Reflections on rural electric cooperatives and socialist organizing

I’ve spent a lot of time recently (aka the past year and a half or so) thinking about rural electric cooperatives (RECs), electric utilities, energy democracy, and socialism. I’ve published two pieces so far on this: “Parliaments of the Earth” in Logic Magazine, and “Co-ops, Climate, and Capital” in Science for the People Magazine.

The first piece gives a general introduction on RECs, and gives a pitch to support them as a progressive alternative to the dominant investor-owned utility (IOU) model, based on their democratic and non-profit status. The piece also gives a few examples of grassroots movements making use of RECs’ democratic structures to push governance reforms and decarbonization initiatives. But this piece ultimately acts as a simple introductory text, and probably gives an overly rosy and one-dimensional portrait of the world of RECs.

The second piece thus serves as a sequel to the first piece, by focusing more on the limitations of RECs, as seen in the context of their origins in the 1930s, as well as in the nature of the reform movements that have sprung up around them in recent years. Special shout-out to Abby Spinak and her 2014 PhD dissertation, which is the single best thing I’ve read about RECs. If you’re gonna spend a few hours reading about these matters, read her dissertation, or at least the introduction and conclusion.

Parliaments of the Earth is fairly straightforward and goes over the obvious benefits of the cooperative form for electric grids, so I’ll summarize here the more nuanced arguments of Co-ops, Climate, and Capital. RECS seem like a radical and potent institution, but in practice they largely function as boring, technocratic institutions that are run by a small, insulated group of experts and managers, and have done so from their very beginnings. This is a result of how they were designed by the Roosevelt administration and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in the first place – their purpose was not to create a community institution that could expand anti-capitalist, communal values and forms of living, but to revamp rural capitalism, unlock a new source of aggregate demand for electrical machinery and appliances, and push forward the industrialization of agriculture. Consumption was the priority, not cooperation. Hardly surprising, given that this was a program by the US government – but still worth spelling out.

Reform movements started springing up around RECS in the 1970s. Here, the structure of RECs gave social movements an advantage, since co-ops can’t accumulate capital as can IOUs, which limits the resources that management can draw on to defend and entrench themselves. RECs are also supposed to be democratically controlled via direct elections. So there ends up being a lot of interesting case studies of co-op reform movements, usually fighting against some combination of mismanagement and reliance on fossil fuels, and for some combination of increased transparency and increased renewable energy. Thus, these movements are relevant for the modern climate movement, and related movements fighting to reform and even nationalize/municipalize modern electric utilities.

But the flip side of these movements is their limited class character. Most of them are largely based in middle-class professionals – the exact kind of people you would expect would have the time, energy, knowledge, and interest to involve themselves in these kinds of local government battles around wonky policies. And if they can get the job done, fine – but it presents a problem for socialists who want to create a mass, working-class movement against the climate crisis and fossil capital, and for public institutions.

The solution to this problem I start to pose, is that co-op reform movements – and any movement for energy democracy that targets electric utilities – should develop a wider program of intervention into the conditions of day-to-day working class life, that can remove the obstacles to mass participation and organization that are set up by capitalist society. But this commentary is limited, and does not address the point of how to organize and mobilize a mass working-class movement that could enact such a program in the first place. (This relates to a hunch I have that simply having a cool working-class-focused policy program does very little to create and mobilize a working-class base – which is why Bernie lost in 2016 and 2020 – but more on that some other time.)

Further Commentary and Points of Interest

There are many interesting and noteworthy aspects of RECs and their history that I have left out of the two published essays. Perhaps some of this can be put into a third essay.

A context of rural radicalism

Its interesting to muse about the wider political context of the Roosevelt administration’s heavy support for rural electric co-ops. There was a sense running through US elites at the time that the countryside was a a dangerous place, whose underdevelopment, isolation, and poverty was becoming a breeding ground for radicalism. Electricity was seen by some as a kind of pre-emptive counter-insurgency strategy, to “civilize” rural America and stave off growing discontent. Consider the many radical movements that had been springing out of rural and small-town America. The post-Reconstruction era saw the Knights of Labor organizing workers and co-ops across the country, often in an agricultural context. The Populist movement was largely an agrarian/farmers’ movement in the south. The later IWW was more urban based, but had plenty of rural roots with their network of wandering “hobo” workers and their bases of support in far-flung mining and timber towns, and other frontiers of extraction. In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, there were incredibly violent battles between miners and corporations in states like Colorado and West Virginia.

It was around this time that the Country Life Commission was established, which reported on the widespread socio-economic problems plaguing rural America [PDF]. Its report did not touch upon political dissent, but at one point it did warn that “the incubus of ignorance and inertia is so heavy and so widespread as to constitute a national danger”. President Roosevelt, in a special message commenting on the report, specifically identified cooperatives as the ideal means by which rural residents could work together for self-development and to overcome the stagnation of rural life. In any case, political dissent continued. In 1915, the Plan de San Diego, a program of armed insurrection spearheaded by Tejano separatist militants, was exposed and defeated in Texas. Two years later, the Green Corn Rebellion broke out in Oklahoma. Three years after that, the Battle of Blair Mountain took place in West Virginia. And by the 1930s, the Communist Party was growing, and had major bases of organization in places like Alabama, among Black sharecroppers.

Maybe too much of a reach to draw a direct line between these currents of radical rural organizing, and the initiation by the federal government of cooperative-driven rural electrification. Still, its probably a piece of the puzzle, which overall in the 1930s is a picture of US elites pulling out the stops in order to prevent economic crisis and social upheaval from destroying the country. And all this would have pre-empted later theories of counter-insurgency and anti-communism, that pinpointed “development” as a key means to stave off unrest and make the ground less fertile for revolutionary upheaval.

Social movement organizing via the federal government

The flip side to the decidedly capitalist nature of the Roosevelt administration, the New Deal, and RECs, is the fact that key officials in the REA did view rural electrification efforts as requiring at least some aspects of a grassroots social movement. Rural people had to be contacted, persuaded, organized, and mobilized to actually form cooperatives, apply for REA loans, put up the poles and wires, and maintain the infrastructure in a democratic and professional manner. To this end, a large number of REA workers were specifically engaging in basic organizing tasks: roaming around the countryside, knocking on doors, coordinating town hall meetings, holding informational sessions, and most importantly, training locals to take on these tasks themselves. It looked like what modern NGO or electoral campaigns might look like, or even union organizing, except the REA was organizing with the weight of the federal government behind it, and was organizing to build up material infrastructure.

