Comrade Holden of Marxist Unity Group deconstructs the question of the “housing crisis” in New York City through questions about power, protagonism and agency, and urges that an expansion of the tenant-worker self-organization movement is crucial to facilitate its historically necessary merger with the socialist movement broadly.
What is the role of the socialist tenant organizer? And what is the relationship between the two currents they embody–the tenant and socialist movements? These are the central questions that I will address in this essay.
This discussion arises specifically out of a discursive milieu here in New York City, but one that gets amplified and dragged across the country; namely, the question of the housing crisis–a name, that by using, we take bourgeois narratives at face value. Tracy Rosenthal, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), reminds us that the language here matters, that calling “this a housing crisis … benefits the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it.” Agency, control and protagonism will be central to all that follows. Other terms we could say to replace housing crisis include: the precarious conditions of tenants, the violences and volatilities of real estate, the crisis of gentrification. None of these phenomena are actually new or recent developments–they are ongoing and historically-rooted processes–though the discourse around them often implicitly (otherwise, explicitly) imagines them to be novel. Regardless – housing (particularly here in New York City) and tenancy are the sight of political and economic conflict and strife. People are hurting; people are upset.
So, what is to be done? The bourgeois or liberal answer is expectedly constricted, and has been succinctly summarized and picked apart by my comrade Harry Zehner in his piece calling on socialists to reject the so-called YIMBY-NIMBY binary. This binary forfeits a socialist imagination to the bleak landscape of ECON 101, where all questions of power, class and politics are supplanted by the deities of supply and demand – figures we know to be false idols, as shown by Kevin Rogan, via Piero Sraffa. “If only we had more housing (of any and all types),” argues the self-professed YIMBY, “this housing crisis would be a thing of the past.” These YIMBYs (short for Yes-In-My-BackYard) label actual socialists as NIMBYs when we, actual socialists, reject or critique new developments that drive up rents and displace working-class communities. As usual for these parties, foundational socioeconomic concerns like rent, expropriation, and capital accumulation are elided in favor of technocratic tweaks – if we only change the zoning regulations, truly affordable housing will flourish. Affordable for who? This is a question never adequately answered by these folks.
What about the ‘socialists?’ What are they doing? The Democratic Socialists of America chapter here in NYC has seen a slow but vocal entry of YIMBYism into its ranks. One only needs to peruse their slack channels or attend a forum event to catch whiff of the “pro-housing” stench. This trend most likely can be traced to OPEN NY (ONY), an organization exactly of “pro-housing activists” that uses social justice language to mask unrelenting and uncritical support of development and all the capital interests therein; they are “rezoning sheep in wolf’s clothing” – the housing equivalent of bootlickers who celebrate capitalists for their job-creation chops.
Simultaneously, NYC-DSA has shown itself in the last couple years to be inordinately unprepared to engage on the question of housing or tenancy in a manner befitting the socialism in its name. This makes the introduction of YIMBYism all the more concerning, and thus challenging (and squashing) it all the more necessary. I’ll present three short notes to highlight this insufficiency and to establish the context necessary for my argument that follows.
The first concerns NYC-DSA member and endorsee Julia Salazar, NY State Senator, who cosponsored the NYCHA (New York City Housing Association) Trust Bill–a bill “that is, in reality, a Trojan Horse for privatization.” Salazar did so on her own, without support or input from her socialist organization; this caused much outcry within the organization, particularly from NYC-DSA’s NYCHA Solidarity Working-Group.
Second: NYC-DSA elect Tiffany Cabán, City Councilperson, approved a 1,400 unit development in her Queens District, with only 25% of the units slotted to be affordable – again, generating much outcry from actual socialists, while fielding robust praise from the most ghoulish of voices. Cabán’s decision to approve this development was not born of socialist reasoning or principle, rather through a self-professed model of ‘harm-reduction.’
