For a Rank-and-File Tenant Unionism
Jai Gohain and Holden Taylor
In what ways is tenant unionism like labor unionism? What is the rank and file of a tenant union?
Preface
As the organization of tenant unions continues apace across the country (and beyond), the comparison between tenant unionism and trade unionism, implied in their names, has become increasingly significant, if under considered. One comparison arose in a debate, first among scholars at the Law and Political Economy Project and percolating into the movement at-large, regarding the appropriate legal architecture to support tenant unionism. On one side was the call for a “Wagner Act for tenant unions”–the institution, through legislation, of collective bargaining rights for tenants in their buildings with their landlords. In a response questioning the reasonableness of the labor-tenant analogy, Greg Baltz and Shakeer Rahman emphasize that unlike workers, “tenants are purchasers not producers, so their ability to leverage interventions… require different legislative agendas than what the labor movement has pursued.” Tenants don’t need collective bargaining rights, the authors of this position argue, but consumer protection laws such as housing code regulations and rent caps.
In contrast to the world of legal theory, tenant unionists themselves have also engaged in the trade-union-analogy, though with more practical ends in mind, and with less overt theoretical attention. The Madrid Tenant’s Union, for example, put together an organizing handbook based on Labor Notes’ Secrets to a Successful Organizer; dozens of tenant unionists in New York City, for another, are currently enrolled in the Jane McAlevey-started Organizing for Power training program; the Connecticut Tenants Union, in perhaps the most notable example, has partnered with SEIU Local 1199 to build out its union along traditional trade union lines. This article subjects the analogy between the two union forms to more concerted theoretical and political pressure by transposing Kim Moody’s rank-and-file strategy to the site of tenant unionism, noting the continuities and problematics that arise in the process. To do so, we ask: What might a rank-and-file tenant union strategy look like?
Our motivation in doing so is twofold:
For one, we want to highlight the practical-political, rather than legal, convergences and divergences between the two union forms;
Secondly, a rank-and-file tenant unionist strategy has the potential to overcome cleavages within the tenant union movement: namely, the gap between “independent” tenant unions and larger non-profit organizations; the role of administration, bureaucracy, and staff in tenant unions, tenant associations, and nonprofits; the question of membership and leadership; the relation between hyper-local organization and wider unions; and, finally, the centrality of democracy.
Introduction
Twenty-five years ago Kim Moody wrote “The Rank-and-File Strategy,” a pamphlet for the socialist organization Solidarity in which the author elaborated a practical-political orientation that had emerged among members of the International Socialists in the 1970s and that has, since Moody’s writing, retained purchase–if contested, reconsidered, and applied varingly–within the left ever since. The rank-and-file strategy was developed to ‘bridge’ the gap between the left (“with its highly theorized, often moralistic politics”) and the most active portions of the working class (with their generally “untheorized, pragmatic outlook”). In a much-quoted metaphor, Moody describes the context of this gap as “the lack of a sea of class-conscious workers for socialist ideas and organizations to swim in.” Such a sea is not produced through flood alone, though floods happen (Occupy, Bernie, COVID & the George Floyd Uprisings, Al Aqsa), but–to extend the metaphor–by the steady drip of daily, relational class struggle and the diligent intentional carving out of democratic, oceanic basins. The rank-and-file strategy places the point of production at the heart of its orientation because, as Moody writes in a 2020 revisit of the strategy, the workplace and union present a site of struggle that contains “elements of democratic procedures,” is in “direct confrontation with capital,” and is itself a “well-defined political arena.” It’s this character of trade unions–bounded site of contest, direct engagement in class antagonism, pretenses of democracy–that make trade unions the ‘natural organizations’ of the working class, the ideal vehicles in which socialists might best ‘draw out’ the class consciousness that makes the grand historical ideas of socialism politically potent.
