Is it quality of life for people who are at risk of not making rent and being out on the street? No, of course not. We are talking about a regime where the value of housing as a commodity is weighted so much more strongly than the importance of housing as an instrument to actually provide shelter for human beings, right?

That’s why we see that when new luxury housing developments get put up, and people get displaced for housing explicitly targeted towards the gentrifying class, in many cases, these buildings sit largely vacant for years after construction, which is a terrible use of housing for shelter, but could still make sense as someone’s investment. The value of that land as an asset could still appreciate in value, so it could still be a “rational” use of land as a commodity. And I think of quality of life framings in the same way. It’s quality of life for people who have access to money and to resources, people whose lives can have value extracted from them by the owning class. It’s not actually “quality of life” for living human beings.

KH: Absolutely, anytime a monied force or government claims to be improving something, we have to ask, who is it being improved for? Who actually reaps the benefit of this change? So, with that in mind, how do tech-driven gentrification projects — like Sidewalk Labs’ “Smart Cities” — act as soft tools of authoritarianism, dressed up in the language of “innovation”?

AL: Smart Cities are this idea that we can embed sensors in public spaces. We can collect data on how people use and move and move through and spend money in a city, and we can use all of this data to optimize how a city functions. There was a big push from Sidewalk Labs, a Google subsidiary, to convert the downtown waterfront of Toronto into one large “smart city” to redevelop it, to bring in tech workers, and the people in Toronto successfully fought this off. It was never completed. In alliance with people in San Jose, people in Berlin, Germany, people in San Francisco who were all fighting these Google developments around the same time, none of them were ever completed, in a really inspiring show of transnational solidarity.

So many tech firms make money by collecting raw data, data that had previously not been commodified, and selling it and using it to build predictive models, and using it to sell things back to us. And in the book, I argue that this is a form of primitive accumulation, taking raw material from our shared common world, human data, biographic data, demographic data, and turning it for the first time into a commodity. Smart cities are an attempt to do this on a municipal scale, and I think we should be really worried about that. I think the common discourse in the U.S. would be that this level of data collection would be concerning in an authoritarian country. If this happens in China, it’s scary and bad, but because we have a public-private divide in the U.S. and because we have state versus local and federal control, we have all of these divisions of power. For some reason, it’s less scary when Google does it or when Meta does it, and I don’t think that that is based in the reality of the situation at hand.

I mean, for one thing, there’s deep integration and coordination between supposedly private tech firms and the national security and law enforcement apparatuses, a deep, deep connection. And for another thing, these are some of the most powerful institutions on the planet today, talking about large tech firms. They are more powerful than most national governments. I think the fact that they don’t have an army and a seat in the UN does not make the authoritarian implications of their centralization of power any less profound.

KH: It’s interesting that you brought up the fact that some people think the divisions between the U.S. government and the business world make corporate data collection less scary. While that’s never been a valid position, as you say, because these corporations are so entangled with the government, and in of themselves, have so much control over our lives, it is literally less true now than ever. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI all have federal contracts to develop autonomous AI workflows and scale up AI usage to address national security issues. On August 11, Trump announced that his administration had brokered a deal to take a 15 percent share of Nvidia’s H20 chip sales in China. In exchange for those funds, the administration will ease restrictions on sales of the chip in China. And more deals like this are expected. So, you know, so much for the free market.

We also know that during the early DOGE free-for-all, Elon Musk’s people gained access to vast troves of government data, which includes a lot of our personal data. You have surveillance companies like Palantir getting paid hundreds of millions to bridge government databases that were never meant to be fused. This is a smash-and-grab era of politics. The people at the top are seizing what they can, and information is a huge part of that, whether it’s the data that details our lives and habits, or the words and thoughts we produce that can be digested and repurposed into AI slop.

I actually read an article in The New York Times the other day by the poet Meghan O’Rourke who referred to Large Language Learning Models like ChatGPT as “intellectual Soylent Green” because they’re “built from the bodies of the very thing they replace.” We are talking about the hyper-exploitation of every possible site of extraction, and it’s really on that terrain that we are talking about trying to hold onto any place or sense of place-making.

Which also brings to mind the prospect of so-called Freedom Cities, which is where I think we could see these corporate dreams of smart cities and totalizing surveillance and control realized. You have people like Curtis Yarvin — a pseudo-intellectual blogger who’s pining for a tech dictatorship — pushing a vision, which a lot of these tech billionaires believe in, of this country partitioned into corporate fiefdoms ruled by tech CEOs. What are your thoughts about that?

