The Brooklyn Rail

Andrew Lee’s new book Defying Displacement (AK Press, 2024) makes what I believe are two important demands on the contemporary revolutionary left: First, the dominant strategies and metaphors for liberatory struggle need to be radically rethought; and second: A key to this rethinking, especially in North America, is a careful analysis of the history and dynamics of gentrification. As such the book is crucial reading for anyone looking to find a way forward in our difficult times. I found this book above all provoking. It provoked me not only to keep reading but also to keep thinking.

The book is excellently written and researched. It offers a broad overview and analysis of both the historical process of gentrification across the globe and resistance to it. Lee himself has been involved in numerous relevant struggles both in neighborhoods and in workplaces and brings these experiences compellingly to bear. Structured as a collection of short vignettes, it is perfect to consume in our hectic lives: on the bus, on a lunch break, right before bed. It’s a book by and for those in the struggle.

Another important strength of the book is its international perspective. While the book is meant for a North American audience and focuses its examples as such, it does place these experiences in their global context both through its attention to larger political economic processes and to examples of community resistance; particularly inspiring examples are drawn from the Chilean experience. Lee gathers this material around a politics aimed squarely at mass militant resistance that attempts to build popular power rather than policy reform. As such, his book offers a valuable alternative to the usual varieties of critical analysis of gentrification: academic perspectives, liberal sentimentality, or social-democratic reformism. If you’ve yearned for a perspective that thinks the Bay Area battles against the Google buses didn’t go far enough, you’ve come to the right place.

From this analytical place the book offers biting criticism of popular political perspectives, including class reductionism, neo-campism, and democratic socialism. Class reductionism gets a particularly virulent rebuttal on multiple grounds. First, the reduction of class to the workplace misses the broader terrain of social domination, especially seen through gentrification and displacement. Second, and more interestingly, Lee argues that class reductionism fails to appreciate the way that the working class is naturally disunited within contemporary society, a disunity and unevenness importantly shaped by geographic forces such as gentrification. For example, tech and other white-collar workers have been doing lots of organizing in the last ten years, but along with this has come a denial of the role of these privileged workers in the destruction of older working-class communities. Lee offers a vision of worker and workplace struggle as significant precisely insofar as it has been able to move beyond the union or the workplace. He writes, “The revolutionary value of the union-form came from the strategic position of the industrial factory, the potentialities of drawing struggle out from the workplace into the city at large.” This point rings true both with innumerable historical examples such as the general strikes of the first half of early twentieth century, as well as contemporary episodes Lee describes such as the struggle of food service workers in Silicon Valley who can’t afford to live anywhere near their work, or the tectonic migrations that made the industrialization of mainland China possible, all of which began as somewhat traditional conflicts in workplaces but gained more profound political content when they connected with struggles around creating and preserving working-class communities.

Neo-campism and democratic socialism are both criticized for hanging on to old models instead of facing the realities of today. In addition, the histories of these models have dubious revolutionary credentials and their contemporary revivalists fail to understand that history accurately. Thus social democrats celebrate “The Nordic Model” without appreciating that it was a capitalist compromise with more radical movements, only possible within a global imperialist context, and some neo-campists in self-described Marxist organizations today still defend the Soviet tanks that demolished the 1956 Hungarian revolution (taking it bizarrely as a model for protecting Ba’athism against American aggression).

Lee raises one very subtle critique of reformism that should be highlighted: the tendency for reformism and do-goodery to be implicated in a general framework of counter insurgency. In his chapter “Terror” he puts forward a vision of geographic development as not just the sloshing around of capital but a political operation meant to quash popular insurgency. This dynamic involves much more than brutish repression. When we look at the destruction of communities to build expensive and tacky condos we should see not only greedy capitalist exploiters or cops cracking skulls but also the networks of nonprofits, unions, and politicians that welcome or even “speak for” critical views from working-class communities. These forces appear to be friends, but it’s crucial to confront the ways that they stage-manage the victory of capital. In one telling example, Google’s new San Jose offices, Lee outlines how well-funded opposition groups like Silicon Valley Rising, a project of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, ultimately served to legitimize the plan and blunt more grassroots organization. This attention to detail and uncompromising eye is one of Lee’s great strengths.