Both of these instances speak to a lack of organizational discipline and lack of political accountability; both electeds here operated as lone-wolves, rogue liberals, doing what they believed was the best course of action, choosing between difficult options, within the deeply constricted contexts of contemporary civic politics. The unit of analysis here seems, for these electeds, to so often be confined to whatever is in front of them; they are thinking in days, months and years. Lessons from the past – a decade ago, fifty years ago, a hundred – are ignored, and so too, the dynamics that can only be witnessed at such a scale. They are presented with options and react according to their own personal values (which, for the most part, are good! This isn’t really about either of them).
We have to, as socialists, understand our movement at multiple and coinciding scales; it’s our duty to consider broader historical processes as they intersect with, inform, and underlie pressing political developments. This is all incredibly difficult, which is why such a task cannot and should not be left up to even the most adept solitary politician. This is exactly why we have socialist organization.
Moreover, these instances reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of power. In both of these moments, power is understood to be derived from the office itself – a seat at the table, etc.; we must, as socialists, reject this implication. The election of politicians (as well as the writing and even winning of legislation), though of course dialectically in-relation to the cultivation of mass power, is only ever the reflection of power, which itself resides in the masses of people and is expressed through our organization.
Lenin, who we will return to soon, characterizes the proper social-democratic operative as she “who can generalize all these manifestations into one big picture of … capitalist exploitation, who is able to use each small affair to set before everybody [her] socialist convictions and [her] democratic demands and to explain to each and all the world-historical significance of the liberation struggle of the proletariat”.1 The burden of living up to Lenin’s directive should not rest on the politicians themselves. This is an organizational, not a personal, responsibility–who we endorse, elect and champion is our responsibility.
The third note has less to do with any specific politician, and more to do with organizational orientation. For the last so-many years, NYC-DSA’s Housing Working Group has operated as a tail to Housing Justice for All (HJ4A), the dominant nonprofit coalition in New York State. I’ve critiqued the pitfalls of this particular NGO, and of housing NGOs in general elsewhere, but the summation that is important with regard to the DSA is that by tailing a coalition of nonprofits (which include in their ranks landlords who regularly evict their tenants), this socialist organization forfeits the revolutionary prospects of a socialist housing program or politic. Instead, it goes to bat for nonprofits that might espouse revolutionary aims or dreams but are fundamentally, and evidently, uninterested in a socialist project.
Again, this can and must be understood in terms of protagonism and agency. The coalition is directed by professionals and boards of directors. It is, despite pronunciations to the contrary, not led by members or tenants. When I and a fellow member of the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union (an independent organization) were expelled from the nonprofit coalition last summer, it was not at the will of the general membership. Rather, a small cadre of lifelong nonprofit directors, all healthily salaried to oversee the direction of the coalition, voted in secret to expel my comrade and I (neither of whom draw income for this work), without any explanation or prior deliberation with the wider (actually tenant and working-class) membership. What exactly did we do to deserve an expulsion? We voiced criticism and disagreement over the coalition’s explicit, and documented, forfeiture of the eviction moratorium and betraying of the Cancel Rent movement in favor of a failed-push for Good Cause. The Cancel Rent movement was a truly bottom-up mass mobilization of tenants and our outrage; it started as the pandemic did and called for the truly radical mass-expunging of arrears. The eviction moratorium was saving peoples’ lives. The directors of these nonprofits made the calculated and ‘pragmatic’ decision to give up on these ‘radical’ projects in favor of the more “reasonable” Good Cause legislation – legislation that restricts landlords’ ability to evict market-rate tenants, but for good cause. That the nonprofits were legitimating evictions in some form was not a concern for them (the specter of harm reduction haunts). This was about results! Deliverables! Realism!
The last coalition meeting that my comrade and I were on before expulsion was a collective reflection of the recently-failed push for Good Cause. Whereas the nonprofit directors led a chorus celebrating the hard work that so many put into the campaign (so many early buses to Albany!), my comrade and I were more interested in reflecting on why and how the campaign failed. What decisions, structures, and politics, we wondered aloud, led to these results? A week or so later, we both received emails alerting us of our expulsion.
