Library:Tenant Spring/Expansion and Democracy

Chapter Seven: Expansion and Democracy

ACTA “does not have the material forces to organize in Rogers Park.” What are its forces and which neighborhood are they in? How do these develop, and how can we call ourselves the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance if we are not in every neighborhood?

ACTA’s most basic practical activity is what we call mass work. Mass work is when our organizers go into the neighborhoods and build links with tenants. Mass work is a process of investigation. We have done mass work in a number of ways, but the most consistent and reliable way to begin, in our experience so far, is door-knocking. Door-knocking is therefore the most fundamental practice in ACTA’s operation, it is what all other forms of mass work are built upon. It is the most simple activity that puts the organizer face to face with the tenant. Just as it is any given tenant’s first exposure to ACTA, mass work is also the typical method to introduce ACTA members to external work. At one and the same time, mass work involves going out (the organization into society) and pulling in (society into the organization). It is the most basic element of centralization. Centralization is this real activity in its process.

At the time of publication, ACTA reliably sends out 12 to 20 organizers every Saturday to do mass work. These forces are not sent out randomly, they are divided up and deployed according to a plan which is developed each Saturday morning. This plan is always specific to the day and utilizes the number of available organizers who have shown up, but it follows the development of mass work week-to-week, month-to-month, because the purpose of mass work is to learn what is going on with people, form relationships and establish preconditions for recurring meetings in the effort to create tenant unions. From the initial contact, ACTA members tend to the unions, guiding them to the level of self leadership and ideological maturity required by the overall struggle. Therefore, successful mass work results in “Units” of organizers who have found organizing prospects and make strategies for developing them into unions until they stand on their own two feet.

It can be seen how mass work is the nutrient that feeds ACTA’s system. Just as nutrients are taken into the body and are destroyed by their conversion into energy, ACTA’s organizers enter the system by mass work but soon develop beyond this early phase of the cycle by establishing or joining organizing units engaged in constructing specific tenant unions. This process is by no means one-directional. Frequently, unsuccessful organizing units dissolve and the individuals are released back into Saturday mass work.

But for every durable, medium to long-term organizing unit that forms, an equivalent number of members are pulled out of mass work. If we are to continue expanding our activity to meet the sheer volume of landlord terror, a relatively continuous stream of organizers need to be entering the organization. Currently this supply of organizers is drawn in from the outside, but it is our hope that the unions will act as a method of transmission for the most developed tenants into the ranks of general organizers.

On any given Saturday, a handful of our organizers are door-knocking, while others are in the early stages of union-formation (i.e. returning to prospective buildings) and others are in later stages of union-formation (i.e. planning regular meetings with tenants in prospect buildings). The planning necessary for directing this kind of operation requires a headquarters for a weekly strategy meeting to take place, i.e a center. Our center is where ACTA’s strategy (i.e. its theory) and the efforts to realize it (i.e. its practice) begin. It is also where we re-incorporate the results of our practice into our strategy (i.e. critique). Therefore, it is not correct to visualize the center as “the head” or central intellect of the organization, while the organizers are the workers and the body. It is better to conceive of the center as the loom where all the many theoretical and practical threads of ACTA are woven together into a unified cloth. Although the physical center is currently the location where we create this unity, physical proximity is not sufficient to overcome the tendency of theory and practice to drift apart. The real unity between our theory and practice is a result of the rotational character of ACTA’s structure, which does not confine our leadership to ideological, theoretical, and strategic work without organizing buildings and does not limit general members to organizing buildings without participating in developing the ideology, theory and strategy of the organization. All the multifaceted activity of ACTA must be coordinated and linked concretely.

ACTA’s operational center is currently located on the southern edge of Humboldt Park. This leaves us in a good position to organize in Chicago’s West Side because we can easily get our forces from our HQ to the apartment buildings and back with short car, bus or bike rides. Because of this, the major share of our activity has been focused in “K-Town” and the surrounding neighborhoods, e.g. Garfield Park, North Lawndale and Austin, etc. This area is currently a soft geographic limit. The number of organizers available and their distribution between mass work, union-formation and unit work are the components of a second limit. There are also more infrastructural limits, such as the physical size of our center relative to the number of people who need to meet there at a single time, the volume of propaganda and organizing literature we can effectively produce, etc. The effective combination of our forces against their various limits is the essence of strategy and, to repeat, this strategic endeavor rests on its center. The center is essential.

ACTA cannot expand beyond these limits without making changes to the existing structure of the organization. The class struggle between tenants and landlords is latent wherever housing is in control of the dictatorship of landlords and, unlike our organization, the extent of landlord domination does not remain within neighborhood limits. Landlord hegemony exists all across Chicago and therefore we need an all-Chicago strategic assault.