Unfortunately, the vignette style ultimately works to leave many thoughts unfinished. More importantly, Lee fails to take his critiques to their most radical conclusions. Rather than attempt to articulate a viable revolutionary politics, he’s content to conclude that neighborhood struggle against displacement is at least as cool and good as workplace struggle (maybe even more). The strategy of defying displacement (in the literal sense), he claims, is a legitimate form of the class struggle that is a “non-reformist reform.” What’s frustrating is that this appealing but ultimately silly notion is an intellectual off-ramp Lee takes instead of reaching some important insights.

Lee correctly sees geography—understood as the organization of our lives in space—as crucial to the problem of forming insurgent political collectivities. Reflecting on a mural of Chicanx historical icons being destroyed in San Jose, Lee remarks that “communities around the world have successfully resisted dispersal through mobilizing the social ties that make such dispersal so painful. … Social ties, cultural practices, and common knowledges might all be weapons in defense of home, so long as they are turned against the enemy.” This leads to the question of why exactly things like “placemaking” play such a big role in political insurgencies. It can’t just be vibes. A point Lee fails to make is that we good materialists should recognize that popular resistance is all about the way people produce their actual lives, and the key is to realize that that production takes place in space. This is not merely determined by architects and planners. It’s also how people respond to the spatial realities of oppression and dispossession in their efforts to build lives they find meaningful, or at least livable. The networks of mutual aid and inter-dependency that allow for that livability are formed in the spaces where capital and the state refuse to make our lives work. The logic of capital is not ironclad, at least not when it lands in our everyday routines. We are still people, not merely bearers of labor-power, and getting from one day to the next relies on our ability to solve problems ourselves. These solutions are often relatively more autonomous from the exigencies of capital accumulation than a more idealized perspective of an economy would imagine. Moreover, whom we include in these grassroots circuits of resiliency and what they concretely look like is heavily determined by who’s close to us, and closeness vs. farness is basically the whole deal of space. While I don't believe these forms of relative autonomy are always liberatory I do believe they are the social condition of possibility for a mass insurgency, perhaps especially a liberatory one.

This includes very practical concerns like childcare, transportation, and fixing your car. But it also includes more symbolic concerns that are often lumped together under the overloaded term “identity.” These networks are both practical and imaginary¹ (i.e. concerning our understandings of and feelings about the world) and together they form the foundation of political struggle and notions of an “us” that's worth fighting with and for. This is true regardless of whether that “us” is a localized identity like nation or a universalizing one like class. As Lee aptly notes, even classical workplace struggles were dependent on the prevalence at the time of large collective workplaces and networks of communication and mutual aid within working-class communities. The crucial point is that while the specific conditions have changed dramatically today, it is still true that the core dynamics whereby social practices of relative autonomy unfold in space are determining of social struggle. The labor movement is first and foremost geographic.

Lee gestures at the spatial quality of traditions and networks of relative autonomy when he speaks of “place.” It’s precisely the reorganization and in part dismantling of the fertile spatial soil for insurgency over the last fifty years that Lee so usefully highlights in discussions of the counterinsurgency framework (such as the strategic hamlets program in Vietnam) and the fragmentation of the workplace. When old spatial patterns of social life are demolished, including a sense of “place,” the old metaphors, narratives, and strategies of revolutionary struggle must be radically rethought and re-approached. Lee correctly sees our urgent historical task to discover and cultivate a new revolutionary tradition. We need new orientations that respond to the effects of gentrification, not grip the past.

We should, that is, look at gentrification not only as a process to be resisted but also as an entire historical epoch that’s gotten us to where we are now. I’m not saying that all the struggles against displacement are “over” or “lost.” But let’s be honest, many of them are. We should expect the future to look not like The International Hotel or Tompkins Square but something else. If we’re looking for a radical rethinking of revolution, then we should be looking for the new, not the dramas of the past fifty years.

Lee unfortunately seems to miss this critical conclusion. While we must have a clear view of the past and take inspiration from struggles against displacement, our task today is to discover new traditions of popular autonomy and new conditions for social insurgency. Concretely, that means looking for new and surprising geographies of struggle. This includes the American banlieues like Ferguson, Missouri; the continental networks of mutual aid among trans kids facilitated by the internet; the veins of migration created by refugees crossing into the US from Latin America; and many similar items mostly off the map of the contemporary left. These have all been profoundly shaped by “the gentrification economy” but they’re importantly more reflective of its aftermath more than its rollout.