Over the last few years, the Venn diagram between HJ4A leadership and NYC-DSA Housing leadership has been a near-perfect circle–a circle named Cea Weaver. A recent cover-page essay in the Nation features Weaver prominently and celebrates HJ4A’s new push for Good Cause. Notably, actual organizing – e.g. building out working-class power block by block – is wholly absent from the article – as it is, generally, from HJ4A’s program. And yet, an individual wearing a Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU) t-shirt is depicted on the magazine’s front cover – CHTU (which Weaver cofounded!) is an actual organ of working-class power, and one of the few non-nonprofit members of the HJ4A coalition. Again, and seemingly always, actual collective organization toward power is used as a symbol or a token by liberal nonprofits, rather than recognized as the actual arbiter of historical change that it is. I say this not to take an easy shot at these nonprofits, but to emphasize the inappropriateness of a socialist organization tailing such a formation.
In the past couple weeks, a sign-on letter written by ONY and now signed on by the biggest of the HJ4A member organizations, such as Make the Road NYC and New York Communities for Change (NYCC) has been circulating housing circles. This letter, and the legislation it champions (which is identical to that of real-estate-backed Kathy Hochul), is prototypical ONY: under the guise of addressing the housing crisis, the plan here calls for an end to exclusionary zoning, in a manner which would open even wider the floodgates of gentrification and luxury development. Crown Heights alone has seen a forced exodus of 19,000 black people in the decade between 2010 and 2020. The letter is, specifically, an eleventh-hour push to tie this end to exclusionary zoning to protections championed by the tenant movement. CHTU has responded to the sign-on letter accordingly, calling on a strict adherence to the democratically decided coalition platform and program. This theme of discipline rears its ugly head again.
It is with this fuller context in mind that I argue thus: it is the role of socialist tenant organizers to work diligently toward the future merger of independent working-class tenant organizations with the socialist movement; that we do so despite all of the complexity, contradiction and morass implied. Before diving into all of the particular reasons as to why this is necessary from both the socialist and the tenant perspectives, first some definition and background of terms and a brief elaboration of theory.
Independent working-class tenant organizations are independent in that they are accountable to worker-tenants and only to worker-tenants. This means that they are not nonprofits or NGOs; they are not subject to the whims of rogue boards of directors and whomever might be pulling their purse strings. They are working-class in that they are composed of and led by working-class tenants–by worker-tenants. Moreover, these organizations are (and must be!) democratic in their functions and their politics. These are location-specific formations – Tenant Unions – that derive their power granularly: organizing building-by-building and block-by-block.
In the last decade, independent tenant unions (sometimes also called autonomous, though I find this term clunky and off-putting) have sprung up all across the country. The first of these (and of which I’m a member) was the Crown Heights Tenant Union, which formed in 2013 in a collaboration between long-term Crown Heights tenants and Occupy Wall Street veterans, with the aim to fight the rapid gentrification of the neighborhood. A year or so later, the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) was founded, and has since flourished, with many vibrant and militant locals across the LA area. Other examples include the Houston Tenants Union and Washington D.C.’s Stomp Out Slumlords organization. In 2020, both the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN) – a nationwide federation of these independent tenant unions – and Brooklyn Eviction Defense (BED; a Brooklyn-wide Tenant Union, that I helped found!) were established.
It is no coincidence that independent tenant unionism has (re-)emerged in this historical moment. The housing and financial crisis of 2008 in many ways marked the formal closure of the “American Frontier.” The dangling carrot of homeownership – of expropriable land and space to be made available for the ideal, “average” American – that had buffeted cycles of US-led capital accumulation evaporated. With no frontier to eject its surplus populations out to, and with increasingly fewer foreign outlets for a vagabond US capitalism to prey upon, the pressures of dispossession and expropriation necessary for continued capital accumulation required new targets. David Harvey’s twin theories of the spatial fix and accumulation-by-dispossession reign important here. Private equity – capital embodied – gobbled up many of those single-family homes made vacant and bank-owned by the foreclosure epidemic of the 2008 crisis. Rather than flipping these properties for quick profit, these big capital firms maintained ownership and converted what were once owner-occupied homes into revenue-generating rental assets. This was what Desiree Fields calls the creation of a new asset class. The returns on these assets compelled, of course, more: massive firms began feverishly buying-up and investing in not only single-family homes but large, multi-family rentals as well, like one I live in. While many academics and academic-adjacents call this development the financialization of housing (wherein financial firms assume control over housing ownership and distribution), F.T.C. Manning importantly argues that the correct causal link is inverted – and she argues this with the (admittedly goofy) phrase that it is actually the housingification of finance. Manning’s intervention is instructive: rather than housing merely being subject to the whims of finance and financial firms, we ought to understand financial firms as becoming increasingly dependent on rent.