At its core, the rank-and-file strategy is about democracy and political struggle; from the rank-and-file vantage, the two components give each other meaning and are practically inseparable. Moody is arguing to socialists that democratization is both the necessary means for and appropriate expression of working-class self-organization. Through robust, participatory democracy, the rank-and-file become protagonists in their local; in its absence, the rank-and-file is sequestered and suppressed, disorganized. The rank-and-file strategy is, in this sense, a direct response to bureaucratic top-down unionism, as well as socialists’ past attempts at ‘cozying up’ to bureaucratic union leadership. Simultaneously, though, the rank-and-file strategy calls for the development of cross-union, class-wide, transitional and socialist organizations and publications. Here the rank-and-file strategy recognizes the bounded sites of shopfloors as useful only insofar as they are transcended.
Perhaps most importantly, and made clear by its name, the rank-and-file strategy identifies the rank-and-file–that is ordinary members, not elected executive committees nor bureaucrats, not staff members nor social cliques–as its protagonist. This emphasis is particularly relevant in that this is a strategy written to and for those already radicalized. While certainly theoretical, Moody is also excoriating those socialists who imagine their correct theoretical or political lines to be sufficient for them to assume leadership, direct a union, etc.
In putting forth an argument for rank-and-file tenant unionism, we want to hold onto these four aspects of Moody’s argument:
The necessity of democracy and the trade union’s pretenses of democracy
Their explicit, direct engagement in class conflict with capital
The well-defined, finite nature of unions as a site of organization
The protagonism of the rank-and-file
Democracy:
Moody does not give an explicit, positive definition of democracy. Rather, he generally counterposes a ‘democratic’ union to one compelled and controlled by undemocratic elements, such as unaccountable leadership, bureaucracy, and staff. It is in this conflict where the rank-and-file strategy begins its intervention into labor unionism as a democratizing force. This is also the entry point at which the authors of this article contend that the strategy could be adapted to tenant unionism, at least abstractly, in constructing a mass democratic tenant movement to whose collective will all supporting bureaucratic structure is subordinated.
For Moody, bureaucratization refers to those unions “in which the leadership and their hired staff are positioned between the pressures of capital and the needs of the members, and thus develop distinct interests from those members in holding their positions in the bureaucracy.” Here, leadership and staff, rather than acting as tribunes for their union’s general membership, increasingly act like their managers. In identifying the undemocratic potential in bureaucracy, the question of democracy is not confined to particular choices (elections, referenda, and contracts) but permeates through a union’s administrative functions and its general reproduction. Democracy is not one thing (the vote) but an assemblage of mechanisms and conditions by which the general populace of an organization assert their will over the functions and character of the organization, with regularity and transparency. These mechanisms and conditions include both the formal, or constitutional character of the union as well as its social, in-practice content. This means things like the enumerated rights of the rank-and-file to recall leadership and participate in open bargaining and union decision-making, as well as the social fabric–the thick organization, the filled-in McAlevey bullseyes, the diligent list-work, mutual aid, care-work, conviviality–that imbues these formal mechanisms with the actuality of democracy.
With this in mind, Moody addresses one of the paradoxes of the rank-and-file strategy, namely that
some rank-and-file movements or caucuses run for union office and win. When they do, those who take office cease to be rank-and-filers by definition. True enough. What the rank-and-file strategy says about this is that it is important the rank-and-file caucus that took power not disband but maintain its links to the membership, and advise, support, and if necessary keep the reformed union leadership on course.
Democratization–of the union and beyond–is not a means (for power or leadership or the assertion of a particular politic) but in itself the perpetual ends of the rank-and-file strategy. The danger of bureaucratization suggests nothing of the general necessity of administrative work in organization. Rather it points to the political content of that work, the practical necessity of its democratization, and the inevitable alienation that results from its concentration in unaccountable hands. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is a robust argument for the capacity of working people to rule themselves: administratively, politically, economically, locally and at scale. Moreover, it is an argument that trade unions are formed under democratic pretenses and lend themselves toward the actualization of substantive democracy.