Consider, instead, all the geographies shaped by “the gentrification economy” that do not look like the classic urban displacement story. No one is gentrifying Boardman, Oregon, even though, in relative terms, its population has grown faster than Portland’s for most of the last forty years—in large part because the yuppies have to have their grass-fed beef slaughtered somewhere. Our task is to identify the liberatory and insurgent possibilities in the suburbs/exurbs/satellite industrial zones to which people have been and are being displaced.

A second important question, one Lee gestures at but fails to answer completely, is why we—the readers of AK Press books and the Brooklyn Rail—have found it so difficult to do this? Why do we feel so outside these processes, looking for ways in? I believe the beginning of the answer is something that Lee points to: the historical connection between the left and gentrification.

In general, Lee maintains a carefully generic address in his writing. As with any generic, it’s also rather specific. Throughout his book there’s an assumed familiarity and affinity with the traditions and touchstones of European radicalism and academia, while maintaining a rhetorical stance arguing for how some “we” should spend “our” energy. And yet as he notes in the final chapter:

The social base of anarchism is transformed not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, with the smaller milieus of today not often rooted in communities of immigrant laborers, as was the IWW of yore, but frequently tied to predominantly white punk scenes. A continuity of slogans does not imply a correspondence in the possibilities of struggle.

While Lee is careful to avoid the more grotesque version of this false continuity, he fails to finish the thought and address the elephant in the room: the current left absolutely does reflect the viewpoint leftists looking at struggles from the outside; it absolutely is a matter of debates about how “we” should get inside, and that “we” is absolutely tied to particular social bases, especially white punk scenes. Rather than indulging in an abstract critique of the habit of launching abstract critiques, I’d like to return to good old-fashioned materialism to argue that there are reasons and history behind the contemporary left’s silliness.

To start, I think Lee’s very apt critique of elite college-educated labor radicalism does not go far enough. The fact of the matter is that the problem of class reductionism among this set goes way beyond over-emphasizing grad students or elite professionals. A deeper critique starts with realizing that the symbolic homes of a generation of leftists—anarchist bike collectives, worker-run grocery co-ops, and DIY venues—also have a historical relationship to gentrification that can’t be swept away by looking at gentrification from the perspective of “production” as opposed to “consumption.” This socio-geographic base has, for a host of reasons, become the home base for those elite college grads and a place where their distinct class position gets masked by other cultural markers. This is but one example of that fact that, in so far as worker struggle emerges from our subculture (I’m looking at you, revival of the IWW!), we’re confined to a terrain of social war that puts real limits on what we can achieve, limits that are only more effectively hidden if we call everyone who gets a wage a worker and therefore their self-organization revolutionary.

Indeed, there is a very real and a very obvious relationship between the pillars of radical subculture and gentrification: the luxury urbane lifestyle that capital offers is a dark descendant of our subculture. Whole Foods was cool once, you guys! … or least the small co-ops that Whole Foods commercialized were/are. As such the process of gentrification has managed to create a cultural continuum and in some cases a personal continuum between the social contexts that gave birth to most of our radical political metaphors and to the playgrounds of the elites we know and hate today. This bewildering reversal of the soil beneath our political common sense is the most important aspect of gentrification for many readers of new AK Press books. Without an understanding of this dynamic, we who’re caught gaping at the corpse of ’90s anarchism (which is more of us than we’d like to admit) are politically dead in the water, no matter what sea we’re trying to swim in.

My understanding of this dynamic goes like this: beginning in the sixties and seventies a new fantasy emerged, a fantasy that the derelict and devalued urban spaces deemed “in crisis” by mainstream society might be refuges for folks who were not interested in that society. Artists, queers, and plain old freaks were finding homes in the city that capital had abandoned. This had important precedents, such as the “lipstick traces”² connecting these new urban enclaves of alterity to the earlier avant-gardes as well as the much more proximate hippie movement. However, we might describe the early twentieth-century avant-garde in broad strokes as largely uninterested in having a mass character, and the hippies as driven by a universalist perspective (the New Age they sought to dawn applied to the entire world, including the “squares”). In contrast, the neo-bohemian zones of Lower Manhattan or Venice Beach were somewhere in the middle. They were mass enough to have a type of self-sovereignty but still be inherently limited. These new scenes were for freaks who wanted to do weird stuff like live in old factories converted into lofts or have radical sex in underground bars, i.e. not everyone. But they still assumed there were enough weirdos out there to constitute something you could dig into and build a life within. The task for freedom lovers was well captured when David Byrne yowled with Talking Heads: “Find a city, find myself a city to live in.”

