Collected Work

A Right to Housing?

In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. A Right to Housing? offers both a roadmap and a reckoning. Drawing from his own experiences of on-the-ground organizing, Stein lays out practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself. With unflinching honesty, he then explores why these visions continuously crash against the rocks of political reality. From the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions, he reveals the forces blocking our path—and summons the complex feelings of a Left that has lost faith in the future. Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani's historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.

“Geographies of Ground Rent: Periodizing Ground Rent Theory, Spatializing Ground Rent Refusal”

This article presents an overview of ground rent theories from a historical and political vantage, analyzing chronological continuities and discontinuities, and hypothesizing about the historicopolitical motivations which spur certain approaches to ground rent. It begins with “Classical Marxist” approaches to ground rent theory in the decades after Marx’s death, followed by an analysis of ground rent theory from the 1970s to 2020s. The essay then argues that ground rent-based analyses yield a unique and essential interpretation of class relations, state–capital relations, and the complexity of embodied categories of capitalist social relations. It concludes by considering Demonic Ground/Rent in which the analysis of ground rent may lead us toward ascertaining how to most deeply and fundamentally challenge, refuse, abolish, the current state of things—if we allow ourselves to follow it there.

“Frantz Fanon: Postcoloniality and New Humanism”

Frantz Fanon’s ethical injunction to imagine a “new humanism” in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth has engendered intense debate in the last 40 years among postcolonial scholars over the character of Fanonian humanism. Some argue that it is “residual humanism” rehearsing pieties of the European form, while others exult in Fanon’s “emergent humanism” that radically breaks with Western humanism. This chapter argues that his humanism is neither residual nor emergent. It contends that Fanon conceptualizes decolonization as an antonymous process, a “humanism without humanism,” that ruptures with the Eurocentric humanist episteme, while also fashioning a liberatory project of Bildung for the postcolonial people, leading to the advancement of their consciousness to the nation-people, thereupon ushering in a new humanity, a decolonizing project ironically modeled on the narrative of self-development of bourgeois subjectivity. Fanon is a profoundly revolutionary thinker and a thoroughly Europeanist one at that.

“The Housing Question, Ground Rent Theory, and Differentiation vs. Homogenization”

This essay takes Engels’ The Housing Question as a provocation to (1) apply ground rent theory to housing (something which Engels neglected to do) and (2) investigate Engels’ conflation of housing struggles with the concerns of a “backwards” peasantry. The author shows that applying Marx’s ground rent theory to housing illuminates aspects of the housing question heretofore unexamined—in particular, the significance of the relationship between landowner and capitalist in housing. The essay then shows that Engels’s dismissal of housing struggles and land-based struggles more broadly is rooted in the specious belief that proletarianization homogenizes people. Engels’s spurious logic nonetheless sets in relief an important connection: that only through grasping what Cedric Robinson has called racialization or differentiation and what Sylvia Wynter has named nonhomogeneity can we recognize the theoretical and practical centrality of housing and other land-based struggles to revolution and abolition.

“Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity”

This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apartby returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, the essay argues that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. It contends further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.