Library:Tenant Spring/The Rent Strike

Chapter Three: The Rent Strike

ACTA organizes tenants because they are "in an economic relation with the capitalists that can be turned an leveraged against them." But how?

There is one central weapon available to tenants—the rent strike. All other fighting tactics and strategies without exception are centered around this tactic. This follows from all that was laid down in Chapter One. Landlording is a method of capital accumulation. What is the source of the landlord’s money? Obviously, it is the tenants’ rent, money which he can only rely upon on the condition that the tenants do not have a pot to piss in. As long as our society allows the private acquisition of property, as long as it allows “the market” to solve the housing question rather than the self-conscious masses of people governing their own relations, there can be no chance of the tenants pissing in their own pots.

At a certain level, the most significant problem that revolutionaries face today is how to contend with a market that has proven time and time again that it is capable of reworking every human relation in its own image. Every problem presented to humanity becomes integrated and solved by the market in such a manner that market relations, that is, capitalist relations of production and circulation, prevail. Like overgrown honeysuckle, the only way to stop the expansion of this invasive overgrowth is to uproot it, but first we must cut away the chaotic thicket. The market operates at a level of abstraction above any given individual, but it does not exist on its own. There are still methods of overturning these relations before the moment of a clean break with capitalism arrives.

A strike, whether it involves labor or rent, is one such method. On the one hand, it is consistent with capital’s fundamental laws, arising as a strategy only because market relations have so thoroughly permeated society. The internal logic of the strike is entirely contained within the domain of values and profits, and, taken as an isolated activity, does not break from the economic processes that occur within capitalism. On the other hand, it directly threatens those processes which sustain the expansion of the market, weakening them from within. Because of the strike’s consistency with the rules of the game, strikes alone will never achieve the final break from capital, but this same consistency is what makes them possible at all. A revolutionary tenant organization is one that is capable of using the rent strike as part of a larger strategy to weaken capitalism at the economic level and prepare for confrontation on a higher, political level.

In accordance with this thesis, our task is to cause the so-called market to “decide” that it will no longer participate in solving the housing question. The rent strike achieves this by making capital accumulation from rent impossible. The rent strike is the direct stoppage of the accumulation process. It is the only tactic available to the inchoate movement that cuts at the rent relation itself, the relation which forms the basis of all landlord power. That is why we believe a socialist organization focused on tenants cannot justify any other type of war strategy without forfeiting its revolutionary character.

Despite its importance to the tenant movement, we have found that the rent strike is profoundly mystified and misunderstood. Allow us to clarify.

As all of the landlords, their journalists, their judges and lawyers and lobbyists (and some of our comrades, regretfully) love to remind us, the rent strike is not a legally protected act in Chicago. This means that striking can result in legal action against tenants on behalf of the landlord. The ultimate consequence which can be brought against tenants on strike is eviction. In modern times this penalty has taken on new significance. In addition to the violent removal of tenants from their home, evictions now appear on publicly accessible records of tenants, causing them increased difficulty in securing housing later.

But this risk is not a static data point in the calculations we make as tenants weighing the dangers of going on strike, though it is often approached as such by organizers. Rent strikes are not risky in themselves. In reality, they carry a degree of risk and the risk of being evicted corresponds to the amount of economic leverage a tenant union has in proportion to their landlord’s total available capital. Take as an example a landlord who has access to $100 cash after deductions are made from his income due to rent held back in the strike. If it will cost him $101 to pay a lawyer to evict the tenants, can he evict the tenants? Obviously he can’t. He will have to come to the negotiating table or walk away from the building by force (seizure) or choice (sale or neglect). This theoretical demonstration shows a case where the rent strike is actually the opposite of dangerous, it is maximally safe from the perspective of the tenants’ objectives, which are at the very least to stay in their homes. We conclude from this that the danger of the rent strike is not entirely determined by factors that are external to us, but also by factors that we can set in motion ourselves.

The problem then is that in practice there are few situations wherein a landlord’s portfolio is of a vulnerable size relative to the size of the tenant union’s capabilities to hold rent. If the landlord is large, like so many landlords are in Chicago, the union must also be large. In fact, as the size of the landlord’s portfolio increases, the relative proportion of the union should also increase because as a capitalist accumulates, his resources tend to multiply and diversify. This means that his profits in rent can not only be reinvested into new apartments, they can go into other types of investments that provide him income which the rent strike cannot leverage. These incomes can ultimately serve him as a war chest and fund his assault on the tenant union.

Large landlords must be fought by large unions. Unfortunately the inverse is not necessarily true. Small landlords might be multimillionaires in other industries and merely dabble in real estate for a little spending money. It is generally easier to leverage a greater number of units relative to the small landlord’s entire portfolio, but this does not necessarily mean that those forces will be strong relative to his total capital. In this instance, the petty real estate portfolio of the small landlord is only the sheep’s wool disguising the wolf, who can wage war without much personal difficulty strengthened by capital hidden from our view.

While economic proportions can theoretically be determined with mathematical precision, there is a crucial gap between what is possible to determine and what can be determined realistically. The landlord’s financial standing can at best only be approximated. This is all to say that although the particular risk taken by any striking union against their landlord can be estimated, and although the risk always varies with the proportion of units represented by the union relative to the total units in the landlord’s possession, achieving favorable proportions with any consistency is rare at this stage in the tenant union movement. Therefore, rent strikes are, generally speaking, a risky endeavor right now.

But, to stop the analysis of the rent strike here, at the level of immediate tactical questions would leave us with only a surface level understanding of the rent strike’s significance. For ACTA the technical considerations of landlord-tenant conflict are only one side of a revolutionary strategy. A more complete strategy requires understanding the process by which capital reproduces itself, that is, via cycles of accumulation. This understanding is cultivated with an eye toward derailing this reproductive process.