REA organizing was also not simply a purely technical venture, of the sort you see today with get-out-the-vote campaigns or other modern state-adjacent efforts. The project was overtly seen as a political movement, that was in opposition to IOUs and right-wing business interests in general. As such, anti-IOU agitation was part of the REA playbook, as was wider propagandizing about the benefits of cooperative power versus dependence on private utilities (who didn’t want to run lines out to the countryside anyway). This political battle even carried over after cooperative-driven rural electrification was well underway, as some IOUs tried to step in and buy out co-ops, with the REA serving as a nerve center to coordinate battles against privatization. (I can’t track down exact citations for this stuff, but I recall reading about this across many pieces on the REA and early RECs, so it seems to be a canonical part of the history, and easily found in any writings about rural electrification or the public power movement).

Socialists are a long ways off from having any comparable power in federal or state-level government, as did advocates of public and cooperative power in the 1930s, but the REA could still be a template for how a segment of the state could become politicized and even radicalized, and operate in a way that blurs the lines between the state and social movement, especially in the context of a Green New Deal and climate policy. It is also perhaps an example of how “top-down” organizing can be productive. It would be interesting to compare this against the ongoing efforts to foster communes and co-ops by the radical governments in Venezuela and Bolivia.

Race

A major under-discussed aspect to rural electrification, which I regret not at least touching upon in my two essays, is race. The stereotypical image of rural America as mostly all white rednecks or whatever isn’t quite true today, and was substantially less true prior to the two waves of the Great Migration, when there were large numbers of rural Black communities in the South. Several of the radical rural movements mentioned earlier had prominent participation by Black militants, such as the Knights of Labor, the Green Corn Rebellion, and the Alabama Communist Party.

The REA, like the New Deal in general, had tendencies that reinforced racialization and white supremacy; Black households were often excluded from initial electrification efforts. One factor in this was the institutionalization of racism via market-oriented logic – since RECs were meant to be self-sufficient business entities, potential co-op members had to have a certain level of income and wealth to qualify for membership and electricity, which excluded many poor Black households, who were still entrapped by the post-slavery sharecropping systems and Jim Crow laws. There is a good academic paper on this that examines North Carolina’s rural electrification process during the 1930s. Overt racism also played a role, given that the hyper-localism of co-ops meant that it would often be local, Klan-adjacent elite networks who dominated co-op boards.

RECs thus became a target for the civil rights movement and related campaigns in the 1960s and onward. Unfortunately, there does not seem to have been much in the way of detailed pieces on this phenomena, just scattered reports and remarks. But one particular success story is that of Roanoke Electric Cooperative, in north-east North Carolina. Roanoke EC had a majority-Black membership for most of its history, however for the first few decades, the board of directors was controlled by an elite White network. Organizing campaigns in the ’60s fought and eventually succeeded in winning more expansive voting rights and mobilizing members to become engaged with co-op issues. Today, Roanoke has some particularly innovative programs that push beyond the framework of an electric co-op as being solely about selling electricity, such as a land management and conservation program that looks to help Black farmers and land-owners – although, since this program is about turning “unprofitable family farms and forests into economic assets”, this doesn’t exactly represent a radical cooperative-based break with capitalism. Today, there are similar struggles still ongoing, such as in Mississippi, where Black organizers are fighting to reform RECs to become more democratic and more representative of their members, and invest more into programs like cooperative broadband. However, its unclear how rooted these campaigns are in the local Black working-class, and it is likely these are still the kind of professional-based advocacy groups that defines most non-socialist and non-union activism today.

Techno-scientific knowledge & the public sector

An important plank of not just the cooperative power movement, but the public power movement in general, was the cadre of engineers who had the techno-scientific knowledge and skills necessary to design power grids in the first place. The first director of the REA, Morris Llewyellyn Cooke, was himself a mechanical engineer by profession. He commented on the role of engineers in the public power movement in a 1948 paper for the American Political Science Review, which discussed various political dynamics during the early days of America’s efforts toward rural electrification. The movement to set up municipal utilities was taking off in the first decades of the 20th century, but in the beginning it was a challenge to rally the technical expertise necessary to actually design and build municipal utilities. This wasn’t just a matter of employment and government planning, but rather, political and social opposition from the entrenched corporations. Cooke reflected that “it was not easy in those days to get electrical engineers who would burn their breadwinning bridges behind them by testifying on the public side”.

It was a slow process to build the kind of pro-public power networks that could concentrate and distribute the necessary techno-scientific knowledge needed to build the state capacity to build and run power grids. A major boost came from World War 1, during which the state took a more direct role in certain areas of power systems, bringing along a number of engineers who gained experience and increased interest and confidence in publicly-owned power. Cooke also identified a series of major studies done by various municipalities and state institutions on grids, rates, and engineering, which enlisted many electrical engineers to carry out the research; and of course the actual establishment in the early ’30s of major public power institutions:

“REA is the lineal descendant of the Philadelphia Electric case (1914-16), the Giant Power Survey (1923-1927), the distribution cost studies of the Power Authority of the State of New York (1932-34), the passage of the TVA Act in 1933 after years of study and struggle, the report of the Mississippi Valley Committee (1933-34)…have a thought for possibly two score indispensable men and women down the line without whose willingness to work skillfully and conscientiously, with plenty of overtime, and sometimes in the face of biting scorn of the opposing commercial interests, always at modest compensation and often without any compensation at all, such accomplishments would have been impossible” (447).

Similarly, it is important to think about what role techno-scientific workers, and the rest of the energy workforce, can and should play in today’s movements to decommodify and democratize the energy system. Compared to the 1920s and 1930s, we have the advantage today that there is a large public power sector. On the flip side, this sector is largely depoliticized, and is in most areas not an organic part of any kind of public power movement, let alone a more radical socialization movement. Progressive-minded expert and techno-scientific knowledge tends to be concentrated in the non-profit/NGO sector, which mostly draws more on academic researchers, rather than industry workers, and tends to be weighed down by liberal ideologies. The general workforce of utilities in certain regions (not RECs!) tends to be unionized, but these unions tend to be largely defensive and either disinterested or hostile to the idea of public power – not without reason, since many public power union contracts can come with no-strike clauses. Bridging these gaps and radicalizing the public sector will be crucial, particularly for the nuanced and in-depth high-level planning necessary to rapidly decarbonize the energy system. In many ways, it is a much more challenging technical feat to transform an existing system, than to build out a totally new one – triply so for a system that is the basis for modern human life, which must be kept up and running 24/7.

