So we see that the crisis of modern society is not without issue. It contains the seeds of something new, which is emerging even now. But the new will not come about automatically. Its emergence will be assisted by the actions of people in society, by their permanent resistance and struggle and by their often unconscious activity. But the new will not complete itself, will not be able to establish itself as a new social system, as a new pattern of social life, unless at some stage it becomes a conscious activity, a conscious action of the mass of the people. For us, to initiate this conscious action and to help it develop, whenever it may manifest itself, is the real new meaning to be given to the words ‘revolutionary politics’.

— Cornelius Castoriadis

We have gathered with a few tenants on a Sunday afternoon in south Chicago to assess our anti-eviction campaign. We remind ourselves of one of our most important achievements over the past 13 months: for the second year in a row, we have halted over three dozen evictions in the South Shore neighborhood, the city’s “eviction capital,” cutting the pattern of forty evictions per year down to almost zero.

We achieved this with no prior experience as tenant organizers.

The toasty apartment sheltering us from the winter cold complements the warmth of being more closely connected to our neighbors. It feels good that for the moment we are not in emergency mode, dealing with active evictions. The “next steps” conversation is peppered with easy tasks, updates of our personal lives, other tenant struggles in the city, new resources, jokes and laughter.

Our trust in one another, the love for our neighbors and our neighborhood is growing in this apartment. There is a neighborhood decoration event taking place in a few weeks, and we put it in our calendars, in addition to some important plans we are about to implement for taking the campaign to the next level before we begin to try to bring about more rent reductions. The future is uncertain and precarious, but we are moving forward with commitment.

The Struggle in the City

For centuries, workers have organized themselves in order to collectively resist the oppressive and exploitative forces of capital. From the early 1900s to the current day, the most common form of worker organizing has been the labor union. With the rise of urbanization, over half of the global population currently living in cities, and a growing understanding that the sites of capitalist production are not exclusive to the factory floor, a new type of anti-capitalist organizing is gaining ground: the tenant union.

The city itself has become a living site of capitalist production, with developers and investors vying for power through municipal arrangements, development codes, urban planning initiatives and policies. These real estate capitalists have a vested interest in pushing up the value of land and housing so that they profit from their commodification, and the general expansion of the market. Municipal governments also have a stake in this, attracting higher-income households to the area, bringing in a stream of revenue for cities often mismanaged by a political class that puts the interest of corporate capitalists over that of residents.

The externalities of this process of capital accumulation via real estate include the displacement of working-class communities and the gentrification of neighborhoods, which tends to disproportionately impact people of color. From the point of view of capital, land and labor are mere commodities, and therefore disposable when not profitable to the capitalist class. In order to fight against this predatory system, we need to confront the corrupt nature of this exploitation through collective direct action while resisting this cyclical process of extraction.

Unions are ways of resisting, and in their optimal configuration, are a fighting force which occupy revolutionary and reformist political spaces. As such, we are organizing towards temporary and semi-permanent improvements to the exploitative and unjust hierarchical relationship between bosses and workers, landlords and tenants.

Unions can be crystallized expressions of our drive to connect and belong, to produce with and for one another, to mutually confirm our positive humanity, to love one another through care and shared experience, to declare common beliefs and spread them. They can be instruments to facilitate the natural desire for self-management and to build a society where our workplaces and communities are managed in a direct democratic fashion.

Tenants’ unions are manifestations of class struggle. As such, they are configured in opposition to landlords, management companies, real estate developers and the state. Tenant unions acting in solidarity promote and nurture healthy relationships and communities.

The oppressive forces of the state and the capitalist class hold us hostage through continuous rent extraction, tenuous, unequal relationships, and laws designed to work in the owners’ interests, not ours. These intersections of hierarchical power and the absence of mutually empowering relationships among tenants all work to commodify land and housing, obstructing our communal self-management.

Forming the Dual Power Tenants’ Union

The origins of our campaign to stop dozens of evictions in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood can be traced back to a series of meetings back in 2017, where we formulated the idea of spearheading a tenants’ union in the city’s south to complement the pioneering work of the Autonomous Tenants Union (ATU) in the north. After these initial meetings, it took another year before we were able to actually start organizing the union.

We discussed that we wanted our union to be anarchist, and to fight the escalating eviction and gentrification crisis. We agreed that we wanted to build power and neighborhood-based relationships, reaching out to people we wouldn’t meet any other way. We also cautiously envisioned the tenants’ unions as a proto-commune, with popular assemblies all embedded in a vision of a cooperative economy.

In this vision, tenants’ unions would coordinate and confederate with a new constellation of horizontally organized collectives. As such, the tenants’ union would pursue a dual power strategy, in which individual unions are not restricted to merely fighting landlords and management, but are also an instrument for the oppressed to take on self-management of the local economy, and to reclaim ownership over our life, work and communities. We knew that it was going to be difficult, “molecular” work that could take years to yield meaningful results.

After securing the resources we needed for a tenant organizer training, we established ourselves as Tenants United of Hyde Park and Woodlawn (“TU,” for short) at a local diner in October 2018. We held a small training session led by an ATU organizer, an attorney and a tenant organizer from the Chicago Metropolitan Tenants Organization. We could have definitely used the content that is now available in the monthly online trainings of the national Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN). We had multiple activities in motion shortly afterward, including emergency tenant assistance, a public launch, flyering and sowing the seeds of shared unity between multiple buildings.

At a November meeting, a South Shore compañero stood out when he volunteered to help on a task. It was shortly afterwards that we learned that the same individual was facing eviction and wanted to fight it. Solidarity was unquestionable. We started the campaign shortly afterwards. We started by discussing first steps with ATU, organized legal support, flyered the buildings and knocked on doors, preparing ourselves for the unfolding of a larger movement for tenant justice.