What this all means is that the expropriable pressures characteristic of consistent capital accumulation have attached even more firmly onto the backs of a now even-more-massive tenant class. Tenancy has always been a site of expropriation, this by definition. But the degree and intensity of that expropriation – and with it, the political character of tenancy as a formation – varies in different historical contexts. Ours – defined by a crumbling American Empire, a fully closed frontier, and unrepentant financialization – sees a tenancy simultaneously precarious and over-exploited, but also a tremendous site of socialist potential. Finance’s dependence on our rent is, unequivocally, a source of leverage and power – the actualization of which, of course, is contingent upon our organization.
While this iteration of tenant unionism is still relatively nascent, it falls within a rich history of radical working-class tenant organization; New York, in particular, has a lively tradition, stretching back to the early-to-mid 19th century, of mass organization against the predations of landlordism and rent. The turn of the century saw the advent of socialist- and communist-led tenant unionism. It is from a close study of NYC’s tenant history specifically that my argument for a merger is in-part founded.
In arguing for a (certainly not immediate) merger of the tenant and socialist movements, I am referencing the merger formula – derived from the political strategies of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin; and, more contemporarily, Lars Lih and my fellow comrades in the Marxist Unity Group (MUG).
The merger formula is most simply the merging of socialism, on one hand, and the worker movement on the other. Socialism, here, is the theoretical school of political thought and strategy that can be traced back to the utopian ideals of Robert Owen and that found materialism in Marx. Historically, socialism has been overrepresented by and in bourgeois intellectualism. Socialism, importantly, cannot and should not be reduced to any particular single formation, especially at the current moment; the DSA is certainly not equivalent to socialism writ large, but it is, as the largest socialist organization in over a century in this country an important site of struggle.
On the other hand, “[t]he worker movement,” Lih writes, “is neither the proletariat as a whole, nor is it Social Democracy. It is the militant or fighting proletariat – the section of the proletariat animated by a spirit of organized resistance”.2 This section of the proletariat, of worker-tenants, exists in practice; tenant organizers know this intimately. These are the folks in working-class communities who refuse to stand by as landlordism and neoliberal decay attack their places of home and their practices of kinship.
The merger formula is best understood as a dialectically-tied pair of missions – “both the world historical mission of the workers to take power and introduce socialism and the mission of the Social Democrats to merge socialism and the worker movement”.3 Notably, there is an emotional, and even religious affect to this formulation. This is a higher-calling: a formula that, through praxis, elevates local struggles into the world-historic. The religious under-(or over-)tones are not a flaw or romanticization but a necessity; again, as socialists, our attention to scale is paramount.
The merger formula is not a prescription of strict or dogmatic organizational dictates. It is not calling for the subsumption of working-class organization to the theoretical ideas of know-it-all socialists. Rather, in a manner that echoes into the fabric of tenant organizing itself (as will be delved into more below), the merger formula hinges upon relations and relationships. Lih describes this as the Good News interpretation. The socialists are tasked with the responsibility of bringing the good news to the workers. Good news: You, the collective worker-tenants are a world-historical force, in whom alone rests the power to transform the world, to abolish the bosses, the landlords, the petty tyrants; to transform our material conditions, to recreate community. The mere delivery of this news is, of course, not sufficient whatsoever. The structures – both interpersonal and organizational – must be built and tended to so that this Good News can be actually and consequently shared; so that this Good News is not just heard but felt, understood, grasped and rearticulated, disseminated and proclaimed.
