Collected Work

Anti-Eviction: The Fight against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco

In the early 2010s, San Francisco experienced a tech boom that created both great wealth and great inequality. The city became known for runaway gentrification, a major housing crisis, and an "eviction epidemic" of long-term tenants. This book tells the story of how residents built a powerful anti-eviction movement and how they fought—and sometimes won—a right to their homes and their city. Focusing on the stories of tenants facing eviction, Maharawal describes the different strategies for resistance that emerged as well as lessons for the broader national housing crisis, beyond California.

“New York 2140: Climate Change and Gentrification in Tomorrow’s Ruined New Yorks”

Ruins, from the perspective of capitalists, are sites where exchange value has collapsed. At the same time, the infrastructural residues of once-productive landscapes present opportunities for those who wish to live outside of the logic of the commodity society. In the latter half of the twentieth century, large swaths of New York City were ruined as sites for capital accumulation and its distinctive forms of social reproduction. Reinvestment was accompanied by a series of political clashes theorized as the “revanchist” city. As climate change proceeds, the prospect of a newly ruined New York City becomes more concrete. This article explores the prospects for ruination and reinvestment through the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose 2017 novel New York 2140 depicts a struggle over the regentrification of Manhattan following a series of catastrophic climate events. In the novel, Robinson posits a dialectic of social struggle that resolves into a kind of post-apocalyptic social democracy. The ending of New York 2140 reflects the impasse in which thinkers and militants who are trying to think about the problem of transition find themselves in an era without a clear revolutionary subject, where reform appears less as a confident triumph than the last-gasp effort to avert total catastrophe.

“On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City”

This article explores the roots of deindustrialization in one of New York City's most important industries, the manufacture of clothing. Capital flight, in the form of “runaway shops,” began as early as the teens, when the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILG) established itself through a series of key battles. The handmaiden to runaway shops was the reemergence of contracting, whereby the assembly of garments was disaggregated in terms of time, space, and legal identity. I trace efforts to combat these dynamics through their culmination in what I call the “New Deal settlement,” a stabilization of the industry across what contemporary analysts called the “New York Production Area.” This settlement, I argue, was at once geographical, political, cultural, and economic. As soon as the New Deal settlement emerged, manufacturers began working to collapse it, dispersing garment work to places like northeastern Pennsylvania, where manufacturers enlisted the wives and daughters of unemployed anthracite miners to sew their garments. Factory owners, sometimes linked to organized crime, sought to establish a new regulating capital rooted in relationships of domination, protected by authoritarian local governments. This account offers an alternative emphasis to that of Robert Fitch, whose influential account emphasized “a conscious policy” to deindustrialize the city, overseen by the real estate industry. Instead, I show how deindustrialization was rooted in significant ways in the dynamics of competition themselves, shaped at each stage by particular social relationships, state policy, and world politics.

The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour Under Neoliberal Authoritarianism

Decades of neoliberal authoritarianism have propelled Turkey into crisis. Regime change, economic disaster and Erdogan’s ambition to impose ‘one-man rule’ have shaken the foundations of Turkish political life, but what does this mean for workers? Moving beyond the headlines and personalities, this book uncovers the real condition of the working class in modern Turkey. Combining field research and in-depth interviews, it offers cutting-edge analyses of workplace struggles, trade unionism, the AKP’s relationship with neoliberalism, migration, gender, agrarian change and precarity, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on workers. Bringing together Turkish activists and scholars, this book is an inside look at the dynamics and contradictions of working-class resistance against Turkey’s neoliberal authoritarian regime; from worker self-management to organized labour and rural struggles.

“Financialized Gentrification and Class Composition in the Post-Industrial City: A Rent Strike Against a Real Estate Investment Trust in Hamilton, Ontario”

Through a case study of a rent strike against a real estate investment trust in a working-class neighborhood in Hamilton, Ontario, this article asks how we might understand class and class struggle against financialized gentrification in a post-industrial context. While class has been central to gentrification literature, working-class experience and struggle have often been ignored or conceptualized in a way that precludes agency. New research on financialization of housing often focuses on struggles but has so far paid limited attention to class. This article draws on Italian operaismo (workerism) and its concept of class composition to contribute to the current debate by suggesting that financialized gentrification and struggles against it might contribute to a recomposition of the urban working class. Through a qualitative account of the 2018 East Hamilton rent strike, the article analyzes this struggle as two moments of class composition in the sphere of social reproduction. First, the extraction, exploitation and displacement pressure tenants experienced is analyzed through the lens of technical class composition. Second, the rent strike itself is analyzed as an expression of political class composition involving a confrontation of urban capital, a politicization of housing precarity, and the building of collective, autonomous power.

