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Chapter 8: Battalion and Army
ACTA wants to create tenant unions in buildings everywhere in Chicago, but not without simultaneously creating a system of linking them into a strategic center. What does this imply for tenants in buildings?
In addition to its leadership, i.e. organizers who specialize in educating, agitating and training tenants in organizing tenant unions, once established, the tenant unions themselves make up a share of ACTA’s forces. Naturally, ACTA’s objective is to build durable tenant unions far and wide. But it would not be enough to build tenant unions far and wide without at the same time building up a system of linking these unions together and bringing them under a single, unified strategic center. This is a reiteration of the point made in Chapter 6 but this time from the perspective of the building-level organizations, i.e. the tenants and their unions.
Tenant-unions at the building level are battalions, they are not the army itself. ACTA is the army as a whole. Imagine, for analogy, if in the US Civil War the 54th Massachusetts Infantry was not linked through a larger chain of command to the entire Union army? Could it (or would it) have taken Fort Wagner? On the other hand, could the survivors of the 2nd and 6th Infantries have continued fighting if they were not absorbed as reinforcements into the other companies of the Iron Brigade?
This analogy should make the problem clear enough. On one hand, we need to build up battalions. On the other hand, we need to develop the army. The concrete tasks necessary for each of these two sides are different and therefore will require that ACTA be filled with people who carry out different work, but this doesn't necessarily mean that everyone will specialize in this or that type of work permanently. Just as in a real army, the soldiers move through the ranks, so too in ACTA. The tenants, pulled out of their building fights, must make their way into the leadership of the organization. The leadership of the organization at one time or another must have their hands in the building-level organization and the ongoing fighting. There is no other way to ensure that as many members as possible become well-rounded and all-seeing strugglers in ACTA, something that will be critical for the durability and tenacity of our organization over the long term. Centralized structure; decentralized personification.
The necessity of the distinction between the tenant unions and the tenant organization stems from the reality that in every army there are battalions that win and battalions that lose. It is the army itself—i.e. ACTA—that prevents losses at the battalion level from being absolute by considering them from the point of view of the army and the context of the war at large. That these fighting units belong to a higher organization with a higher purpose than any given local battle is what allows the systematic evaluation of “losses” and “wins”. It is what will prevent us from falling into the traps and ambushes associated with chasing down small and easy victories on one hand, and going to extremes to avoid small losses on the other.
However, this distinction also recognizes the reality that organized tenants who make up the battalions are the ones in the “immediate” lines of fire. They are the practical forces. It is their rent which hammers the landlord in a rent strike. And it is the roof over their head which is at stake in any given building level struggle. They are the direct, physical targets of landlord terror. It follows from this that the organized tenants of ACTA are required to have a certain type of consciousness, which is basically the psychology of a soldier. Put frankly, the organized tenants of ACTA have to want to fight and have to develop a passion for fighting. Following what has been laid out above,[1] ACTA seeks out conflict. Therefore, our organization needs to raise a military of tenants who understand this point of view as one that is strategically and theoretically legitimate and furthermore, are in a position to adopt the correct attitude for carrying it out.
The attitude is summarized and expressed well in the words of one of our present tenant-unionists, Comrade Anay, who aspires to lead her children by example: “You see your mother always fight. You need to be the same way.”
This is not cavalier, it would be cavalier if we were promoting the idea that conflict is good in and of itself and not in relation to our principle of class struggle.[2] For example, it would be cavalier if we were suggesting that tenants should randomly vandalize and destroy their buildings simply because they know they belong to the landlord, rather than suggesting that they should assess that tactic as one potential link in the chain their organization forges to connect its line, strategy and objectives to its concrete tasks of realizing them.
ACTA tenant unions need to lure the reaction of the landlord according to the degree in which they are organized to defend themselves against and survive that reaction. More importantly, they must do this because they have learned and internalized the principle that these reactions are the materialization of his diminished monetary profit which is the key to ending the capitalists’ dictatorship over our housing. All of this follows directly from our fundamental line.[3]
This is why the organizers of ACTA must understand ACTA’s line, we need huge improvement in this regard. It is also why the organizational structure of ACTA—especially at the point where the organizers and tenants interact directly, i.e. in our organizing units—must practically carry ACTA’s strategy from its center, teach it and spread it, and then return to the center with its problems and experience for reflection. Another area where dramatic improvement is required in our organization.
From the point of view of tenants in unions, this is why the importance of ACTA’s organizers—the organizational side—cannot be downgraded, sidelined or bemoaned for their unique role and why it can never be an accepted attitude among the organized tenants that, because the organizers are not in the “immediate” line of fire, that they are therefore “outside organizers.”[4] We are in one organization: ACTA. The cadres and organizers of ACTA are not “outside” fighters, just like no one—privates, lieutenants, generals, majors, sergeants, colonels, etc.—are “outside” of the military. No individual part is less “inside” than any other. All make up a single, integrated organism.
The war on landlords requires a division of labor to prevail. For an organization of the working class to be worthy of its position in this war, it must rise to this necessity. Most importantly, the individuals in ACTA must move through and between that division of labor in the pursuit of the all-around development of our fighters.
“La pelea es peleando.”
Victoriano Lorenzo
- ↑ See Chapter 4.
- ↑ See Chapters 1, 4.
- ↑ See Chapter 3, 4.
- ↑ This view is narrow on multiple counts. First of all, ACTA’s leadership are tenants, in buildings, with landlords. Secondly, it is demonstrably false that “outside organizers” do not have anything personal at stake by participating in fights at buildings in which they do not live. Believing otherwise is indicative of inexperience and a misapprehension of the scale and power of the enemy’s force! ACTA is currently in the crosshairs of the lawyer of one landlord against which they’re helping tenants organize a fight. No doubt, if action is pursued in court, the names of ACTA’s leaders will be revealed, they will be targeted and the organized dictatorship of landlords will conspire against these individuals indefinitely in similar ways that they will retaliate against the tenants in the ‘immediate’ line of fire. It is also certain that the attacks on the central organization of ACTA will only increase as ACTA’s activity becomes more effective. The position of organizer or leader is only safe until the organization becomes a serious threat to capitalist hegemony. ACTA seeks to become such a threat.