Capacity & activism

The question of techno-scientific knowledge also gets at fundamental matters of class, organization, and mobilization around utilities and climate. In the last section of Co-ops, Climate, and Capital I reflect about how campaigns around RECs, and other utilities, seem largely limited to educated professional-class people, with conclusions that apply in general to matters of local government and civic participation. My main point is that basic democratic activity – let alone more militant campaigns – requires time and knowledge: time to go to meetings, talk to neighbors and friends, attend town halls; and knowledge about the technical and social aspects of government (which in turn requires time to accumulate). And knowledge is especially relevant in the context of a sprawling and complex technical system like the power grid.

“However, both of these resources—time and knowledge—are valuable and scarce resources under capitalism. Workers spend much, if not most, of their time laboring for corporations, limiting their ability to substantively participate in social and political activities that aren’t grounded in day-to-day life. On a more fundamental level, capital is constantly deepening the division of labor, concentrating knowledge amongst a small class of professionals and managers, and further alienating the working class from the production process, and science and technology in general. Thus, in a capitalist society, the average worker is functionally excluded from democratic institutions.”

This fundamental problem of a lack of capacity (time + knowledge), as driven by the dynamics of capitalism, can also be extended to the general problem of why many activist campaigns seem so limited in class character – with the exception of workplace and tenant union campaigns. What makes the latter different is that they are directly intervening into the lives of working-class people, helping people attack constraints on their capacity (low wages and long working hours, or high rents and lack of maintenance, etc.), in a way that is immediate and concrete. This is a very different matter than fighting for more abstract and immaterial goals around reforming a utility, or really any kind of reform at the level of government. Even if its a worthwhile reform, its hard for people to put limited time and energy into work whose payoffs are uncertain and far down the line – especially when there are more pressing day-to-day problems to worry about. In other words, I don’t think the solution is to simply have a progressive, worker-oriented policy program – even if people agree with the program, that isn’t going to automatically inspire people enough to become organizers, activists, and cadre to actively fight for the program. (I would also argue that this is one of the key lessons from the 2020 Bernie campaign).

I don’t say it in the piece, but my hunch is thus precisely that you can’t really organize a mass working-class movement around utilities, energy, and climate, without there first being a reconstruction of more fundamental proletarian organizations, that can attack basic problems of the class, and build militant networks on that basis. In other words, the analysis put forward by the DSA’s Communist Caucus, “Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time”.

Of course, one solution could be the basic, orthodox-Marxist position that we need to center utility workers when strategizing and organizing around utilities. I don’t really disagree with this, but I don’t think this actually gets around the basic problem of working-class disorganization, given how much existing unions have stagnated, and their general lack of interest in fighting for serious reforms – let alone taking up a vanguard position to democratize, decarbonize, and decommodify the grid.

Utility workers and utility socialism

Despite the lack of real militant organizing among electric utility workers, it is still worth brainstorming about its potential. Electricity is arguably the foundational infrastructure of the modern world, and as such, electric utilities are essentially layered underneath the entirety of socio-economic life. A map of electric infrastructure is a near-complete map of capitalism. Electric utilities thus have unrivaled insights into the pulses of capital accumulation, industrial trends, settlement patterns, etc. There is a good reason that Lenin said that “communism is soviet power plus electrification”, and that the first five-year plan of the USSR centered on national electrification.

This also has implications for what a radical group of utility workers can do. In my experience, utility workers in many different roles have ready access to both information, aka maps of the grid, info on upcoming developments, demographics data, as well as autonomy, aka freedom to roam around the territory, respond to calls, plan inspections, or just mill about and talk to people (this experience may be heavily biased by my old role as a utility engineer, and not a lineman or other kind of supervised field personnel – but I dunno, the linemen and techs I knew seemed relatively free too!). Utility workers thus have enormous potential as organizers and agitators, with their access to a wide array of data, and their ability to “steal time” to roam around and talk with people, spread propaganda and conduct inquiries, and in general as people who can be first-contact to find and confirm organizing leads across the entire spectrum of a territory’s working class. This is especially true with RECs, whose workers are generally held in high esteem by locals.

At a more advanced stage of revolutionary struggle, we can also start to think more about how utilities can be instrumentalized as a weapon of the proletariat. The fact that electric utilities are dynamically interconnected with the whole of capitalist political economy means that even absent full state control, radical influence over electric utilities could be used to weaken and overcome bourgeoisie forces.

In many ways utilities are already a class weapon in a soft sense, albeit for capitalists, not workers. Here is an example and personal anecdote. I used to work at a publicly-owned wastewater treatment plant. Part of the plant recycled wastewater into non-potable (non-drinkable) water, and at one point, the plant decided to embark on two new infrastructure projects, to build pipelines and pumping stations to deliver recycled water to two customers: a local oil refinery, and a local country/golf club (can’t make this up!). These projects took place at the same time as the water rates were “rationalized”, which included disproportionate hikes on lower-usage users, as well as on schools (seriously – can’t make this shit up!). To be fair, the oil refinery and country club projects were going pay for their projects – but still, it was a net drain on our engineering and labor personnel, and presented added maintenance costs in the future.

Now, imagine a scenario where the plant – or an electric utility – was under the control of a socialist movement, instead of MBAs. The above logic could be flipped on its head. Instead of subsidizing oil refineries and golf clubs, utilities could deny resources to refineries and golf clubs, and instead subsidize schools and cooperative housing, perhaps in coordination with their unions. And this could be taken well beyond rates, into a militant direction – electricity could be routinely cut off to workplaces whose workers are on strike, or hookups could be denied entirely to environmentally-destructive subdivisions.

The book Recharging China in War and Revolution has some fascinating examples of this general framework of seizing control of electric utilities and infrastructure playing out during the Chinese Revolution, in the most extreme scenario of armed revolution and civil war. A key part of the Chinese Communist Party’s war strategy was to seize control of power plants and substations, and deny power to the Guomindang’s industrial production bases and logistics networks, and to use power access and grid maintenance as a negotiating chip to gain better military positions, and to win over hearts and minds of urban residents. It was as much a social strategy as a military strategy; taking over the grid wasn’t just about sending in troops, but winning over the workforce and the professional-managerial class to the communist project (see Chapter 6).