AL: I think we have an idea in popular culture, at least until the most recent presidential election, that tech workers in California in Silicon Valley were exceptionally progressive individuals, there was the whole idea that tech platforms were censoring conservative voices because everyone who works in tech is a California democratic socialist or something. And what we’ve seen recently is we’ve really had a mask-off moment in the tech industry, and we’ve seen that a lot of these tech workers, tech founders, CEOs are explicitly far right, or willing to cut deals at the very least with the extreme far right.

I don’t think that this is surprising for the people who’ve been fighting gentrification in cities like San Francisco and San Jose and Oakland and Austin, people who’ve dealt with this industry face-to-face. This has always been an extremely male-dominated, white-dominated industry, with a mentality that they represent some sort of cognitive elite who should naturally have greater political power than other individuals. The idea that they got to where they are because of some sort of functioning meritocracy that makes them better, more intelligent, and more deserving of vast resources than other people. That doesn’t mean that every tech worker is a far-right zealot, but there are strong lines of continuity between how this industry is structured and interacts with the communities outside it, and these elitist white supremacist political ideals.

KH: Absolutely. Kate Knibbs recently wrote a piece in Wired about how some tech companies in the U.S. are adopting a so-called “996” workweek. That’s 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week — a 72-hour workweek. And while actually putting this demand in job listings is an escalation, even for Silicon Valley, it reflects a culture of extraction and exploitation that’s been growing and flourishing for quite some time. None of us should be surprised that the politics of people who are so extreme in their exploitation of workers, both here, and even more so, in other countries, where people can be paid a pittance for work that is exhausting, and sometimes, psychologically damaging — people who are driving up everyday people’s electric bills by building water and power-hungry data centers, who are looting people’s thoughts and creative and intellectual work, and demanding the courts simply authorize their lawlessness, in the name of progress — of course their politics are the politics of empire.

Sam Altman has said, “Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.” He’s also said that forming a company is “the easiest way” to form a religion. So you have people – whose technology is being fused with governance, by the way – who are really trying to create not only fiefdoms, but religions with themselves at the center. This is true of Sam Altman, it’s true of Elon Musk, and they’re not alone in that vision.

So, I think we need to reframe a lot of our analysis and critiques, because the escalations of this smash-and-grab period are really changing the terrain and raising the stakes. And on the subject of reframing our analysis, you critique the framing of gentrification as a result of individual consumer behavior. I think this is such an important point. In this age of algorithmic targeting and digital redlining, how should we be updating our analysis?

AL: A lot of the popular discourse on gentrification is one-sided. It’s from the perspective of the potential gentrifier. As a housing consumer, is it unethical for me to live in this sort of neighborhood or that sort of neighborhood? How should I feel about my inhabitance of a city? And I think the two things about this discourse are, one, it’s never from the perspective of people facing gentrification. It’s always from the perspective of the gentrifier, probably because those are the people who write think pieces. And second of all, it’s always from the perspective of the consumer, right? Should I consume a housing unit in this neighborhood or in that neighborhood? And that’s important, but that’s only half of the story, because aside from the question of should I choose to gentrify or not, there’s a question of being in a position to identify in the first place.

What we see with gentrification is that this is a side effect of a new economic formation where a small group of people, gentrifiers, largely male, largely white, almost universally with higher elite education, are paid so much, both as owners, as investors, and as privileged workers, that they are able to displace entire communities when they move in. The other, much larger section of people is those who are now paid so little in urban areas that they’re at risk of getting priced out. This is the remnants of the urban working class, a formation that previously was crucial to capitalist profits, but now because of outsourcing and automation are so superfluous that displacing them can be a profitable endeavor. I don’t think that the individual perspective is unimportant, but we need to look at gentrification, I think to truly understand it as a product of a change in capitalist production, not merely through the ethical lens of consumer choices.

KH: In your book, you write that many traditional strategies on the left were born in a now-defunct urban geography. What approaches do we need to re-evaluate, and what tactics or frameworks are more suited to this moment?

AL: To a large degree, leftist politics are a product of urban revolt. Virtually any branch of leftism has its roots in the Industrial Revolution when cities were growing to house industrial assembly line workers, and these workers were centralized in large workplaces in the key industries of the global economy of the day. When these workers organized, formed a union, walked off the job, they threatened the entire capitalist system: the steel mills, the textile mills, the auto plants.