This summary obviously smashes together quite a lot of very different types of social projects, and the self-awareness the narrative imputes is an illusion, but to observers of gentrification today what I have in mind should be familiar from most major cities: small enclaves of alternative living constituting less a counter-culture and more blossoming subcultures. Within these enclaves were formed cultural vernaculars and even systems of small-scale niche production/distribution that were not bound to a few blocks in one town but were often networked across the continent. Forms of life developed, relatively autonomous from capital, that fostered imaginations and practices, and eventually political traditions. This was the time of $300-a-month rent and working four bar shifts a week, leaving plenty of time to make radical puppets or whatever. Out of this matrix emerged North American anarchism as we know it, setting the scene for the most prominent aspects of anti-capitalist politics since the decline of the New Left.

One common critique of these enclaves is to call them a white kid thing. And while that’s certainly not wrong from today’s perspective (after all, it was ultimately a strategy of “settlement”) it hides important nuances of the story. The early phases of this geographic and cultural history were far from monolithically white (think Bad Brains and the collaborations between New York’s Downtown Scene and the beginnings of hip-hop), and it’s rather rude to presume that some of the key forces shaping it, such as homophobia, transphobia, domestic abuse, and cultural stultification, are exclusive to Euro-Amerikans. Instead we should see the white-ification (gentrification?) of these enclaves as a historical product that must be explained rather than asserted. It was in fact a specific process that made the scenes monolithically white, one that has everything to do with how spunky anti- or non-capitalist projects became so closely tied with rising land rents. It’s a history that needs to be told. But, in order to do this as well as draw out relevant political lessons we need to develop analytical tools beyond mere description.

My starting point is to coin a phrase: from the vantage point of today's discourse on gentrification and cultural scene, I like to call this historical project “the hipster nation.” “Hipster” not so much because it’s an accurate description of those who built these semi-liberated lives, but more as a way to spotlight the intimate cultural and stylistic connection to the social realities of gentrification familiar to us today. “Nation” to spotlight essential political and social characteristics of this diffuse and largely unselfconscious history. Referring to this as a nation brings to fore the peculiar middle ground between a narrow, limited scene and something mass, within which people built whole lives and futures. You might be a denizen of these communities in radical distinction from the ways of life in the suburbs from which you've fled, perhaps for your life, and have a rich and varied experience across numerous cities and even more niche cultural communities. There developed a certain kind of familiarity and even homogeneity from enclave to enclave that allowed people to feel a sense of belonging within them, one they often had a hard time finding in other ways. As a result, however implicit, there was a fantasy that all the common styles and routines might found an imagined and material unity. This was a dream, partially realized, of practical networks including where people live, how people get their food, and where they work.³ The historical dream of the hipster nation has some beauty to it. It bears striking resemblance to Butch Lee and Red Rover's call in Night-Vision to build new nations as vehicles of liberation, “if the capitalist class can create nations of the most widely varying types, sizes & shapes, including new types never seen before, to carry out its mission, then so can the oppressed in the course of the struggle.”⁴ And let's be honest, we who’re reading Field Notes likely have some soft feelings for those neo-bohemian heroes, whether crews of anti-fascist Oi! fans, guerrilla gardening projects in vacant lots, or the crafters of our modern discourse on intimate violence and its survivors.

Most importantly, the concept “nation” facilitates a more complicated conversation about the class politics of gentrification. While it is absolutely true that the advancing “new urban frontier”⁵ of capital investment is structured by the logic of capital accumulation very much as Lee describes, that does not finish the story of the political trajectories of the people implicated in this process. Why did “DIY” products transition so easily into “craft” and now on to “artisanal?” Why is it, for instance, that struggles of front-of-house workers in the artisanal bakeries that Lee references seem to have such a complicated relationship to those doing very similar work in non-artisanal commercial bakeries? Why is it that neo-bohemian urban enclaves have been so iconically white? Why did Portland, Oregon feel so similar to Wicker Park, Chicago in 2010, and even more so today? And again, why does it now feel so white?