It’s helpful to situate Moody’s concept of rank-and-file democracy with Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, which is, among other things, a celebration of the working people of Paris’ world-historic reclamation of administrative governance from the bureaucratic “boa constrictor” of the bourgeois state. Gone, Marx wrote of the Commune, was “the delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste.” The Commune saw the replacement of “haughteous masters of the people by its always removable servants,” and the responsibility of civic administration carried out by regular working people “publicly, simply, under the most difficult and complicated circumstances, and doing it… for a few pounds, acting in bright daylight…” This, Marx wrote, constituted the “reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression.” The rank-and-file strategy can be understood, in its democratic orientation, as a call for the reabsorption of union power by a union’s own living forces, publicly, acting in broad daylight: combating the delusion that the complexities of union administration, negotiations with management, and exigent political circumstances require unaccountable bureaucracy.
This emphasis and articulation of democracy, when transposed to tenant unionism, highlights a few principles that must remain abstract until we survey the tenant union scene and its parallels with and divergences from trade unionism. Those are as follows: that a rank-and-file tenant unionism calls for a) the continual democratization of administrative labor and responsibilities; b) the revocability of any leadership and administration by the general body; c) universal suffrage, in form and content, amongst membership; d) that such formal mechanisms require the content of thick organization, of intentional and maintained relationships between membership; e) that staff, leadership and bureaucracy are subordinated to the general populace’s will.
Direct Class Conflict
As Baltz and Rahman assert, tenants and laborers assume distinct places in the broader cartography of the capitalist mode of production. Labor produces surplus value, whereas tenants, through their rental payments, are extorted of what surplus value they retain in the form of wages. Workers, moreover, are directly engaged in the process of production. Tenants operate in the sphere of reproduction and, in Baltz and Rahman’s legal framework, as mere consumers of the commodity that is housing. This distinction has clear bearings on the necessary legal reforms the movement should fight for. This framework’s initial relegation of the tenant, however, to just the singular position of consumer, misses the fact that the collective tenant generates the vast surplus value expropriated by the landlord class, first by consuming the commodity via rent, but by then themselves reproducing that same commodity–their homes–and often augmenting its value (before its next consumption by them or the next, higher-paying, tenant). As one scales up to buildings, neighborhoods, even entire cities, it becomes more clear that the housing commodity’s value is a product of tenants’ reproduction. This reproduction is a delineation of tenancy that distinguishes it from labor but does not reduce it to a form of class struggle subordinate to that of labor and labor unions. Rather, with real estate’s growing proportion of surplus value extraction in the global economy, tenant struggles can be seen as labor’s complement. Further, the relative absence of the tenant union form in capital’s legal framework, confirmed by efforts to construct a Wagner Act for tenants affords the tenant movement a relative blank slate upon which to construct transitional, liberatory forms. How, in the first place, do these structural differences persist or bear upon the political-practical strategy of these two means of class struggle?
In both union forms, the primary and anchoring means of leverage is the strike. The strike is the class struggle tool from which other tools–like petitions, direct actions, public rallies–derive their potency. But these types of strike are not the same. Both are means of developing leverage and gaining control by starving a class antagonist of expected accumulation. As the existence of the landlord and the capitalist hinge upon the regular extraction of surplus, this withholding can produce substantial leverage and result in the substantive transformation of workers’ and tenants’ material existence: wages can go up, rents can go down; conditions of work and life can improve dramatically. However, Baltz and Rahman argue that the potential shared interest between labor and capital in the growth of their firm–in that a bigger pie means bigger slices–makes for a fundamental contrast with the more zero-sum struggle between tenant and landlord, where the ‘pie’ in question only grows at the expense of tenants (their rents raise, or they are replaced with higher-paying tenants). Because of this, they argue, “tenant unions don’t have a power that is comparable to controlling production. Even when done collectively, withholding rent does not function the same as withholding production.” Yet the emergence of the ‘real estate state’ and the long process of domestic deindustrialization have made rent and rent-extraction increasingly central means of accumulation and sites of contradiction and class struggle. The power imbalance between a rent strike and a labor strike is perhaps more a question of scale and organization than an essentialized characteristic of the mode of production and the respective locations of tenancy and labor.
