“[I]f a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then the tenant movement works to establish collective control. Our aim is not to eliminate tenancy by becoming owners ourselves….Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging.” Working-class control over how and where we live is the lodestar shared across the nascent independent tenant union movement. Control, whose negation defines tenancy for this movement, necessarily constitutes its horizon. But the excessive focus on rent, akin perhaps to a trade union fixation on increasing wages, obscures the forest (capitalism becoming a world without rent) for the trees (rent itself).
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is ...
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