‘Books and Beers’ invites you to a reading/social group dedicated to good ideas and good beer!

From Oct 15th Solidarity:

1. Talk to your whanau, friends and workmates about the trial and get them signed up to the email list and ‘like’ our facebook page to stay up to date: https://www.facebook.com/pages/October-15-Solidarity/25598818522
2. If you are in Auckland or planning to come to Auckland for the trial (or some of it – it is expected to last three (!) months), have a think about what you could do in terms of political and practical solidarity.
3. If you are a member of a union or a political group, get a story about this trial printed in your magazine to make the links between this trial and political activism and aspirations for tino rangantiratanga.
4. Write a letter to the editor – a great way to keep this show-trial in the public’s mind.
5. Watch ‘Operation 8′ – you can get it at many Video stores and libraries. Or you can buy a copy here: http://cutcutcut.com/Operation8.html

If you are in Christchurch, there may be a meeting to co-ordinate support coming soon. Watch this space.

Yet any hint of benefit fraud is decried, and quick to be denounced by those in power—triggering law changes and targets on anyone on the dole (regardless of their situation). However the total amount of benefit fraud comes nowhere close to the amount swindled by the capitalists running SFC. In 2010/11, benefit fraud totaled $22.6 million—from 2005 to today, the total amount of benefit fraud comes to $71.6 million. Nowhere near the $1.7 billion, let alone other examples of white-collar crime (take the director of the LWR for example, who swindled $118 million while his workers in Christchurch were made redundant).

While those on the dole receive the bare minimum, and a swag of grief, discrimination, and social stigma, the suit-and-tie criminals of the capitalist class go relatively unnoticed. Sounds like a backwards system to us!

The media have given plenty of space to Ports of Auckland management, but nobody has canvassed the opinions of those most affected by the company’s decisions, the workers. Here we get behind the news to the men, their wives and the children affected by the Ports of Auckland actions and proposals.

For the background to the dispute read the Maritime Union of New Zealand and Council of Trade Union fact sheet and the Port of Auckland’s industrial dispute updates. 

The Thorton family: “They want drones when we are actually parents”

Shaun Thorton, 43, drives a straddle at the Ports of Auckland where he has worked for 18 years. He met his wife Leah at the port where she worked before becoming a fulltime mum looking after their four kids: Ben (9), twins Max and Amy (5) and Nina (4).

“We want predictability so we can have a family life,” he says. “We only get one weekend off every third weekend meaning I work 35 weekends in the year. I’m striking for the kids.”

Leah interrupts: “and for the marriage”.

“Shaun’s work is a nightmare for me and the kids,” she says. “Dad only went to two soccer games last year and couldn’t come to the preschool Christmas party. We’ve learnt to live with it but it’s far from perfect.”

“It’s clear from the ports casualisation plan that they want drones, when we are actually parents. You can’t sustain a family as a casual and deal with the everyday stuff parents have to put up with. One of our kids has a chronic illness and another is getting progressively deaf in one ear. I should be able to count on partner to help out with hospital visits and specialist’s visits.

“Everyone complains about irresponsible teenagers going out on town and they wonder where their parents are. They are here and in other unsociable jobs. The only other option to this work is working on the minimum wage.

“It astounds me that they are trying to increase productivity by ruining our work life balance – do they want people sleeping on the job?” she says. “Can I complain to the company about not having annual leave or sick days?”

The Wallace family: “It’s not just husbands affected, it’s our families too”

Mark Wallace is a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland. He worked his way up from a casual to a permanent crane driver over 18 years. Mark and wife Katrina have two children, Ashley (9) and Rebecca (7).

“I’m trying to protect my family life,” he says. “The company wants the right to tell me at midnight, eight hours before a shift, that I don’t have the shift anymore. How can I plan a family life around that?”

“The company goes on about caring for its employees, but they treat us like shit. We’ve given them the best container rates ever. If they really cared about us, we’d be inside working. We had to strike at Christmas just to get time off with our kids.”

Katrina, is a self-employed dress-maker who works from home.

“I brought the kids down to the picket show solidarity with my husband,” she says. “But it’s not just husbands affected, it’s our families too. The company’s proposed changes would be hard for me and the kids. I couldn’t take on huge jobs because I wouldn’t know day-to-day what Mark would be doing. I wouldn’t even be able to count on him to pick up the kids from school.”

The Witehira family: “Keeping family time is more important than a pay rise”

Jermaine Witehira, 31, got his first ever job at the Ports of Auckland where he has been working as a stevedore for 14 years. Jermaine and wife Destiny have three children, Gabrielle (5), Karine (2) and Jayda (1)

“I’m doing this for my family and my mates,” he says. “A 10% pay rise isn’t worth the new casual roster system – family time is more important than a pay rise.

“The company says we earn $91k a year – I‘ve never earned that in the 14 years I’ve been here. I get around $64k but I have to work 24 hours overtime and that costs my family.”

Destiny says Jermaine doesn’t see his kids because he leaves for work at 5:30am and gets back at 11:30pm.

“Being a young family is hard enough, but with his hours it feels like I’m a solo mum,” she says. “If the company gets what it wants I’ll have to put my kids in day care and get a job. The thing is that the job would probably only just cover day care costs and I’d have to find a job that worked around casual hours.”

Brandon Cherrington

Brandon Cherrington, 38, has worked at the Ports of Auckland for 1½ years. He is a permanent part-timer and is only guaranteed 24 hours a week. Brandon has a 1½ year old daughter.

“This strike is all about our families,” he says. “We are here supporting the boys to keep and improve our conditions. With the company’s [proposed] new flexibility, they want us to be on call and I won’t be able to plan activities with my daughter anymore.”

Shaun Osbourne

Shaun Osbourne works at the Ports of Auckland. Because he is a casual employee, he hasn’t had a single guaranteed hour in the eight years he has worked there.

“My shifts are allocated the day before I go to work,’ he says. “I could get anywhere between eight and 48 hours a week which could be in the morning, afternoon or graveyard or a combination of the shifts. I won’t be crossing over. We’ve got to make sure permanent workers don’t end up like us casuals.”

Wayne Wolfe

Wayne Wolfe, 58, works as a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland. He has worked on the ports for 35 years. Wayne has three adult children and two grandchildren, including a two-week old baby. Wayne is an executive member of Local 13 of the Maritime Union.

“Many of these young fellas are casuals and have had busted up marriages because of their casualised hours,” he says. “When I first joined, conditions were brilliant and I am doing my best to leave it that way.”

Ron Bell

Ron Bell, 53, is a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland. He will have worked on the waterfront for 31 years this coming April and has been union since he was 17. He has four daughters Jac (20), Katherine (18) and twins Samantha and Amanda (15). He is an executive member of Local 13 of the Maritime Union.

“I just want our guys to keep their jobs on decent hours and not get shat on waiting by the phone 24 hours a day,” he says. “People before us made our conditions what they are today and they should stay that way.”

Ken Ziegler

Ken Ziegler, 49, has worked as a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland for 12 years. Ken is the main provider for his son Carlos (10). He is an executive member of Local 13 of the Maritime Union.

“It’s really simple,” he says. “The company is trying to casualise the entire workforce to keep labour costs down.”

Napo Kuru

Napo Kuru, 27, has worked as a casual lasher at the Ports of Auckland for four years.

“I’m on $16 an hour as a casual and can get anywhere between 16 and 30 hours a week,” he says. “We have the same fight as the permanent boys. They want everyone to be cheap which will drive down everyone’s pay.”

Anarchism, as a body of thought, has been misinterpreted, misused and mystified by both those who agree or disagree with it, yet according to the authors of the recently published book Black Flame, despite the wide berth of anarchist ideas some important definitions and distinctions can be made. Using a fresh and thoughtful framework, Black Flame analyses the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism, producing a coherent and cohesive overview of tactics, strategies and praxis to both illustrate an anarchist history of struggle and revolution, and to push the current movement forward.

“A good definition is one that highlights the distinguishing features of a given category, does so in a coherent fashion, and is able to differentiate that category from others, thereby organising knowledge as well as enabling effective analysis and research. The usual definition of anarchism fails on all these grounds.”

For Schmidt and van der Walt, the usual definition of anarchism, or at least one that is held up by some, is its antistatism. The ‘seven sages’ of anarchism — Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker and Tolstoy — are generally accepted as developing or influencing anarchist thought. Yet as Black Flame illustrates, while antistatism is a necessary component of anarchist thought, the grouping of these loose figures and their ideas are “simply too vague to really distinguish anarchism from other bodies of thought and action, resulting in anarchism being defined so loosely that it is not clear what should be included and what should not, and why some things are included and others are not”.

Instead, Black Flame uses a framework identifying anarchism as a result of specific socialist and working class praxis developed in the 1860′s and the realm of the First International, and firmly placed in the tradition of revolutionary class struggle: “It is our view that the term anarchism should be reserved for a particular rationalist and revolutionary form of libertarian socialism that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century”. The argument that anarchism can be traced back into antiquity or is a natural or universal aspect of society or the psyche is disputed and convincingly disproved: “not only is it the case that anarchism did not exist in the premodern world, it is also the case that it could not have, for it is rooted in the social and intellectual revolutions of the modern world.”

“Anarchism was against social and economic hierarchy as well as inequality — and specifically, capitalism, landlordism, and the state — and in favour of international class struggle and revolution from below by a self-organised working class and peasantry in order to create a self-managed, socialist, stateless social order. In this new order, individual freedom would be harmonsised with communal obligations through co-operation, democratic decision making, and social and economic equality, and economic coordination would take place through federal forms.”

Having established their framework, named in the book as the ‘broad anarchist tradition,’ Black Flame goes on to re-examine anarchist ideas, its relationship with technology, classical Marxism, syndicalist struggles and tactics, organisation, unions, the IWW, and race and gender — and portrays an internationalism refreshingly void of the narrow focus on Western sources. This ‘broad anarchist tradition’ enables the authors to critique past definitions:

“it follows that commonly used categories such as ‘philosophical anarchism’, ‘individualist anarchism’, ‘spiritual anarchism’, or ‘lifestyle anarchism’ fall away. Because the ideas designated by these names are not part of the anarchist tradition, their categorisation of variants of anarchism is misleading and arises from a misunderstanding of anarchism. Likewise, adding the rider ‘class struggle’ or ‘social’ to the word anarchist implies that there are anarchist who do not favour class struggle or who are individualists, neither of which is an accurate usage.”

Many agree with the framework and resulting definitions used in the book (myself included). Black Flame has sparked some very positive discussion since it was published earlier this year (see any anarchist forum or Wayne Price’s review), and of course, disagreement from the ‘post-left anarchists’ and ‘anarcho-primitivists’, who, as a result of the book’s framework, fall into the traditions of Stirner, individualists, or other thinkers outside of the ‘broad anarchist tradition’.

Definitions aside, Black Flame is a truely valuable and practical book, with something to offer both the newbie to anarchist thought, or those looking to further their own previous understandings.

The 111 CMP meat workers, who have been locked out since 19 October, have today accepted an offer from CMP and will be back at work by the New Year.

Workers at CMP were locked out after refusing to take a 20% pay cut and many other changes to their working conditions. “We did not go into this dispute expecting to stop all the cuts and the company used the most extreme and harsh measures against these workers to both secure sufficient workers on the new agreements to maintain much of its business operations and to force those workers that were locked out into a situation where they faced such severe financial impacts that the company hoped they would accept the proposed cuts. These workers showed so much strength and with the support of the union movement, fought back.” Dave Eastlake, National Secretary of the New Zealand Meat Workers Union said.

Following negotiations yesterday a settlement was reached that has now been accepted by the workers and while some pay cuts have been agreed, these have been reduced to a level that the workers were prepared to accept. Importantly all the non cost conditions that the company sought to also remove have been put back in the new agreement and the workers will be paid a $500 payment on return to work. There are a number of other improved provisions in the agreement.

“The workers have shown enormous heart throughout this lengthy and onerous dispute against the odds. They go back to work with pride in the resistance and solidarity they have shown and knowing that had they not, the conditions the company originally offered would now be their working conditions.”

“While this has been hard for the workers, they are heartened by the support that has been shown by the community and the New Zealand trade union movement. Without such support the financial and emotional hardship caused by the lockout would have been harder to bear.”

An article from The Guardian on the ‘ultraleftist propaganda machine’ known as the Deterritorial Support Group.

Walking into a small room in a communal house in north London, I’m confronted by a poster depicting an Egyptian protester hurling himself into a line of riot shields, with a message in huge capitals: “WE WILL FIGHT, WE WILL KISS/LONDON CAIRO ROME TUNIS”. Elsewhere books on radical philosophy are stacked alongside photocopied “FIGHT FOR YOUR EMA” flyers and other design scraps. I’m here to meet – on condition of anonymity – two members of the shadowy Deterritorial Support Group (DSG), who use the names Pablo and Nick, and, via Skype from somewhere outside the M25, a third whom we’ll call Jamie. “I’d make you dinner, but I’m skint,” apologises Pablo, as they set up the laptop. “I wasn’t paid this week.”

At various points DSG – named as an antithesis to the Territorial Support Group, the Met’s public order riot police, and kettling specialists – will identify themselves as “Ikea anarchists”, “autonomist Marxists”, “humorous provocateurs”, “cartoonish materialists” and an “ultra-left propaganda machine” (their official description). These tongue-in-cheek/silly labels might mark them as determined outsiders hectoring from the fringes, but they have cast a long shadow over politics in 2011, infiltrating mainstream debate via the virus-like spread of their internet memes. Since the student protests a year ago, they have become know for a stream of provocative political posters; for timely polemics about internet activists Anonymous, political policing and the Occupy movement; for sparking journalist Johann Hari‘s downfall; and for spreading across the global media an astonishing hoax about radical philosopher Slavoj Žižek offering his endorsement of Lady Gaga.

They are deliberately vague on the specifics, but it becomes clear that DSG comprises around 10-20 members and affiliates, all graduates in their early to mid-20s, either on the dole, still studying or precariously employed – Pablo has been working as a cleaner. In a key piece written in February by Newsnight’s economics editor (and DSG fan) Paul Mason, entitled 20 Reasons It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, reason number one, linking everything from the Arab Spring to Greece to Millbank, was “a new sociological type: the graduate with no future”. DSG are that group at its most well-read and radical – and they have nothing to lose but their student debt.

Visit their blog and, as with any good propaganda, their visuals strike you first: classic revolutionary aesthetics reimagined for the internet age. In bold red and black, accompanied by blownup images of the Twitter “retweet” symbol and Facebook thumbs-up icon, they declaim “STRIKE/OCCUPY/RETWEET” and “EDUCATE/AGITATE/LIKE”. It’s both tongue-in-cheek, and deadly serious. At the eruption of the student protests this time last year, says Pablo, “we saw a lot of awful propaganda, which didn’t relate to what was going on. People are embarrassed about talking about Facebook and Twitter, because it relates to their everyday life, which is stupid – it’s the way we share information. Fifty years ago they’d have been talking about occupying a TV or radio station.”

DSG’s posters around the large trade union protests on 26 March became notorious, taking the “March for the alternative” TUC branding and subverting it to provocative effect, turning the open-palmed TUC hands into raised middle fingers, suggesting that people “occupy”, “kick off”, or “fuck shit up for the alternative”. The posters spread virally across the internet, and were plastered on lamp-posts and walls in London. The TUC were, Pablo feels, asking to be parodied. “Their campaign was non-confrontational almost to a comical degree.” The aesthetic was “very consciously decodified, without any political affiliation whatsoever. Instead of primary colours it was teal and beige and turquoise.” So DSG “recodified” the TUC posters in “traditional confrontational colours of the left”, red and black.

