“[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?
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51