That tenant unionism finds kinship in both trade unionism and land struggles worldwide is yet another important consideration. Tenant unions seek working-class control over where and how working-class tenants live. Sovereignty, popular control, territorialization, communal infrastructures of governance, protagonism, neighborhood democracy, Marx’s notion of reabsorption–these are some expressions and horizons of tenant unionism that move beyond economistic struggle over surplus value. The assertion of working-class tenant control over home and reproduction expressed through a rent strike is both a direct class confrontation over value and a prefigurative–Moody uses the term transitional–construction of worlds and relations beyond capital.
For Moody, the direct class conflict of trade unionism is significant in at least two senses. First, a central reason Moody focuses on trade unions “is that unions bring people together at the heart of the social relations of production. This is where both class formation and class conflict begin.” The combination of class formation and class conflict produces in workers a ‘trade union consciousness,’ (e.g. a class in itself) which “involves an awareness of class conflict and the need for organization.” Such a consciousness, though it might rest upon the uncritical assumption “that ‘the system’ is here to stay,” is the raw material that can become socialist consciousness, or the subjectivity of a class for itself. The rank-and-file strategy hinges upon this movement from trade union consciousness to socialist, revolutionary consciousness. Such movement requires not only direct class conflict–which all tenants and workers by definition live–but organized struggle in direct class conflict. This distinction is important. Famously, as Engels wrote, under the capitalist mode of production, the worker is not the property of a particular boss, but rather property as it were of the entire bourgeois class. The tenant, similarly, is not the property of a given landlord, but of the landlord class writ large. The movement from trade union consciousness to revolutionary class consciousness is the practical recognition of this very distinction: you struggle and organize against your boss and in doing so, in the practice of which, the absolute tangible possibility of working-class self-management and the similarly absolute limitation of particularized direct class conflict in the context of the totality of social relations are both made pressingly evident (just look at what happened to the recently first unionized pizza place in New York City). Does this map 1:1 between labor and tenancy? The geographic correlation of rent is an important consideration: rents are, far more so than wages, integrated by geographic proximity; landlords, with increasingly algorithmic efficacy, look to rents nearby as benchmarks, constantly one-upping one another in an ever-rising seascape of rent prices. But it is unclear whether or not this lends itself to something like neighborhood collective bargaining, through which the distinction between rent and wage is made more analogous in their expression of organized struggle. It is worth noting that neighborhood collective bargaining was an early (though never achieved) goal of one of the first autonomous tenant unions of the current movement, the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and the Swedish Union of Tenants collectively bargains for rents of the whole of Sweden.
Second: for Moody, it is precisely the over-mediation by an undemocratic bureaucracy that blunts the direct character of class conflict in bureaucratized unions. The rank-and-file strategy is predicated on direct class conflict, and it prescribes the removal of obscuring mediations of that direct class conflict. Tenant associations, located in discrete buildings and in organizing against a single landlord, are engaged in direct and fairly unmediated class conflict. It is because of this that tenant associations are often home to more incipiently radical class consciousness than their labor counterparts. In the authors’ experience, a tenant in a tenant association dealing with the deprivations of a predatory landlord is quick to question the very fundamentals of private property. The rank-and-file strategy of tenant unionism, then, is predicated on this very fundamental radical consciousness and on the organizational cultivation of such consciousness beyond the scene of the apartment building. This means the culling and rebuffing of bureaucratic tendencies in organizations as they scale up. This also means the development of democratic organization at scales larger than the building and neighborhood, such that the incipient class consciousness of Why should I pay rent? can integrate more complex political analyses involving the state and the broader political landscape.