Two more important notes before diving into the question of the tenant/socialism merger. The first regards historical contextualization. It is now the year 2023; it is certainly not 1891, when Kautsky wrote the Erfurt Programme, or a decade later (1901) when Lenin wrote What is To Be Done? (WITBD). Conditions are different; contradictions have matured and rearranged. We should take from both an understanding of historical scope – the revolution Lenin was writing toward did not arrive until 16 years after WITBD. Kautsky’s near-revolution in Germany didn’t come for almost 30 years after his theoretical insight. We need also to recognize the slog of history and struggle.
That said, the primary contradiction that we as contemporary socialists in 2023 (in NYC and in the United States broadly) must engage and overcome, in order to reach a point where a merger becomes feasible, is one of proletarian disorganization. As our comrades in DSA’s Communist Caucus write:
No left alternative can be realistically offered without militant and active mass working-class organizations across the entire spectrum of capitalist contradictions. No left tendency — not socialism, not communism, nor serious strands of anarchism — can survive without its integration into an organized working-class movement; for a left formation without an organized proletariat is a fish out of water — a politics defined by its atrophy and destined for a slow death.
That is to say, for a merger – or more aptly, mergers – of the sort Lenin argues for in WITBD, there need to be appropriate mass-organizational vehicles. Institutions of self-organization of worker-tenants (and with them, robust class consciousness) did not disappear naturally (working-class institutions did not just wither away); rather, neoliberalism is the story of their systematic decimation. It is our duty as socialists, then, to participate in the reconstruction of proletarian organization. These are not merely labor unions; though, of course, worker organization is centrally important. They also include abolitionist organizations, community-control organizations, tenant unions, formations of climate resistance, Indigenous organizations, anticolonial and anti-imperial organizations, homeless unions, undocumented worker unions, and more. The merger formula of 2023 is necessarily attendant to the multitude of struggles that compose working-class resistance today.
The second note springs off of this and relates to spontaneity. Proletarian self-organization of a mass character, similarly, does not just arise naturally as an instinctual response to capitalist exploitation or expropriation. Worker-tenants always have and always will resist the oppressions and violences of capital. But resistance in-itself does not constitute the construction of a new world; it must, in fact, be imbued with that sort of higher calling, with that extended and expansive scope. My comrade Cliff Conolly is very helpful on this subject when he writes:
[I]t is of utmost importance to recognize that the soviets, factory committees, and militias that formed the backbone of the Russian revolution were built intentionally by socialists. While different factions in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party eventually split into separate organizations as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, both groups were instrumental in the creation of these mass organizations. They did not emerge organically from economic struggles with bosses and feudal landlords like some of the trade unions and peasant associations, but instead were the product of a socialist intervention in economic struggles which emphasized the need for political organization.
While at one valence the concept of the merger formula might suggest that the worker-tenants and the socialists compose two distinct camps, it is important to hold onto Cliff’s lesson: that in absence of independent working-class organization, it is the socialist’s responsibility to help build these, and to become an active member within them. Moreover, Cliff reminds us that mere participation in the production of these institutions is not sufficient: “The lesson to learn from the Bolsheviks is this: we must win political hegemony in whatever independent organs of proletarian power that we help build, using every available means, including running opposition candidates in bourgeois elections to expose broader sections of the class to our ideas.” We must help build up these independent institutions, we must establish them as truly democratic and only through that can the Good News be dutifully shared and actually spread.
[For a fuller elaboration on the application of the merger theory to current conditions, refer to Rosa Janis’ essay on the subject.]
We can then move more specifically to the conceptual merger of the tenant movement in NYC with that of the city’s socialist movement. This is a merger that is not only mutually beneficial or symbiotic, but an actual historical necessity for both movements.