But today, in today’s cities, we actually see the exact opposite dynamic. Poor people are more likely to work in smaller businesses, not huge sprawling assembly lines, if not in the informal or gig economies. Who’s being pulled together and centralized in our contemporary cities, not the urban proletariat. For the most part, gentrifiers who are working at huge tech campuses, or in elite universities, they’re the people who are getting pulled together and working side by side with one another. But when they revolt, if they were to revolt, it would not be for a universal interest. It would not be for reforming or abolishing capitalist exploitation because they are, for the most part, beneficiaries of that exploitation.

That doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I think that it does mean that we need to reassess and have an openness as the revolutionary left to new forms of fighting and new forms of tactics. If we look at the actual spatial and material conditions around us, we can see that we are on a vastly different terrain than the second Industrial Revolution.

KH: I’m really intrigued by this point. As I was reading your book, I thought about a lot of the smaller unions we’re seeing, and how, while it absolutely makes sense for those workers to unionize, and for all of us to support those unions, our worker power is, as you say, largely fragmented. The example you used in the book of a bakery that’s employees unionized, that was promptly shuttered by its owner, reminded me of the Gothamist and DNAinfo — publications that were shut down after employees unionized. Workers can break a business, but sometimes, that’s all the leverage we have. Of course, there are still unions that have enough heft to shake the system. The Chicago Teachers Union is one that comes to mind, given that they have not only gone on strike multiple times over the last decade and a half, but also bargained for the common good — which is something we need from all unions that actually have the potential to disrupt systems.

In Defying Displacement, you wrote, “The danger under modern conditions is to hew to the union formed to signal fidelity to the class struggle of the historic left rather than investigate its use as a node in the class struggle around us.” Can you talk about what it means to investigate the role of the union as a node in the class struggle around us? What should that struggle look like?

AL: I think sometimes when we think about class politics, we think exclusively of workplace politics, and I think that that’s a big mistake. I think that comes out of our left tradition from a period in time at which there was enormous strategic power in organizing at the site of production in these large crucial industries in growing centralized cities. But I think that it’s a mistake to think that class equals workplace for two reasons. I mean, first of all, it discounts all non-waged labor like social reproductive labor, labor in the home, labor in the community. That all gets erased, all of the labor that’s necessary for wage labor to even happen.

But I think the second problem is we don’t stop having our class positions when we clock out of work. If you’re a working class-person or if you are a business owner and you go home, or you go on vacation, or you go to the supermarket, or you’re taking care of your home, you are still a worker or an owner or whatever it is. So I think that there are ways… When people are fighting displacement, they’re fighting for their class interests. They’re fighting for their class interests against another fragment of the working class and the owning class that’s seeking to engineer their displacement for reasons of economic interest. This is also the class struggle.

We don’t think of union organizing as being very important for the class struggle because someone thought it up in a book. We think of it because of a historic moment where enormous victories were had because of the strategic potentialities of workplace organizing. And I think we need to look and see what those potentialities are in the actually existing struggles around us that we can participate in, not just trying to revive these glory days of union organizing that happened under different economic conditions.

KH: What tactics do you think are more applicable to the moment that we’re in?

AL: People will fight for their homes. People will fight for their neighborhoods. People will sacrifice a great deal to know that their elders and their children and their family and their friends will have a place to call home, especially given that because the neighborhoods targeted for “redevelopment” are often ethnic enclaves. When there’s a sense of communal meaning and importance and history and language attached to a place, people will fight and people can win. But I think that looking at gentrifying cities actually helps us shine a light on a lot of tactics, even if they aren’t explicitly about gentrification.

In 2020, people around the country took the highways. People autonomously took the highways during the George Floyd rebellion. There was no central committee or secret listserv where people came up with a single collective plan: “Everyone go to the highways.” People saw it working in different cities, and then they did that. And this was all coming out of Ferguson, right? When Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson, and there was a community response in this small suburban excerpt of St. Louis nobody outside of the region had ever heard about, the reason people got mainstream national media attention is someone figured it out. Someone had the tactical innovation that would define the next decade of protest activity in this country and decided to take the highway, decided to take the two lane highway into St. Louis, and that is what caused a massive disruption. That’s what brought press, that’s what catapulted this movement.

People made the same tactical decision in 2020 to choke off circulation points into, out, and through the city, circulation points that become more and more tactically significant with greater gentrification. As more people are priced out of cities and have to commute back to go to work, these transportation networks become more and more opportune targets. I think this is just one example of how thinking through the spatial terrain and the human distribution over that terrain can illuminate how we think about tactical possibilities.