The bounded site of organization:
The union form is founded on the fact that it is hard for individual workers or tenants to negotiate with their boss or landlord. Through collective organization, workers and tenants develop leverage, can negotiate from places of strength, and can win legal regulations that can soften the violence and bolster organization. And yet, the union-form is hamstrung insofar as it confines itself to a struggle between individual firms or buildings. Particular struggles are necessary in constructing a broader union-form, yet the particular struggle is only made relevant beyond its bounds precisely by the union-form–the union form is a container in which a rich litany of strategies, tactics, and their assessments can be stored, shared, and referenced. A rent strike in one building, disconnected from others, is never known beyond its walls; a rent strike in one building, in which a union supports it, in which the tenants present on their experience at a union meeting, in which the union provides the infrastructure for the tenants of this striking building to visit strike-curious buildings down the street, to share the gospel of not paying rent. Moreover, the struggle of any given shop floor or building is limited by the exigent legal/social/political circumstances in which the particular struggle occurs. The union is then meant to be a force multiplier, a widener of possibility but precisely through the particular.
The specific site of class conflict that labor and tenant unions attend to is fundamental to the rank-and-file strategy in both cases. Yet their sites of struggle and organizational forms are not analogous. Labor unions have a clearly defined bargaining unit: all the workers represented by a union. Such a dynamic emerges from the legal architecture created by historic labor movements (e.g. the Wagner Act, the NLRB, etc.). This legal status results in one of the primary distinctions in between the labor and tenant union forms: in closed shop states, where labor unions have a certain sovereignty of representation, workers are de facto represented in negotiations by the union. In other words, unions mediate the class conflict. Tenant associations, however, are voluntary and not compulsory. While a group of organized tenants can secure wins in their struggle against their landlords and transform the conditions for all tenants in a building, they are not by default mediating the rent-relation between tenants and landlord. This distinction in organizational form is precisely what occasioned the call for a tenant unionist Wagner Act.
The labor union is split into various locals, differentiated by industry, profession, and/or geography. Locals typically have elected officers that form the governing body of the bargaining unit. These unions are also often subordinated into federations and coalitions, like AFSMCE. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is predicated upon the nested nature of labor union organization: you organize enough shops, from the bottom up, and you can transform the union as a whole and even the larger federations. This provides a clear (though not easy) pathway toward scalable political power. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is a direct response to the decayed character of so many unions: while the formal positions, the chapter chairs and shop stewards, the delegates and executive committees, remain formally filled, many locals are husks, trench coats hiding largely unorganized workplaces. The formal existence of the union, the persistence of its structure, is predicated upon dues from working members. As a result, the formal architecture of unions guarantees their reproduction. That the human, organizational content is not guaranteed is precisely where the rank-and-file makes its intervention.
In contrast, tenant unions are more often loose federations and are less neatly nested. Though they do have bounded and particular class antagonisms at their foundation: these are organized apartment buildings, sometimes even called locals by certain tenant unions, particular tenants sharing the same address congealed into a tenant association, engaged in struggle for control over the conditions and circumstances of their homes. However, whereas many labor unions exist only in form, lacking human beings and organizing work, the tenant association is generally emergent, containing many people organizing around shared goals but lacking a formal structure. Tenant associations typically emerge in response to urgent conditions: the heat is turned off, rents have been jacked up, a tenant in the building is harassed by management. A motivated tenant in the building knocks on their neighbor’s door; maybe organizers with a neighborhood tenant union or tenant organization help doorknock even more neighbors. A meeting is held: a tenant association is declared; the tenant association exists primarily insofar as its content exists. While there do exist tenant associations with rigid structures, elected presidents and boards, the emergent character of tenant associations is more typical. Oftentimes, the informal form of tenant associations lies dormant for long stretches. Conditions improve, or a leader moves out, and the practice of assembly and collective action begins to fade. Then, a new crisis emerges, and a renewed content and form of collective assembly also emerges.
