A-Infos (en) US, BRRN: Anarchists in the Tenant Movement #3 - the Southeast (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

This is the third installment of our Anarchists in the Tenant Movement 
series. You can find the first installment here and the second here. The 
interview below was conducted with an organizer named Mario, involved in 
tenant union in the Southeast. We've concealed Mario's specific location 
at his request. --- Like our other series Anarchists in the Labor 
Movement, these interviews aim to capture insights and perspectives from 
anarchists who are active in tenant organizing. Some of those we speak 
to are organizing through established tenant unions, others are building 
new unions, while others still are launching initial campaigns without a 
formal union yet.

For Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN), mass organizations like tenant 
unions play a central role in our strategy. It's through these kinds of 
organizations that people create and apply their collective leverage 
against structures that dominate and exploit us, such as landlordism and 
private property. By engaging consistently in everyday campaigns members 
of mass organizations grow their collective confidence and power, 
enabling them to take on ever bigger fights and ultimately to challenge 
the very existence of these dominating structures.

In part, the aim of this series is simply to shine a spotlight on the 
presence of anarchist militants in the U.S. tenant movement. More 
substantively, we ask participants to critically reflect on their 
experiences, including both successes and failures, to draw out 
generalizable lessons.

Most, but not all of those interviewed in this series are members of BRRN.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Mario - Tenant Organizer in the Southeast
Black Rose/Rosa Negra (BRRN): How would you summarize your political 
beliefs in one sentence?

Mario: I want all people to have autonomy, self determination, and the 
opportunity to reach their full potential, and I think that's only 
achievable through a collective liberation from capitalism, the state, 
and the social hierarchy that props them up. One sentence is tough!

BRRN: Prior to tenant organizing, did you have any other organizing 
experience?

Mario: I had done some political activism but nothing that involved 
convincing people who weren't already interested in the project to take 
action or organize together. I started from the direction of organizing 
for the advancement of black people, mainly with education and things 
like voter registration drives. I participated in the George Floyd 
uprisings, and got into anti-policing efforts after that. I also did 
some mutual aid work, or what's commonly known as mutual aid (but feels 
mostly like charity). Both experiences taught me that activists showing 
up week after week to protest or volunteer doesn't always transmit to 
change, and that power doesn't necessarily flow from large public pressure.

If the only place you interact with people that need aid is at the 
distro, they continue to only be served at the distro - I noticed often 
that the people being served were rarely making real decisions or 
holding power in any way. The closest they got was something like an 
exit survey asking whether the aid provided was what they needed. I had 
to step back and process all of it and ended up learning about the 
tenant union.

I started to research tenant unionism because I'd been interested in 
labor unions but had never been in a traditionally unionized industry or 
had a job that felt right to try to unionize, but I'd had plenty of 
difficulty in tenancy and it seemed like somewhere I could actually do 
the "mutual" part of mutual aid. The funny thing is that I had 
participated in multiple walkouts and labor actions that took place 
outside of a union structure without ever realizing what they were, what 
they meant or the possibilities that those ruptures could've opened up. 
Even in answering this, I'm just now remembering that they were probably 
the most militant forms of organizing I've engaged in so far.

BRRN: What tenant union are you part of, and about how many people are 
part of it?

Mario: I'm a member of a tenant union in a mid-sized metro area in the 
southeast US. We have about 70 dues paying members right now, with a 
couple of building-level tenant associations.

BRRN: How is your tenant union organized?

Mario: It's organized into city-based locals made up of building-level 
tenant associations and at-large members. The locals meet to support 
each others' organizing and plan day-to-day activities of the union and 
make decisions regarding where to spend our time and energy. Members of 
the locals plus at-large members in the county make up the whole union, 
and each of these levels makes its decisions in a direct democracy of 
members.

There are also union-wide committees that carry out essential functions 
for the growth and development of the union (e.g. an organizing 
committee), with elected chairs. The elected chairs sit on a committee 
tasked with putting on the general body meetings and carrying out the 
proposals or resolutions that are adopted at the general meetings, as 
well as coordinating across the committees and addressing significant 
union-wide challenges.

BRRN: What are some of the things you do as a tenant organizer?

Mario: I canvass, have one on ones with neighbors and tenants at 
complexes we're helping to organize, give organizing trainings, organize 
solidarity support for unions and local organizations, and table to find 
new members and organizing leads. I research and study to find weak 
points of the local landlords and the municipal structure, as well as 
learning strategies other tenant unions are using. I also attend and 
help set up our local meetings and participate in committee and general 
meetings. Oh, and potlucks: food is part of a lot of our in-person 
meetings and we'll have a social every couple months.

BRRN: Describe a campaign you are currently or were most recently 
involved in: how did it start, what are the main issues, what strategy 
and tactics are being used?

Mario: We're starting a campaign against a non-profit landlord. It began 
when one of their tenants came to a local meeting and started organizing 
their building, and then another one came and both building organizing 
drives kicked off. They've had some success with just their buildings, 
so now they are hoping to establish a campaign across all the buildings. 
The main issues are ignored maintenance and accommodations requests, 
security and safety issues around building access, and threats of 
eviction by management. Tactics being used now include petitions and 
public pressure, but there are planned escalations depending on the results.