KH: You talk about our position as laborers not being definitive, or not necessarily being central to our class identity in this moment. I want to stay with that idea for a moment because I think a lot of people are trying to make sense of what’s happening in the world right now, and how they should understand their own position in the struggle. We are living under an authoritarian government that is further consolidating power on a daily basis. And I want to state that very clearly: this is not merely the rise of an authoritarian government, or the rise of fascism — the capture of government has occurred. The process of consolidating power is ongoing. Some people are still clinging to institutional guardrails here and there, but those are being ripped apart as well. A lot of people are struggling to reckon with this, which makes the questions that come next, about who we are, and who we are to each other, and what we ought to be doing, even harder to address. But we have to address those questions.

So how should people be thinking about their class identity, and their sense of relationship to each other, and their sense of place right now? What is a constructive way to form that analysis of one’s place in the struggle?

AL: Yeah, I think that there’s the knee-jerk reaction for a lot of folks on the left is to want to preserve that worker identity and think of self-identification as a worker as some sort of stable base for the formation of a revolutionary subject, and I have questions about that. I think my politics are oriented towards and rooted in the working class, of course, but I think for that strong identity formation to say, as a worker, as this type of worker, I think that was most prevalent in eras when people basically had to work the same job forever. If you’re a mill worker and your parents were mill workers, and your children were mill workers, you better have an identity as a mill worker or else your life doesn’t make any sense.

I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants. It’s a precarious industry by design. I don’t think I’m going to retire from my current restaurant position. I don’t think I’ll be working it in five years; no one there does. That’s the economy that we’re in. People don’t stick around long enough to have their current position, I think, be a deep-rooted part of their identity. That doesn’t mean they’re going to stop being workers, but they’re probably going to stop being a certain type of worker at a certain shop … before the revolution. I think that’s just the case.

In the 1960s New Left, people did a lot of thinking about how to identify this type of revolutionary subject. Is it still white industrial workers if white industrial workers are pro-police and pro-the invasion of Vietnam? I think people did a lot of thinking about this sort of subject formation around Occupy when people were talking about the multitude and ways that different identities could come together to form an oppositional subject. And I think we’ve taken a step back with the idea that we can just pick up the abstract category worker and use that as a coverall when we’re thinking of revolutionary subject formation.

I think now is a time where we have to have a little creativity, where we need to really be rooted in the manifold struggles around us, where we need to be doing that creative theoretical work at the grassroots level with one another, and seeing what works for people, what’s motivating for folks, what makes sense with the struggles that we have today?

KH: I appreciate that push to think creatively. I also think it’s important to think about the various structures and formations that connect us. While labor has long been central to our class analysis, structure-based organizing has always been about more than job sites. We should be thinking about all of the places and group relationships that bind us together, in these times, because those are all sites of potential. A lot of the organizing people have experienced in recent years is what we call self-selecting — as in, I care about this issue, so I am going to engage with this cause. That’s important work, but the buy-in involved can be tenuous and potentially fleeting. With structure-based organizing, where we look at organizing our apartment building, our school, or our church, for example, there are already existing relationships and bonded interests to build upon. I am not telling people to abandon self-selecting projects, because those are really important, too. But we definitely need to assess existing points of connection where solidarity could unite and empower us. There’s actually a great piece in the summer edition of Hammer & Hope by Benji Hart about how the Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago has organized against anti-Blackness and in support of the migrant community that I hope everyone will check out.

Of course we still need labor unions, and we need existing unions that have the power to shut things down to wield that power strategically, but as you’ve talked about, many people have been displaced as workers. They are stranded at a distance from each other, either through the gig economy, or from the actual geography of workplaces that keep people far apart, and engineer a high turnover by design. Amazon warehouses are a good example, in that workers don’t work in a friendly proximity to each other, and face such grueling conditions that they are basically being used up and ground out — which the company can afford to do, because there are always more people in search of that income. So under these difficult conditions, what political projects have you found hopeful or impressive?

AL: I think the movement to Stop Cop City, while not ultimately successful at blocking the development of the law enforcement training facility in Atlanta, really shows the kinds of possibilities of pulling different elements of our movements together and having this incredibly politically and tactically diverse movement that brought so many folks together and I think really provided a lodestar for folks across the country in fighting the expansion of police power and gentrification in Atlanta.

