In several previous articles we have discussed “revitalization” or gentrification in Chester County and the City of Coatesville. In two of our most recent, we wrote about gentrification first as it relates to democracy and second as it relates to displacement. In the current context of the U.S., working-class residents, especially working-class Black residents, are increasingly likely to experience displacement as a result of their neighborhoods being gentrified.
In this article we demonstrate that the same U.S. imperialist/capitalist class behind displacement in the U.S. is also funding Palestinian displacement in Gaza. The struggle against Israeli genocide in Gaza and the struggle against working-class displacement in the U.S. therefore face a common capitalist-class enemy. International solidarity in this context is therefore not just symbolic, but it is material, concrete, and practical. Our intention through this article is to make those connections more clear.
Displaced by Capital Investments
In other words, when working-class communities are targeted for capital investments, needed services begin to be constructed, including restaurants, grocery stores, and new luxury housing units. However, residents’ ability to benefit from what are often much needed improvements tend to be short-lived. That is, a sudden influx in capital investments leads to a corresponding increase in property values, and as a result, rents go up. If working class wages don’t go up too, working class residents begin to be displaced.
In the current fight against displacement it is important to understand that the relationship between the tenant and landlord is similar to the relationship between the worker and the capitalist, but is perhaps more similar to the relationship between the colonized and and the colonizer.
Unlike the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class, the rent collected from the tenant by the landlord and the land violently taken and held by the colonizer doesn’t involve the exploitation of labor-power and the creation of new value. Rather, the landlord collects a portion (an increasingly large portion) of the workers’ wages, and the colonizer expropriates a portion of the colonized’s land.
Engels points to Paris in 1853 when working-class neighborhoods were torn up to widen the streets and build luxury apartments. Following this revitalization workers were driven out of the city and into the suburbs. The same process is underway in Gaza, but this time it is U.S. funded bombs employed by Israel.
Tenant Movements
While the tenants’ movement in the US can be dated back to at least the emergence of industrial cities in the mid to late 1800s, only in New York City was the poor and working-class able to win rent control in the 1920s.
In an early wave of activism between 1907-08 thousands of tenants went on strike against rent increases in the Bronx and Manhattan. By 1919 more than 25,000 NYC tenants were affiliated with the Tenant League.
Even though rent control was won in the 1920s, landlords and investors have found new ways to extract more from tenants and by 1963-64 the rent strike movement in New York City spread like wildfire involving more than 100,000 people. [1]
Counter-Insurgency
Nothing is ever static or standing still. Capitalism is a dynamic system always shifting and morphing as it seeks to perpetually reproduce and expand itself by expropriating value from the working-class. When working people win a victory against capitalism, it is only secure in so far as the capitalist class is unable to reverse or co-opt it.
Many of the victories against housing displacement have been reversed or somehow made ineffective by the capitalist class counter-insurgency.
One of the most recent examples is the chipping away of rent control in New York City. For example, in 1985 the power of the Rent Stabilization Association in NYC was terminated. Under the Rent Regulation Reform Act of 1993 the process of deregulating rent regulation gained momentum. Today NYC’s unelected Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) has jurisdiction over roughly one million rent stabilized apartments and the two and half million people who live in them.
Every year the RGB meets to vote on increasing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments. In the summer of 2023 the landlord-driven RGB proposed a 15% hike to rents. After organized public outcry and resistance the RGB settled on a two to seven percent increase depending on the length of the lease [2].
It is clear that no partial victory will ever pacify the tenants movement. Workers will continue to fight for the right to housing until capitalism is defeated once-and-for-all.
While revitalization initiatives, as the current strategic orientation of the capitalist class, are supported by local and federal government throughout the U.S., another form of displacement is also being supported by the U.S. bourgeois government at both the federal and local levels, and that is the siege on Gaza [3].
Displaced by Bombing and Genocide
It might still seem like a big jump connecting working-class displacement in the U.S. to Palestinian displacement in Gaza. Yet both are only happening because of imperialism. Where and how is the U.S. getting all of this money to give to Israel? One main source is our very own tax dollars. According to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, in Pennsylvania alone, $135,979,834 per capita dollars go to weapons for Israel. In Coatesville that number comes out to $174,809. In West Chester the amount increases to $249,957 [4].
We know that the U.S.’s goal for Israel is to continue to exist by any means necessary as a proxy state to advance its imperialist interests in the region. Israel’s goal is to complete the nearly century-long process of colonizing all of Palestine and expelling the entire Palestinian population. Towards these ends Israel has been airing ads over televisions across the world showing their end-goal to “revitalize” Gaza and develop the land to its so-called “full potential,” including luxury hotels and resorts. This also includes building settlements for Israelis where Palestinians are currently living, whose homes are now mostly in ruins. In fact, Israel already has real estate firms eyeing the land for this development [5].
This process began in earnest after the United Nations 1947 vote to partition Palestine. As no Palestinians were involved in this decision, it is not surprising that a war between zionists and Arab Palestinians emerged in its wake. Palestinians, in other words, responded within their internationally-recognized right to resist the illegal invasion and occupation of their lands. The U.S. and Israel, in response, have attempted to bully the world into accepting the propaganda that the freed0m fights (i.e. Palestinians) are terrorists, and the terrorists (the U.S. and Israeli states) are freedom fighters.