Fingers crossed, we won’t see a full-scale civil war in the US….but regardless, case studies like this are good food-for-thought when thinking about how utilities can be a weapon of class war, and an important organizing target for socialists.

Enron and 1990s capitalism

It is remarkable how much of bellwether Enron turned out to be regarding structural changes within capitalism — despite the fact that the company ultimately turned out to be fraudulent house of cards built on bizarre and incomprehensible accounting tricks (although then again, maybe its fraudulent aspect is precisely that which most represents capitalism’s fundamentals). Studying the rise and fall of Enron is like studying the political economy of the 1990s in general. The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (2003) covers the whole saga with definitive detail.

Initially, in the ’80s and early ’90s, Enron was a logistics company in the energy industry, specifically focusing on owning natural gas infrastructure. This involved being the intermediary between gas production plants and consumers, selling access to pipeline capacity, ensuring delivery, etc. Before long, Enron started to financialize all these physical assets, which coincided with the steady deregulation of the energy markets. Gas contracts were made more short-term, and trading markets were set up so that contracts could be bought and sold by third parties, and speculation on future prices started to increase. Of course, since Enron controlled a large portion of national natural gas infrastructure, they had access to high-quality information to inform their bets.

Even as Enron slowly morphed into primarily being a financial firm, they expanded their physical operations globally by hopping on the international development train that was taking off after the end of the Cold War. This was a time when privatization of assets and contracts across the Third World was heating up, and Enron was buying up energy and resource access in places like India and Brazil. A lot of these deals turned out to be total busts, not least because Enron was far more interested in closing big deals, fast, than in actually running an efficient and profitable operation, or even making deals that made long-term financial sense. And when they did make a profitable longer-term deal for themselves, as in the case of the infamous Dahbol gas plant in Maharashtra, India, they turned out to be such blatantly crooked deals that they were eventually shut down by popular backlash. For an analysis specific to Enron’s global operations, check out Vijay Prashad’s Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism (2002).

Within the company, the real fraud turned out to be in the accounting. Enron used “mark-to-mark” accounting, popular on Wall Street, which allowed you to book the total expected profits from a deal immediately, instead of as the cash actually came in over the life of the deal. The flip side of this is that if the expected value of the deal decreases in the future, you have to mark that down as a loss. Of course, Enron never did that, and took the abuse even further by twisting their assumptions about deal profitability to absurd lengths to book whatever amount of profits they needed to hit their quarterly earnings targets. And when they did have to face a loss, Enron shuffled away them away in weird shell company entities so that losses and debt were moved off the company books. However, these didn’t actually disappear, and slowly grew as a ticking time bomb over the course of the ’90s.

But even before the accounting fraud finally blew up, Enron became infamous for their actions during the 2000-2001 California electricity crisis, when they took advantage of a shoddy power deregulation effort to manipulate the markets and engage in serious price-gouging. By this point, Enron’s physical assets had grown to include power systems, and they used these to do things like withhold or divert power to drive up prices, or overload the transmission line schedules to get paid to not produce power, and so on.

Last but not least, Enron even tired to get into the Internet business, by trying to roll out broadband networks and to build a trading operation for Internet access like they had done for natural gas and electricity. This turned out to be a bust, not only because they didn’t understand the technology, but also because the dot-com bubble popped in 2000.

So to sum up, the story of Enron is also a story of logistics infrastructure, energy deregulation, state privatization, international development and neocolonialism, financialization and speculation, Internet and tech — and, fundamentally, the short-term systemic thinking that is central to the overall operations of capitalism. Wowza!

Netscape and the rise of technocapitalism

Only ’90s kids will remember Netscape, the original browser of the Internet before the era of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. But what we didn’t realize was the impact Netscape had on capitalism, and the way it symbolized and perhaps even initiated a recomposition of political economy. I have a hypothetical periodization of capitalism that I’ve been trying to work out, involving a distinction between industrial capitalism, finance capitalism, and technocapitalism, based on what industries are dominating the economy and directing the flow of capital, and studying the Netscape era yields some very useful information.

Netscape was the first real “unicorn”, a tech start-up that becomes valued in the billions of dollars by big investors. It was the brainchild of Jim Clark, an eccentric entrepreneur in the likes of Steve Jobs, whose impact on Silicon Valley has been documented in Michael Lewis’ The New New Thing (1999). Clark had already made a small fortune during the 1980s from his first start-up, Silicon Graphics, which had revolutionized graphic cards and 3-D rendering and paved the way for graphic user interfaces and the personal computer. But as the company grew, it was essentially taken over by Wall St. investors, who pushed out Clark and took control of the the profits.

Bankers taking control of up-and-coming companies wasn’t exactly a novel thing; it was how things were in the 1980s. But with Netscape, Clark was determined to not lose control and money to the bankers again. The new company, and its core product — an Internet browser — suddenly made the Internet more accessible to the average person by many orders of magnitude, and thus also meant a massive, massive market opportunity.

Its not clear exactly what kind of bargaining power Clark had against Wall St. Part of it was probably just a case of information asymmetry, and the bankers having severe FOMO. But in any case, he and his team played hard and fast against selling out the company too early, or for too few shares or seats on the board, and the result was that Netscape was the first tech firm that had engineers and programmers at the top, controlling the lion’s share of capital and the flow of profit. Wall St. made money too, of course, but they were simply following along in the wake. When the company launched its IPO in 1995, it turned the engineers and programmers into millionaires, and the co-founders into billionaires, and forever changed the game for Silicon Valley. Even though the company would be very quickly run off the road by Microsoft and Internet Explorer, the nature of its rise created a new standard for the ambitions and strategies of its entrepreneurs, and flipped the balance of power between tech capital and finance capital.

However, the Netscape era was only the beginning of a larger recomposition and re-balancing of global capitalism. The rise of technocapitalism rode on the Dot-com bubble, which burst in 2000 and eviscerated the industry. The survivors would kneel once again before finance capital — until the latter had its own reckoning in the 2008 financial crisis, after the housing bubble burst. Once the smoke cleared, tech would once again be in the vanguard of capitalism, based on the foundations built by companies like Netscape years earlier.

