Library:Tenant Spring/Tenant Unions in the Revolution

Tenant Unions in the Revolution

How can tenant organizing directly contribute to the revolution?

"a Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not on social peace."

It is said that a revolution requires the right conditions. Conditions have to be revolutionary in an objective way. This means that the economic conditions have to be ripe for a change, like a prepared fruit, as a consequence of the contradictions inherent to the economic system in combination with the class struggle. On the other hand, conditions need to be right in a subjective way. This means that the strugglers need to be conscious of the need and possibility for a change, organized self-consciously and prepared to seize the opportunities to both grow the fruit and pick the fruit.

Objectively, by the simple act of fighting a landlord, to some degree a tenant union disables the landlord’s way of making money easily. A tenant union that makes economic struggle their priority not only makes profit harder to come by, it makes the profit margin smaller. In other words, pitted against a tenant union that prioritizes economic struggle, landlords have to work harder for less. ACTA’s objective is to raise the number of tenant unions fighting landlords on the principle of economic struggle. In other words, we want 10 tenant unions fighting 10 landlords today. Tomorrow we want 30 tenant unions fighting 15 landlords. As we have argued above, it should not be possible to bring capital into the branch of real estate without having to contend with a tenant union driving down the rate of return.

These are the conditions that will objectively transform real estate from a safe branch of capital investment into one with constantly growing risks. As the expected rate of profit falls, capitalists will be turned away from real estate in increasing numbers. Private investment has been the state’s go-to method for managing the housing problem since the earliest days of the nation, but it will begin to fail, and the people’s need for housing will press on the state with increasing urgency. The old method will dissipate like smoke in the eyes of the legislators.

If capital flight ensues in the real estate industry, the first thing to expect is the centralization of capital. In other words larger landlords will begin monopolizing the rental market. The largest and most powerful investment firms will be the only ones heavy duty enough to tolerate the precarious conditions of the money market. Worried sick about lending to landlords whose promises to pay are continually broken, banks will hike interest rates, further driving down the profitability of the sector. These are all tendencies of the free market, but here they are manipulated by the cooperation of masses of organized tenants. All of the familiar powers of price-fixing will affect the price of rent in the medium-term, but tenants will no longer be defenceless against landlord extortion. A unified tenant organization capable of reaching this point will be ready to force a political crisis between the masses of tenants, the landlord monopolies, and the state.

It should go without saying that this is only the most general shape of the movement to come. In reality, there will be no such clean progression of conditions. The movement will go in erratic bursts, steps forward, steps backward and to the side. These events represent a practical possibility worthy of pursuing strategically—a clear end which can be appraised over the course of actual events. As we will argue, navigating this type of zig-zagging is precisely the type of concrete activity that necessitates a single, centralized organization.

By expanding in a centralized way, we will move beyond the limits of spontaneous and isolated defensive battles between landlords and tenants. This type of struggle arises constantly due to a landlord’s negligence or abuses of power that oppresses the tenants and violates their rights. In response, tenants attempt merely to reassert their rights. Decades of this lullaby have rocked the tenant movement to sleep. The economic weapon must wake it up. Without it these legalistic scraps and squabbles will always end—usually in defeat for the tenants—and “peace” will return until somewhere else in the city a conflict arises again under circumstances that haven’t changed. When tenants do win some sort of codified victory, the following period of peace and quiet serves only to lower our guard, freeing landlords to erode the victory and sharpen their methods of oppression.

This cycle of disjointed peace-followed-by-skirmish-followed-by-peace must be broken and replaced with a continuously expanding but strategically centralized war of attrition against landlords. This is to say that the struggle of the working class against capitalists must be fought with the understanding that victory in this war is the only way to definitively solve the puzzle of the “housing crisis.” As long as capital continues to find a working class that becomes stupid with affection toward the brilliance of “democracy” every time they get handed a new right to housing, this crisis will be inevitable and permanent. That magical fountain of profit—a working class with pacifist tendencies—will never stop producing its opposite: an easy war that makes landlords out of enterprising capitalists as if it were an assembly line. Against this, ACTA understands its double task described in the previous chapter to be rooted in the principle of raising the general level of class conflict between tenants (the workers) and landlords (the capitalists). In other words, we need to prevent peace and deepen the state of war between tenants and landlords.

This principle can be summarized like this: ACTA aims to raise the general level of class conflict (capitalist landlords vs. working class tenants) toits apex.