The more salient distinction, though, is how parts of the union relate to their whole. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy generally directs its attention at trade unions where locals conglomerate into a single bargaining unit. Tenant unions are, for the most part, loosely-linked federations of distinct bargaining-unit tenant associations and individual tenants. It’s helpful to pause and spell out the nomenclature that we are familiar with, but please note that this nomenclature is far from uniform across the movement. The smallest, basic unit of the tenant movement is the tenant association (TA), which is composed of tenants living in the same building (or interconnected buildings) owned by the same landlord. The TA is a natural and bounded site, both as a bargaining unit and geographically. Multiple TAs located in buildings owned by the same landlord can organize together to form a tenant council (TC). A TC is bounded in terms of bargaining but not in terms of geography–a TC can extend across different blocks and neighborhoods and across the city; the prospect of nationwide tenant councils often serves as inspiration for nationwide tenant organization, particularly given the increased concentration of real estate ownership. TCs are generally subordinate to tenant unions; the former are often organized by the latter. A tenant union (TU) is an organization of tenants, tenant associations, and tenant councils in a given neighborhood or city. A TU is bounded geographically but rarely in terms of bargaining. Another level of organization, whose place in this architecture is actively being negotiated, is that of the hyper-local yet beyond the building unit: these “circles” or “locals” or “block” organizations are bounded geographically and yet not by bargaining. They are sometimes codified into union structure and otherwise are sometimes informal places of gathering and social reproduction, or both.
All of this is to say that there is not a clean, cohesive articulation of agency, leverage or democratic integration of the site of fundamental class conflict into the tenant union or the nonprofit tenant organization. This results in a separation between the base-level class struggle and the reproduction of the tenant union as a whole; the people making the tenant union exist at any given time (holding meetings, coordinating, developing politics) often aren’t specifically accountable to organized tenants in their buildings, the latter of which we might term the movement’s “rank-and-file.” This separation is fertile ground for the development of bureaucracies. This is the case in both independent tenant unions, where the ideologically-invested assume positions of informal bureaucracy, and in nonprofit organizations where the formalized role is generally assumed by staff and directors. One is accountable to ideological presuppositions, the other is accountable to boards of directors and funders. Neither are particularly accountable to a general membership. Tenant organizations in this sense operate beside base-level class conflicts, offering support and resources for particular building fights and, in return, employing and utilizing the militancy of building-level leaders and organized tenants for fights beyond the building–such as legislative campaigns (like the 2019 laws won by the New York tenant movement) or mass mobilizations (like the 2020-22 Cancel Rent Movement). The formal relationship between the union/organization and the tenant association is, by and large, tenuous, often ill-defined and informal, emergent at one point (like when a TA needs support), quietly receding at another (when a TA leader moves out or a campaign ends).
This split between the “rank-and-file” in their buildings and the agential actors of a union, does indeed mirror the ‘service-provision’ model of bureaucratic unions, but the lack of a formal connection between a particular tenant struggle and the union organization marks a point of departure between tenant and labor. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy conceives of the formal, material tether between local and union, as well as across unions in federations, like a ladder that insurgent rank-and-file movements can ascend. Tenant unions and nonprofit tenant organizations rarely have such ‘climbable’ architecture: either the structures don’t formally exist, in the case of autonomous unions, or they are formally undemocratic, in the case of staff-driven nonprofits. Either way, there are often no democratic mechanisms for the rank-and-file to take control of the larger-scale organization. On top of this, tenant unions find tenants who aren’t organized in their buildings or blocks coming to organize. The tenuous relationship between TU and TA is then replaced with an inexistent, irrelevant one. One question the movement must answer, then, is can you be a rank-and-file tenant unionist if you are not organizing in your building or on your block? This dynamic is intensified in nonprofit organizations where staff and directors operate as administrative leaders of their organizations, with no accountable relationship either to their own tenant association nor to that of their organization’s membership.