The object of our strategic investigations, capitalism, remains an abstraction. “The capitalist system” is not a thing which can be poked and prodded except in the confines of our imagination. We cannot take hold of it, much less smash it as we could a glass tumbler.

All that can be smashed in fact are individual capitals that rest on the private ownership of specific property. This property will have concrete ties to a source of exploitation that give rise to a concrete accumulation of capital in the hands of a real owner. The specific “cycle” of accumulation (i.e. the capitalist’s investment-return-investment+ process) in turn contributes to the average profitability of that particular branch of industry. Every branch of industry is related to all others through this average profitability of capital investment. A decrease in the profitability of one sector causes new investment to flow towards the more profitable branches. As a result, a change in the average profitability of a branch regulates not only the concentration of an individual’s capital (i.e. his decision to continually reinvest his profits back into the same branch or not), but also the entry and exit of competitors and their sums of capital to and from this branch. Competition establishes the basis for the possibility of centralization of capital in a given branch. In our case, we are dealing with the real estate sector.

A revolutionary tenant organization should strive to destabilize the conditions of profitability in real estate. As we saw in chapter one, by making lesser profit harder to come by in a competitive environment, it will progressively corrode the possibility for, first, small scale landlords (the “mom and pops”) and, next, the medium sized landlords to survive, eventually forcing their exit from the field, either by ruin or by the search for greener pastures. Their properties will be destined for centralization under the control of larger, more heavily armored investors. At the same time as housing centralizes and approaches conditions of monopoly, the tenant-unions will be centralizing as their own opposing force, setting the stage for a much simplified and direct showdown: the masses of tenants on one side and the landlord giants on the other. At this point, the state will have no choice but to intervene in the crisis, and our struggle will increasingly take on a more political character.

Our strategy has to be devised at this level but this does not mean that our strategy should turn its back on any isolated landlord-tenant conflicts and cast its eyes on the abstract concept of the real estate industry and capital in general. Our strategy needs to engage with these real movements in order to tie the concrete but isolated landlord-tenant fights together. The individual fights must be conducted in a way that always sharpens the broader movement against its counterpart, the broader movement of capital. What does this mean for our strategy today, practically speaking? In proverbial terms, “You’ve got to pay some agony for the ecstasy.” We are going to lose battles in the course of trying to win the war. To put that into its properly dialectical terms: lost rent strikes will chip the armor of capital and begin the process of corroding the profitability of the real estate sector.

Plainly, any rent strike which ACTA can manage to organize today faces great odds. But properly executed, each strike will come at non-trivial cost to any landlord who has the misfortune of running into us. For example, the landlord’s lost rent (even if he recuperates some or all of it in the end through negotiations with the union), combined with his legal fees and all of the various expenses accrued on account of the extra work necessary to manage a tenant rebellion, will objectively lower his profitability below what it otherwise would have been. This is true even if the struggle ultimately results in the tenants’ displacement. At the same time every strike, win or lose, has the potential to raise the general level of struggle in the movement, acting as a school for tenants.

But it is not enough to mechanically assume that all organizing experience leads to a development of consciousness or an intensified will to fight, much less a social movement incorporating those individuals. If this were true, the disconnected, isolated face-offs between tenants and landlords would have compounded into a flood of activity long ago. In addition to the fighting itself, the other necessary component for the struggle to act as a school is some structure to ensure connection and continuity. If the strike is successful, there must be a guiding force to direct energy to the other battles occurring in the city. If the strike is defeated, there must be some organization to both protect the tenants and offer them an alternative to despair. A defeat can be instructive to an organization with a definite strategy, but to an isolated union of tenants it is, more often than not, fatal. The more those tenants are integrated into the larger organizational momentum, the more likely their setback does not spell the end. “Losing the battle but winning the war” is only possible if there is a broader war to speak of—and an organization to conduct it.

As we have seen above, a proportional increase in the number of tenants organized as the working class establishes the conditions which improve the odds for fighting tenants and thus the conditions under which we can expect to regularly win rent strikes. The number of organized tenants can grow by no other means than by regularly incorporating new tenants into the struggle. At present, ACTA’s cardinal tasks are two.

The first is to start hacking at and clearing away the first layer of this “chaotic thicket,” i.e. those landlords who are estimated confidently to be of a scale that puts our organization—understood at its current level of power to organize tenant unions—in favorable, proportional conditions. Local petty landlords, “mom and pops,” owners with 3-5 properties or 100-200 total units, etc.

The second is to find and develop tenants who are lean, mean, fighting machines. Tenant soldiers, who are not afraid of the high levels of risk that are characteristic of the tenant movement during this early stage. It is in these dawning days of the war, when our forces are still small and inexperienced that the fighting is most dangerous. The good news is the task of recruitment is made much easier for us by the objective conditions of the class struggle today, which send tenants by the dozens into our field of activity. This is a consequence of the current intensity of landlord terror. At the time of writing, two tenant unions are on rent strike against great odds because they simply had no other options.

ACTA’s role can be none other than to “prepare to lose, fight to win.” This requires our emphasis to be on ideological development. The school of the rent strike needs its teachers. To the graduates of this school, defeat is only a temporary break before they “redeploy”, willing and eager to continue the fight. This level of commitment requires ACTA to establish deep levels of trust and respect with every tenant we come into contact with. If we are successful in our role, the process of organizing their struggle will teach them that all isolated skirmishes are only tiny scenes belonging to a great worldwide drama which we are writing together.

We’ve got to pay some agony for the ecstasy. The rent strikes that lose but chip away at landlord power belong to the period of tenant spring. The struggle will only mature into tenant summer, the season which will see rent strikes that win and blow away landlordism entirely, when certain conditions arise, which we will now describe in more detail.