I think I also always encourage people to take a transnational look at gentrification because this isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. Mexico City just saw its second, I believe, anti-gentrification march. The first one was on July 4th because entire neighborhoods in Mexico City are being effectively colonized by American “expat digital nomads.” We saw a huge movement in Berlin to block the expansion of a Google office plan for there. I am very interested in fostering new forms of transnational solidarities between global cities fighting the same adversaries. I don’t think we’ve had the objective conditions for that to be possible before the last few years. So I think this is a huge opportunity for popular forces to build connections and try to outmaneuver some of these institutions whose whole business model is playing off cities against each other in a race to the bottom.

KH: Can you say more about international struggles that you think U.S.-based organizers can learn from?

AL: When we were organizing against a Google development in San Jose, California, in the so-called Silicon Valley, we formed connections with folks in San Francisco; Toronto, Canada; and Berlin, Germany that were also in simultaneous fights against Google campuses in their cities. We had a week of action where we had identical banners and messaging and actions in San Jose, San Francisco, Toronto, and Berlin, and I do not think that Google’s PR team was ready for that. I don’t think that was on their bingo card for things that could possibly happen.

The housing market in the United States has become financialized, simply meaning that it’s largely controlled by national and transnational financial institutions, not just local rich people, since the 2008 Great Recession. We now have the possibility for housing fights where your fight in Cincinnati, you might be fighting the same people who are being fought in Albuquerque or who are being fought in Seattle. That’s new.

The explosion of tech campuses after the dot-com boom into the present day where they’re playing city governments off one another, as in the case of Amazon’s HQ2 a few years ago, to get the best tax breaks, to save the most money, to get the best deals on land. All of these cities have an objective basis for solidarity with one another. That’s also new, as is the fact that they’re not only playing American cities with cities across the world off against each other. So now we have gentrification happening as a real social struggle, not only across the United States, but in cities across the Americas and around the world. We have a new basis for transnational solidarity, for housing justice, and community liberation that did not exist before 2008.

KH: You mentioned tech campuses, and I want to talk a bit about the evolution of campuses as an extractive force. I live fairly close to a university campus and have for about 20 years now, and I have watched the creep and expansion as the university has served as a gentrifying force in the neighborhood, subsuming buildings and businesses, and changing the face of the area. I’ve seen campaigns to stop the university from closing beloved cultural venues and a local community garden.

Elsewhere, we’ve also seen the rise of tech campuses, which insulate tech employees from the people they’re pricing out. And more recently, we see AI companies creating what they call “AI campuses” which sound like places where people study AI, but they are really just massive, sprawling data centers that devour enormous amounts of water and electricity, and produce pollution that harms local ecosystems and communities. So the word “campus” — which I think most people attach to the idea of shared space for shared learning — has been increasingly used to brand spaces of extraction as if they were centers of enlightenment.

Campus urbanism is playing a central role in the pacification of our communities. How should people of conscience inside these institutions understand their social position?

AL: Yeah, I think the first thing is to look at the functioning of campuses. What are campuses designed to do? Thinking about tech office campuses or university campuses, university campuses are the model. University campuses are not a universal phenomenon. In many countries, when people go to university, they will go to one close by their home and keep living in their family home. The idea that people of a certain class background move away from home to go to a campus where you have all of your needs met, where you have housing and recreation and food and leisure activities all at your school, that’s a very American phenomenon.

It was actually created for a purpose, because in the early 20th century, what were formerly rural schools began being surrounded by large encroaching cities. The people who ran these universities were scared that their students would talk to poor people. If they were talking to poor people and doing poor people things, they weren’t learning and doing the life of the mind. Woodrow Wilson, who was a [Princeton alum], said that the purpose of a campus is to protect elite students from the “majority who carry forward the common labor of the world.” That’s the purpose of a campus is that separation, forming really strong bonds and a form of solidarity between those inside, and a total separation from those on the outside, even when the people on the outside are on the campus to clean, to cook, to serve its members.

The existence of a campus in its most basic sense, I think needs to be problematized because it is a racist and classist structure, that division that it creates by making an elite privileged in-group and effectively erasing the rest of the world. That is what it’s designed to do. When I was organizing in Silicon Valley, I found that a lot of people who worked in tech seemed to think that everyone in Silicon Valley worked in tech.

