Sofía D. | Corresponsal de Red Phoenix | Minnesota–
The tenant movement is on the rise. Across the country, including in the Twin Cities, tenants are forming bargaining units – from a single building to unions spanning across entire cities – to stop rent increases, win reforms to improve basic living standards, and even call for political action and change. This movement is a working-class movement, and its most ambitious goals – abolishing rent, housing for all – are embryonic expressions of the demand for working-class socialist revolution.
What makes the tenant’s movement part of the worker’s movement? Tenants are not a class unto themselves. Tenants may belong to any class: they may be workers, who make a living by selling their own labor, and who are exploited; or they may be bourgeois (i.e., capitalists) who own tools, machines, and land, and who exploit the workers. But it is the working tenants, the poor and exploited tenants, to whom the tenant movement properly belongs. The wins demanded by tenants are demanded for and on behalf of the working class.
The goals fought for by the tenants movement are initially economic, fighting for access to a better-quality commodity – in this case housing, a market in which landlords try to maximize the rents charged, while tenants struggle to minimize the rents paid. This is an irreconcilable contradiction, in addition to the actual quality of the housing. The movement demands rent caps, proper sanitation, working heat, and clean water. The working-class tenant, unlike the bourgeois tenant, does not have the funds to simply buy better housing – they must fight against the landlords to improve the quality of the commodity that they need to survive.
The working tenant senses the injustice inherent in the system, and begins to attempt to explain it: because the landlord is taking the tenant’s money and returning a sub-par product, the landlord is “exploiting” the tenant; because rent is a burden on an already low wage, we need to “abolish rent”; because there are homeless, we need “housing for all.” But the fact that this commodity is as plainly necessary as food and water means that the working tenant swiftly moves from economic demands (i.e. affordable, sanitary, and safe housing), to political demands (abolishing rent and landlords).
These oversimplified attempts at reasoning are not complete, and fall flat without an understanding of class relations and contradictions: the landlord does not “exploit” the tenant – he simply sells a commodity. “Abolishing rent” would mean abolishing housing as a commodity. Creating “housing for all” means encroaching on “free market” competition promised by capitalism. Commodification and free market competition are fundamental rights enshrined in the U.S. (and all bourgeois) constitutions. As soon as the working tenants’ demands shift from the economic to the political, they became a declaration of war on the whole capitalist system, as well as on the government which protects it.
Once we, as a class or as a considerable section of our class, have reached this level of consciousness, we can look back and see that our initial demands were based on too narrow of assumptions. The oppression we experience at the hands of the landlords is merely a facet of the oppression we experience at the hands of the capitalist class. Rent is only high relative to our low wages, the real site of our exploitation, where we are paid less than what our labor power produces while the bosses and owners collect the surplus value. The dilapidated buildings across all major cities of this country are products of competition, profiteering, and a government sworn to protect profit over human lives. Housing is not available to everyone because the capitalists prefer to keep a certain portion of the population desperate, willing to work for pennies. This follows the same law of capitalism that demands that a certain fraction of the population be unemployed or underemployed.
From here there are two roads: either we can resign ourselves to “work within the system,” narrowing our goals to “reasonable” economic improvements, or we proudly declare our demands more firmly, and explicitly state that we want to abolish rent and landlords, and provide affordable, safe housing for all.
By doing so, we would acknowledge the ongoing class war and consciously take up the fight against oppression and exploitation. We should not shy away from this; we should not balk at accusations of “idealism” or “authoritarianism.” We want the overthrow of the capitalist government, for the benefit of the working class, and for the establishment of a true democracy through the workers’ seizure of power over the state and production. We want to suppress capitalism, overthrow the “rights” of private property; we want to centralize housing in the hands of a workers’ state, to fix rent at a small fraction of workers’ incomes, to repair and maintain all dilapidated housing, and to build safe and affordable housing for all.
If we demand revolutionary goals, but denounce revolutionary methods, we land ourselves on the first road, trying to work “within the system,” but with a radical-sounding coat of paint covering hollow demands. By doing that, we would be doing no more than misleading workers and tenants, and damning them to a life of squalor. It’s time to free ourselves from capitalist oppression, exploitation and crisis. It’s time the workers controlled their housing!