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Title: Tenants’ Unions Author: Jay Lucien & Varlam Akra Date: Autumn 2019 Language: en Topics: community syndicalism, community unionism, libertarian municipalism, Dual Power, tenant organizing Source: *ROAR Magazine*, Issue 9. Retrieved on 2020-03-24 from https://roarmag.org/magazine/tenant-unions-dual-power/.
Tenants’ unions do not only help stop evictions, but they also carry
within them the seeds of an organized counter-power to the rule of the
landlords.
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So we see that the crisis of modern society is not without issue. It
contains the seeds of something new, which is emerging even now. But the
new will not come about automatically. Its emergence will be assisted by
the actions of people in society, by their permanent resistance and
struggle and by their often unconscious activity. But the new will not
complete itself, will not be able to establish itself as a new social
system, as a new pattern of social life, unless at some stage it becomes
a conscious activity, a conscious action of the mass of the people. For
us, to initiate this conscious action and to help it develop, whenever
it may manifest itself, is the real new meaning to be given to the words
‘revolutionary politics’.
— Cornelius Castoriadis
We have gathered with a few tenants on a Sunday afternoon in south
Chicago to assess our anti-eviction campaign. We remind ourselves of one
of our most important achievements over the past 13 months: for the
second year in a row, we have halted over three dozen evictions in the
South Shore neighborhood, the city’s “eviction capital,” cutting the
pattern of forty evictions per year down to almost zero.
We achieved this with no prior experience as tenant organizers.
The toasty apartment sheltering us from the winter cold complements the
warmth of being more closely connected to our neighbors. It feels good
that for the moment we are not in emergency mode, dealing with active
evictions. The “next steps” conversation is peppered with easy tasks,
updates of our personal lives, other tenant struggles in the city, new
resources, jokes and laughter.
Our trust in one another, the love for our neighbors and our
neighborhood is growing in this apartment. There is a neighborhood
decoration event taking place in a few weeks, and we put it in our
calendars, in addition to some important plans we are about to implement
for taking the campaign to the next level before we begin to try to
bring about more rent reductions. The future is uncertain and
precarious, but we are moving forward with commitment.
For centuries, workers have organized themselves in order to
collectively resist the oppressive and exploitative forces of capital.
From the early 1900s to the current day, the most common form of worker
organizing has been the labor union. With the rise of urbanization, over
half of the global population currently living in cities, and a growing
understanding that the sites of capitalist production are not exclusive
to the factory floor, a new type of anti-capitalist organizing is
gaining ground: the tenant union.
The city itself has become a living site of capitalist production, with
developers and investors vying for power through municipal arrangements,
development codes, urban planning initiatives and policies. These real
estate capitalists have a vested interest in pushing up the value of
land and housing so that they profit from their commodification, and the
general expansion of the market. Municipal governments also have a stake
in this, attracting higher-income households to the area, bringing in a
stream of revenue for cities often mismanaged by a political class that
puts the interest of corporate capitalists over that of residents.
The externalities of this process of capital accumulation via real
estate include the displacement of working-class communities and the
gentrification of neighborhoods, which tends to disproportionately
impact people of color. From the point of view of capital, land and
labor are mere commodities, and therefore disposable when not profitable
to the capitalist class. In order to fight against this predatory
system, we need to confront the corrupt nature of this exploitation
through collective direct action while resisting this cyclical process
of extraction.
Unions are ways of resisting, and in their optimal configuration, are a
fighting force which occupy revolutionary and reformist political
spaces. As such, we are organizing towards temporary and semi-permanent
improvements to the exploitative and unjust hierarchical relationship
between bosses and workers, landlords and tenants.
Unions can be crystallized expressions of our drive to connect and
belong, to produce with and for one another, to mutually confirm our
positive humanity, to love one another through care and shared
experience, to declare common beliefs and spread them. They can be
instruments to facilitate the natural desire for self-management and to
build a society where our workplaces and communities are managed in a
direct democratic fashion.
Tenants’ unions are manifestations of class struggle. As such, they are
configured in opposition to landlords, management companies, real estate
developers and the state. Tenant unions acting in solidarity promote and
nurture healthy relationships and communities.
The oppressive forces of the state and the capitalist class hold us
hostage through continuous rent extraction, tenuous, unequal
relationships, and laws designed to work in the owners’ interests, not
ours. These intersections of hierarchical power and the absence of
mutually empowering relationships among tenants all work to commodify
land and housing, obstructing our communal self-management.
The origins of our campaign to stop dozens of evictions in Chicago’s
South Shore neighborhood can be traced back to a series of meetings back
in 2017, where we formulated the idea of spearheading a tenants’ union
in the city’s south to complement the pioneering work of the Autonomous
Tenants Union (ATU) in the north. After these initial meetings, it took
another year before we were able to actually start organizing the union.
We discussed that we wanted our union to be anarchist, and to fight the
escalating eviction and gentrification crisis. We agreed that we wanted
to build power and neighborhood-based relationships, reaching out to
people we wouldn’t meet any other way. We also cautiously envisioned the
tenants’ unions as a proto-commune, with popular assemblies all embedded
in a vision of a cooperative economy.
In this vision, tenants’ unions would coordinate and confederate with a
new constellation of horizontally organized collectives. As such, the
tenants’ union would pursue a dual power strategy, in which individual
unions are not restricted to merely fighting landlords and management,
but are also an instrument for the oppressed to take on self-management
of the local economy, and to reclaim ownership over our life, work and
communities. We knew that it was going to be difficult, “molecular” work
that could take years to yield meaningful results.
