Do you have some things to get off your chest regarding rent, capitalism, politics, and/or gentrification? Good news, Rent is Theft is now accepting submissions! You can request to have the article published anonymously if you do not want your name attached to it. Submitted articles will be curated by our team, and may be sent back for edits.

Articles that are accepted and published by Rent is Theft are considered open-source and we will not honor any copyright or claim to ownership. That includes our own claims to ownership as a publication. The articles shared here are meant to be freely distributed for the advancement of the movement against state, capital and rent.

To submit an article to the publication, send it to us via email in plaintext, .txt, .doc, or .pdf format to: rent.abolition@gmail.com

Types of Submissions

Rent is Theft will publish material that covers the following:

• Analysis of the current political situation, from an anti-authoritarian perspective.
• History of different struggles, or history of housing/rent in more-or-less recent times.
• Proposals for how to engage in struggle and rid ourselves of oppressive institutions.
• Communiques or Report Backs from grass-roots, self-organized actions against state and capital with a focus on housing issues.

Guidelines

• Rent is Theft is an anti-capitalist, ant-state, anarchist publication. As such, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, etc will not be published. Our perspective is anti-state and anti-capitalist, so make sure your article keeps within those bounds.
• Articles should be written in essay format, between approximately 500 and 2500 words.
• We will not publish any calls for reforms, or endorsements—implicit or explicit—for any political figures.
• If your article discusses actions that are potentially illegal, please don’t use anyone’s real name or information. This can also include actions that are otherwise legal, but might result in unwanted retaliation.
• This publication is geared at the wider populace, so make sure you write in a way that everyone can understand. Avoid obscure references and try to use words and phrases that don’t require a dictionary.

Submission Guidelines was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Monday evening (June 20, 2016) in Bushwick, politicians and community groups held what they called a “Community Planning Open House” in which they invited community members to “join a round-table discussion”. The event was essentially a ruse to shove gentrification down the throats of a community already torn apart by its ravages. Brooklyn Solidarity Network rejects the top-down bureaucracy threatening to sell-out this neighborhood, proposing instead a bottom-up model, where the neighbors are the ones who make the decisions that affect them. We stand by the neighbors who are being forced out by rising rents, and unequivocally oppose the condo developments and those responsible for them.

We offered this perspective by setting up a table outside the event with information, as well as our ever popular “Evict the Rich” posters. Additionally, a couple of our members attended the open house, to get a feel for what these so-called “community leaders” were offering.

Those of us that stayed outside with the table spent the evening talking with the concerned residents of Bushwick about gentrification and the vision of the Brooklyn Solidarity Network. The reception was overwhelmingly positive; so positive that within 15 minutes we had completely run out of literature and posters, and had pages of email addresses from people wanting to stay in touch. After a quick run to restock, we continued talking with people and hearing their stories. The people we spoke with were tired and angry with the rising rents and displacement endemic of gentrification, and many were as skeptical as we were of the political process surrounding it. Hearing the sentiments of our neighbors further ignited our commitment to fighting for our community.

For the members of BSolid that went inside, the evening was not so enjoyable. What was billed as a “round-table discussion” was actually more of a walking tour of the dizzying labyrinth that is the mainstream political process. Participants were invited to give their opinions on various proposals for Bushwick in the form of stickers and post-its on poster board. Many of the proposals were vague and contradictory. What struck us was how the conversation had been framed in favor of so-called “development” without an alternative. The topics had already been predefined prior to residents attending, thus our “feedback” was limited to the patronizing activity of sticking post-it notes around to indicate our approval.

There was also a lot of talk about “affordable housing”. Of course, very little time was spent explaining what constitutes “affordable”, and why something as low as 30% affordable is considered reasonable. Why not 100% affordable? Why are we even having this conversation? When did we agree to have our neighborhood infested with luxury housing?

Other activities involved placing stickers for where we would like new shopping centers, coffee shops, bars, and banks. But we were never asked whether we wanted these things. It seems the community board had already decided Bushwick should be gentrified, and it gave us the insulting consolation prize of “voting” on the manner in which it would be gentrified.

In one poignant example, a poster asked if residents would like Citibike in their neighborhood. A few stickies said “yes”, a couple said “no”, and one said “fuck Citibike”. A random passer-by read the note, tore it off, and threw it away. The person charged with tallying the “votes” thanked him and said she wished she could have torn it off herself. When a member of BSolid pressed her on it, she replied: “Well, it doesn’t matter, Citibike is coming here anyway.” Say what you will about the language used in the note, it was the feedback they claimed to want. Obviously, they didn’t actually want feedback.

All this culminated in speeches from Bushwick’s “representatives”. They continually mentioned that they were “from the community” and stressed their vision of a “united Bushwick”. BSolid would like to ask this: What exactly does unity constitute here? Are those of us with the most to lose in the gentrification of Buwshwick to unite with those with the most to gain? These politicians parade the fact that they grew up in the community as a right-to-rule, but many of our landlords, so intent on evicting us, live in Bushwick too. It would seem to us that “unity” means that the poor fall in line behind the rich, and comply as our community is leveled to make way for luxury glass towers.

Following the speeches, no time was given for questions, feedback, or direct dialog, with the exception of some political “schmoozing”, as one member put it. The message was clear. This open house was nothing more than a charade to make us feel like we had a say in our demise. They control the conversation, they make the proposals, they make the rules. They don’t want us to give our opinions, they want us to participate in their games to give them their legitimacy.

Though all of this “unity” and “compromise”, one must ask: Why do we have to negotiate with the real-estate moguls destroying our neighborhood? Shouldn’t it be they who are negotiating with us? It is our neighborhood after all. And if we decide we don’t want them here, why is it that we can’t walk away from the negotiations? In a truly participatory process, we would have the option of saying “no”, and stave off the onslaught of condo infestation. But in this process, to walk away would be to ensure our displacement. This process was not designed to regulate real estate capital, it was designed to regulate us.

The dizzying levels of bureaucracy and obscure laws are enough to alienate most of us into defeat and apathy. For those of us that still try to participate, we’re treated like children and asked to apply stickers to cardboard, and condescendingly told that we’re the ones making change.

There was only one table at this event that offered an alternative and the option to say “no”. That table was outside, draped in a banner that read “Rent is Theft” staffed by members of the Brooklyn Solidarity Network.

We have another vision for Bushwick. We don’t see “development” as an inherently good thing. All the dog parks in the world won’t mean anything if you can’t afford to live anywhere near them. Furthermore, we don’t believe that nice things should only be enjoyed by the rich. Why should seeing a newly paved road, or a fresh new park, or a brand new bar, or hearing the words “community investment” fill us with such anxiety? It’s because we know these things aren’t built for us. They’re built for the yuppies that will replace us once we’ve been evicted. BSolid believes that we should be able to have a beautiful neighborhood without the fear that we won’t be able to afford our rent.

They want us to sit idly by as “community leaders” and “community organizations” sell-out our neighborhood to the developers, but BSolid is committed to fighting the onslaught of gentrification and committed to never selling out, and never compromising with false friends for the sake of “unity”. We are the only group who has vocally come forward to say “no” to the developments at Rheingold, with or without its deceptive promises of “affordable housing”, and we will be unwavering in our determination to stop the development.

BSolid has a vision of a Bushwick that is self-governed by its people, horizontally, without some politicians saying “I represent you” while shaking your hand with one arm, and stabbing you in the back with the other. We see a process in which we call the shots, and are not forced to agree to our own displacement. We won’t allow our conversations to be framed by the rich and powerful; all options will be on the table — most importantly, the option to say “no”.

Despite all the fanfair of “community participation”, there is no freedom of choice without the freedom of refusal. BSolid envisions a Bushwick where we have the freedom to refuse to be gentrified; where refusal does not come with the threat of redlining, and having our neighborhood fall into disrepair; where refusal simply means, “We refuse to be displaced”.

