This Could Be Housing; or, What Is a Demand Anyway?

Today’s left movements are rejecting neoliberalism and pivoting toward mass politics through an array of strategies and tactics. Struggles for reforms—or nonreformist reforms—loom large. This essay examines Occupy Wall Street, defund the police, and relations between the Green New Deal and the Red Deal as a way to contribute to critical thinking about demands in popular struggles from below and the left. The author’s aim is to push us toward a stickier vocabulary through which to think with today’s movements and their demands, as a way to participate in building popular understandings and struggles that have the potential to reconstitute the political, economic, and social.