The city-wide reach of landlord terror poses a problem to the organization. Tenants who are spontaneously prepared to join the struggle do not appear in a series of neat, concentric circles moving out from our center. Landlord portfolios span neighborhoods and eager organizers come into the movement regardless of neighborhood. Nevertheless we are limited by geographic distance. The natural tendency is for disconnected centers to spring up in different parts of the city, each following its own isolated goals and strategy. If we take what has been said above seriously, then this must be understood as the most pressing problem for the tenant movement as a whole, and therefore for our organization. How to expand without losing the connection to a strategic center is the major concern of ACTA today.

As we have seen, coalitionism is one of the go-to means that organizations use to “expand” their sphere of activity in Chicago. We reject this on principle, for reasons we have started to describe above. The center is the crux of ACTA’s organizing practices. Actual centralization should not be misunderstood as something literal or merely physical, per se. It does not mean that ACTA cannot establish multiple organizing centers across the city. It does mean that these centers must be established in a manner that proceeds dialectically from the principle and practice of centralization. The theoretical and practical processes of these distal centers must be carefully interwoven with ACTA’s current processes if we want to ensure the same strategic unity. A process of expansion that sacrifices or attempts to “leap over” our real centralization in practice is an artificial one, and one that is doomed to fail.

An approximate example of this type of attempt can be seen in one of the schemes of the now defunct Chicago Tenant Movement. After forming, CTM’s main activity was gradually dragged toward the operation of an eviction hotline. At one point, they attempted to overcome this and organize the city into regional sections where building-level organization could be carried out, but the theory was preemptive and abstract. There was little to no building-level organization to speak of in the first place. No rich organizational life had been consolidated at the center of their organization that could be expanded. This example only partly illustrates a mistake we are at risk of making. In CTM's case, the organization made a leap from its abstract principles of a citywide movement to a strategy, rather than starting from the real, actual life of the organization and expanding to reach concrete strategic objectives. If they had done the latter, CTM would have discovered an extensive series of concrete steps to take in order to develop itself from its existence as a crisis response organization into its desired existence as a multi-neighborhood, tenant union organization.

What distinguishes ACTA at our present stage from CTM then is that our activity is consolidated around mass work (as described above), and we have two dozen organizers all quite trained or currently training in the work of building-level organization. Our activity is at a stage where expansion is a real possibility, created by an influx of organizers from other parts of the city. Of course, the potential work in each area greatly exceeds the capabilities of the youthful movement, but we cannot simply assume the rest of the city will supply the manpower to organize the west side right now. The struggle will need to mature before the potential work can be realized to absorb our available organizing power. In the meantime, potential forces from other parts of the city are eager to join the movement, but ACTA must be capable of integrating them. The task of establishing centers in other parts of the city is something we always knew we would have to address at some point. Now it has become feasible because people from other parts of the city have become involved. We still face limits to our geographic reach and our current forces, but these two limits are no longer objective limits. The development of the struggle has transformed these from objective problems into theoretical problems to be solved. We are now in a position to restructure our organization and advance beyond our previous limits. The distant strategic problem of establishing additional physical centers of our organization and integrating them with the actual center has become an immediate problem for us to solve.

But just because the possibility exists doesn’t mean we can leap out into every other part of the city recklessly to justify our claim to being the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance. We are the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance, we understand the contradictory identity of being with becoming. ACTA is not an organization, it is a unity of real active processes. We can’t roll out a map of the city on the table and begin walling off organizing boundaries with our pens, writing the names of organizers into the zones. We have to walk the real earth, encounter boundaries as real boundaries and overcome them in our real activity, which, as we have already seen, is built on the elemental unity of strategy, implementation, critique. i.e. of centralization. This activity is the soul of ACTA and it is also the flesh. These can only be artificially separated in thought because they can’t be separated in reality. God was able to create Adam’s body before giving it a soul because he is God, and we all know what happened to Adam. We are not gods, we are humans and therefore we know that it is walking that makes the road.

Expansion can only be done by building carefully in a way that begins with the real facts of our central practice and continues to preserve and develop our center by transmitting it through every step, until it transforms itself organically from what it is now—all-Chicago in principle—to what it wants to become, all-Chicago in fact. There are any number of possibilities for how a centralized organization can be built, as long as each link in the chain is connected to the one before it, so that the center analyzed above—the most basic organizational unit of ACTA—is carried through to every nook and cranny of the organization, no matter the physical (geographic) arrangement or design of the transmission at every scale.