Rather than answering these questions in piecemeal ways, I contend they are best approached by leaning into the metaphor of nationhood. The hipster nation, like all nations, contained its own class struggles where indigenous capitalists and workers engaged in political contests to shape the collective horizon. Moreover, the nation was implicated in the larger geographic structures of exploitation and domination; the most significant example of this was its often unwitting role as a key, if usually unwitting partner in the process of recuperating devalued land rents in urban cores and the subsequent displacement of the existing communities. Capital benefited from both the uneven development of space-fixed value and the fragmentation of strongholds of proletarian resistance, and it was happy to have allowed punk houses to facilitate these processes. This was not uncontroversial among neo-bohemians, but ultimately the class character of the nation became clear. The hipster capitalists often welcomed partnership with developers and municipal stewards of profit. The hipster refugees from the ruling elite didn't sever ties, they hooked people up with jobs or “mutual aid.” This in turn ensured that the pillars of the burgeoning hipster-national culture were structured by the same racialized distributions of capital and social power from the “mainstream” against which it defined itself, hence “the hipster” became white. Finally, and most importantly, the networked territory that hipsters cultivated blended seamlessly with the new lifestyles of a ruling elite in a financialized and globalized network-empire.

And yet, the historical fate of the partnership between capital and the hipster nation, as with so many liberation-minded settlers, has largely been a dismal one. The vitality of neo-bohemian enclaves is swamped by a brutal and decadent tidal wave of capital. The bite of this narrative must be taken to its conclusion. Insofar as it was the cradle of our dominant political metaphors and traditions, the hipster nation is the wreckage upon which revolutionaries today—at least those inhabiting the world of AK Press and Rail readers—need to build something new. The whole narrative arc of punk-house to luxury-condo honestly feels anachronistic because capital's approaches to urban development today, as Lee accurately observes, seem to have little use or interest in the bohemian outside of the faintest whiffs. In Dallas, Texas there’s plenty of gentrification and displacement happening, but barely a nod to the liberatory scruff I’ve been talking about and the phase of cheap rent and flexible work has been leapfrogged. That has implications for our politics. It’s not easy finding volunteers for your new organization that meets Tuesday evenings among service workers wearing holes in their non-slip shoes every weeknight trying to make rent. The hipster nation is over, a failed experiment.

I admit my narrative is a cartoon, but it puts a pin in some of the social preconceptions baked into the dominant forms of radical politics. The historical partnership between the hipster nation and capital solved a lot of problems for hipsters in terms of where they will work, where they will live, and how they will have enough time to do their alternative living. And these practical solutions determined the political ideologies that developed. This should not be taken abstractly. I’m talking about the brass tacks of political activity: attending meetings, completing tasks, sharing ideas, and defending against repression. I think dominant stylistic choices like non-hierarchical organizations, prioritizing accessibility, and interpersonal norms are all marked by the specific contexts of networked geographies that had a certain level of cultural homogeneity. This is not to denigrate those practices, but to place them in their context; without that we’re doomed to empty debates about whether “identity politics” is cool or not. The blindness to this relationship leads to bad political trajectories, the banal workerism Lee discusses being among the most odious. The workers of the hipster nation have had a very particular relationship to capital throughout gentrification, one which we cannot ignore even when this or that natural grocery store is fucking over its workers.

And that’s not just a catchy example. We as a movement need to answer why in Portland, Oregon the natural grocery chain New Seasons has had such a long and successful history of worker-led organizing, while most other efforts have had tremendous uphill battles to realize even a fraction of the member engagement seen in the currently ascendent New Seasons Labor Union. The framework I’m proposing helps us do just that. For one thing, the routines and styles of the hipster nation, with its rich tradition of self-organization and volunteerism, have laid a heavy stamp on this workforce. This is not the first meeting workers have attended or facilitated, this is not their first Google doc, and when they feel uncomfortable with how a meeting went they have language and examples to address it. This has been an enormous strength for the campaign, and will likely result in an impressive victory.