Finance capitalism vs. industrial capitalism

What marked the beginning of the modern era of finance capitalism, and what differentiates it from the earlier era of industrial capitalism? There is some good information and arguments on this in David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), and in Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy’s Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (2004) (which is cited extensively by Harvey).

By most measures, finance capitalism arose out of the crisis of the 1970s, and its hegemony has lasted at least until the 2008 crash. There were several factors in why finance capital started becoming so structurally dominant:

• The collapse of the Bretton Woods system (which regulated international monetary policies and tied the US dollar to a gold standard), thus making most currencies free-floating, and loosening the ability of capital to flow across national boundaries
• The oil shocks of the 1970s, caused first by the 1973 OPEC embargo and then by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, drastically increased the profits of oil-producing nations, who subsequently invested these super-profits into Western banks
• The political turn toward financial deregulation in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, which was both a consequence and a cause of the increasing economic power of finance capital
• The Volcker Shock, which spiked interest rates in 1979 and ushered in an era of high real interest rates through the 1980s and 1990s; this drastically increased the flow of capital toward creditors (financial institutions), and as companies or even whole governments defaulted, sold off assets, and restructured, finance gained more and more direct control over the global economy

One major qualitative change in the era of finance capitalism seems to be the commodification of consumption. This might be a strange way of putting it; after all, isn’t consumption always about consuming commodities? But what I mean here is that under finance capitalism, the very act of consuming — the purchasing goods and services — itself becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold on the market, in the form of various types of consumer debt.

Another major qualitative change was in the nature of corporate governance and the control of profits. After the 1970s, industrial production was increasingly controlled according to the dictates of finance. More and more profits were sucked up into finance companies and to shareholders, rather than reinvested back into production, as was the general trend during industrial capitalism; and on the flip side, many industrial corporations increasingly branched out into finance themselves.

Capital Resurgent, p111

Another way we can describe this periodization is by pinpointing where the center of dynamism was in the economy during different eras. In the era of industrial capitalism, the cutting edge of profit-making was in creating new industrial goods: automobiles, household appliances, houses, gadgets and widgets and doohickeys and whatnot. In the era of finance capitalism, the cutting edge of profit-making shifted toward the creation of new types of debt and other avenues for extracting surplus value from the circulation of capital, rather than just in production and distribution.

I’m not sure quite how accurate all of this is; there are some good graphs in Capital Resurgent clearly demonstrating how finance companies become very powerful in the 1980s and 1990s, if you judge by metrics like market cap or rate of profit. However, other metrics — i.e. consumer debt in the US — don’t as strong or clear of a trend. It’d be useful to find some more raw data-sets on such things, to get a stronger quantitative understanding of the transition.

But the real purpose of thinking through this potential framework of industrial capitalism vs. finance capitalism is to consider whether there has been yet another shift, toward an era of technocapitalism, where the cutting edge of profit-making is in the commodification of data. After all, data has been declared to be the new oil, and tech companies are generally understood to be at the top of contemporary capitalism’s pyramid. This also raises the question of how useful the term “neoliberal” actually is, and whether it is specific to finance capitalism and whether we need a more nuanced understanding for technocapitalism. But more on this another day.

Notes on Endnotes’ “A History of Separation”

Endnotes Issue 4, “A History of Separation”, is all about situating the workers’ movement of the 1800s and 1900s into its historical context.  It continues with Endnotes‘  rather heretical central thesis that the industrial proletariat is not the class that will overthrow capitalism, and that in fact capitalism will not automatically create a revolutionary class in the first place.

Here is a summary of the arguments that stood out to me.

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The workers’ movement of the 19th and 20th century was couched in a very specific identity, that of the industrial worker.  This identity was rooted in the conditions and experiences of laboring in the factories, but also in the institutions and social spaces built by the workers’ movement to help reproduce this identity and pave over divisions of language, religion, etc.  This was all closely connected to the orthodox Marxist valorization of the industrial worker as the producer of all value in society, and thus the rightful heir to the wealth being produced by capitalism.

This not only informed, but overdetermined the class politics of the era.  Early communists believed that capitalism, as it developed, would inexorably proletarianize the rest of society, expanding the ranks of the industrial workforce and uniting them in the factory across divisions of nation, language, religion, etc., and creating a revolutionary force that would overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, a dictatorship of the proletariat.  This seemed correct for a time as industrialization, urbanization, and the expansion of the industrial workforce proceeded; but as capitalism developed and became fully mature in the mid-20th century, the real long-term trend became deindustrialization and the marginalization of industrial workers, as automation steadily reduced the relative need for industrial labor, and produced all sorts of different sectors and strata of workers with no real shared experience or identity — and in particular, a growing population of surplus people of no use to capital.  Capitalism did not unite the masses into a homogeneous collective industrial class, but instead alienated and separated them from one another; the only unity produced by capitalism is the unity of being atomized from everybody and everything, and being dependent on the market.  Unity-in-separation.

The excessive focus on the industrial worker by the workers’ movement also explains the policies of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist states, which took hold in societies which were backwards and agricultural.  These states saw their primary task as developing the productive forces and creating the proletariat in the first place, and so ruthlessly attacked and undermined and displaced peasants and other rural/agricultural classes, driving them into the factories.  The underlying logic was to produce the revolutionary class that the old regime, dominated by feudal elites who stifled capitalism, had failed to produce.  But this focus on expanding industrial production and industrial workers replicated in the socialist bloc the same dynamic as in the capitalist bloc: the tendency toward the technological displacement of workers and the production of alienation and separation.

Deindustrialization and the full realization of unity-in-separation also meant that the shortcomings of the workers’ movement — whose self-identification revolved largely around the figure of the semi-skilled white male worker — became obvious, thus leading to the relative increase in importance of the various social movements around gender, race, sexuality, etc. in the 1960s and afterwards.  With the identity of the worker no longer able to mobilize a strong and powerful force, other identities became more materially powerful.

None of this is about whether communists at various times had mistaken ideas in their heads about how to go about revolution.  Rather, it is an assessment about how the leading revolutionary strategies of history were emergent from their specific material context, with regards to the particular phase of global capitalism at the time.