At first glance it might appear needlessly provocative to read about our desire for “war,” but what we mean by war needs only to be understood in its context. We are talking about class struggle in that old familiar way. Perhaps it goes without saying that for everything written above to develop, a certain type of revolutionary consciousness will need to develop in tenants as well. ACTA believes that this consciousness can only form in the process of organizing the class struggle itself. The objective conditions of that struggle will not advance if organizations of the working class watch the struggle from the sidelines, or even worse, fail to form altogether. But neither will the enthusiastic participation of the working class occur automatically without the influence of clear, accountable, revolutionary leadership. Labor unions are a useful comparison here. In the long history of

labor unions, capitalists have done everything they can to secure “labor peace.” This so-called peace is always defined from their point of view because they are the class that rules over the means of production and, therefore, over society. Peace means offering concessions to the workers’ unions in such a way as to pacify them and keep them working without apocalyptically disturbing the bosses’ ability to make profits. Over time, the trade union leaders took these concessions and progressively dismantled the working class’ power and drive to fight. Most consequentially, when they haven’t completely forfeited it, the unions have consistently mutilated their ability to go on strike.

The consequences have been disastrous. Here are some examples of working class oppression that the labor unions nearly unanimously have no apparent interest in confronting, because they have accepted the capitalists’ vision of “peace”:

• While the wage-scale has gone up for some sections of the working class, there still remains a racist and segregated division of labor that confines black and latino workers to a lower wage scale than white workers, keeping them in the most menial, degrading, precarious and dangerous types of jobs, if not unemployed outright.

• Automation is eliminating jobs and making the labor process increasingly dull and dehumanizing for the ones who are spared.

• The classic manufacturing industries and the new tech industries continue to pollute and poison the planet, changing the climate in a way that is killing more and more people, animals and plants each day, gravely threatening the future of our children.

• Huge capitalist companies continue to exploit and oppress the people of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America, keeping dozens of nations in these regions poor and underdeveloped. The American military continues to wage hot and cold wars in every corner of the globe to ensure that this remains possible indefinitely.

We can add to this, coincidentally, that the cost of living continues to rise, in general. Most emblematic of this is the price of securing housing. The weakness of the workers movement and its failure to decisively defeat capitalist profiteers has brought us to this point. If you’re asking yourself, “Does ACTA blame the ‘housing crisis’ on the workers movement?” Our answer is unequivocal: yes! It has done so by conceding to what the capitalist class means by “peace,” taking bribes to weaken the fighting power of the working class.

The working class has the power to change all of this as organized workers, but the way workers are currently organized—if we can even call it that—deters it. The vigor and consciousness of the North American worker has atrophied as a consequence of years of enfeebling “peace”. We have become passive, self-interested, individualistic, politically uneducated, incurious, uncreative and frail in the face of adversity. Workers rarely engage in extended strikes anymore. The ratio of organized workers to workers without union has fallen in absolute terms. This reality betrays a broken understanding of the basic structure of capitalist society among the leadership of the once powerful unions. They neglect the central historical problem that constrains the working people in monotony and suffering. The seizure of the means of production—the means of life itself—no longer factors into the strategy of union leadership who instead focus on advancing their own careers providing palliative care for the decrepit workers movement.

As tenants, our organized power cannot strike those capitalists at the center of production as directly as workers once could. Nevertheless, there are other advantages to be found in striking at the other critical organ of capitalism. In order to summon every potential reserve of power at our disposal, ACTA intends to avoid the mistakes of the workers organizations. The greatest of those mistakes can be preempted by establishing a tenant organization on different foundations, that is, on permanently revolutionary foundations. These foundations cannot be laid by, first, making an abstract analysis of the history of the trade union movement and, once that is completed, attempting to prescribe alternative principles for our movement based on their mistakes.

But this is counterintuitive. Didn’t we just say we wanted to “learn from their mistakes?”

All the specific tasks of our organization arise from a single, general aim. This aim is to retain our revolutionary orientation all the way to the revolution. History teaches us nothing definitive about how to accomplish this. In fact, it is the reverse: our efforts toward building the revolution teach us about our history. For example, we have no abstractly valid basis to say that the trade unions forfeiting striking power was a mistake. It is our present concrete activity that has shown to us the actual and potential power of the strike. With this experience, we produce concrete analysis of our conditions and a war strategy that prioritizes economic struggle centralized around the strike. Looking to the past and seeing all of the defeats that occurred in the absence of deploying the strike, we make our conclusions about history. It is mysticism to then turn around and say that it is history which teaches the principle of the strike. History has only provided us the material to understand the workings of the strike. Only our own practice teaches us the true significance of this weapon. Practice is the criterion of truth.

