'Dispatches Against Displacement' -- a review

Nobody gets paid to fight against capitalism in America. Anyone who receives a paycheck as an “organizer” in social struggles is first and last getting a paycheck. Good intentions don’t matter -- money always implacably talks and all other stuff walks. The evolution of social work in the 20th century and the rise of the parasitic non-profit industrial complex are fringe expressions of the dynamism and sophistication of democratic capitalist regimes; unlike historically obsolete Stalinist and fascist tyrannies, advanced capitalist democracies are skilled at peaceful integrating discontent into the legitimate decision-making apparatus of the state, and with this diffusing the possibility of discontent expanding in any sustained, disruptive, autonomous direction. Jobs integrating discontent into the decision-making mechanisms of a democratic capitalist order usually pay badly, but this doesn’t bestow plebeian virtue on them, or otherwise alter their objectively pro-capitalist social and political function.

Anyone can get paid to register voters. Nobody gets a paycheck to foment collective action against market society and against the class power of the private sector elite. For comically obvious reasons subversive action around real human needs can only be pursued on an unpaid volunteer basis.

In this larger context, long-time housing activist James Tracy's 2014 book 'Dispatches Against Displacement' offers a somewhat scattershot overview of the minutiae of housing politics in San Francisco. Tracy pours on copious detail of civic politics pertaining to an endless series of housing and public space struggles, setbacks and defeats as working class and low income people engage in endless efforts to keep their heads about an ever-rising tide of market forces.

For most of the past twenty years, housing activist and 'Dispatches Against Displacement' author James Tracy has been a professional housing activist. This means that Tracy has received a steady paycheck in part to pedal illusions to hard-pressed poor people about the character of their powerlessness under capitalism in America. Regardless of subjective intentions, these paychecks necessarily color his perspective.

In "Dispatches Against Displacement," City Hall, elected officials, and electoral politics are the star around which James Tracy's very small planet orbits. What is the legacy of this unrelentingly pro-electoral politics, work-within-the-system approach to the market-generated housing crisis in 21st century San Francisco? Today San Francisco is well on the way to becoming the world's nicest looking office park. This is happening without the faintest hint of any kind of credible, real world resistance -- resistance that doesn't play the capitalist election game, does an end-run around the bourgeois political apparatus altogether and inflicts real damage on the economic interests of the private sector elite. Regardless of subjective intentions the activities of work-within-the-system housing activists like James Tracy have helped pave the way to a contemporary situation of total demobilization and defeat for working class renters and poor people in San Francisco.

In "Dispatches Against Displacement" James Tracy's most far-going and visionary response to what capitalism does to housing in America is for "Community Land Trusts." While this might not be a terrible thing in and of itself it tends to suggest our ultimate options is to try to shop our way out of the grief we get under the dictatorship of the market. For "radicals" of the James Tracy stripe, the capitalist system -- wage labor, money, the market -- and its political racket are eternal; they will always be with us, we must always work with them, and there is no possibility for another kind of society, let alone of fighting for it now. Quotes from Herbert Marcuse can't obscure this. Opposition to market relations themselves and to the capitalist political apparatus are beyond the cognitive reach of remember everything and learn nothing salaried housing activists. Their abysmal perspectives, the consistently abysmal results they have produced, and the endless bogus rationalizations they make for their failures are proof that there is no such thing as a paying gig fighting against capitalism in America.

Reading between the lines of "Dispatches Against Displacement" it can be seen that in San Francisco, James Tracy's approach of getting politicians elected and complaining about them afterward has been a catastrophic failure. The Bay Area's galloping demographic catastrophe screams that it is time to retool and engage in actions that cut elected officials out of the picture and consign professional housing hustlers to positions in front of a computer monitor in the unemployment office.