It should be self-evident that centralization cannot occur without a simultaneous link to the periphery of the organization. A central core without a clear and effective connection to its branches is not actually a center at all. A spiderweb is more than its capture spiral, it is also its radial threads. In ACTA centralism is a democratic principle. We do not see democracy and centralism as contradictory forces within the organization. The rank and file do not act as a check or balance opposite to the leadership. Instead, they act as co-creators of the organization. The leadership provides the rank and file with strategic continuity and opportunities to take leadership in the organization and in turn, the membership extends the actual reach of the organization, stepping into the position of leadership themselves. This reciprocal connection between the leadership and the rank and file of the organization imbues the organization with vitality and fuels purposeful growth.

It is common for democracy to be treated as synonymous with elections and representatives, a view which treats democracy as an abstract ideal rather than living, breathing participation in an organization. Practices such as elections or rigid parliamentary procedure should not be mistaken for democracy, especially when they so often become anti-democratic. Only true participation and activity in the organization by its members should be considered true democracy. ACTA seeks democracy as an actuality and this means sober reflection on every facet of the organization. If an organizational practice empowers members to deepen their organizational activity we may call it democratic.

The opposite of actual democracy is not leadership or formalization. The true opposite of democracy in an organization is inactivity and impotence. If the organization cannot develop, expand, and pursue its aims, then any supposedly democratic structures will only lead to an illusion of democracy. Opportunities for creative participation in the organization and positions which provide members with ownership over particular aspects of the struggle are necessarily democratic, in that they provide deeper popular control over the organization. For example, ACTA’s general membership are encouraged to take on leadership projects designed around pressing organizational problems of the moment. These projects offer general members opportunities to transform the organization in significant ways, from taking on leadership of a union to implementing new practices or even additional organizational divisions. Only the development and expansion of the organization can reliably provide these types of opportunities. Trying to institute formal democratic processes without corresponding developments in the organization’s activity can only lead to stagnation and over-bureaucratization.

We have seen organized tenants mistake formal democratic processes for actual democracy. An emblematic case of this recently occurred, in fact. Under ACTA’s influence, a group of tenants organized a group chat and began arranging meetings. This union-to-be formed in response to the sale of their building to an investor who immediately informed them he’d be throwing them out in order to renovate their units and raise the rents. At the meetings, the tenants began to formulate demands for the new landlord. The building was naturally split between those who participated a lot, those who participated inconsistently, and those who did not participate at all. Rather than building a strong core to push the organization forward, the tenants who did meet put all decisions to a building-wide vote, subsuming all of their activity under the requirements of soliciting the input of every unit, including those who had not attended a single meeting.

As a result, the tenants became bogged down delivering letters to every door requesting votes from the members and the union was unable to take a single step towards its true interests. These tenants believed they were being democratic, but in actuality there was no real activity to speak of—democratic or otherwise. Instead of power, only impotence was “democratized.” Needless to say, if the active tenants had seriously pursued the tasks required of them, many of the inactive tenants would have seen the organization as something worth getting involved in.

This anecdote also gives us a look at another side of the problem of democracy. These tenants prioritized absolute and universal democratic procedures for everyone in the building rather than limiting them to those engaged with the union. As a result, they spent time soliciting votes from tenants with no intention to carry forward or be bound by the results of the vote. The tenants had not taken the time to determine who should participate in each vote and ended up with democratic stagnation. Healthy democracy cannot take the question of who is eligible to participate in elections and votes for granted. An overly broad vote where every disinterested party chooses according to personal whims can be just as undemocratic as an overly narrow vote where only a few make decisions for the many.

It is clear to us that democracy cannot be distinguished from an organization’s activity or formally grafted onto an existing organization from the outside. The idea of “democratizing” an existing organization without transforming it from inside out is absurd. This is because living democracy hinges upon actual participation in the organization. If leadership is not to be a symbol, representing the interests of the organization, the organization must integrate these interests in concrete ways. Votes and decision making must be tied to the process of participation in the organization. It would be absurd to let someone who simply signed their name on a contact sheet make major organizational decisions, but this also extends to the series of increasingly central votes that are necessarily tied to ever smaller circles of membership. The guiding principle for establishing these circles must be based on the extent of the responsibilities and commitment of these members.

In the same vein, it would be absurd to require the leadership of the organization to vote on particular decisions such as which building to hold a tenant meeting in. ACTA’s unit structure divides not only the labor, but also the power and responsibility, allowing others to take charge of organizational work. The difference between the inductee, the general member, and the leadership is their level of integration into organizational life. No member’s power should outstrip their responsibility to the organization. From this perspective, the process of building a democratic, city-wide organization is not about connecting various organizations under a single formal democratic process, it is about connecting the actual practices and life of each organization into a strategically unified, living process.