The Bushwick we envision, sadly, does not yet exist. We must fight for it. The Brooklyn Solidarity Network invites you to fight with us for a Bushwick in which we no longer have to beg for scraps from an opaque political process, where we are our own representatives, where we are no longer counting the days until our neighborhood is a playground of the rich. Fight with us for the freedom of refusal! Fight with us to refuse gentrification!

— Brooklyn Solidarity Network

Beyond the Illusion of Democracy was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1971, people from the surrounding neighborhood busted through the fence guarding a disused military barracks in the center of Copenhagen. A few weeks later, the site was declared a free town: “The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the wellbeing of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted.”

Since then, Copenhagen residents defected to Christiania to become active members. There, people have the freedom to build their own houses, but also must collaborate with others to put in piping, electricity, etc. Christiania has collective governance, with all decisions reached by consensus; all the residents must agree.

This self-governing community has had some remarkable successes. From youth programs to transportation to sustenance to a vibrant cultural life, the collective has fulfilled social necessities through its equilateral decision making. It even succeeded in putting people addicted to hard drugs in a self-run recovery program and ending the cycle of retaliatory violence that briefly overran its streets.

Their independence was hard won. The government has engaged in consistent tactics to erode the self-determination of the residents. Though each attack required a different strategy, they have always fought back with the tenacity of people fighting for their freedom.

Christianites have been subjected to police raids and house demolitions. In response to these attacks, they erected barricades and attacked with molotov cocktails, fireworks, and stones.

Since 2006, the government has been trying to take control over the area through development: opening the Free Territory for condominiums to be built. Residents have resisted by forming their own development plan, launching a campaign against privately held landownership, and in one particularly strange case, responding to a negotiation deadline with a flute performance.

In 2011 a deal was finally reached between the government and the Christiania collective. The ultimatum: the collective has until 2018 to “buy” the land from the government. This ransom issued by the state ensures that the territory it struggled to finish off before, would be dealt the death blow by capitalist transactions. Now residents spend their time producing to pay off an artificially invented amount of money, to buy off what they once claimed as their own, by their hands-on development and investment of materials and time. They are now forced to interact with other people not on the basis of free association, but as customers who might buy their wares. This ‘solution’ makes it clear what it means to live a free existence, and what factors constitute subjugation.

Yet as an example of a decades-long process of functional independence, Christiania offers a lot. It shows that people working at producing their own society in an egalitarian manner can have a significant result. They didn’t need the state to protect them, but rather developed a full range of skills. They didn’t need capitalistic relationships to meet their material needs. It also shows that a willingness to fight for land can work in the short term. Likewise, these struggles must be connected with similar ones in other cities and countrysides, if they are going to last more than a few decades. In Christiania we can see the model for a future society and the hope that it will be part of a network that spreads over a vast area.

For the Sake of Argument: Freetown Christiana was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We currently live in the Neoliberal age of Capitalism. Social infrastructure is being privatized, wages are so low that people accumulate credit debt just to secure basic necessities, and people are continuously being forcefully displaced from their communities. All this so that corporations can continue profiting from the misery of those below them, and the State, as always, facilitates this process of exploitation through violence. What this essentially boils down to, is the placement of profit over people. This has always been the golden rule of capitalism.

Here I wish to focus more on the current displacement of people and the fragmentation of communities, otherwise known as gentrification, and why building strong communities is vital to defeating capitalism. Specifically the ways in which the state and wealthy capitalists go about destroying communities and why they must do so. I will also show how this process of community destruction, go far back to the very beginnings of capitalism, and ways in which we can build communities of resistance to finally overthrow both capitalism and the state, and build a better society for all.

New York City has been one of the epicenters of gentrification. Long time residents of neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights are currently being displaced so that big real estate investors can make money off of building luxury condo’s for wealthy newcomers. Since the capitalist’s goal is to continue making more money, he must continuously find new ways to fuck over some people, in this case, working class Blacks and Latinos who have been the long time residents of these neighborhoods. Gentrification is just one of the many means in which the landlords and other greedy capitalists oppress the working class and profit of their impoverishment. But let us now take a look at the ways in which people are currently being displaced from their communities and how this has affected their lives.

Gentrification is a process which is made up of mainly two things; economic pressure and state sanctioned violence. The goal being to divide communities and further alienate people to make them more susceptible to control and exploitation.

Rents have been skyrocketing the past few decades in New York City, while wages have remained criminally low. Without the money to keep up with the rising cost of living, many families either wind up having to move to poorer neighborhoods, competing with other poor people for housing or are unable to find homes and become homeless. Landlords will also either attempt to buy out long time residents, or try to force them out by refusing to provide basic services like heating or repairs for their tenants. When bogged down with all these problems, people are less likely to be in a position to question the legitimacy of these unjust conditions and be able to take action to resist them. As people are one by one displaced from their neighborhoods, the old community begins to disintegrate along with the many intimate, diverse relationships between the people who once lived in the gentrified area.

But what role does the state play in all this? The same role it has always played throughout its long bloody history, as the violent enforcer of the law. A law that appears to be just and equal but in actuality is only the will of a wealthy minority. It is the state that allowed for the privatization of land so that developers could build condos for wealthier newcomers. Instead of serving the people who they claim to represent, they refuse to control rent costs, raise the minimum wage, or invest in programs that alleviate the poverty within these neighborhoods. Exploitation and degradation becomes legalized while people are criminalized for being forced to live in poverty. Things like taxes, rents, and wages are all simply forms of legalized extortion. To keep the gentrification process going, the state must always use violence to displace and prevent people from rebelling against their unjust conditions. Here is where we get into the role of the police in the gentrification process.

The duty of the police is not to protect people, but to protect property. The nypd play the role of an occupying army in poor nyc neighborhoods who maintain order through violence. They are the ones who pave the way for investors to come and gentrify poor communities. Police brutality is a daily reality for Blacks, Latinos, and other oppressed groups. The nypd are notorious for being one of the most corrupt police forces in the country. Thousands are harassed daily by the nypd, and many innocent people have died at the hands of these assholes. Blacks and Latinos also make up the majority of the people filling up the prisons, most of them locked up for petty crimes which pale in comparison to the crimes committed by the State. This is how people are forcefully removed from their communities by the police. People are either harassed, locked up, or killed by the nypd, who justify their actions under the disguise of defending the law.

Criminality is how the state legitimizes violence against it’s own people. The law blinds the people from seeing their own submission to the slavery of capitalist society. People are forced to commit acts that are deemed illegal by the state because of the poverty that has been caused by capitalism. The police can arrest a homeless man for living in a vacant building or stealing food from a store, but depriving people of food and shelter is not deemed illegal by the state. When we are told to “obey the law”, what we are actually obeying is the violent, unjust rule of the state and capitalists. All this serves as a means to get rid of people and destroy communities making way for more luxury condos and yuppies.

But none of this is particularly new to the history of capitalism. The destruction and expropriation of communities through the use of state violence can be traced all the way back to the earliest stages of capitalism. The enclosure acts during the Middle Ages expropriated vast amounts communal lands from the people through state violence, creating mass poverty in Europe and laying the foundations for the creation of the modern waged worker.

In Silvia Federici’s brilliant book, Caliban and the Witch, in discussing the transition to capitalism, she points out how, “In Europe land privatization began in the late-15th century, simultaneously with colonial expansion. It took different forms: the evictions of tenants, rent increases, and increased state taxation, leading to debt and the sale of land.”(Federici 2004: pg. 68) Sound familiar? She also notes how,”In the Middle Ages, migration, vagabondage, and the rise of ‘crimes against property’ were part of the resistance to impoverishment and dispossession…Starting with England, always a pioneer in these matters, the state passed new, far harsher anti-vagabond laws prescribing enslavement and capital punishment in cases of recidivism.”(pg 82) In other words, we see more of the same process, community displacement through economic pressure and state sanctioned violence.