Since the long-term tendency of capitalism is the production of a unity-in-separation, the task for revolutionary communists is to engage with the problem of composition, of how to add up different fractions of the exploited masses into a revolutionary force.  What’s necessary, then, is not “class consciousness”, but a “consciousness of capital” as the common enemy of all of our disparate and differentiated lives.  From the last paragraphs of the second-to-last section:

Ours is a society of strangers, engaged in a complex set of interactions. There is no one, no group or class, who controls these interactions. Instead, our blind dance is coordinated impersonally, through markets. The language we speak — by means of which we call out to one another, in this darkness — is the language of prices. It is not the only language we can hear, but it is the loudest. This is the community of capital.

When people make the leap out of that community, they will have to figure out how to relate to each other and to the things themselves, in new ways. There is no one way to do that. Capital is the unity of our world, and its replacement cannot be just one thing. It will have to be many.

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So how much of this do I agree with?  A lot, I think.  Its absolutely necessary to not be weighed down with the traditions and myths of the past, and moving beyond the heroic figure of the industrial worker in favor of examining capitalism and class as it actually exists today is a vital task.  In this regard the arguments of Endnotes echos that of Autonomist Marxism, and indeed “A History of Separation” starts with a quote from Mario Tronti.  There is no doubt that the working class today is heterogeneous and stratified, encompassing everybody from software developers to teachers to meatpackers to waitresses.  Building a basis for unity must be the point of organizing, not something assumed or asserted.

The points on automation and decomposition are also on the mark.  This essay goes into more depth on the question of automation and employment, and reaches more or less the same conclusion: that while automation expels the working class from some segments of production, there is a corresponding increase in labor demand in other sectors, mainly lower-wage and more precarious service work, or what Endnotes terms as “surplus population” (surplus to the core sectors of capital but not to the capitalist economy).

I’m not nearly as pessimistic as the essay is with regards to the problem of composing a revolutionary force.  At the risk of sounding like a simpleton I think it is pretty easy to assert that there is more that binds us than separates us, and despite the mass production of unity-in-separation its not at all a hard sell for most people that regardless of our occupations, national backgrounds, etc. we all gotta eat, and we all have to take shit from some kind of boss.  Pushing this generic observation to actual material alliances built around class struggle is another story, of course, but I’m optimistic about these prospects based on the organizing I’m seeing around me, particularly in the tech industry where workers across strata are working together and slowly grasping toward a common identity built through struggle.

Indeed reading Endnotes makes me outright optimistic, despite them being labelled as “bleak” by magazines like N+1, possibly because it echoes what I’ve been hypothesizing on my own in recent years: that the key task of revolutionary communists is to act as catalysts for different fractions of the working class to come together in common struggle, by facilitating communication and collaborative efforts, unveiling avenues of concrete solidarity, and doing whatever else it takes to recompose the working class.

Creating a new Lucas Plan for Google

One of the many, many excellent essays in Issue 2 of Notes From Below discusses the Lucas Plan and the potential to replicate it for the tech industry.  The Lucas Plan was a proposal developed in the 1970s by workers at Lucas Aerospace, a major aircraft designer and manufacturer in the United Kingdom.  The plan sought to overturn management and capitalist control over technology and the use of the workers’ surplus value, in favor of the reorganization of the company and a worker-lead vision for the creation of products far more useful to society.  As quoted from a Guardian essay on the subject:

Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.

At the heart of all this is the fundamental, radical question: what would we like to do with our labor?  The answer has never, and will never, be “whatever capitalism has me working on now”.

This contradiction between what one would like to work on, and what one is forced to work on, exists in the tech industry.  As it currently stands, the tech industry mostly revolves around the accumulation of data collected from people using search engines, social media, service platforms, etc., and using this data to make it easier for advertisers to sell people stuff.  When you really break it down, the fact that Silicon Valley is largely about advertisement technologies is decidedly uninspiring, even without getting into the other aspects of this system, such as the engineering of addiction and political/ideological polarization.  Surely tech workers would rather work on technologies that are more socially useful than this?

Thus the call for a Lucas Plan for the tech industry is coming at a very timely moment.  And in fact unrest within the industry around its products is already growing.  Google workers are making international news with a petition, signed by thousands of employees, to get the company to abstain from military contracts.  This drive is coming after news that Google has been helping develop artificial intelligence technology for improving the precision of drone strikes.  It is excellent news that so many workers in a major tech company are disgruntled with its entanglement with the military-industrial complex, and shows that the trend of tech workers politicizing and radicalizing is continuing.

Of course, a petition will do little by itself — what is needed is for worker power to be built up, and for organizing happening in Google and elsewhere to strategize around how to actually put some muscle behind their demands on management.  As the Notes From Below essay discusses, the investigation into the class composition of Google and other tech companies is key, in that it is necessary to build up alliances between different layers of tech — from the skilled technical layers (programmers, engineers) to the subaltern layers (gig economy workers, campus service workers).  This way, further organizing, and any new Lucas Plan for Google and other tech companies, will truly reflect the interests of all workers, not just a skilled labor aristocracy.

Its worth nothing that creating a viable Lucas Plan for tech companies will be much more difficult than creating one for an aerospace company that is centered around defense contracts.  The latter has a close relationship with government, and its not a stretch to imagine that nationalization and state support would have been able to play a key role in reorganizing the company and completely overhauling production.  But for the tech industry, its a much greater leap to think about nationalization, and whether this would be desirable at all given the hyper-nationalist and imperialist nature of the US state.  But without some kind of nationalization, how could the tech industry revenue — which is currently based on surveillance and advertisement — be replaced?  Perhaps some sort of municipalization, involving the break up and decentralization of the big tech companies, is the way to go.  This could even be linked with a rural and rustbelt renewal program, to heal those old industrial areas that have been left behind by contemporary global capitalism.  In any case, its clear that drafting an alternative worker-centered vision for the tech industry would require a concurrent revolutionary reorganization of all of society.  A tricky task, to put it lightly, but a necessary one.

Amazon, the decimation of warehouse worker wages, and a warehouse inquiry

In the latest issue of Economist, there is an article with some pretty stunning analysis about the wages of warehouse workers in US counties where Amazon sets up shop — specifically on how they collapse.  The following two graphs speak for themselves.

What’s behind this?  According to the analysis cited by Economist, it appears to be a combination of Amazon workers being younger, more inexperienced, and more unskilled than in other warehouses, and generally not able to find alternative jobs due to there only being a few employers in the area.  Technology also plays a role here, with cutting-edge automation allowing the company to hire younger and less skilled workers in the first place, which is deeply related to the argument that automation doesn’t eliminate the need for work, but rather helps generate the need for less skilled work.

