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Showing posts with the label “The Tenant Movement”

Abolish Rent

“[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). Is rent the crisis?