The destruction of the Medieval village was the main goal of this process. As Federici notes, “Social cohesion broke down; families disintegrated, the youth left the village to join the increasing number of vagabonds or itinerant workers…while the elderly were left behind to fend for themselves.”(pg. 72) Once again we see the relations between people and their communities being purposely eroded to create the conditions for capitalism. Allowing the state to divide and conquer the people, and forcing them to accept this new form of slavery. This could only happen with the destruction of villages. According to Federici “…the medieval village was the theater of daily warfare.”(pg. 26) Mass opposition to these policies was everywhere, all across Europe there were massive uprisings against the destruction of communities.The village was the place in which these rebellions would begin to burst. With their destruction the people lost the ability to resist the annihilating force of the capitalist machine. All of which led to the continued objectification and enslavement of individuals. So beginning the long history of the despotism that is capitalist society and the resistance of the people that continues to this very day.

Which brings us to the main question of this piece, which is, why exactly must capitalism continuously destroy communities for it to grow? And how can this history of capitalist displacement provide us with some insight in our current struggles against gentrification? Before we answer this question, we must first discuss what exactly a community or neighborhood is.

The neighborhood is one of the main spheres of social reproduction. Meaning it is a place where people create a particular network of meaningful relations with others within a specific area which also provides a basis for human interaction within it. The way people interact and establish relationships within this network is what creates the culture or “community identity” of the neighborhood. This community identity is a basis in which we craft our own individual identities which in turn, provides a basis for other unique relations and interactions with people outside our communities. In other words, you can take the person out of nyc, but you can’t take the nyc out of the person.

Now the intimacy of these connections within the neighborhood varies, but to varying degrees, in each of us, already exists an inclination to form these relationships with other people. This is because as humans, we can only survive and create meaning out of our lives through forming networks of relations with others. The proliferation and interaction of these networks is how society came into being. We form these distinct networks with people who live in the same area as us because we interact with each other on a much more personal and meaningful level. We are social beings who are always seeking to form new relationships with others. It’s how as humans, we could go on to create things like agriculture, cities, and art. We can only create and transcend ourselves along with our environment by creating relationships with other beings that facilitate this organic process of self-determination.The community is simply the natural manifestation of this innate feeling.

However in capitalism, these relations are under constant attack. This is because capitalism can only exist if these intimate, complex webs of relations are removed or continuously made more impersonal. How else could you have a system where people accept the exploitation and enslavement of others? With the destruction of communities, what follows is the atomization and alienation of the individual. It makes it harder to create these intimate, complex relationships and experiences that make life so meaningful. Stripped of these relations, people become further alienated from each other to the point that they can be reduced to mere objects to be managed and exploited by those in power. To the boss, landlord, or bureaucrat who you are as a human being is largely irrelevant. To them you are simply another faceless worker, tenant, or citizen who they don’t give a shit about. All they want is for you to remain obedient and content in your perpetual state of domination.

Gentrification is only a part of this much larger, devastating process. With gentrification, the conditions for the continuation of this domination are cemented. If people are kicked out of their neighborhoods and have to constantly worry about making ends meet, it becomes harder to form those intimate bonds with other people that we need to live and give our lives a larger sense of purpose. The community must be fragmented so that the capitalists and the state can continue alienating and exploiting the people who are ruled by them. The loss of this feeling of community between people is how gentrification contributes to the overall continuation of capitalism and all it’s oppressive relations. If we are unable to connect with others who live in the same neighborhood and beyond artificially imposed borders, we lose the ability to build the collective power we need to fight against this suicidal system. Each passing day bringing us closer to global annihilation due to things like war and climate change.

With all this one thing becomes clear. If we are to not only resist the current effects of gentrification, but preserve and liberate our communities, then we must overthrow both capitalism and the state by turning our neighborhoods into organs of resistance; communities where people have full autonomy and control over their neighborhoods and their very lives. We must build collective power and increase it by extending these networks to people around the globe, so we can finally destroy this fucked up system and replace it with a stateless and classless society where everyone is free to live life to it’s fullest potential. But it all starts in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is the very soil in which seeds of discontent can be planted so that flowers of insurrection may bloom. Each flower unique and when combined, form a beautiful field of rebellious flowers, blooming despite the dying weeds of Capitalism that prevented their growth. But these rebellious flowers can only grow if they are continuously replenished with the rain that is the class struggle and the sunlight that is our vision for a better world.

We must begin organizing locally within our own communities and fight for direct and total control of them. Only then, can we successfully resist the effects of Neoliberal Capitalism. Neighborhood assemblies should be created where people can meet with their fellow neighbors to discuss and address problems in their communities collectively through direct action. By doing so, people begin to form more intimate relations with each other, resisting the alienating effects of gentrification while at the same time, making steps towards the self management of society by the people and the communities themselves.

Tenant unions can be formed to defend tenants and challenge landlords. Anytime someone is about to get evicted the community should organize anti-eviction actions. This undermines the authority of both the landlord and the state, revealing to those in the community their own collective power. Physical spaces can and must be created so that people are allowed to freely interact and engage in all sorts of activities from block parties to organizing. These activities will be what solidifies the relationships within the communities and allow them to grow organically. Neighborhoods must also begin to create their own defense forces to resist the police. All possible forms of self defense should be considered. The police need to be completely disarmed and removed from our communities, especially the ones that aren’t from the neighborhood.The police are servants of the state and capitalist society not of the people. They only exist to impose their rule on the rest of us. If we eliminate them, the state and capital lose their ability to rule over us. Occupations of housing, schools, workplaces, and other things needed to keep society running must also take place and be managed by the communities directly. Expropriation is the way we materialize and establish our collective power.

Basically any action that weakens capitalism and the state while empowering communities should be attempted. Fighting both while simultaneously creating alternatives to them.The goal in engaging in these activities is to build real people power from below, so we don’t have to give up power and be managed by representatives or bosses who claim to know what’s best for all of us. When the people unite and decide to take matters into their own hands, there will be no need for any kind of rulers.

Another world is indeed possible, but only if we are willing and able to create it. Socio-economic crisis is a recurring feature of Capitalism, but now with problems like climate change, we face the possibility of global extinction. We must build federated, decentralized, autonomous communities if we are to successfully overthrow capitalism and save our planet. Where everyone is intimately connected and takes part in the management of their communities and society as a whole. So people can finally live freely and have complete autonomy over their own lives, living it to its fullest potential. Capitalism creates a world of fear, violence, misery, apathy, alienation, ignorance, selfishness, and slavery. We must create a world of love, solidarity, mutual-aid, creativity, diversity, and freedom. Resisting gentrification will be one of the first steps in creating this new world. Let’s start organizing locally in our own neighborhoods so we can finally get rid of this fucked up system and let some other flowers grow.

Building Communities of Resistance was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“The principal cause of crime is always human behaviour. Our aim, therefore, is to control behaviour to such an extent you change it.”

– William Bratton

Democracy in the United States has recently shown us how far the institutional left can succeed in implementing reforms in our political system. We see one coin with two talking heads, president Barack Obama and mayor Bill de Blasio, both espousing similar leftist rhetoric but offering absurd solutions to serious social problems. Obama’s lofty rhetoric astonished crowds, all the while proclaiming his new declarations would move mountains and turn water into wine, while de Blasio — being a bit more reserved of a figure — promised to usher in a new day of progressive change. De Blasio, in a recent speech at Cooper Union, declared his “administration is a product of movement politics,” that “respects everyone’s dignity,” and will “restore New York’s proud legacy as the progressive city” it once was. He further claimed that he would fight against the “inequality crisis — the Tale of Two Cities that we’ve been living for years and years [which] threatens who we are, and… threatens what kind of city we will be.”