In my estimation, the emergent independent tenant movement has two paths to actual sustainability. The first path is that all of us organizers – those of us who are inordinately invested in this movement and in the organizations that compose it – choose our own self-interest and professionalize. We have accumulated the knowledges, the bureaucratic know-hows and the languages necessary. To do this, either our organizations themselves incorporate as NGOs (with all of the trappings therein) or we get jobs that cause the boundaries between our independent organizations and the nearby nonprofits to blur. Many of the current housing nonprofits in New York City (e.g. Met Council on Housing) are examples of the former. In fact, New York City’s tenant history is littered with radicals-turned-professionals, with base-building giving way to clientelism. NYC-DSA’s current and recent housing leadership and program fit the latter, as expounded above.
The second path is to work toward this merger – for us organizers to become participants in the construction of a socialist New York City. And this is, of course, the only appropriate choice.
This merger is entirely necessary from the perspective of the tenant movement. For one: our antagonists, landlords and real estate, have already more-than-completed a merger of their own – that merger with finance capital, otherwise known as the ‘financialization of housing.’ For the tenant movement to remain narrowly focused in the face of such integrated class foes would be to circumscribe our struggle and limit our capabilities as a movement to the current political realities; as we grow, so too must the tools at our disposal develop. That is to say: the hammers we have as tenants to actually attack and dismantle landed capital’s stranglehold over the political economy and the organization of our lives are and will remain incredibly limited. Socialism is how the tenant movement retools its armory – how we come to control how and where we live.
But this merger is a tricky thing. Its contours operate in multiple, dialectical ranges. On one hand, we as socialist tenant organizers have to help seed and build organizations that functionally recognize working-class tenants as the rightful historical protagonists of this movement. We have to be (and I think, for the most part, we really are, so far) building organizations that are structurally and principally up to that task. That means these organizations have to be truly democratic and truly independent: these have to be vessels of and for working-class power. These organizations themselves must be democratic in their functions and in their relationships to place, time and people. Democratic here means they have to be integrated consciously into historically-situated and unique cultures and communities; democratic means building relationships so as to understand how to actively foster democratic participation, e.g. protagonism, in any given context; it is not always the same. We do not just plop down structures and protocols (and politics) but, through inquiry and repetition, help develop practices of democracy: of collective decision-making (and often also disagreeing, critiquing, rediscussing) of matters relevant and pressing. These organizations that we’re building have to be independent from local NGO’s, political machines (even our own) and other interest groups. This is not because all of these formations are inherently antithetical to our project, but because a union of this sort must be wholly and exclusively accountable to its base: which is always composed of organized worker-tenants.
Then, as alluded to above, we have to win the people and these institutions with visions of this merger – with our good news, with socialism. That means, as we help build out these institutions we also have to be setting the foundations for the internal struggle toward socialism. This doesn’t mean pushing Marxist tomes onto folks and really doesn’t even just mean political education; political education too often in contemporary left-activist scenes means cliquish reading groups. Popular, protagonistic education is closer to it. What does this mean exactly? Lenin writes that “the self-knowledge of the worker class is inextricably tied to full clarity in its conceptions of the mutual relations of all classes of present-day society – conceptions that are not only theoretical… more precisely, not so much theoretical as they are worked out via experience of political life”.4 The tenant union, and the tenant associations that compose it, are the grounds in which the worker-class, the worker-tenants, can compile, contain, sharpen and practice these practical analyses of class relations; the tenant union is a vehicle in which the experiences of political life Lenin writes of take place, over and over. Through the struggle of one tenant association, as it then relates to the struggle of the tenant association down the street, through the clarity borne through shared-constellating struggle, the mutual relations of all classes are brought forth.
This is how we show and share that socialism, as it echoes out from the most local of shops and apartment buildings, is a powerful tool – in fact, the only tool – for worker-tenant liberation and a reclamation of the many publics taken from us. This has to be done slowly and with persistence; it has to be done soberly, with intensive study and reflection; the world becomes more complicated each day and we can only apply Marxism to terrains we know intimately.
