This article examines the political and cultural struggles over housing and human rights in Los Angeles. It analyzes the racial and spatial dynamics of the housing crisis and subsequent global economic crash, and underscores the significance of the politics of scale. It argues that struggles for the human right to housing in Skid Row, in Los Angeles, represent a continuity of campaigns to contest racial capitalism’s organization of space. As grassroots activists and artists have shown, the resolution of crisis by racialization, neoliberalization, and securitization is not inevitable. They have produced alternative definitions of events, which could produce alternative outcomes.
The US has been engaged in coercive projects of counterinsurgency since the Indian Wars in the 19 th century. Racist constructions of the enemy have been central to this process. Counterinsurgency has called forth new waves of contestation at every juncture, which has in turn shaped the very texture of military doctrine. This article draws on archival research, historical geography, and Marxist theory to trace the dialectics of counterinsurgency and insurgency through a series of turning points in US imperial history from the development of small wars doctrine in the 1930s to renewal of counterinsurgency during hybrid wars in Venezuela and Latin America in the current conjuncture. Through a conjunctural analysis, we argue that racism performs fundamental work in achieving consent to counterinsurgency wars, allowing capitalism to survive challenges to its legitimacy.
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