These two politicians both claimed to promote a new period of leftism, a revival of a past tradition that few remember, but that everyone yearns to live through again. In reality, what their political bodies have done is shrewdly manipulate voters into mistaking the rhetoric of the revolutionary left with the political goals of the reactionary right. Furthermore, they have been vastly more successful in implementing rightwing political goals through the complexities and implementation of counterinsurgency operations into the daily social lives of the population. Barack Obama is accomplishing this through an increase in state surveillance while de Blasio is doing this through gentrification, policing and cooptation. Bill de Blasio will be our focus here. However, both of these figures are in charge of the ever expanding state apparatus. To challenge American politics more broadly and nyc politics more specifically from a genuinely revolutionary perspective then we must understand what the state is and how to organize its abolition. The aspirations of many people in nyc, the abolition of the “Two Cities” and a dignified existence will not come until we rid ourselves of the state.

Mayor de Blasio is the figurehead of the nyc government, but the state apparatus, we must remember, is not simply the administrative bureaucracy that is government, but rather a vast array of coercive apparatuses that control and administer the population, while stifling the possibility of a free existence for people. The most commonly used definition of the state originates with German sociologist, Max Weber, who described the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government “that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” thus “the modern state is a compulsory association which organizes domination.” The state apparatus includes administrative bureaucracies, military organizations, the police and prison systems, social services, the judicial apparatuses and several other broad institutions.

States are fundamentally imagined modes of total social control. The pervading idea behind the art of statecraft seems to rest in the assumption that human beings can craft, manage, and manipulate large social groups and control these groupings in ever expanding ways. The submission and/or tacit approval of the population, then, is the predominant objective for statecraft. The domestic population, one could argue, is essentially the state’s primary enemy. The matter of keeping the population politically “clean” — using military terminology — is the state’s essential task. This is true in the most authoritarian dictatorship or the most liberal democracy. In each of these societies the state’s true character does not change because the fundamental basis of the state is coercive, organized violence.

In totalitarian states one finds that conventional political and social violence tends to be quite crude. Totalitarian regimes can typically be satisfied with lesser degrees of adherence to required truth. In liberal democracies, such as the United States, the threat from the population is vastly more acute. The authorities have a latent fear that the potential for independent thought may translate into political action. Writing in 1928 Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, was explicit about the need to control the public mind in democratic societies.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Approximately 50 years later, the Trilateral Commission — an assembly of academics, statesmen, and businessmen — published a report titled, “The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies.” In this report the group concludes that unrest in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960’s did not stem from racism and inequality but rather an “excess of democracy.” This report and Bernays’ text, which is aptly titled “Propaganda,” both advise for the manipulation of the media and the coordinated control of the public by the political and business classes.

It is here we see something fundamental about the state in liberal democracies. We have a body of individuals with access to the coercive mechanisms of the state apparatus manipulating the public through various passive means. If those mechanisms fail then the totalitarian nature of the state is there to stifle political action. But rather than using the bludgeon what matters most is creating a certain kind of person; molding the individual to such a degree that egalitarian political action seems impossible or, at the least, misguided. It is the disciplinary institutions of the state and its accomplices that facilitate this process of normalization.

The prison system, the military, the media, the workplace, political organizations, the schools, etc., all coalesce around the aim of complete social control and the desire to keep the population disciplined and “clean.” French philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued these modes of discipline, “cannot be identified with any one institution or apparatus… precisely because it is a type of power, a technology, that traverses every kind of apparatus or institution, linking them, prolonging them, and making them converge and function in a new way.” It is not only the convergence of these institutions that must be combatted but the existence of the institutions in general. The abolition of these institutions and the creation of egalitarian institutions and social relations is the primary objective of movement politics. In the 20th century, heads of state claiming to represent revolutionary currents and social movements used the mechanism of the state apparatus as a vehicle for instituting changes. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and even Venezuela have all demonstrated conclusively why the state apparatus cannot be used as the agent for revolutionary change, but rather, as anarchist revolutionaries have long argued, the state must be abolished as well as other oppressive institutions. One could state unequivocally, that to use the organized violence of the state, the hierarchical, oppressive nature of the institution to usher in freedom is absurd.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio recently won a landslide election and informed us that his administration is an extension of “movement politics.” Previously, an ardent supporter of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, de Blasio, is clearly cognizant of revolutionary politics and ethos. He came into power with the promise of being a great reformer. He campaigned heavily against the nypd’s stop and frisk harassment tactics and he opposed a New York City Housing Authority decision to cut the number of Section 8 vouchers issued to New Yorkers. Months later he launched a website “nyc’s Worst Landlords Watchlist,” which tracks landlords who fail to make repairs. He claimed he “want[ed] these landlords to feel like they’re being watched.” Additionally, de Blasio bellowed during his campaign and afterward that he was fighting inequality. He would not rest until income disparity is brought to a halt and nyc would no longer be the “exclusive domain of the One Percent, but a place where everyday people can afford to live, work and raise a family.” Echoing the discourse of Occupy Wall Street, de Blasio, artfully positioned himself far to the left in the New York City political spectrum.

The mainstream press consistently reminded us that de Blasio is the first Democrat elected in nyc to the mayoral office in two decades, since David Dinkins. nyc was a very different place in the early 1990’s. The crack epidemic was winding down, racial tensions were staggering, and the representation of urban malaise — predominantly created by developers and the government — provided an ideological framework for politicians and business people to engineer a narrative about government assistance that would have made Edward Bernays proud. Mayor Dinkins came into power promising he would “never lead by dividing” in a city he called a “gorgeous mosaic” of diversity. While extolling a message of tolerance and progressivism he instituted a policy called “Safe Street, Safe City,” where he increased the size of the police force to a record 38,310 officers. Ray Kelly, the police commissioner under Dinkins, began instituting “quality of life” style policing measures which had catastrophic consequences for huge segments of the population in nyc and beyond.

Quality of life style measures are, in essence, counterinsurgency methods conducted on the public at large for political ends. Counterinsurgency is a military strategy based, as the word suggests, around defeating insurgencies, but outside of traditional warfare the approach also describes an approach about how operations are managed, with an emphasis on intelligence, peacekeeping, population control, security, propaganda, and fundamentally with gaining legitimacy from the populace. Legitimacy is the central objective. As noted previously, states view their own domestic populations as their most dangerous foe, so keeping that population complacent, and ensuring they view the government as legitimate is the central task. So the conflict with the public is a political issue and not exclusively a military issue. Counterinsurgency specialist and former director of the cia, David Patraeus stated in the Iraq War, “Military action is necessary, but it is not sufficient. There needs to be a political aspect.” This political/military equation is first applied domestically, then internationally as in occupied Iraq, then returned home and applied in new ways.

Repressive policies are not directed, as could be implied, only against insurgent forces. These methods are directed at the entire populace. As counterinsurgency scholar Kristian Williams notes, “the state has ceased to view subversives in isolation from their surrounding society. Increasingly, it has directed its attention — its intelligence gathering, its coercive force, and its alliance building — toward the population as a whole. Repression, in other words, is not something that happens solely, or even mainly, to activists.” The whole political apparatus, particularly in nyc, is now designed entirely for repressive measures directed at the undesirable populace.

This is the framework in which David Dinkins expansion of the police force should be viewed. His successor, Rudolph Guiliani, and his police commissioner William Bratton expanded on Dinkins’ earlier work. Bratton instituted his “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” style of policing, where he mandated officers crack down on petty offenses arguing they would lead to larger and more serious arrests. Bratton came down on subway fare evasion, public drinking, public urination, graffiti vandals, and the “squeegee men” (who had been wiping the windshields of stopped cars and requesting payment). He also began demanding arrest and ticketing quotas from police officers.