As such, one of the more urgent tasks of the rank-and-file tenant unionist strategy is to develop and demand, within tenant unions, tenant organizations, and in spaces of coalition, the formal architecture of democracy. This requires democracy at the base-level, actual democracy in our buildings and not just democratic vibes, that can then articulate up and out to every level. The actual particulars of the democracy that is practiced can and naturally does vary; what is consistent is that there is some degree of formality, reproducibility, generalization of skills, engagement in deliberation and collective decision-making; voting is absolutely necessary, but of course not sufficient. Parliamentary procedure, even casually and necessarily shaped for the context, is helpful in that it induces a rehearsal of governance that is necessary for the construction and maintenance of democratic organization.
We prefer to think of democratic structures in terms of centripetal and centrifugal forces of organization–the constant expulsing of bureaucratic control combined with the gravitational pull of rank-and-file into agency, into administrative and organizational reproduction, into leadership. In concrete terms, this means that all potentially-bureaucratic labor be subject to democratic control. Staff and leadership must be subject to the discipline of the democratic rank-and-file body; likewise, the rank-and-file body must be capacious enough to effectively and democratically discipline such leadership. Form and content–norms and practices, bylaws (or their equivalent), and actual activity. Any structural obstacles to this dynamic–on the one hand, unaccountable boards, undemocratic fiscal direction, lifelong career directors; on the other hand, amorphous, role-lessness in organization, that tyranny of structurelessness–must be overcome time and time again. Moody gestures toward precisely such democratization in perpetuity in his call for rank-and-file caucuses to not disband when and if they win union leadership.
A second, related task is that of building scalable organizational architecture: from the building, to the block, up to the city, the state, and the country. The tenant movement has a relatively blank slate to operate from: this means we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to construct truly democratic organization. So too, though, do we have the responsibility of infusing any such organization with the capacity to organize for that democracy to matter. To the extent that larger organization already exists (examples being New York’s Housing Justice for All coalition and the KC Tenants’ newly launched Tenant Union Federation) : the task is the explicit democratization of those structures and the grounding of them in building and block struggles; establishing formal and concrete tethers such that any organizations of higher abstractions cannot float off (as they so often do) is paramount.
The protagonism of the rank-and-file
Protagonism is the shift from being a mere recipient of conditions to an active force in shaping them. To become a protagonist, to act protagonistically, is to recognize a narrative of history and to place yourself within its movements. The rank-and-file strategy expresses and sets for itself a mass protagonism, that is, a protagonism that exists in the form of collective organization. The key facets of the strategy’s program: democracy, class conflict, and the organizational terrain of the labor (and tenant) union aim to build this protagonism. It is also essential to note, however, that protagonism, or Moody’s “worker self-activity,” is also a prerequisite. It must be the fuel that develops these facets of the rank-and-file program and without which the political dangers of bureaucratic top-down forms inevitably arise. We must help its flourishing in the tenant movement, but only protagonism itself can plant its own seed. In constructing a rank-and-file transitional tenant union form then, we must resolve and propel through our work this dialectic.
When speaking of protagonism and protagonists, we’re necessarily speaking of particular subjects, so we must ask: Who is the rank-and-file of the tenant union movement? Surely, it’s the organized tenant who is not paid to be a tenant organizer. But, would this encompass any tenant who is organized with their neighbors in their building (in the form of a tenant association), in their neighborhood (through a tenant union or a block committee), or through a larger tenant organization, even if they are not actively engaged in struggle? Or is the rank-and-file tenant necessarily someone who is actively engaged, organizationally, in that ground-level class conflict, tenant vs. landlord, from the site of their home? The more strict application of Moody’s strategy leans toward the latter, though this overlooks some of the complications of the tenant/labor analogy teased out above. A tentative solution would be to confine the ranks of the rank-and-file to those non-professional tenants who are organized within their buildings and/or in their immediate neighborhoods. Such a distinction, for now, allows us to retain the social reproductive significance and conscious-building character of hyper-local organization and direct class conflict without over-prescribing an analogy that is admittedly imperfect. Tenants in small apartment buildings (who are, remembering Engels from above, tenants of the landlord class), where organizing is less immediately feasible, would not be systematically overlooked; and yet, untethered, unrooted activists would not be overly emphasized and allowed free reign. The tenant unionist affection for land struggle as an orientation reinforces this rooted, but not isolating definition of the rank-and-file tenant. The rank-and-file tenant, after all, seeks, along with their neighbors, to wrest control over where and how they live from the ever-squeezing grip of profiteering landlords.