By May of 1948 the state of Israel is declared to exist. At this time 300,000 Palestinians are already displaced. The formation of Israel was called the catastrophe or al-Nakba by Palestinians. It represents the beginning of an apocalyptic era.
Within a year, by 1949, nearly 80% of Palestine is occupied by Israel. The strategic orientation of Israel has followed this trajectory. That is, Israel’s goal is to occupy the entirety of Palestine and displace, through ethnic cleaning, genocide and forced removal, all Palestinians.
With the atrocities and violent encroachments of Israel escalating in recent years, on October 7th, 2021, Palestinian resistance forces launched the unprecedented Al-Aqsa Flood. This campaign began with hundreds of armed militants in motorized hand gliders being sent over the concentration camp walls targeting military installments within so-called Israel. Israel responded with the greatest acts of violence and cruelty since al-Nakba began in 1948 [6]. Over 30,000 mostly women and children have been killed by Israel in the past 4 months.
Displacement as Imperialism
Turning our attention back to gentrification and displacement in the U.S. placing it in the context of imperialism offers additional windows into making connections to the situation in Palestine. In one of his seminal texts, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, Vladimir Lenin comments that,
It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. [7]
How does this translate to the working classes of Chester County and the City of Coatesville? There are two key important ideas presented in the quote. First is the idea of the separation of capital; that money itself is separated from things that help produce or make products, or that help produce or increase the value of a product. Second is the idea of separating those whose income is made from property and investments. Gentrification is a process of displacement and separation. The working class is increasingly not able to see the fruits of their labor. Outside investors or new businesses come into town and act as a parasite, sucking the life out of a community and the working class, and are then forcibly removed from their homes. In some cases, these investors or businesses are a small cog in a much bigger, imperialist machine.
Imperialist countries use any means necessary to advance their wealth and power, more often than not, through violence. Dividing and conquering the world is no small task and takes a ton of money and resources. Private companies make deals with the government in order to widen their profit margins. Smaller companies or corporations are often not as small as they seem and have terrifying parent companies. The state will use every imaginable resource to further its goals, including the funding and legitimization of the state of Israel.
For example, during Super Bowl Sunday, a tweet on X-formerly Twitter, by President Biden, “Just like we drew it up,” came just as bombings and attacks increased and heightened in Palestine [8]. On Tuesday February 13th, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would give $95.3 billion between Israel, Taiwan, and the Ukraine [9]. This comes as Free Palestine protests and rallies all across the U.S. have only grown and increased. We have seen an increase in police repression and arrests across the board for those in attendance. Additionally, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has maintained that Israel must follow its ruling over Gaza, but has for all intents and purposes ignored them [10]. Again, while such rulings are important, only the organized and mobilized people can shift the balance of forces and defeat the class enemies of all working and oppressed people from Coatesville to Palestine.
Conclusion
Palestine needs international solidarity now more than ever and we must not give up our fight for her freedom. The capitalist class in the U.S. and Israel watches in horror as the world stands up and fights for a free Palestine. As U.S. imperialists lose leverage in one context, they lose leverage in another. When we defeat displacement in Coatesville, we contribute to the socialist reconstruction of the world. When Coatesville wins Palestine wins. When Palestine wins, Coatesville wins. We are all Palestinians.
References
[1] Anne Jaffe. “The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984.” NYLS Journal of Human Rights. 1(IV), Part One, Fall 1986 – Homelessness, 329-340.
[2] Noor Inqalabi. “Tenants disrupt board as it voted to raise rent across New York City.” Liberation News. May 27, 2023. https://www.liberationnews.org/tenants-disrupt-board-as-it-voted-to-raise-rent-across-new-york-city/
[3] Jihye Song. “NYC tenants disrupt board vote to increase rents, demand rent rollback.” Liberation News. June 26, 2022. https://www.liberationnews.org/nyc-tenants-disrupt-board-vote-to-increase-rents-demand-rent-rollback/
[4] US Campaign For Palestinian Rights, accessed February 17, 2024, https://uscpr.org
[5] “Israeli real estate firm pushes settlement building in Gaza,” Al Jazeera, December 19, 2023, accessed February 17, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/12/19/israeli-real-estate-firm-pushes-settlement-building-in-gaza.
[6] Richard Becker. Palestine, Israel, and the US Empire. New York: 1804 Books.
[7] Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, trans.Tim Delaney and Kevin Goins (Marxists Internet Archive, 2008), 57, accessed February 17, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/imperialism.pdf.
[8] Joe Biden, X post, February 11, 2024 (10:50 p.m.), accessed February 17, 2024, https://twitter.com/JoeBiden.
[9] Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking, “Senate passes $95 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel, fate uncertain in House,” PBS, February 13, 2024, accessed February 17, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-passes-95-billion-aid-package-for-ukraine-and-israel-fate-uncertain-in-house.
[10] “ICJ Demands Implementation of Gaza Measures, but No New Action on Rafah,” Al Jazeera and News Agencies, February 16, 2024, accessed February 17, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/16/icj-demands-implementation-of-gaza-measures-but-no-new-action-on-rafah.