Michael Denning, speaking on Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, is very helpful here:
For him, the challenge for the philosophy of praxis, for Marxism, for his Communist Party, is to create a conception of the world that is accessible both to the young militants, still barely literate, barely numerate, who are coming in because of the oppression of their daily life and daily work, and also the intellectuals who are contesting and battling. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, he’s got this double sense. We have two tasks: popular education and the combating of dominant ideologies at the highest level…
But he says that’s not enough. You can’t leave people at that position of pure faith. A party that actually wants to turn people into self-determining rulers of their own society has to actually criticize that common sense, raise people in it, raise oneself out of that rarefied common sense, those Stone Age traces, and instead understand in the good sense: out of one’s experience of work, out of one’s experience of politics, out of one’s experience of one’s own household life and neighborhood life.
Herein lies some of the difficulties and messiness. The dialectical task of both transcending the localist struggle (to beat back an eviction, to hire more building staff, to reduce a rent) toward the emancipatory, while also always grounding that emancipatory vision in the very localist struggle we are engaged in. This notion of common sense is not something that is combatted merely through formal organization: through meetings, pamphlets, organizational structure, or votes. Rather, common sense is produced daily; it is enmeshed within (and is constituent of) social reproduction. Common sense is found and articulated in our daily maneuverings. Intervention into common sense, then, must be environmental and quotidian, consistent and repetitious.
Tenant organizing is a local, rooted and intimate practice. We tenant organizers are welcomed into people’s homes; we work in building lobbies and on front stoops; our places of operation are in courtyards and on rooftops, in stairwells and hallways [Sadiyia Hartman writes: “They didn’t know that the hallway and the stairwell were places of assembly, a clearing inside the tenement, or that you love in doorways.”].
We are cooking with tenants, holding space and community with tenants in their home, and most importantly, struggling alongside tenants (as tenants, too) to gain control over how and where they (and we all) live. All of this, as life dictates, is always clumped together; the strategizing takes place over shared food – the potluck form permeates and symbolizes: people come to the meeting, each bringing their own thing, their own dish, their own set of grievances and list of misrepairs. And then we share. We pass around and confer. We recognize shared interests and convert that recognition into action. That action –small, like planning a day of outreach; larger, like announcing a rent strike! – then rebounds to produce more recognition of shared interest. And always, we keep each other fed.
Tenant organizers encounter and intervene into what geographer Cindi Katz calls “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” – social reproduction – where common sense is performed and produced. Katz’ work is a continual recognition of the revolutionary potential of social reproduction: that it is within the mundane and the daily that revolutionary culture can be, and is, produced. Social reproduction refers, in the Marxist sense, to the complete collection of activities, norms, relations and institutions necessary for the continual reproduction of a mode of production. Everything required for a worker-tenant to be in the position to rise daily to sell her labor, and later, pay her rent – this is social reproduction.
Tenant organizing, particularly principled socialist tenant organizing, keys into the fabric of social reproduction, and engages practically with (and contests) how this fabric is constantly unraveled by capital. When Lenin writes of the importance of “drawing in” the masses to political struggle through more than just sites of economic oppression, the importance of organizing “an all-sided political indictment” that attends to “each and every manifestation of police oppression and autocratic outrage”, and that the oppression of capital “appears in the most various areas of life and activity”, he is gesturing toward this holistic social reproduction.5 Tenant organizing, particularly in New York City – and particularly within the contexts of gig-labor, bureaucratized unions and proletarian disorganization – is a means to harness practically and collectively this all-sided political indictment.
Katz writes that “[f]ocusing on social reproduction allows us to address questions of the making, maintenance, and exploitation of a fluidly differentiated labor force, the productions (and destructions) of nature, and the means to create alternative geographies of opposition to globalized capitalism.” Katz and Lenin are saying the same thing and provide instruction to us socialist organizers: our organizational projects must extend out far into the disparate, distant tangents of peoples’ lives. The tenant movement must grow extensively (covering more-and-more buildings on more-and-more blocks) and intensively. This means the movement must grow its presence further into working peoples’ lives. This isn’t an abstraction or a romanticization, but a very practical lesson. One way that tenant organizers practice this is through the offering of childcare at union events. This is a very simple and meaningful organizational habit; it is welcoming and helps integrate people into unions. Moreover, it is an absolute necessity, seeing as the tenant movement is one led by working-class women. The Tenant Union is for the whole family. The family, this thing of social reproduction, the substance (the flesh, the humanness, the dailiness) that fills the structures and relations of everyday life – is what the tenant movement attends to and is what the socialist movement needs. In the equation of the merger we are concerned with here, then, the tenant movement, in effect, brings the body and soul to the skeleton of socialist politics and socialist theory.
The above are the basic characteristics necessary for the tenant movement to be ‘ready’ to merge with the socialist movement.
On the other hand, for this merger to happen, the socialist movement with which these independent working-class tenant unions are supposed to merge also has to be truly democratic and truly independent. This, similarly, is no small task. Our work then, as socialist tenant organizers, has to be on multiple fronts at once. We have to build this tenant movement and this socialist movement; if we are DSA members, that means that we have to struggle for an independent and democratic socialist organization – independent of NGO’s and the Democratic Party, democratic in our principles and program, and democratic in our internal functions, structures and culture.
To build a democratic and independent DSA requires profoundly reassessing fundamental aspects of the organization. This includes reversing our tendency to tailism and divorcing ourselves from the bourgeois Democratic Party. More: the culture of the organization has to be pushed toward this democratic, independent horizon; it has to be implemented and cultivated, not just in our meetings, but in everything we do. We need an organization where rank-and-file members, and particularly newer, working-class, black and brown members are not just welcomed but imbued with protagonism. We have to study how this has been done and experiment with how this can be done! We have to produce a robust culture of critique, debate and discussion. Organizational decisions not only have to appear transparent or democratic but actually be so. This is, again, not easy. It requires much trial, error, and about-face. We as socialists in New York City run up against many of the most powerful capitalist formations in the world. We have to be deeply sober about how tremendous of a task we have ahead of us. We cannot be content with creating and maintaining an organization that provides meaning and sociality to (generally well-meaning, downwardly-mobile) middle- or upper-class (mostly white) socialists. We have to carefully, and with principle, identify and interrogate our organizational contradictions, including those regarding race and class. We cannot be scared of these contradictions – that fear perpetuates them.
But tenant organizations across the country are showing us that independent and democratic working-class organization works. Not only this, but independent organization of this sort is necessary, warmly welcomed and already happening in so many ways – most of the time, as organizers, it’s our role to knock on some doors and then get out of the way. This is one of the fundamental dialectics of socialist tenant organizing: at once creating these tethers between tenants, between buildings and neighborhoods and between the tenant movement and socialism; while all the same, mostly staying out of the way and letting tenants – our historical protagonists – guide.
These organizations provide us tangible templates of actual, practical democracy and organizational independence that we can use as models within the DSA. We need to support and uphold these organizations so we can, as we engage in the arduous and unenviable struggle of refashioning the DSA toward these ideals, show those who might be doubtful that this does work and is in fact our only path forward. These are a democracy and an independence that are tethered to actual community, that are discovered there and always grounded there. This is, I think, the most important aspect – the merger not merely of tenant organization and socialism, but of democracy and community.
The DSA here in NYC is famously unrooted. It operates so often in a game of politics-from-above, which masks a pervasive transience of its membership. The ideas are all there. The ‘fixes’ needed are understood and recognized, the legislative course mapped out (Good Cause + Tax the Rich = Socialism in One City). But correct ideas mean very little without power to employ, enforce and actualize them. And power for socialists – it bears repeating – comes only through bottom-up organization. Power is not derived from having a seat at the table or from being let into the room where zoning decisions are made (though these arenas can certainly influence power-building efforts). Rather, power exists amongst the indeterminate stuff of everyday life. Power is harnessed through actually building real organization founded upon and containing real relationships with people where they live, of compelling people to engage in active democracy within their homes and on their blocks, and of building out the organizational infrastructure worthy of the power already existing in working-class communities. It is always our organization that determines our collective capabilities (to enforce our rights, to act as a class, and to assume stewardship over our historical moment).