This heavy handed approach to policing was coupled with “community policing” efforts. While the police were harassing the public in ever expanding ways they were also engaging with the public in ever more intimate ways. Professor George L. Kelling, founder of the broken windows theory stated, “Social workers should accompany the cops… we shouldn’t be using our jails as mental hospitals or drug rehabilitation sites.” Kelling felt that the community component was vital to the repressive elements. The New York Times published an article before Guiliani’s reign titled, “Does Community Policing Work?; Efficient, Cooperative.” The article suggests the implementation of community policing efforts for nyc.

If New York and other cities want to succeed in aggressive campaigns to reclaim the streets for all citizens, they must make the most of a relatively new idea: community policing. This concept, also known as neighborhood policing, empowers the police to do more than just make arrests. Officers are permanently assigned to one neighborhood so they can get to know the people living and working in it. They tackle problems once deemed unimportant: noise complaints, trespassing, teen-agers’ hullabaloo. The public is given easy access to them through storefront stations and officers’ telephone numbers at work, not the impersonal and frequently busy 911.

Bratton, speaking to the bbc about the 2011 London riots, stated “Community policing is the philosophy that saved America in the 1990s… It’s about partnership, the police working with the community…” The nypd under Guiliani and Bratton began this new process; a combination of petty harassment and neighborhood outreach. The expanded police force began visiting community centers, churches, and local businesses. Bratton also tried to diversify the police force. Bratton stated, “In New York and lapd the promotion path was open for women and ethnic minorities. They became more representative of the minority composition of the city.” And, in effect, the police force became more integrated into city life. After Bratton’s departure from police commissioner the nypd continued their campaigns of brutality against the poor and people of color, but the outreach efforts remained firm.

Guiliani and Bloomberg expanded these efforts, making them common day practice for the nypd. These efforts were coupled with the “revitalization” of the city. Guiliani began the process of the complete alteration of the nyc landscape. Times Square was completely transformed into a hub for multinational corporations and other huge industries. Bloomberg accelerated this process and also continued with new “quality of life” policies like banning cigarette smoking in bars and beaches and ticketing people for riding bicycles on sidewalks. What starts becoming increasingly clear is the connection between “quality of life” policing and urban revitalization. The illegalization, displacement, and disappearance of certain groups of people became common place with the influx of gentrification and development. Places that once seemed like dispossessed war zones soon become playgrounds for the wealthy almost overnight.

In Brooklyn, this process is as straightforward as it is ominous. The same method of revitalization and displacement we saw in the Lower East Side we are now seeing in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Landlords in collusion with the local government assisted in racist hysterics in the 50s leading to white flight to the suburbs. In the 1970s New York’s Housing of Preservation and Development schemed to enrich the landlords at the expense of the poor; offering a program that would let landlords earn more than market value for a house for allowing in a welfare recipient. Due to this program landlords would fill as many people as they could into an apartment without repairing any of the buildings. Lastly, state services were intentionally eliminated in Bushwick just as the social situation became dire. The neighborhood was left to collapse, which it finally did after the 1970s blackout.

After the successful gentrification of the Lower East Side, spillover began to pour into Brooklyn; particularly Williamburg due to its proximity to Manhattan. Mayor Bloomberg, then, began a process of expanding on the Williamsburg example. Bloomberg and Bushwick Assemblyman Vito Lopez drafted a policy document in 2006 titled, “The Bushwick Initiative.” The policies were implemented a bit earlier but the document lays out the guidelines for community policing and gentrification rather starkly. The document states the “Bushwick Initiative is a two-year pilot program spearheaded by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (hpd), the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council (Ridgewood & Bushwick), and the Office of Assemblyman Vito Lopez. The program goal is to improve the lives of Bushwick residents in the 23 square blocks surrounding Maria Hernandez Park through various housing and quality of life programs.” Housing issues are the primary emphasis of the initiative — lead abatement, rodent removal, repairs, etc. Several agencies worked in tandem to reach the overall goals. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, nypd and Department of Small Business Services worked in tandem to:

• address deteriorated housing conditions,
• increase economic development opportunities,
• reduce drug dealing activities, and
• enhance the quality of life in the target area.

The commercial area on Knickerbocker Avenue was repaired and became heavily policed. The police chartered out, what they called, an H zone where they targeted dozens of homes for police raids. In one month around 60 people were arrested.

The effects of this policy have been devastating for many residents. Black and Hispanic people live under constant scrutiny and brazen harassment by the police. People’s apartments and homes are in jeopardy from international developers. Less wealthy landlords have escalated their campaigns of intimidation to displace residents and move in wealthier tenants. For instance, local slumlords Joel and Aaron Israel have used demolition teams to destroy their tenant’s apartments when they were not home, in a brazen effort to force the occupants out. This situation in Bushwick is policed by the diverse multicultural police force that William Bratton envisioned. The 83rd precinct in Bushwick recruits considerably more officers locally, artfully employing the traditional blueprint for military occupations — the French used Algerians, the Israeli’s used Palestinians, the German’s used the French, etc. While specific people live under this military style occupation and are forced out of their homes, the state produces the conditions necessary to create a situation where the wealthy can fraternize.

This is the political situation Bill de Blasio now oversees. De Blasio’s entrance into the mayoral seat was heralded as the new coming of a progressive nyc. However, the political class has not only moved in an undeniably right wing direction, it also has created a political situation where even moderately left leaning goals are unattainable through conventional means. De Blasio’s appointment of Bratton, returning him to the halls of power, demonstrates this point. “He [Bratton] is going to bring police and community back together,” de Blasio stated at a press conference. It is this intersection that matters. De Blasio’s political approach attempts to create a union of state and community; the adjoining of the coercive mechanisms of the state with the egalitarian aspirations of the populace; articulating the Two Cities narrative while intentionally criminalizing the majority of the city.

In reality, no administration could ever really embrace or implement the politics of revolutionary movements. Nation-states and their local administrative bodies, like the mayor’s office, structurally cannot construct a free world. The state de Blasio administers, like all states, legitimacy rests in coercive violence which is embraced and embodied by the nypd. This coercive apparatus can never be truly pacified because its core is savage. It is due to this contradiction that public opinion is so managed, why polls are conducted so frequently, why every few years we’re presented with a new Mussolini then a new Che Guevara. Politics of each spectrum appears represented while in actuality reactionary social control expands across the board. The general acceptance by the authorities of conventional counterinsurgency practices on the populace is the norm.

The anarchist solution then is not implausible. The idea that people can organize their lives without coercive authority is always threatening to those with the weapons. The marriage of the coercive nature of the state and its related institutions — the workplace, the schools, the media, and the judiciary — to an ideal of human freedom has always been unworkable. The solution thus far has been to restrict human freedom all together. The repression from the state, as we see, has become so generalized, targeting everyone and every potential incipient social problem that any response must take a firm political form.

The repressive apparatus will continue to grow if an oppositional movement doesn’t take root now. The seedlings are already there for a liberatory future. The state has long viewed the public as its target in war — its domestic enemy. The sooner we realize this reality the sooner we can begin organizing for a better future.

The Tale of Two Cities was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The mythos of capitalism in America is constructed on the basis of “economic freedom”. One is free to own property; one is free to open a business; one is free to buy luxuries. These freedoms seem reasonable and desirable — principles upon which to build a “free” society. However, if we were to say that one is free to work for a wage, one is free to pay rent, and one is free to be in debt, suddenly the principle of “economic freedom” seems less desirable. The champions of capitalism are quick to retort that freedom is a “double-edged sword”, but this cliché is nothing more than a ruse. “Freedom”, in our society, is a privilege dependent upon class.