The political implications of this are huge. We should all be familiar with the complicated pill that is union victory. Consider for example that the clientele of this store, many of whom share the same cultural fluency, have already bought into paying the higher prices that allow for higher wages and even worker agency that the union is demanding. These customers are generally richer and likely want to shop at New Seasons because it’s “better,” which in this case often includes caring about the workers. This pro-worker vibe, which is not a guarantee for what is essentially a luxury grocery store, comes in large part from the cultural fluency and “identity” shared between wealthy Portland shoppers and the workers. So we have something like a cross-class alliance based on the legacy identity of the hipster nation. Without attending to this dynamic, the NSLU can easily win its demands but lose the opportunity for this victory to open broader political possibilities. In the end, New Seasons workers could win the privilege of being the “kind of workers” who get high wages and a voice on the job, tacitly and unintentionally validating that other “kinds of workers” don’t deserve the same dignities. Of course all is not lost, there’s still plenty of time to avoid this outcome and good signals that other paths will be found, but my point is that without facing the key lever around which this new labor aristocracy is crafted, i.e. the legacy of the hipster nation, we’re looking for the trail with our beanie covering our eyes.

But this opportunist boost to hipster organizing is the exception not the rule. As I said, capital seems to be done playing “Bobo.”⁶ Now that we're living on the dark side of the hipster nation’s historical decline, those of us stuck in its political imaginary are left with innumerable practical problems of political organizing: What telephone polls do we put up our flyers on? Where will we meet? Who will have the time to do the administrative work? What workplaces are workers going to organize? Why does Andrew Lee correctly assume most of his readers are outside the displaced communities with which they wish to be in solidarity? These are the questions that should haunt us. Consider, for instance, holding a film screening. Who the heck is going to come to your film screening? What the heck do the ten people who come get out of it? When you hold an event at the storied movement bookstore, who feels welcome in that neighborhood with its posh boutiques and confusing public art installation? More dangerous than the problem faced by the NSLU, where victories may become obstacles, is the way we can go through the motions of hipster insurgency, feeling like we could never give up on the old alternative hymns. Face it, it’s harder to recruit, harder to retain, and harder to keep people feeling like it’s worth being in the same room with each other. This is because the histories and strategies we've been relying on were built on the unspoken social/spatial assumptions of the hipster nation and its neo-bohemian urban enclaves, a nation that is in tatters and enclaves that exist only in nostalgia or increasingly meager margins. As I said before, we're all agape before the corpse of ’90s anarchism, and the Weekend at Bernie's game has gotten rather gross.

My biggest disappointment with Defying Displacement isn't that Lee doesn't share my idiosyncratic take on the history, but that he shies away from that history’s biggest lesson: that the reality of gentrification means we have to rethink not only our political ideas but also the social matrix from which they're emerging. Battles in and around the new urban frontier are characteristic of an era that I believe is coming to a close, and the implicit call to assemble a crew and go fight is simply not enough when the bulldozer has already swept us off our feet. Instead, we need to creatively escape not only from our old political narratives but also from our old social contexts.

The bright spot is, this is already happening. The dream of the nineties is thoroughly dead and no one in their right mind feels “free” living in Bushwick today. I should hope most of you aren't even trying anymore and have realized that $3,000 a month to live in garbage isn't fun. You, we, are living wherever we're living, and struggling where we're struggling. Freedom-lovers now might try to find themselves “a city to live in,” but spoken less with Byrne’s defiant edge, and more with the stammer of Piglet scuttling through our wrecked society. Maybe it’s the suburbs, maybe clinging to a COVID rent deal in midtown Manhattan, maybe some city that was never “cool” in the first place. The truth is, though, that we’re not meek and beaten. We’re making our lives as best we can. Just like so many working-class generations before us. Our old dreams of special affinities based on the special geographies of urban disinvestment are only holding us back. We are all already crafting tiny slices of freedom. The beautiful secret of capital is that it never really met our needs and that our lives are always already saturated with networks of care of creativity that are “relatively autonomous” from its grasp. The next phase of struggle will involve novel strategies and metaphors that will be born from this current lived reality.

Thus the political question that the gentrification economy asks us is not whether defying displacement is as cool and good as workplace organizing, but what realities of freedom are already at hand. This is a very practical question. Just look around. How are you getting access to childcare? How are you accessing gender-affirming care in an eradicationist state? How are you finding work when new to this country? How did you make rent after quitting your Burger King job in “the great resignation?” How are you finding loving-community while commuting two hours to make minimum wage?

These and many other questions lie at the foundation of a new revolutionary politics. As Andrew Lee powerfully demonstrates, they are first and foremost geographic questions. I share his emphatic call: look around you, find the spaces that foster freedom, and from there fight like hell.