Against Conciliation
Two roads exist for a tenant union: struggle and conciliation. These roads lead in opposite directions and to walk both is to do each worse. I firmly believe that only the path of struggle offers a better future for the working masses. First, we should clarify what we mean by struggle and what we mean by conciliation.
The path of struggle draws a distinction between friend and enemy. The tenants at your building, and the working masses of the entire world are friends. Along with the fighting organizations of the working masses. As enemies we have our own landlords, but also landlords more broadly. But it goes beyond that. Landlordism and real estate are a fashionable place for rich people and their corporations to invest their money. Our rising rents and evictions are simply the result of another way to invest large sums of capital. So, we must make clear our enemy, the dictatorship of capital. Or, by another name, capitalism. Finally, we look to the supposed neutral organs of the US state, it’s courts, police, legislative bodies, etc. We know the great sums corporations spend on lobbying and on election campaigns. They would not expend this great sum of money if it didn’t grant them control. These government institutions are not neutral, but are a constituent part of this dictatorship of capital. So, what does struggle offer us as a solution? Unite with our real friends, to fight our real enemies.
That means rejecting the idea of a “fair deal” with landlords or a “just” policy from our government. “Is it fair?” Is a false question, fair for who? The only fair deal for the poor tenant is the abolition of private ownership of housing. We expect the landlord to resist, and their state to take their side. So we escalate. We unite all who can be united around struggling against our exploiters. We build community to serve our fighting organizations. And then we follow a path of escalation. Of demand letters and rejections or insufficient responses. Of rallies and platitudes. One on one meetings and evasive answers. Rising to the level, not in one leap, but as gradual growth of our solidarity, experience, and justified anger, of eviction defenses, rent strikes, occupations, etc. This does not represent the sum total of the tactics available along this path nor the order they must occur in, but I hope it clarifies what we mean when we talk about taking a path of struggle.
Conciliation is the rest. That method which confuses friend and enemy and, on some level, believes it can get fairness from landlords and justice from their courts. Conciliation often takes the form of winning light concessions, de radicalizing, and accepting an exploitative situation that is “better than most renters.” We will win the same early concessions that the conciliators do, but we will take them, not with gratitude, but with the understanding that we have only won a reduction in the amount we are robbed. We set our sights beyond the deals they cut trying to placate us. We never forget who our friends are and who are enemies are, we set our sights on the abolition of private ownership of housing.