The overwhelming majority of people in the so-called Silicon Valley do not work Silicon Valley jobs. The only reason people think that is because they’re on the eBay or Adobe or Google or Meta campus, and so you only ever interact as humans with other members of the campus, or you’re at a networking event or a boot camp. I don’t really know that many things that tech people do, rock climbing, and you’re talking to other people who are also in the same position as you, so it seems like everyone must be a software engineer. And that’s the same thing that university campuses are designed to create. Everyone’s a student, and no one else exists. Even the people who serve you food every day, even if they’re your same age, they don’t count. They aren’t inside the campus even if they’re standing on its grounds. And we can’t have any sort of liberatory politics or practice from within these institutions that does not break that division down as an urgent political task.

KH: What would breaking that division down as part of a liberatory politics look like?

AL: I think campus politics can’t just be about students and grad students and professors. They have to be about the communities the university is encroaching upon. They need to be about the service industry workers who don’t get to be part of the campus. I don’t think that progressive tech politics can just be a conversation between tech workers. I think they need to grapple with the way that their industry and their peers are displacing and gentrifying communities. I think there needs to be a real effort to break down those walls because that division is what makes a system run.

KH: That makes a lot of sense, and I also really hope that some folks who are operating within these systems that isolate and benefit them will take the long view. Because that kind of isolation from harm is not permanent. Students who attend universities that wall them off from workers and poor people living in struggle ultimately wind up living at the mercy of a lot of the same conditions once they’re no longer a source of revenue for the university. I feel like I was part of the last generation that had a precedented reason to believe there would be good paying jobs waiting for us after college, but we promptly learned otherwise. People studied the humanities, and found out there were no jobs. People were told to learn graphic design, and they did, and then those jobs went away. People were told to learn to code — and now the tech field is being destabilized as well. The point is that if you’re not in the very top tier of people benefiting from exploitation and extraction, there is no safety. There are just periods in which you are momentarily more valuable to the people exploiting us, but that’s not a fixed condition. It’s really just a matter of how long that cycle lasts and who’s around to actually give a fuck when you’re the one being disgarded and displaced.

AL: Yes, absolutely.

KH: So, as we wrap things up, I want to return to your argument that displacement is “the leading edge of confrontation with the contemporary ruling class.” How should we be reframing the housing struggle as a terrain of class war?

AL: I think some people on the left have thought of housing struggles as an afterthought. The idea that the real work is at the workplace or it’s building the party, or it’s forming some sort of collective, and that anti-gentrification work doesn’t have the same sort of credentials for some on the left. I think that’s a deeply mistaken view. When people are fighting for the preservation of their community, when people are fighting some of the most powerful institutions on the planet, we need to pick a side.

I think going back to your early example of a unionized bakery that folds, yeah, that never touches the capitalist class writ large. That’s not a threat to the system by itself. But some of these fights against neighborhood displacement come up almost immediately against Fortune 500 companies and the entire state apparatus. I think there’s something that very much needs to be explored, and materially supported in that, because again, we don’t shed our class positions when we’re talking about rent. We don’t shed our class positions when we’re talking about sustainable housing. Those are still coming from our positions within capitalist production, and it is just another train of struggle in that same fight.

KH: Well said. Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

AL: I just want to say that things are admittedly dire in the U.S. and around the world, and I still remain full of revolutionary optimism for what lies ahead. The military gentrification of D.C., deploying the military for quality-of-life policing, is not the move that powerful, stable nation states make. Trying to ram through deeply unpopular cop cities in dozens of cities around the country is not what a stable ruling elite that is not afraid of the people it rules over does. I think a lot of what we’re seeing today are signs of the thinness of imperial and capitalist power, and I just hope that we can all keep going together.

KH: Thank you for that. I think we should also understand these hyper militant actions as efforts to terrorize people of conscience who might otherwise advocate for themselves and each other. While most of us are not among the most impacted by these actions — and should be doing all that we can to support those most impacted, and people organizing in support of those communities — this administration is seeking to terrorize us with these actions. They are trying to break our sense of relationship to each other, or prevent us from forming the sense of relationship we need, by instilling fear. And I would also agree that so much of what we are seeing, from ramped up militancy to billionaires building bunkers, is a reflection of the unstable situation the ruling class has created. As Dr. Luke Kemp explained, this spiraling inequality is unsustainable. It’s the stuff collapse is made of. The people that rule us want to police, displace, and dispose of us as needed to maintain their position for as long as possible. What we need, in order to create structures and systems that might give us a fighting chance, is each other, and that’s why they want us immobilized and afraid. So, let’s remember that, and let’s connect and build. Because that is where all our hope lies.

Andrew, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss your book, Defying Displacement, and to talk about gentrification, and ways that we can innovate within the class struggle.

AL: Thank you so much.

KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes