Building The Masses: Whose Side Are We On

In a neighborhood in a mid-size New England city, tenants in a single room occupancy (SRO) building formed a tenant union. Their building was not being maintained, and they decided to get together to make their landlord address their concerns. Among their concerns was security in the building. The tenants were asking for security systems to be installed and for doors to be repaired. However, once those repairs were completed, the tenants shifted their attention from improving conditions in the building to working to remove the unhoused people from the area around the building. The leaders of the tenant union also avoided doing the work of expanding the union beyond the core leadership, preventing the voices of other tenants from being brought in.

How should socialists relate to this situation? Likely, if you asked any of the tenants involved in that union what the tenants (or tenants more generally) wanted, they would have responded with the demands they were presenting. But do those tenants represent all the tenants of the building? What about the unhoused folk who would be exposed to harassment due to the demands as presented? What would a tenant union fighting for all tenants, housed and unhoused look like?

Socialists fight on the side of the People. We fight on the side of tenants, but also on the side of sex workers, on the side of drug users, on the side of the unhoused. Conflicts between these groups are inevitable. So how should people seeking to be on the side of the People think about these contradictions? How can we start to work through them?

In her book Crowds and Party, Jodi Dean proposes an understanding of the People as  a collective of collectives. She bases this model on the observation that individuals can be members of multiple collectives simultaneously, collectives that often have contradictory interests. While these contradictions can be difficult to analyze when looking only at a single individual, by abstracting to the level of collectives, things can become more clear. Looking at the example of the tenants union, the interests of those tenants were in conflict with the interests of the houseless people of their neighborhood. Building trades unions can enact racist internal policies, harming the interests of people of color. Labor unions (representing predominantly white workers) have a history of supporting policies that harm immigrants, and large internationals like the AFL-CIO include police unions who defend the daily violence cops commit against communities of color.

Observations like these are what led the Combahee River Collective to write in 1973 “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.” Socialists that fail to ground themselves in those principles run the risk of making notable errors and undermining solidarity in the broader movement (such as when members of the new communist movement intervened against school integration in Boston in the 1970s).

Making a verbal commitment to opposing all forms of oppression is easy, but what actions should socialists take to transform those commitments into reality? Discussion of how to effectively carry out anti-oppression socialist politics typically takes the form of a contradiction between “universal” demands - demands that benefit all members of the people, such as medicare for all or rent control - and “specific demands” - demands that benefit a subset of the people. 

What constitutes a “specific demand” often varies depending on who is speaking. In some circles, opposition to police violence towards Black and Brown people has been described as a specific demand, as ending this violence does not directly benefit white workers. This view’s class reductionism and white workerism clearly fails to challenge the racism that socialists must oppose. Instead of falling into the trap of chauvinism, we can instead define specific fights as smaller scale fights in a single building, against conditions in a single jail, against a specific instance of medical debt.

However, even once we exclude the chauvinist understanding of specific demands, there are still problems with looking at issues through that lens. Asad Haider has argued that the separation between universal and specific demands is a false one - that specific fights are making the same demands as larger fights. Is not the demand for affordable, healthy, housing for all a universal demand? Does the fact that it’s being made by a single tenant union to a single landlord change its universality? Is the demand to not be arbitrarily targeted by police or imprisoned in a system of modern slavery a universal human demand? Does the fact that racism in USian society spares most white people from this violence change the demand’s nature? Isn’t the demand that health care not depend on ability to pay the underlying ask of both medicare for all and work on medical debt clinics?

The goal of left organizing (beyond winning the immediate fights) is the creation of a movement where people understand that their liberation is tied to everyone else’s, where people are active politically, and where they have the organizing skills to keep building the movement. Our goal in our day to day work is to activate people not currently active in politics and bring them into solidarity with all oppressed. 

Both large sweeping demands (like medicare for all or universal rent control) and more specific local fights (such as a tenant union in a single building) work towards this goal. Large fights can activate people who have been looking for a way to get involved to engage in the work of politics, while local fights can make the political personal, they can politicize people’s day to day experience, and can intensely build up organizing skills within the people participating in them.

There is a symbiotic relationship between these two forms of action. The new people brought in to political work through the universal campaigns means more people able to contribute organizer energy to the local campaigns (especially in times when the campaign for the universal demands runs into a structural impediment that cannot be immediately overcome). Similarly, people activated through specific fights can contribute the skills and knowledge they build through those fights to the broader fights.

Left organizing and left spaces (somewhat uniquely) provide a location where all the fights that the collectives of the people engage in can come together. By bringing together the specific and the universal, by connecting those that know the fights for rent control, against street fascism, for police abolition and de-carceration, for landlords to make repairs, for medicare for all, for free public transit, for decarbonization,  against a new gas compressor are all parts of the same fight, the demands of the people can start to take shape. The only way we can hope to resolve the contradictions on the left is by working through them, by actively sharing the lessons of each struggle, and continuing to draw the people further together in solidarity.

So where does this leave us on relating to the tenant union first discussed here? The demand for a home in which you feel safe is a universal demand, but the way the tenants are seeking to acquire that safety violates the socialist commitment to always fight on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. If attempts to redirect the tenants back towards struggling against their landlord fail, the correct course of action may be just to no longer work with that union, and hope that another fight in the future will bring the tenants in that union back into solidarity with the people.