“What separates us aesthetically,” continues Pablo, “is that without the specific historical and economic conditions I live under, I don’t feel would be involved in this sort of thing. These are times when you have to grab the opportunity.” So what would they be doing, if they were born into another age? “Probably have a mortgage or something?” Nick says. “As cartoonish materialists, the material conditions own us.” Indeed, they would never have started DSG were they not unemployed, poor, and fired up by the student protests of last winter – for them, the storming of Millbank represented a kind of “year zero”. Indeed, Nick admits to voting Lib Dem in May 2010, and Pablo, with a chuckle, to being a former member.

Over several hours they dispense praise for radical designers and propagandists such as Atelier Populaire, Grapus, The Designers Republic and Class War, and have harsh words for almost everyone else, including the Labour left (“2011′s real utopians”), the Lib Dems (“trepanning on the brain of social democracy”), Adbusters (“hipsters are the abortion of the vanguard”), and the Trotskyist SWP (“how endearing to base your entire political outlook on a text written in 1921, under very specific conditions”). They seem equally in love with radical theorists such as Gilles Dauve, and lolcat pictures.

Their aims, they said earlier this year, are “full communism, with lulz as a transitional demand”. Surely that was just a gag? “In the one hand it’s completely honest,” says Nick, “and on the other it’s a joke in its own right, which is similar to a lot of the stuff that we do.”

At times this year DSG’s jokes have got slightly out of hand. In June the Murdoch tabloid the New York Post ran an astonishing story entitled “Marxist muse befriends Gaga”, reporting that “the world’s hippest philosopher” Slavoj Žižek was cavorting with the world’s biggest pop star. As their source they quoted a long essay Žižek had written for DSG, applauding Lady Gaga’s militancy, entitled Communism Knows No Monster. Except, he hadn’t written it at all. The story’s obvious falsehood didn’t stop it being picked up by the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Fox News and Vanity Fair. On Fox, Nick recounts. “It was established in the first two minutes it was a hoax, but they nevertheless spent a further eight minutes discussing it, which is fantastic.” So what did you make of Žižek’s response in the Guardian Review, that “there is an anarchist leftist group here in London who hate me”? “We were heartbroken!” says Nick. “We’re not anarchists, and we don’t hate him! He’s a great communicator, which is more than you can say about a lot of academic leftists.”

Some of DSG’s coups have been more serious: their discovery of Independent columnist Hari’s extensive plagiarism of an old interview with the Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri escalated fast, as the rightwing press picked up the baton, and turned it into a pitch-fork. “I was just casually reading an obscure Negri text,” Jamie says. “It’s pretty difficult to get hold of – the only way I found it was by downloading it. You know when you’re reading something and you think, ‘I’ve seen this somewhere before’? So I started going through Hari’s Independent piece and I was shocked – genuinely shocked.”

In the ensuing scandal, the debate over plagiarism eclipsed DSG’s original point: that radical thinkers such as Negri are routinely and deliberately misrepresented. “What’s been lost,” laments Jamie, “is the specific content of the discovery: a liberal journalist fabricating material about a person on the radical left, accusing him of murder, in order to smear him, and by proxy to smear radical thought.

“Journalists like Hari police the boundaries of what is acceptable thought. It’s the left wing of capital, as the old anarchist critique of social democracy says.” It’s sad, he continues, that the politics was stripped out of the debate, but it’s how our elites function: just like the TUC’s timid aesthetics and bland colour schemes.

Another striking thing, given their leftist politics, is their refusal to reject the trappings of consumer capitalism. “You can’t be a communist in a capitalist world,” says Pablo. They shop at Tesco, they happily admit. “That’s what DSG is about aesthetically as well, which is being based in your everyday life. Most people like shopping at Tesco.” Same with Ikea, says Nick, pointing to a description of DSG’s aesthetics as “Ikea anarchism”. “I’m happy with ‘Ikea anarchism’, because they give reasonably good design, on the cheap, to a lot of people, and it’s very popular. It’s better than the alternative, which is handmade anarchism.”

