{"id":42012,"date":"2026-05-05T14:22:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T19:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/?p=42012"},"modified":"2026-05-06T14:28:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T19:28:02","slug":"tenant-rights-movement-to-abolish-rent-demand-housing-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2026\/05\/tenant-rights-movement-to-abolish-rent-demand-housing-for-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Tenant rights movement to abolish rent, demand housing for all"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sof\u00eda D. | Corresponsal de Red Phoenix | Minnesota\u2013<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Several thousand tenants along with city council and state assembly members staged a march across the Brooklyn Bridge for affordable housing, New York City, May 14, 2015. (A. Katz)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The tenant movement is on the rise. Across the country, including in the Twin Cities, tenants are forming bargaining units \u2013 from a single building to unions spanning across entire cities \u2013 to stop rent increases, win reforms to improve basic living standards, and even call for\u00a0 political action and change. This movement is a working-class movement, and its most ambitious goals \u2013 abolishing rent, housing for all \u2013 are embryonic expressions of the demand for working-class socialist revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes the tenant\u2019s movement part of the worker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The goals fought for by the tenants movement are initially economic, fighting for access to a better-quality commodity \u2013 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 \u2013 they  must fight against the landlords to improve the quality of the commodity that they need to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The working tenant senses the injustice inherent in the system, and begins to attempt to explain it: because the landlord is taking the tenant\u2019s money and returning a sub-par product, the landlord is \u201cexploiting\u201d the tenant; because rent is a burden on an already low wage, we need to \u201cabolish rent\u201d; because there are homeless, we need \u201chousing for all.\u201d 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These oversimplified attempts at reasoning are not complete, and fall flat without an understanding of class relations and contradictions: the landlord does not \u201cexploit\u201d the tenant \u2013 he simply sells a commodity. \u201cAbolishing rent\u201d would mean abolishing housing as a commodity. Creating \u201chousing for all\u201d means encroaching on \u201cfree market\u201d 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From here there are two roads: either we can resign ourselves to \u201cwork within the system,\u201d narrowing our goals to \u201creasonable\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cidealism\u201d or \u201cauthoritarianism.\u201d 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\u2019 seizure of power over the state and production. We want to suppress capitalism, overthrow the \u201crights\u201d of private property; we want to centralize housing in the hands of a workers\u2019 state, to fix rent at a small fraction of workers\u2019 incomes, to repair and maintain all dilapidated housing, and to build safe and affordable housing for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we demand revolutionary goals, but denounce revolutionary methods, we land ourselves on the first road, trying to work \u201cwithin the system,\u201d 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\u2019s time the workers controlled their housing!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The tenant movement is on the rise. Across the country, including in the Twin Cities, tenants are forming bargaining units \u2013 from a single building to unions spanning across entire cities \u2013 to stop rent increases, win reforms to improve basic living standards, and even call for\u00a0 political action and change. This movement is a working-class movement, and its most ambitious goals \u2013 abolishing rent, housing for all \u2013 are embryonic expressions of the demand for working-class socialist revolution.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":42014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[175,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-housing","category-us-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/04-2026_tenants.webp?fit=1476%2C984&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42015,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42012\/revisions\/42015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}