BRRN: What resources have helped you the most in developing as a tenant 
organizer?

Mario: The Madrid Tenants' Union organizing handbook is a very solid 
base. It includes everything from how to canvass, run meetings, and 
escalate a campaign with a lot of insights on how to organize. The 
Autonomous Tenant Union Network's "kitchen table sessions," where 
organizers from different tenant unions across the country can learn 
from each other, were great for learning on the ground strategy lessons 
and connecting with tenant unions organizing under similar conditions. 
Most of what comes out of Labor Notes is applicable to tenant organizing 
as well.

BRRN: How do your anarchist politics relate to/inform the day-to-day of 
tenant organizing work?

Mario: The main way it shows up is in how I view the organizing process. 
I want wins for tenants, but I want it to actually be the tenants 
winning. I think this is a common perspective among a lot of people in 
the tenant movement but it comes out in different ways. To me, it's 
about showing up to support and building people up to be the protagonist 
in their own struggle. It's being a co-equal participant and not a 
"community organizer." It's sharing knowledge and effort to help people 
learn to facilitate their own meetings, plan their own actions, and run 
their own fights. But it's also fighting in places that aren't just good 
targets for organizing, and a belief that I should be struggling forward 
as well and not just convincing others to do so, in whatever fashion is 
necessary for those specific conditions.

It also informs the way I approach the union generally. The union began 
as a project of external organizers, and it really heavily shaped the 
early character of the organization. In a lot of ways we've moved past 
that, but in others it's still very present - It's squarely a leftist 
organization so I don't worry too much about us deviating from focusing 
on the class interests of tenants, but I do worry about where our energy 
gets focused, how we make decisions and who they are made by, and the 
distribution of both labor and knowledge within the union.

BRRN: How do tenant unions fit into a broader strategy aimed at 
revolutionary social transformation?

Mario: When I think about the things that have to change as we build 
toward social revolution, the first thing that comes up is the 
fight/flight/freeze stress response. The general responses from tenants 
seem to be freeze or flight, in that people are mostly accepting the 
conditions and trying to float or they're leaving for better conditions. 
It's a very common response by tenants: "I'll just move somewhere else 
next year." People don't know any other way right now, so it's necessary 
to develop combative formations to show people that fighting is actually 
an option, and to show them that they have power and can win those fights.

Tenant unions are a formation where ordinary people can learn and 
practice class struggle and solidarity. Forming a tenant union and 
demanding improvements to your conditions either shows people their 
agency and power or gives them a fight. It helps people make connections 
between their own experience and struggles and the general economic and 
political system, and really lays bare the class contradictions between 
landlords, property management, real estate developers, and the rest of 
us. In the past week, I've heard two tenants ask why the property 
management neglects tenants and their apartment complexes and then 
describe what they would do with the place if they were running it. 
Having a real say in the circumstances of your life and engaging in the 
struggle to win that say can change the character of people and spur a 
desire for greater control and agency.

There is also an aspect of prefiguration to tenant organizing, depending 
on how it's done. If you build democracy into the union, if you're 
running your own fights, solving your own conflicts and developing the 
knowledge and ability needed for self management, you're building your 
revolutionary capacity. If there's ever going to be a successful 
transfer of control over housing and land to the people, not only will 
having these structures in place be necessary to handle management and 
control of social production, but people will need to be comfortable 
operating within them.

BRRN: What advice would you share with anarchists looking to organize or 
become active in a tenant union? What do you wish you had known when you 
started?

Mario: It depends on if they're new to organizing generally. If so, I 
would say to focus on the the concrete tasks of organizing tenants. It's 
easy to get caught up in setting up the most ideal system and support 
projects for the union and miss that the only people in it are the 
people you started with. There is a lot of information and theory on the 
best way to carry out "organizing" and building solidarity and 
confidence for fighting the landlords, but don't just blindly follow 
those guides. Commit to a strategy and then bring together the people 
you tried it with to seriously reflect on its efficacy. Do this even 
with individual conversations - not in the way of just second guessing 
yourself, but asking why things you said did or didn't move the person 
you were talking to. I wasted a lot of time early on just following the 
training, failing, and then applying the same training with refined 
execution, instead of assessing whether the execution or the training 
was the issue.

For the more experienced organizer, I'd say there is a lot of political 
interest in tenant unions right now, for better or worse, and so you do 
need to be aware of the local political ecosystem and how your union 
interacts with it. It can have a significant impact on the direction of 
the union, which brings up a second point around small formations vs. 
established unions. When the union is small, it's a lot easier to get 
scooped up in a larger organization's presence or influence, but it also 
makes it easier to build in some defenses against that and to build a 
culture in the union that prioritizes tenant power. It can be a lot to 
work with, so don't try to take it all on yourself: your neighbors and 
the other people in your union are all facing the same issues as you and 
you can build up trust and shared understanding of what needs to be done 
that will protect you all as you go on.

https://www.blackrosefed.org/anarchists-tenant-movement-3/
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