After securing the resources we needed for a tenant organizer training,
we established ourselves as Tenants United of Hyde Park and Woodlawn
(“TU,” for short) at a local diner in October 2018. We held a small
training session led by an ATU organizer, an attorney and a tenant
organizer from the Chicago Metropolitan Tenants Organization. We could
have definitely used the content that is now available in the monthly
online trainings of the national Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN).
We had multiple activities in motion shortly afterward, including
emergency tenant assistance, a public launch, flyering and sowing the
seeds of shared unity between multiple buildings.
At a November meeting, a South Shore compañero stood out when he
volunteered to help on a task. It was shortly afterwards that we learned
that the same individual was facing eviction and wanted to fight it.
Solidarity was unquestionable. We started the campaign shortly
afterwards. We started by discussing first steps with ATU, organized
legal support, flyered the buildings and knocked on doors, preparing
ourselves for the unfolding of a larger movement for tenant justice.
Tenant unions that pursue a dual power strategy provide immediate relief
to struggling working-class families and communities while elevating the
legitimacy of new grassroots systems of self-management. They fulfill
their purpose through a variety of tactics, relationship-building and
the creation of new, grassroots institutions. These work to weaken the
commodification of housing, public space and the urban commons.
Dual power tenant unions engage in many of the tactics that regular
tenants’ unions use, as such unions in general — even the not explicitly
anarchist ones — tend to engage in various types of constructive actions
that are conducive to building dual power. That said, the dual power
toolbox has more refined tools for reaching revolutionary objectives.
The dual power toolbox includes important elements, such as:
self-confidence, building up tendencies toward equality and independence
from authority;
independent of the state’s litigious system;
our own future;
More practically, there are different courses of action available to
tenants and local residents to undermine the authority of their
landlords while increasing their autonomy. Some of the tools most
readily available are sabotage, a libertarian-municipalist electoral
strategy and community land trusts.
Sabotage can include actions such as switching apartment numbers to foil
evictions, paralyzing management with problems, conspiring with workers
in management to “lose” documents, “cheating” the landlord back for
stolen deposits, and more. Sabotage is an act of reclaiming power and
authority by taking matters into one’s own hands, while at the same time
reducing the harm inflicted upon our communities by landlords as agents
of capital.
Libertarian municipalism is a form of revolutionary organizing developed
by Murray Bookchin, which, in the words of his daughter Debbie Bookchin,
“is about much more than bringing a progressive agenda to city hall,
important as that may be.” As she puts it:
Municipalism … returns politics to its original definition, as a moral
calling based on rationality, community, creativity, free association
and freedom. It is a richly articulated vision of a decentralized,
assembly-based democracy in which people act together to chart a
rational future.
As Murray Bookchin elaborated elsewhere:
After having democratized themselves, municipalities would confederate
into a dual power to oppose the nation-state and ultimately dispense
with it and with the economic forces that underpin statism as such.
Libertarian municipalism is thus both a historical goal and a concordant
means to achieve the revolutionary “Commune of communes.”
As institutions of local power and autonomy, tenant unions pursuing a
dual power strategy can serve as embryonic forms of directly democratic
neighborhood councils or assemblies, which in turn elect delegates to
run for local office and organize the grassroots campaigns that will see
them elected.
Lastly, a potentially powerful institution to ward off gentrification
and promote non-commodified housing is the community land trust,
described by the Symbiosis Federation as a “non-profit legal entity
entrusted with property management in the community’s interest —
ensuring affordable housing, preserving environmental assets, and
driving cooperative neighborhood development.”
Tenants can use community land trusts to make collective demands for
proper housing and pool resources to purchase buildings for collective
housing initiatives. By running them as housing cooperatives, these
procured buildings can be used to ensure long-term housing affordability
and can even serve as communal spaces for neighborhood assemblies, hubs
for mutual aid initiatives and outward-facing radical educational
forums.
Many of us who started the union had experience in other forms of
organizing and had no illusions about how difficult building the union
would be. The biggest fear for many of us was that people might get
evicted as a result of our mistakes. We have since come to realize that
the real harm comes from not getting involved. Our experience has taught
us that in cases where tenants fight back, they are significantly more
likely to get a better outcome, and crucially, to help avoid future
evictions.
As tenant organizers, we face challenges in our time management, health,
self-care and the variety of responsibilities related to political
organizing. In order to build and maintain relationships with our peers
and neighbors, we often need more time than many of us can realistically
spare. It is difficult to know if and how labor should be diverted from
other struggles.
We have not figured out the exact formula for how to make new community
activists engage in tenant organizing without simply shifting people
from other types of organizing work. Sometimes tenants are so far behind
on rent that there is simply no legal or organizational strategy we can
think of that would avoid their eviction — except for fundraising their
overdue rent, which is often very difficult to do in practice.
The power of the landlords and the system backing them is still much
stronger and much more developed than the resistance against it. In the
short term, direct action remains our most valuable asset in
circumventing the hierarchical power of the landlord without relying on
the current system of bureaucratic management, cops or judges. With the
legal system so clearly tilted toward landlord interests, going to
eviction court results in defeat much more often than in victory.
A lot of work therefore remains to be done if we are to construct dual
power tenants’ unions that truly have the potential to become autonomous
popular associations as part of a broader libertarian socialist
movement. Yet tenants’ unions may continue to grow in the coming years
as many more people embrace this model in an effort to resist rampant
gentrification and the commodification of housing and of all life in
general.
The growth of tenants’ unions is necessary both for immediate reprieve
and to help lay the foundations for an organized counter-power to the
rule of the landlords. The example of Tenants’ United in Chicago
demonstrates how successful such efforts can be, even if the organizers
involved had little experience to begin with.