What’s Race Got To Do With It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality, 2nd Ed.

The first edition of What’s Race Got to Do With It (2015) addressed a moment when those working on the ground—activists, educators, young people, and families—were trying to understand and fight back against neoliberal education reforms (e.g., high stakes testing, school closings, and charter schools), while uncovering what race had to do with it all in the context of a supposedly post-racial United States. In the years since, the steady and grounded work of social movements has increased the visibility and critique of privatization, market-based reforms, and segregation; demonstrating the interlocking connections between racism and capitalism. In this period we have also seen an intensified attack on public education (alongside other public infrastructures) and a return to a more overt "racism as we knew it." This new edition of What’s Race continues the examination of neoliberal education reforms as they are being rolled back (or reworked) to track the changes and continuities of recent years—revealing the ways in which market-driven education reforms work with and through race—and share grassroots stories of resistance to these reforms. It is hoped that this new edition will continue to sharpen readers’ analyses concerning what we are working to defend and what we are working to transform, and provides a guide to action that emboldens the collective struggle for justice.

Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life. Prisons, Brett Story shows, are more than just buildings of incarceration bound to cycles of crime and punishment. Instead, she investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism.

“‘Dead Addicts Don’t Recover’: ACT UP’s Needle Exchange and the Subjects of Queer Activist History”

At the start of the 1990s the New York chapter of the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was essential to the continuation of needle exchanges, which provide clean syringes to injection drug users without disapprobation or discipline and have been shown to reduce rates of HIV transmission. ACT UP’s participation in needle exchange was part of an effort to build connections between political actors, especially across race and class lines, as the group sought a more expansive understanding of who was affected by HIV/AIDS. These efforts have been largely overlooked in the recent attention to ACT UP’s legacy. This article asks what the history of ACT UP’s needle exchange might tell us not only about the history of HIV/AIDS and public health but also about the ideals of health and recovery in defining the subjects, forms, and historiography of queer activist history.

“Black Lives Matter, Gentrification, and the Security State in the San Francisco Bay Area”

This article analyzes the San Francisco Bay Area Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 in relation to the regional political economy of the tech-industry, the real estate booms, and the attendant ‘eviction epidemic’ in the region. It analyzes the regional political economy as the context in which these protests must be understood, argues that the protests created a regional protest geography that, in turn, was met by a regionalized repressive security state, and reads the disruptive practices deployed by these protests as a series of complex and sophisticated contestations which embodied connections among policing, gentrification, and the regional political economy.

“Harveyan Utopian Thought and Social Justice: Approaching Public Space”

This essay explores the idea of public space by reviewing David Harvey’s utopian thought about social justice and the future of cities. It analyses several of his writings as well as conceptual constructs, including those of “dialectical utopianism” and “territorial distributive justice,” the modified versions of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “subaltern [insurgent] cosmopolitanism.” Having produced, during the last four decades, a consistent and profound critique (and corresponding theorization) of contemporary capitalist society and its urban development, Harvey finds it critical that, at some point in the future, all institutional and physical infrastructure set up by bourgeois society during the last five centuries or so be replaced by another that gives rise to an alternative, relational space and place which are born out of “philosophical reflection,” an “assessment of practical requirements and basic human needs” and the “ferment of social movements.”

“Neoliberalism Is a Political Project: An Interview with David Harvey”

In this interview, Bjarke Skærlund Risager, a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University, sat down with David Harvey to discuss the political nature of neoliberalism, how it has transformed modes of resistance, and why the Left still needs to be serious about ending capitalism.

“Broken Windows at Blue’s: A Queer History of Gentrification and Policing”

This essay uses the 1982 police raid of a gay bar in New York City's Time's Square to outline how LGBTQ political movements engaged with and were transformed by law-and-order politics that helped enable large projects of urban gentrification. It notes how a process of political struggle led to predominant a gay politics that abandoned police violence as an issue in favor of the fear of street violence from strangers, aligning with certain militant liberal conceptions of neighborhood safety that suited more narrowly the class interests of professional white gay men.

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs. 

They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

This book asserts that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today. Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today.