The ability to open businesses, own land, and buy luxuries is only awarded to the owning class. This class makes up a very small percentage of people, but the difference is even more stark in our urban centers. The upward mobility promised by the American Dream is a lie at best, and a sick joke at worst. Far from being the smiling benefactors of capitalist growth, the urban proletarians are not only wage slaves, as countless leftist texts will point out, but they are also necessarily compulsory debtors, perpetually extorted by private entities.

In the neighborhood of Bushwick, in the borough of Brooklyn, the median income is approximately $35,000/yr. Now compare this to the typical property values of between $500,000 and $2,000,000. To even comfortably afford the cheapest property in Bushwick, one would have to be making more than triple the median income. Obviously, this is a ridiculous request, and no amount of tugging on bootstraps will triple the salaries of hundreds of thousands of people, despite the relentless assurance to the contrary from the devout apostles of the “free market”.

The plight of the lower strata of the urban proletariat is no secret, and none of this should be of any surprise. However, the plot thickens when one looks at what types of properties are available. For the most part, the only properties available in Brooklyn are apartment buildings or empty lots of land. Homes built for the purpose of living within them are the minority, and fading. This means that even if there were a resident of Brooklyn making that $150,000/yr salary to buy themselves a mortgage, they’d be hard pressed to find a home at all. The real estate of Brooklyn is set up to be a wealth extraction machine via rent. In other words, we’re all extorted by landowners for the right to live in our neighborhoods.

If that weren’t reason enough to be angry, if we then look at the minuscule “middle class” of Brooklyn, we see that their two and three fold increased salaries are not enough to free them from compulsory debt. Should the middle class home-owner-hopeful find an affordable home, the average mortgage would run them between $3,500 — $4,500/mo. Considering that the generally accepted wisdom is to apply about a third of your income to housing (a luxury that most Brooklynites are ill-compensated to afford), that would mean a salary of $126,000/yr after taxes at minimum. But then the conditions of said mortgage arrangement would take them out from under the boot of the landlord only to place them snuggly under the boot of the banker. Given the volatility of the economy — specifically the housing market — it is a risky bet that the mortgage will ever actually be paid. Any hindrance to their flow of income could result in a default. Thus, even making a “middle class” salary still makes you a victim of a Brooklyn not built to house a community, but to ruthlessly extract wealth from its working population.

What this means is there literally is no choice but to pay rent in some form, i.e. you are either extorted by the landlord, or indebted to the banker. For all but the upper strata of the Brooklyn proletariat, there is literally no option for housing that isn’t rent, and for the tiny middle class, it just means you’re paying rent to the bank instead, with no guarantee you’ll actually pay the mortgage off or that you’re “growing your wealth” (as is generally the justification for paying ludicrous rates on a mortgage).

For the most part, the only way to be free from rent in Brooklyn is to own an apartment building. That is, you must own wealth extracting property in addition to a personal home. Of course, “wealth extracting” means that you are extorting your fellow Brooklynites for their meager paychecks, but that is an ethical issue beyond the practical one at hand. Given the prices for these types of properties (in the millions of dollars and growing rapidly), this is an unrealistic prospect to the Brooklyn proletariat. With this set of arrangements our “economic freedom” boils down to the freedom to be extorted by housing debt, or the freedom to be homeless. When the veil of the American Dream is lifted from the capitalist machine, it becomes obvious that “freedom” for the American proletariat means freedom to obey, or freedom to die.

It is with this grim realization that I denounce attempts at rent stabilization or rent reform as impotent at best, and masochistic at worst. Making a case for the impotence of rent stabilization should be no more difficult than looking out your window. Rent stabilization has been in place for decades, and yet rents continue to sky rocket, and masses of people are still displaced. Anyone that lives in a rent stabilized apartment knows they are on borrowed time. Greedy landowners use an assortment of nefarious techniques to force tenants out of their rent stabilized apartments.

One particularly egregious and widely publicized example occurred in the summer of 2013 at 98 Linden Street in Brooklyn. The landlord, Joel Israel, promised the tenants, who had lived at that location for 23 years, that he would put in brand new floors in the kitchen of the rent stabilized apartment. Instead, he had his goons smash up the kitchen and bathroom, making the apartment unlivable. This act of sabotage was not only to force the tenants out, but also to take advantage of weak city policies to destabilize the apartment, allowing the landlord to make a massive profit by bringing in wealthy new tenants into the gentrifying neighborhood. The tenants were without a kitchen and bathroom for 10 months, during which time they were forced to rely on the generosity of a neighbor for those facilities. In addition, the landlord paid a tenant to play loud music, accompanied by a mean dog. Unfortunately, these practices are not uncommon in gentrifying neighborhoods.

One could make an argument that this abhorrent behavior is despite the system, and if the law were applied effectively, it wouldn’t be a problem. The error in this line of thinking is that laws are only as effective as those willing to enforce them. Furthermore, most landlords can afford a lawyers, whereas most tenants cannot However, if we removed this rent relationship all together, we could avoid the need for rent stabilization and the despicable efforts at destabilizing.

So-called “affordable housing” is usually a ploy to use city subsidies to flip a dilapidated property into a massive financial profit for developers. The city will award a decades long lease to a developer on the stipulation that they dedicate some portion to “affordable housing”. However, those stipulations expire long before the lease does. This allows a developer to gentrify an area while satisfying political “advocates” of the low income residents. Not only is affordable housing a lie, but it’s a tool used by developers to offset the risk of breaking ground in a poor neighborhood.

Regarding masochism: The fight for cheaper rent, rent stabilization, and affordable housing is a fight with a core erroneous assumption. That assumption is that it is fair that we be forced to pay rent at all. I’ve already laid out that under our current system there is actually no freedom in the matter; we are compulsorily indebted, extorted. And so, even in our most passionate fights against rising rents, we are accepting our caste as the perpetually extorted. Activists will boisterously toss around figures about income inequality, and the shortage of housing, but always champion a solution that doesn’t change our relationship to housing or to rent. It’s akin to a prison riot in which the sole demand is a better lunch menu.

I think the reason for this is two-fold. 1) It’s more than possible that most people just haven’t thought about rent in this way before. That’s not terribly surprising given the way the mainstream media deals with economics. 2) I think people are afraid. It’s this that interests me most. Brooklynites are more than happy to complain about how high their rent is, and how terrible their landlord is, but when the question of the justness of the rent-relationship comes up, we often shirk back into quiet obedience. We’ve been trained to accept our place in society, to not rustle any feathers. We’re told that if we don’t like our landlords we’re free to move out. But we’re not free to no longer have a landlord. That option is not available to us. We’re told the housing courts are available to us, along with an abundance of eager housing lawyers. There’s 311, and there’s hpd. But again, look out your window and see how effective these institutions are. These are the dead ends where we deposit the very last of our active rage before relenting in exhaustion and defeat.

What we’re left with is to accept our fate in this relationship with our heads down and our wallets open, signing away our dignity and right to self-determination with each new lease. That is our only option if we do not wish to address the systemic question of rent. Brooklyn residents can no longer afford to rely on the empty promises of wealthy developers, two-faced politicians, and misguided ngo’s. Our future depends not on rent stabilization, but in rent abolition, the utter refusal to be extorted.

The Indentured Tenant was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

July 13th 1977 is famous in Bushwick history as a night of looting that left Broadway a devastated mess. However, it was long before this date that Bushwick endured a more thorough and systematic ransacking. It was not, as has often been charged, at the hands of residents, but rather under the oversight of banks, real estate agents, and in fact City governance itself.

The stage was set in the mid 1960s when African American refugees from the South and Puerto Rican immigrants surged into Bushwick. Real estate agents took this opportunity to encourage the racial paranoias that led to so called ‘white flight’. They left cards in the mailboxes of white homeowners saying, “Houses wanted, cash waiting,” and, “Don’t wait until it’s too late!”. The panicked homeowners sold their houses to real estate companies for a fraction of their market value. The agents then turned these same houses over for an inflated price to the incoming black and Puerto Rican families[1]. How did they get away with that? The city’s housing inspectors knowingly appraised them for the fraudulent amount. A house that sold for $8,000 could be flipped for $20,000.

