Class Struggle on the Housing Terrain: Building Power in the Tenants’ Movement.

Sponsoring Authors:
Lewie L, Nick W, Sarah M, Cece S, Dani T, Kellen D, Justin G

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Foreword: 

The Housing Question. Housing has become a clearcut site of struggle. This is no accident. Our homes have now become integrated into the circuitry of capitalism. Commodification forces the working class to expend wages on rents and therefore engenders a direct wealth transfer from working class people to landlords and corporate entities. As housing has become intensely financialized our homes have been made into storehouses for surplus values that, after being accumulated elsewhere in the system, can be again augmented through asset inflation. All this together creates conditions by which a permanent class of property owners can extract rent and income from the working class without ever having to step foot into the realm of labor. 

Union participation rates are at an all time low and tenancy rates are at an all time high. A significant portion of workers are rent burdened, paying rents in excess of 30% of their income. Millions spent more than 50% of their income on rent. Housing has become a new and promising terrain of mass class struggle, and thousands of militant organizers are cutting their teeth in autonomous tenant organizing. Many new tenant unions have sprung up, and they have organized together in a new national formation, the Autonomous Tenant Union Network. Just as DSA has a responsibility to organize within the labor movement by building new unions and supporting existing ones, the DSA too should build and support autonomous tenant unions, working to expand organizing in the field of social reproduction at the same time that we fight to revitalize struggle at the point of production.

Through the Housing Justice Commission, DSA can not only develop organizers that can effectively engage with people around shared struggles, but also form the start of long-term relationships with other working-class people in our neighborhoods and workplaces to build other campaigns that are responsive to dramatically different conditions of each local chapter.

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Resolution:

Whereas, the DSA’s ability to advance a socialist politics requires a proletariat that is itself self-organized into fighting formations across all terrains of struggle; and 

Whereas, the working class has experienced intense decomposition since the 1970s, such that it has both become atomized into increasingly individualized units, and fractured by the explosion of variegated social contradictions arising from capitalist expansion into evermore areas of social life; and 

Whereas, housing has become a primary site of both direct extraction—rents accumulated through housing commodification—and indirect accumulation through financialization—the use of housing as a storehouse of surplus values and its subsequent inflation—; and 

Whereas, just as labor’s organization is essential for the possibility of moving past capitalism and building socialism, so too must tenants become organized for us to find sufficient power to transform society; and

Whereas, a young and growing tenant movement has emerged across the country, based on the increasing importance of housing both for working class daily life and for the accumulation of capital, a movement buoyed by the recent Covid-19 crisis. The tenant movement has emerged as a clear terrain of class struggle due to the ascendancy of real estate capital as an important cornerstone of rent extraction during falling rates of profit in the Western post-industrial core; and

Whereas, working class tenants across the country have already constructed tenant unions free from the imperatives related to the non-profit industrial complex in general and the Democratic Party in particular, demonstrating that working class innovation and self-organization is taking place today on an unprecedented scale; and 

Whereas, the first ever national tenant union organization—the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN)—has been constructed, which some have compared to the CIO of tenant unions, bringing together all the major socialist tenant unions; and

Whereas, building a new tenant union—or engaging in a productive way with the existing autonomous tenant union in an area—is difficult work that can remain daunting for a local DSA chapter without training and support from the national body; and

Whereas, many areas across the country lack the dense network of legal support that often exists in larger cities (i.e. pro bono tenant lawyers, progressive lawyers’ associations, know-your-rights training, etc.). This legal support helps both to clarify the terrain of struggle between landlord and tenant, and to develop effective tenant outreach; and

Whereas, even in larger cities with strong legal support, the existing legal network often cannot provide useful advice for organizing, because of its political orientation and connections to the Democratic Party and non-profit industrial complex. Instead, legal support in that context advises tenants to resolve issues solely within a legal context, and not as a part of a fully integrated organizing practice; and

Whereas, interpretation and language justice are essential to build inclusive, multi-racial tenant unions, but interpretation can be both expensive and difficult to coordinate for new unions; and

Whereas, the DSA should aim to build a new common sense understanding of housing within capitalism through political education, emphasizing the class divisions between tenant and landlord and calling for socialism; and

Whereas, rental housing associations regularly contribute to politicians from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. And such contributions are often a vulnerable point of contestation against the same politicians; and

Whereas, many DSA members and chapters have already engaged in building tenant unions, or else in putting forward efforts that organize tenants against real estate capitalists and against housing market dynamics; 

Therefore be it resolved, that the DSA should strengthen ties to a growing tenant movement across the country, by building and supporting tenant unions; and be it

Resolved, that the convention directs the National Political Committee (NPC) and the Housing Justice Commission (HJC) to develop and facilitate a structure, with three distinct wings, that can enable local DSA chapters to build and support local autonomous tenant unions; and be it

Resolved, that the HJC shall develop a first training wing responsible for building and running a train-the-trainer program that teaches comrades how to either build new autonomous tenant unions—meaning, tenant unions that are entirely funded and run by tenant members—that can grow into mass organizations in areas where none currently exist, or how to build intermediate structures that train and orient local DSA chapter members to collectively and collaboratively engage within their respective autonomous tenant unions if they already exist; and be it 

Resolved, that the HJC training wing shall include details and processes for building inclusive, multi-racial organizations committed to language justice relevant to local conditions, and that are specifically committed to building organizational solidarity with BIPOC tenants; and be it 

Resolved, that HJC shall develop a second wing to conduct an inquiry among local DSA housing committees into local conditions of legal resource availability and obstacles to access. HJC shall develop a guide for tenant unions to search for and connect with legal support networks. The HJC shall also develop a strategy and practice that uses tenant rights knowledge for organizing outside of the legal system; and be it

Resolved, the second wing shall also be a legal-aid outfit that supports the tenant organizing of comrades in regions with deficient tenant rights support, for example by constructing know-your-rights trainings tailored to local legal conditions and purposefully constructed for local use, and by making legal interpretation for local and regional tenant laws available to such comrades; and be it

Resolved, that the HJC shall include a third wing for purposes of political education relevant for the tenant movement, and whose duties shall include developing a political education curriculum that can be adapted to local conditions; and be it

Resolved, that the HJC shall be provided with funds for translation and language justice; and be it

Resolved, that these tenant unions should apply to affiliate with, or be affiliated with, the national Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN), which has emerged as a national center for the actually existing socialist tenant movement and brings together LA Tenants Union, Philly Tenants Union, TANC and many other socialist unions in the rising tenant movement; and

Be it finally resolved: the NPC shall direct the editorial board of the Democratic Left to include a section on the tenant movement, specifically related to the work of HJC and ATUN-related unions, for each new print issue.