“Be the change you want to see in the world”, goes the hippy motto. It chimes with Louise Mensch’s and Theresa May’s criticisms of Occupy St Paul’s protesters: how can occupiers call for the end of capitalism, yet still buy coffee from Starbucks? Pablo grins. “What’s really interesting about those glib rightwing reactions is, if that’s really the best argument you’ve got, then there is no real defence.

“Four or five years ago their argument would have been: ‘Capitalism has given you everything you ever needed.’ Now it’s: ‘You’re drinking coffee.’ Capitalism is a relationship caused by wage labour, and you can eat as much organic food as you want, but you’re not changing those fundamental relationships.”

He pauses. “I think the real problem with ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ is the change I want to see in the world, I can’t embody.”

And that change involves a world that fully embraces the advances of the 20th century, not a retreat to the hills. “Thatcher exploited the fact that people wanted to buy their own home, and live in a nice place, and have a lot of nice material possessions,” continues Pablo. “And that’s what I want! I don’t want this sort of leftist poverty, and the left in Britain needs to get over this asceticism, the idea that fighting capital means suffering behind a machine. You go along to Trotskyist events and they’re arguing for the right to work – I don’t want the right to work! What I’d like is to work less.” Always keen to show the working behind their final answer, Jamie cites a report by the New Economics Foundation, saying that at the current level of economic output, Britain could comfortably reduce the working week to an average of 21 hours a week.

This all sounds wonderful, of course. But DSG isn’t that optimistic about the imminent arrival of a new world – at the very least, it’s sure change won’t come from the TUC, or from Westminster. “Capital has already smashed organised labour, and now it’s going to work on parliamentary democracy: across southern Europe, there’s this slipping into a state of exception,” Pablo says, reflecting on the recent appointments of “technocrats” to head the governments in Greece and Italy, and concern about a resurgence in fascist parties (“the fash”). “This postwar argument that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand; well maybe that was just a transition period before capitalism reaches its actual zenith, which is … China?”

Young radicals have always pontificated about a world after capitalism: the difference for DSG, and the generation it preaches to – the children of New Labour, the internet and ubiquitous branding – is that it looks more realistic than ever before. One of the most dramatic of its posters, which reads THE POST-POLITICAL = THE MOST POLITICAL, was created in response to some older voices on the left complaining, almost nostalgically, that the August riots “weren’t even political”.

From the laptop, Jamie’s voice pipes up – the poster is, he thinks, all that needs to be said about the riots – in a way, all that needs to be said about the age we live in. “Some people asked me what it meant, but it means exactly what it says: the post-political is the most political. It hits the nail on the head. Mainstream politics is over. It’s over! It’s us, capital and the fash. That’s it!”

Originally posted: December 15, 2011 at The Guardian

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

- Frederick Douglass

Decent housing should be an absolute right for all people. But, we continue to live in a world that homelessness, evictions of the poor, and degrading housing conditions are all too common. At the same time, we see abandoned housing left to rot. This should convince us that our housing problems come not from a lack of resources, but from a poor distribution of those resources. As is the problem with so many facets of our lives, housing is organized for private profit and not for people’s common needs. The only way for us to change these problems is to organize together and demand it. But, who do we organize and how? And, who is the enemy?

Who is the landlord?
For most working class people, owning our home isn’t a possibility and we’re often forced into a housing market with large landlords. Just as often, the tenants and the landlords have conflicting sets of interests. While we’re simply trying to hold onto a basic necessity of life, landlords hope to gain a profit from us. Sadly, the interests of the landlords are usually dominant, thanks to a system of legal and government support rarely enjoyed by tenants.

Supposedly, we have a choice. We can live wherever we’d like – if we can afford it. So the “choice” offered to those of us that live in or near poverty is between a variety of bad housing situations and homelessness. This is obviously not a choice, but a threat. Where can you go to leave an unfair housing market? Our life experiences repeatedly tell us: “You will take whatever horrible standards your income can afford, or you will have nothing.”