In what later became known as the “FHA Mortgage Scam”, the low-income families were offered assured loans through the Great Society federal mortgage program. Recorded by the New York Times: “Both in the 70’s and 80’s, real-estate operators used payoffs, ruses and fraudulent statements to secure inflated amounts of fha mortgage insurance for hundreds of clients, overwhelmingly lower-income members of minority groups who stood little chance of meeting mortgage payments on their often dilapidated houses.”

Families could sometimes hold on to the houses for five or ten years, but original structural damage or a changed income would force them to default. Rather than help them work things out, it was in the broker’s interest to foreclose quickly, get the fha insurance payout, and sell the house to another family[2].

Simultaneously, in the mid-seventies, Mayor John Lindsay raised the subsidies that landlords got for housing welfare recipients. This meant that because a landlord in Bushwick could get more than market value for a room, he or she would opt to have a welfare recipient in their building. This resident, instead of receiving the money they needed to live, simply became a cash cow for greedy landlords. This also meant that the people with the highest need were being packed into Bushwick just as the city began pulling its resources out.

The program was called Planned Shrinkage [3]. It was suggested by the Rand Corporation, the same think tank that was responsible for the policies that led to the creation of a massive nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. Their suggestion was premised on game theory: human beings will always behave selfishly and harm another if they can win by doing so [4].

Planned Shrinkage was embraced by New York’s Housing of Preservation and Development. The idea was essentially that further civic investment in poor neighborhoods was a waste of resources. As a result, calls to the police and fire departments went unanswered.

There were an increased amount of calls to the fire department because when the population of Bushwick was no longer a profitable mine, landlords and destitute home owners tried to recoup losses through insurance. They would set their properties on fire so frequently that every night another building burnt down [5]. Stories abound of residents sleeping in their clothes with suitcases packed in case they had to run out in the middle of the night. Bushwick houses burnt down and rows upon rows remained burnt out shells, giving the area the look of bombed out Dresden.

This was the desolation left in the wake of unabashed real estate greed and civic policy. In the 1970s it was profitable to raze Bushwick to the ground, so it is was razed. The newcomers, the most vulnerable, and the poor were left to their own devices. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s Bushwick, like most us cities suffered from the influx of crack cocaine, Reaganomics, and neoliberal reforms.

How did Bushwick transition from a neglected and ravaged borough into the real estate gold mine we see today?

This process began when the city returned in the guise of a knight in shining armor, striking down the “bad” residents and building the infrastructure of the neighborhood back up. The question is: for whom?

Starting in the 90’s police commissioner William Bratton put counterinsurgency tactics into effect by deploying extra officers in hardest hit neighborhoods. This is a euphemism for removing people the city had deemed “criminal” and putting them into the prison industrial system.

That was the first stage of a multi-tiered process that has come to be known as gentrification. This recent investment is explicitly geared towards “the next generation of New Yorkers”. This process was stumbled upon by chance and has now become fairly mechanized. Essentially, the city and/or developers target a neighborhood that has low property values, but other valuable attributes such as location or infrastructure. For example, New York City chose the Lower East Side in the 1970s as an ideal neighborhood to house Wall Street workers. The city then paved the way for bank investment by using the police to clear out undesirable characters, taking over ownership of abandoned buildings, and restoring services. The city asked the banks to ease up on redlining, the categorization that denies loans to specific neighborhoods, allowing quick loans to flow. The rest is in the hand of developers who tear down buildings and throw up quick condos, real estate agents who market the “up and coming” neighborhood, and landlords who force out low and rent stabilized tenants to get higher rents. The result is a quick displacement of former lifetime tenants with young, upwardly mobile people, with access to a larger array of money and resources. They need the initially low rents to survive, but help give the neighborhood its hip flavor, making it more desirable to the young professionals and trust funders who follow them with greater spending power and eventually price them out.

Bushwick fell into the crosshairs of the city and developers due to its proximity to gentrified Williamsburg (parts have been designated East Williamsburg to force this association), the accessibility to the city by train, and its general degradation, meaning property values start off low enough to be a good turnover.

Civic interventions came to light through the Bushwick Initiative, a collaboration between various New York City departments [6]. The clearly stated intention of the Initiative was to help landlords fix up buildings, encourage police to conduct sweeping arrests of youth, and replace the diminished services. The intention behind the “clean-up” was to attract capital to the neighborhood in the form of wealthy renters and new businesses. The program was a highly successful counterinsurgency campaign, which led to the incarceration of vast swathes of the population, while simultaneously offering huge benefits for developers. “During one four-week period, there were 56 drug related arrests,” made through the Initiative. After this process Bushwick is now one of the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in America.

Where once white homeowners were encouraged to flee, now a predominantly white group of educated young people is being encouraged back into the neighborhood. Similar deceits were conducted by real estate agents, who, this time around, tricked some of the earliest newcomers into thinking they were moving into desirable Williamsburg [7].

The process underway in Bushwick right now makes the gentrification of the Lower East Side seem lazy and quaint. Hedge funds and professional investment companies have been surging the market, paying all cash for houses, and, as a result, driving up house prices and rent prices also. Housing prices in Brooklyn have leapt up 40% in the last year. “The goal for these Wall Street investors is not to buy and flip the properties for a quick profit à la real estate bubble of the early 2000s. Instead, they are hunting for steady, dividend-like returns they believe can be earned by renting out the homes” [8]. How important is rent to the companies? For CityShares, a property-specific investment company, 70% of returns come from rent collections[9]. Many of these companies are based overseas, and are beholden to investors in other countries, rather than the local tenants. A major property holder in the Australian investment firm Dixon Advisory, which even has its own rental management company, Dixon Leasing, that looks after all its properties.

Rents in Bushwick have increased more than anywhere in the country in the last ten years. In 2009 a studio apartment in Bushwick would go for $900, now the average rent is $2400. This has led to an incredibly fast turnover of tenants in Bushwick, as the incentive to seek higher paying renters for the same apartment is so dramatic. Many tenants who have lived in the neighborhood for decades are being forced out through property destruction, eviction, threats, and sometimes payoffs. A destabilized population is rippling away from the epicenter, as new and richer tenants are moving in. Family homes are being torn down and mega-condos are being erected in record time.

Still in the midst of this decadence, immigrants from Latin America are packed into windowless basement rooms, or rented rooms for only a portion of the day.

Unfortunately neighborhood beautification and quality of life is still being attributed to the gentrification process. Overheard on the street was a comment by a Puerto Rican home owner to a young neighborhood newcomer, “Boy am I glad you guys are here now.” This statement reflects the misconception that the new residents are responsible for the changes. In fact, it was a strategic ten year plan by the city, banks and developers to reinvest in Bushwick to make more money. It is clear from the relatively fast transformation of Bushwick that investment will burn down a house if it makes sense or make a loan to a landlord — it merely depends where the profit margin is larger.

Only a few decades ago real estate agents, city agencies, the police department, congressmen, speculators, and banks conspired to ravage Bushwick and leave its residents for dead. Now this same group has returned under the guise of a stern, yet concerned family member, ready to take the helm of a sinking ship, to dole out punishment where punishment is ‘needed’ and to slip money into their pockets at strategic moments. Fewer homicides, more green areas, and better apartments does not mean these interests are conspiring to make people’s lives better,or to make the neighborhood better. Fixing the neighborhood is simply the newest way to violently extract money out of Bushwick.