Under no circumstances will we find ourselves in the conditions of the past. Just as soon as we yell out deja vu, we will discover that the past which appears to have reproduced itself before our eyes lacks exactly this—the cry of deja vu. The conditions determining what is possible do not repeat themselves and, therefore, the risk of making the exact same mistakes is a phantom of our imaginations. Our conditions are our own. Our problems will be our own to solve. We are standing in a river, the question is not whether we are standing in the same river a second time—it is whether we can navigate our own river safely to the other side. ACTA aspires to become an organization capable of navigating these difficulties and it measures itself as being up to the task.

We take the attitude of being active creators of our world and therefore instruments of its change. This calls for an organization capable of surviving drastic changes without losing focus on our general aim of revolution. As part of the world, we simultaneously change ourselves through our own activity. The strict division in thought between the categories of objectivity and subjectivity collapses into a dialectical spiral. Bringing the objective conditions of revolution into being will not be a smooth or steady process, as we have already alluded to, and much of the pain that may come with this experience will be the pain of bringing ourselves into existence again and again.

Subjectively, ACTA must learn to adapt its activity to the criterion of revolutionary struggle, hasta la victoria de la revolución siempre. This necessarily means to repeatedly cast our past-selves into the fires of self-criticism. No achievement is exempt from the requirement of self-criticism. We can never rest on our laurels or grow complacent when we could be pushing forwards towards our ultimate aim. It is crucial that we keep in check our satisfaction with our own achievements at every stage. This is all we mean when we talk about the necessary rejection of “peace.” We have every intention to keep the struggle directly in front of us; never avoiding it, never attempting to “leap over” or go around it. Toward the struggle, always.

Concretely, this revolutionary orientation is made in two ways. The first and the most important is the constant construction of the central organization, which, as we have said, enables the ongoing escalation of building struggles beyond individual conflicts. The second is by way of a dogged politicization of that activity as it occurs. We begin to talk about revolution and socialism with tenants as soon as it is prudent. But we also know that this kind of abstract jargoneering is useless and can even be detrimental to short- and long-term ambitions without an intricate and specific kind of education that takes seriously the task of bringing individuals from point A (non-revolutionary) to point Z (revolutionary).

For example, one of the aforementioned unions that is on rent strike at the time of writing this is entirely Mexican. We noticed right away that the unionists speak with clear pride in their national history and identity. So we looked for ways to explore how their own activity might belong to a lineage that they had already embraced. Initially, we made the obvious comparison with the land struggles during the revolutionary period in Mexico because there were familiar classes in conflict; peasants (which we associated with tenants), landlords, capitalists, etc. At our weekly meetings, we set time aside for political education, and we consistently attempted to bring this content into the learning, in one way or another. After a couple months of this, we began to see the unionists making these associations independently with one another, without us prompting them.

In the union’s chat, for example, one day, a tenant shared an image of a brigade of soldaderas and encouraged her neighbors to remember what they are made of and where they come from. While this was very motivating to see, it would not be terribly remarkable in and of itself. For us, however, the event revealed a new level at which education could now be focused. We recognize that an appreciation for history is one thing, but the application of revolutionary ideas into our actual behavior is another. At the following meeting, we decided to focus on Emiliano Zapata, while also wanting to draw the focus out to a higher level by linking the Mexican Revolution to an explicitly socialist revolution, in order to move beyond what might be understood as a primarily nationalist struggle toward something that specifically used concepts like the workers’ organization of society, division of labor, exploitation, proletarians, the bourgeoisie, etc. We also anticipate a near future where the basic organizational problems of running their union will need to be met with increasing seriousness, and we suspect that we can use Lenin to help with some of this.

All of the above was made possible as material for education by the historical fact that Lenin wrote favorably of the prospects of the Mexican Revolution and Zapata had written enthusiastically about the similarities between the Russian and Mexican revolutions. We used these writings to enter into a small “curriculum” that we created specifically for the tenants in the union to investigate the concepts above. These are not surface level connections or disconnected history lessons. History is always examined in order to elevate the significance of the present struggle, as it presents itself concretely. The ongoing strike, an immediate instance of class struggle, both provided the opportunity to reflect on history, make judgements about it and imbue it with a living significance. The tenants are able to see their own struggle as part of a larger picture. It should go without saying that the work of politicization is never complete, and the present ideological level at any given time is nothing but a limit to go beyond.

These are the subjective conditions of the revolution we aim to create. These are the conditions of the development of more class-conscious, more revolutionary fighters who are organized ever more impeccably—the conditions of all of this in motion. The present members of ACTA recognize the need to continue rising indefinitely to this aspiration. As organizers with this outlook, we need to earn the mantle of leadership. Experience shows us every day that this forward march towards revolution will continue as long as we join tenants authentically in the mutually humanizing act of becoming organized, self-conscious participants in the class-struggle; fighters who believe that what is at stake is nothing less than the future of humankind.