Not all working class people are renters and many in poor cities, have managed to buy their own home. While at times, we may rent out a room or floor of our house, we generally have more in common with tenants than the large landlords. Homeowners are very often tenants themselves of the largest of landlords – the banks. Even if the mortgage has been paid, working class homeowners occupy a very small and isolated part of the housing market, where much larger landlords have real control. These homeowners may be in a more comfortable immediate position. But, they’re also in a very precarious situation and could easily lose their home in any number of ways.

On the other hand large landlords own apartment buildings or dozens of houses throughout the city. They use our basic need for housing as a tool to create profits, often massive, for themselves. Their interest is to make the greatest possible profit for themselves. That means keeping repairs to a minimum and charging as much rent as they believe they can.

Having little power individually, renters are often on the losing end of this conflict. Homelessness, evictions, and poor living standards are clear signs of our current weak position.

Tenant Power
The beauty of our situation, is that collectively we have far greater power than our landlords. Our rent is the source of their wealth. For them to continue their life of luxury without work they need us to continue living in their apartments, continue paying their rent, and keep accepting the living conditions that they choose for us. Our landlords are absolutely reliant upon us. They rely on the hope that we will never understand our true strength.

The power of the working class has the same limits in the struggle for decent and affordable housing as it does in the workplace – it’s collective. When we struggle alone in isolation the landlord has nearly absolute power. Our power is only real power when we get together with others in similar situations and organize for justice.

Tenants Union
Just as we would organize in our workplace against exploitative bosses, we propose the organization of a Citywide Tenants’ Union to organize our power to assert that decent, affordable housing is a right for all people. A City Wide Tenants’ Union should commit itself to organize all tenants of the large landlords in our city to aggressively demand our necessary rights to good quality housing. The tools of a serious Tenants’ Union are incredibly powerful:

Public Pressure: Through rallies, media events, and public meetings we can hurt the image of our landlords. A bad public image can hurt their ability to find new renters and force public demand for investigations of the conditions in their properties.

Eviction Blockades: In the case that any of the members of the tenants’ union are being unjustly evicted or evicted in retaliation for their organizing efforts, other members of the union should organize a blockade of that member’s house or apartment. With the tenants’ union, the normally disempowering experience of being evicted becomes a show of the power of solidarity. The act that we usually suffer in isolation becomes a moment of true community as serious attention is brought to the eviction.

Direct Action: In the case that our organized public pressure doesn’t solve the problems that we are having with our landlords, we could target them more aggressively by actively disrupting their ability to continue business. Occupation of company offices and disrupting the visits of new tenants are a couple of possibilities that may force our landlords to listen our demands.

Rent Strike: The greatest source of our power with landlords is actually one of the easiest for us to use. A collective refusal to pay rent until demands are met should bring even the most abusive landlords to the table. If an individual were to refuse to pay rent, the landlord would have an easy time fighting back. But when all of their tenants refuse to pay rent, they quickly find themselves outmatched.

Solidarity: An injury to one is an injury to all. When we begin to fight our landlords, we have to know that we aren’t doing so alone, and this is the purpose of our union. Having a Tenant Union would mean that none of us struggle in isolation. Just because one group of tenants has won a fight against their landlord doesn’t mean that they are no longer part of the struggle. They will provide resources, experience, and volunteers to the effort of organizing other renters throughout the city.

Landlords Need Us, We Don’t Need Them

In the struggle against our landlords, there is one important realization. Our landlords don’t do anything for us that we aren’t capable of doing for ourselves. We are more than capable of organizing ourselves to make repairs and maintain the buildings where we live. There are cooperative housing associations throughout the world that show us proof of our ability to live without landlords. So, if we can organize ourselves to maintain our housing needs, what do landlords do? That is exactly the point. Landlords exist purely to take rent from us.

As we develop true power as renters, we will realize that the real battle is for a system of housing that recognizes our right to decent, affordable place to live no matter what. This means getting rid of a world of for-profit housing. No one should exploit a system of vulgar inequality to create massive profits from our need to survive. We know that these inequalities will only exist as long as we permit them. So let’s begin the struggle for just housing today!

Taken from Buffalo Class Action website