Now that Bushwick has become beautified, it is not time to cede this space to the profit of banks, to let real estate agents return to capitalize, to let police and profits decide who stays and who goes. It is time for the current groups of disenfranchised people, without lobbying groups and without the massive capital of hedge funds, to make decisions for the neighborhood. Most importantly: we must not allow investment banks and callous city officials to decide the conditions of our lives. Nobody should own a property besides those that live in it, nobody should profit off someone else’s livelihood, and certainly nobody should be forced from their family home because an investor in Australia wants to amass more money. It is time for the current groups of disenfranchised people — without lobbying groups and without the massive capital of hedge funds — to make decisions for the neighborhood. It is time to refuse rent hikes, to manage public spaces, to decide what to do here and how.

Bushwick will always be a ravaged town until the residents take control of their own buildings, of their own neighborhood, of their own future. We must take this dream of a peaceful Bushwick and force those agents out; to build a self-reliant and self-organized Bushwick that will never again be steamrolled by the cold, calculating interests of investment.

Sources

• [1] http://www.upfromflames.brooklynhistory.org/uff_path/uff_path_divestment.html
• [2] Toby Sanchez — Bushwick Neighborhood Profile, 1988 — Neighborhood Information Center
• [3]http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/pubhealth/p9740/readings/wallace_plague_chap2.pdf
• [4] The theory was disproven when Rand scientist John Nash did an experiment on company secretaries, but he declared that rather than disprove the theory, the secretaries were ‘unfit subjects’.
• [5] http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_bushwick.html
• [6] Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizen’s Council (RBSCC), the Office of Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the New York City Police Department (NYPD), the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and the New York City Department of Small Business Services (SBS)
• [7] http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_bushwick.html
• [8] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/realestate/commercial/brooklyn-homes-draw-australian-investors.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
• [9]http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140609/BLOGS02/306089990/a-novel-fund-lets-investors-take-it-to-the-streets-of-bklyn

What is Regeneration? was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s the first of the month, and like two million other New Yorkers, you begin a dance. That dance might start elated as paychecks stuff your wallet with the fruits of a month’s worth of hard work. The second is dreary and crestfallen, as you surrender the bulk of it to your landlord: the bully in the schoolyard demanding your lunch money. Every month it’s repeated, and if you’re like many of Brooklyn’s residents, the shakedown is preceded by uncertainty of whether your landlord will demand more than you can afford this month, or kick you out altogether. This routine has become so commonplace that it may seem absurd to ask: “Why do we pay rent?” The simple answer to that question is that your landlord owns the building, thus you have to pay to live there. However, that answer then opens up further questioning. What is ownership? What is property?

Again, the system of property and ownership is so commonplace in our everyday lives, that It may seem still absurd to ask what it is, but the answer to the question is revealing. The most basic form of property is, of course, land. If I happen upon an unclaimed piece of land, I can build a house on it, and call it my own. I can grow crops; I can raise livestock. The land on which I live, and produce my livelihood I call “mine”. That all sounds reasonable. However, let’s say I happen upon a piece of unclaimed land, and I decide not do anything with it and leave, can I still call it “mine”? Now let’s say I built a house on said land, and left immediately after I was finished never to return. Could I still call it “mine”? If after I die, someone decides to live in that house, are they trespassing? What about while I’m alive, living somewhere else, with no intention to move into the former house? Are they then trespassing? The answer to these questions would obviously be “no”. Just like at the bar, when you sit in your chair, you call it “yours” for the time being. If you get up to use the bathroom, and someone sits in “your” chair while you’re gone, your friend may say “excuse me, that’s my friend’s seat” and the expectation would be that the person mistakenly sitting would find another chair. However, once you leave the bar, or switch seats, it would be ridiculous to continue to consider that chair “yours”.

So how does that line of reasoning apply to housing and rent? Let’s say I’m a landlord. I pay to have a house built. I don’t live in that house, I live somewhere else. While I live somewhere else, what is to stop someone from just squatting in the first house? The answer should be obvious: as soon as the squatter is found out, they’re told they are trespassing on “private property”, and they’re hauled out by police. If this were the bar, it would be like me claiming multiple chairs as “mine”, but only sitting in one. By what authority can I do that? In the real world, by owning private property, you have at your disposal a team of enforcers known as the police. So, as long as the state or city recognizes that I “own” a piece of property, they will prevent others from using it at my request.

Continuing the analogy of stools at a bar, if I have claimed most of the stools at a bar, and I have some tough guys enforcing that for me, I can then begin to charge people to sit in those chairs. If they don’t pay, they have to stand; if they try to sit without paying, they get beaten up. The question then must be asked, “Is this moral?” In the analogy of the bar, this sort of “bar stool rent” would seem like a pretty mean-spirited thing to do and pretty immoral. The only reason I can get away with it, is that I have some tough guys enforcing it. In the housing market, this practice is seen as normal, but again, it’s not a moral practice, it’s just that landlords have a bunch of paid tough guys (the police) enforcing it for them too. If someone were to claim all of the stools at a bar, you may say, “What the fuck? You stole all the chairs!” and you’d be right. So why when millions of New Yorkers struggle to pay rent do we not all stand up and shout at the landlords, “What the fuck? You stole all the houses!”

The landlords didn’t build those houses, some carpenters did. They didn’t wire the houses, some electricians did. They didn’t actually contribute to the houses’ construction at all. What they did was hand over some slips of paper (money) and said, “This is mine.” Then they left, never intending to live in those houses. All they do is use that concept of “mine” to take money from you, because you need a place to live, and don’t have enough slips of paper to call another building “yours”. So if the landlord is just taking money from you without contributing anything to society, just owns things, what does that make him? A parasite, no better than a tick or a mosquito. Likewise, what does that make rent? Rent is theft!

This is especially true of Brooklyn. Have you ever taken a look at properties for sale in Brooklyn? There are a few two and three bedroom townhouses available for the not-so-modest price of $500k and up, but the overwhelming majority of properties are apartment buildings that cost well over a million dollars. That means that even if you wanted own your own home and not pay rent, you couldn’t. There is no middle class in Brooklyn that can own a homes for their own use. You are either landlord or you are a renter, there are no other options.

So next month, as you gather your hard earned money to pay that parasite, take a moment to ask yourself: What am I paying for? Why am I paying it? Who really owes what to whom? And most importantly: What are the alternatives?

Leech With a Deed was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That’s us: the pawns, the mules, the collateral damage. However, if we the publishers honestly believed our fates were sealed, that there was no changing this arrangement, we wouldn’t have bothered making this publication. It’s true that each of us is a caged animal. But we are not caged kittens, impotent to affect our incarceration. No, we are tigers. We can thrash and tear, should our anger inspire enough. We can strike fear, should our hearts embolden enough. The chains that bind us are thick, but not impenetrable.

The hope of this publication is that it acts as a call-to-action. We have provided some information with which to arm your mind. It is up to you to arm your heart. It’s true that alone we are weak, but in every eviction notice served, every convict sentenced, every family torn apart by poverty, there are potential comrades in our fight against state and capital.

There will be those that extol the virtues of piecemeal victories; slow reforms; working within the system. We hope the articles in these pages will make it clear that the system cannot be changed from the inside. The very structure of our society is made to control and imprison us. Talking the Rent Guidelines Board down to a 1% rent increase is a victory for the landlords; a rent freeze is a stalemate. If rent is truly theft — as we have sought to demonstrate in these pages — then agreeing to pay any amount for rent is consenting to robbery of ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our class.

We instead call for a permanent rent strike. We demand a world in which land, housing and industry are communalized. There are those that will say our demands are “unrealistic”. But, to be realistic in this world is to accept a caste system in which our very humanity is a commodity to be bought and sold. To reject our place in society is to demand the “impossible”, which we, and countless revolutionaries before us have done proudly. In capitalist society there are many prisons, and being “realistic” is one of them. Demand the “impossible”.

Mission Statement was originally published in Rent Is Theft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.