For the rank-and-file tenant movement to become protagonists, their organizations, at all scales (of the building, neighborhood, city, country etc.) must be structured to facilitate the regular expression of their general membership’s democratic will. This is a prescription of form and content. Democratic mechanisms must be built out patiently; relationships of trust too. Leadership must always be subject to discipline; administration democratized; staff controlled by members. This is also a question of capacity. So-called ‘autonomous’ tenant unions–that eschew the prospects of hired staff or incorporation for the reasonable fear of becoming bureaucratized, undemocratic, accountable to boards and foundations–must grapple with the correlation between low-capacity organizations and a generally undemocratic and unrepresentative character. If the barriers to tenant self-management of their organization result in the concentration of leadership and administration in already-ideologically-inclined cadre activists, then those activists must plot out a path to transform these conditions. Clear in Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is the absolute necessity of a mass-character union. An organization of five people is, categorically, not a rank-and-file organization, though it certainly can be interpolated within one.
A rank-and-file strategy that centers mass protagonism and mass-democratic organization allows for a more genuine collaboration across tenant unions, across tenant organizations and might allow for a more militant tenant class for itself. The strengths of various formations–nonprofit, autonomous; neighborhood, citywide, statewide, across the country–might be, rather than contrasting, complementing and cohering.
Conclusion
In sum, the tasks of socialists in the tenant movement include:
The development of expressly democratic tenant unions and tenant organizations, whose democratic character is explicitly rooted in the localized class struggles of tenants in their buildings and on their blocks. Such a democratic character includes the formal (or constitutional) makeup of the union, as well as the relational, cultural, and political educational content of the union;
In the context of these unions, organizers must clearly define administrative and leadership roles such that the discipline of these necessary organizational functions by the democratic rank-and-file is rendered possible and continually so;
The development in these unions of the capacity to be democratic bastions of working-class power. This requires de-essentializing any notion of ‘non-profit’ while not misplacing the salient critique from which an essentialized notion of the nonprofit tenant organization emerged. Undemocratic NGOs merit the criticism they receive, particularly when they tout “radical democratic” veneers. Yet capable staff are essential for the development of mass organizations. This task entails the experimentation by democratic tenant unions of hiring staff and electing leadership; moreover, this calls for developing effective language justice programs and, otherwise, wide-ranging practices of accessibility–a mass tenant union necessarily includes a vast and diverse array of working-class tenants and the unions must be well equipped to facilitate the development of protagonism across languages, cultures, accessibilities;
To develop organizational infrastructure at higher levels of abstraction that maintain and even bolster the mass-democratic tenant unions described above: citywide and statewide tenant unions, based in the democratic struggles of block and building organization where decisions are made by general body assemblies and, again, bureaucracy and professionalism are disciplined by the general body;
To struggle for the democratization of already-existing tenant coalitions and spaces; to caucus with organizations and organized tenants within these existing coalitions toward this project of rank-and-file tenant unionism; to, join with other working-class tenant organizations in expressly democratic federations and coalitions;
To explore the concrete possibility of engaging, as rank-and-file tenants, in already-existing large tenant organizations, to inquire into their democratic content and as far as necessary and possible to organize toward their democratization, which includes the subordinating of career directors and unaccountable staff to the democratic will of the rank-and-file.
Individual articles are not a reflection of caucus policy.