Amazon is growing fast, already worth more than all the major brick-and-mortar retail companies put together.  Its combination of retail, logistics, and tech is allowing it to devour large swathes of the US economy into itself.  Amazon and its low-wage, cyborg workforce is the future — and the present, for that matter.  Engaging in militant labor struggles in Amazon warehouses will only become more and more critical for all those interested in rebelling against the rule of capital.  Thus inquiries and workplace reports, like this one just released by Angry Workers of the World, are a valuable resource that worker militants should use and produce themselves, in order to pick apart the nature of the workplace and reveal the ambient level of worker unrest and struggle.  To quote from the conclusion of the first report:

This all sounds bad, but don’t believe that the workers just sat and took it like the good victims the newspapers like to write about every now and again. In the beginning a lot of people had high expectations of working with Amazon, but after a few weeks they started to realise what working for Amazon really meant. So after a few weeks you started to hear more and more angry and incensed discussions amongst workers around the aisles of the pick tower. Workers who in the beginning tried to run themselves into the ground trying to reach their targets, now having realised it didn’t make a difference in terms of getting a long term contract, stopped stressing about targets and deliberately worked slower than they could. In the beginning we were all worried about even going to the toilet because we might get a warning for “time off task” but after a few weeks when we started to realise we would all be fired soon anyway more and more people started to take “extra” breaks, spending time talking with colleagues, wandering around the warehouse, going to the canteen to grab a cup of coffee, playing a game of ping pong, and of course not giving a toss about ‘power hour’. The permanent staff already know that Amazon don’t care about the workers and the temps quickly learn it, and a lot of us start to do minor individual acts of resistance. That is all a good start, but if we want to change the way Amazon treats us we have to work and resist together!

Moving beyond Marx’s fetishization of science and technology

One of the starting points of my attempts at arguing the importance of analyzing and organizing techno-scientific workers has been a perceived shortcoming in existing Marxist theory on the matter.  McKenzie Wark, in the in introduction to General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (2017) has some excellent comments on this shortcoming, starting from the arguments of Karl Marx himself.

Wark focuses on Marx’s Fragment on Machines, a set of notes that speculate that technological development is the transferring of skills and knowledge of workers into machines in a process mediated by and for the interests of capital.  However, there is a gap here in terms of the actual process of how this information is turned into machines in the first place.

For Marx, science will appear to the laborer as something alien to him.  Science appears in the form capital dictates.  Science is a productive force: “all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital”.  But who makes science?  “Invention has become a business,” says Marx, but who does the inventing?…

…The problem is that as actual organized social activities, science and technology do not fit so neatly into the schema of labor and capital.  Hence in Marx they simply come from without as a reified thing called “science” which then becomes part of the machine system as fixed capital. (8-9)

In order to move past this fetishized understanding of science and technology, Wark offers analysis by both J.D. Bernal and himself.  In Bernal’s Science in History series, he argues that contemporary techno-scientific labor (as of the 1950s) was a fusion of high-skill technical labor and the bourgeoisie “gentlemanly culture” of leisurely philosophical-scientific inquiry.  Thus, the new scientific workers who make the science and do the inventing constitute a new class with hybrid origins.  Wark, in A Hacker Manifesto (2004), similarly argues that there is a new techno-scientific class of workers that he dubs “the hacker class”, who today mainly labor with information and are dealing directly with capital’s commodification and enclosing of information and knowledge.  (It would be interesting to compare the arguments of Bernal and Wark with those in “The Californian Ideology”, which seems to take a much more pessimistic view of the new techno-scientific classes).  All of this echoes other efforts at a class analysis of techno-scientific workers, such as analysis by student leftists in the US in the 1960s, debates among French Marxists in the 1970s, and of course recent writings on the new “Tech Left”.

Wark’s comments on this can be summed up in this paragraph that ties the above comments to the project of the book overall:

One task for general intellects might be to imagine a kind of common hacker class interest among those whose efforts end up being commodified as some sort of intellectual property: artists, scientists, engineers, even humanist and social science academics.  We could imagine all of them as belonging to the same class from the point of view of the commodification of information.  We all process information that is part of a complex natural-technical-social-cultural metabolism.  But nearly all of us get to see a ruling class of a rather unprecedented kind extract most of the value from the combined efforts of hackers and workers worldwide.  As general intellects, maybe we should stick our heads above our little cubicles, look around, and figure out how to cooperate with others who understand different parts of the labor process. (11)

Techno-pessimism in the early 1990s

There seems to have been something about the early 1990s that lent itself to intensely pessimistic ideas about the direction of an increasingly technological society.  At least that’s the impression I’m getting from reading two different and highly influential pieces of literature: a 1995 leftist polemic against Silicon Valley, “The Californian Ideology”, and a 1992 cyberpunk sci-fi novel, Snow Crash.

“The Californian Ideology” had a huge impact on discourse about Silicon Valley and its politics, enough to make the editor of Wired issue a very angry and snarky rebuttal.  It analyzed the way the ideology of Silicon Valley — a combination of techno-utopianism with a hostility to any kind of government regulation — is historically rooted in the merging of two previously antagonistic classes in the San Francisco Bay Area, counter-culture hippies and money-grubbing yuppies.  When the various social movements of the ’60s were defeated, a significant faction broke off to try to continue their project in developing new technologies and new ways to mediate social life free of states and corporations, but in the process accepted the boundaries of the free market and slowly mutated into the anti-regulation libertarians that define the stereotypical Silicon Valley techie.  The essay predicts a future of intense economic inequality, environmental collapse, and renewed forms of apartheid in the US.

Snow Crash seemingly builds its dystopian cyberpunk vision directly from the arguments of “The Californian Ideology”, despite being written three years earlier.  Its world is one where techno-libertarianism has been taken to absurd lengths: the government has completely collapsed and private corporations run the entirety of society while also competing with each other, the military has fragmented into rival security firms, the Central Intelligence Agency is now the Central Intelligence Corporation, the mafia has risen to the heights of political economy via innovations in the pizza business, some nations-turned-corporations use fully automated robotic security systems, the global biosphere has totally degraded, tends of millions of refugees from the Third World are fleeing to the First, while California suburbanites construct explicitly white supremacist and segregationist suburbs.  But perhaps the most stunning aspect of the world of Snow Crash is the vision of a labor market that has been fully fragmented via digital platforms, where each worker is a pure individual who must compete with other works to fulfill discrete tasks — indeed, the main characters are a freelance hacker (and ex-pizza delivery guy) and a delivery girl, both of whom work through automated digital platforms.  Somehow, despite being written in 1992, Stephenson predicted the rise of the gig economy and platform companies like Uber, Deliveroo, and Task Rabbit.

Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what about this time period would have produced this kind of techno-pessimism.  After all, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, all the “end of history” chumps were cheering loudly, and US politics was turning sharply toward the right with the Democratic Party going all-in with “Third Way” neoliberalism.  I guess you can chalk one up for left-wing media studies scholars and cyberpunk novelists.

Notes on the revolutionary potential in housing campaigns

There are some real swell comrades in the area who are kicking off some serious work around housing, so its a good time for me to dive back into some of my earlier musings on revolutionary communism and housing struggles.  The following is a summary of the argument I was trying to make across three essays I wrote several years ago: Biopolitics, Dual Power, and the Revolutionary Characteristics of “Serve the People” Programs, The Political Economy of Revolutionary Struggle: Lessons From the Black Panthers, and Serve the People, Seize the Land: Prospects for Revolutionary Struggle Around Affordable Housing.

Revolutionary movements are all based on particular local conditions and histories, but they do have important similarities that can be universalized and applied generally.

• Revolutionary movements deliver immediate and concrete benefits to people.  They are not based in abstract demands for a better world, or promises of societal improvements at some point in the future—they improve things now.  Hence why workplace action has often been at the center of Marxist praxis—it is an area where people can force immediate changes, and in the process, develop into revolutionary subjects.  The creation of concrete benefits makes it clear to people that participating in the revolutionary struggle will improve their lives, even if they may disagree ideologically, or don’t understand the more complex theoretical underpinnings of communism.  The Black Panther Party applied this practice in the US outside the traditional site of class struggle (the workplace), in the neighborhoods, with their service and protection programs.
• Revolutionary movements develop autonomous institutions of the working class, outside of state and capital. This is a requirement for the revolutionary creation of material benefits to the masses; what makes these benefits revolutionary is that they are created and distributed by and for the masses.  This requires proper coordination, planning, and discipline, as well as the ability to scale up and out, and to continually reproduce itself—hence the term “institutions”.  They are also independent from capital and its fetters, outside the control of the state, wealthy donors, non-profit foundations, and so on.  Thus the establishment of popular institutions of the class, which govern and coordinate the creation and distribution of tangible goods and services, develops proletarian “dual power”.  The Black Panther Party developed such institutions to organize their diverse spectrum of survival programs such as breakfasts, clothing drives, etc., although they failed to ensure that these efforts were properly independent from state and capital.
• The economic foundations of the revolutionary movement are key to its survival, and is heavily related to the way dual power institutions are structured. The Black Panther Party, while at its core was made up of dedicated volunteer cadres, also became dependent on donations from petite-bourgeoisie classes like local business owners and white professionals.  This worked while there was a material basis for an alliance (local business owners were locked in the ghetto due to segregation and thus subject to Panther governance; the children of white professionals faced the draft), but once the foundation of this alliance crumbled (desegregation, end of the war), the Panthers were split between a social-democratic tendency that chased after donations from an increasingly conservative base (thus steadily absorbed by liberal institutions) and an insurrectionary tendency attempting to be true to its revolutionary principles without any material base at all (thus easily crushed militarily).  For modern revolutionaries it is clear that we must take seriously the question of how we sustain and reproduce ourselves and our organizations financially.
• Revolutionary movements tap into feedback loops. The creation of immediate concrete benefits isn’t just a way to attract new recruits and impress observers, it is to help break the biopolitical control of capital over our lives and free up time and energy to further engage in revolutionary organizing — thus allowing for even more benefits to be created, and so on, in a positive feedback loop.  Militant unionism increases wages and decreases workplace stress and working hours, thus increasing the amount of money, time, and energy available to organize, which should lead to even more wage increases and stress/workday reductions.  The Black Panther Party’s armed interventions against police brutality made the streets safer for people to walk around and organize, and also kept money in people’s pockets, making more available to help fund more survival programs.
• Land struggles in particular have a lot of potential to generate revolutionary feedback loops. It is precisely for this reason why pretty much all modern revolutions have had at least some basis in land struggles, and why some of the most interesting movements today are based in land struggles (EZLN in Mexico, MST in Brazil, Maoist guerrillas in Asia).  The monopolization of land in agricultural societies presents a very obviously zero-sum game for the masses of landless peasants.  When even a small group of revolutionaries begin to upend this monopolization and start to seize control of and distribute land, it is obvious to all landless people that it would be most excellent if this revolutionary movement was to expand.  The more land gets expropriated and redistributed, the more stable and prosperous and popular the revolutionaries are, and the weaker the old landed class is, and the more land that can be expropriated and redistributed.  (Obviously things are more complicated than this, i.e. unresolved ethno-linguistic conflicts between landless people, less black-and-white statistics around land ownership and inequality, but in general the trend seems to emerges).
• The situation of housing in the US today has many parallels to unequal feudal/agricultural societies. After 2008 the rates of property ownership for different income/class groups was completely upended in favor of the bourgeoisie and their institutions.  The number and proportion of tenants has skyrocketed, as has the amount and proportion of workers’ income going into the pockets of the landlords.  Pushing back against this trend and organizing to put money into people’s pockets is a simple, common-sense idea with broad popularity, but at the same time is a radical attack on capitalist property rights, even if it does not immediately turn into a campaign of expropriating and collectivizing housing (it won’t!).  Organizing around simple and straightforward demands (i.e. repairs/maintenance, freezes on rent increases) would be popular, and also pave the way for increasingly revolutionary actions, like rent strikes and outright expropriation.  But key to all this, as comrades on the ground in housing struggles have emphasized, is overcoming the incredibly high level of risk present in acting against your landlord — and by extension, the state’s security apparatus.  This is not just a question of tactics, but a question of overall revolutionary strategy, and one that should be the focus of investigation and experimentation for all of us interested in exploring the revolutionary potential in urban land struggles.