(Two page summary of a longer draft document. Updated July, 2011)

In 1973, anti-war activists, feminists, and socialists combined to form City Life/Vida Urbana. They brought profound experience in fighting militarism, racism, male supremacy, and class oppression. They proposed to use this experience to address the practical, every day problems of the multi-racial working class of Jamaica Plain. They believed that understanding these larger social forces would help in local organizing; and they believed that this local organizing would help create the base for radical change throughout society. We remain committed to this vision. What does it mean to us in 2011?

Getting At The Root Cause Through The Day To Day Fight

Radical organizing seeks to change the root causes, the society itself, not just the symptoms of distress. How do we do that? The vast majority of the time, grassroots organizing must respond to immediate, day to day problems. It must seek to win immediate, tangible reforms.

How does the fight around these day to day issues lead to fundamental change? This is the connection that has always proved most difficult and elusive for radical activists and leftists.

Good radical organizing should link day to day reform and radical change. We try to do our day to day organizing in a way which makes that link, by asking these questions:

• What issues can we emphasize in our fight that bring underlying contradictions to the surface?
• What tactics can we choose that allow average people to participate and play the leading role?
• Do we make connections between different reform efforts, different issues, that in turn link to how the system as a whole functions?
• Do we provide space for people to talk about lessons learned, how each individual fight fits into the whole?

What Is Good Radical Housing Organizing?

1) Organize those directly affected.

We have primarily done that through tenant organizing and, in the last few years, foreclosure related organizing. We believe in organizing the whole community to demand housing justice. But it is most essential to organize the resistance of those directly threatened with displacement. This accomplishes many goals at once:

• Anti-eviction organizing produces immediate results against displacement.
• Anti-eviction organizing stresses the solidarity that people themselves can build.
• Tenant organizing and foreclosure organizing have placed a demand directly on private capital (see #3).
• Resistance to real estate greed and bank evictions challenge the right of property to maximum profit (see #4)
• Organized residents faced with displacement have the greatest moral authority to demand help from government.
• Win or lose, people feel better when they fight back. New leaders emerge even from defeats.

2) Radical organizing must be organizing.

In our organizing trainings, City Life makes a distinction between, providing services, advocacy and organizing, emphasizing organizing, putting people in motion to solve their own problem. No radical challenge can emerge from fostering reliance on professional advocates or service providers. But since we are organizing those directly threatened with displacement, we also recognize that good services (eg providing information) and good advocacy (going to court with folks) are vital parts of a program that emphasizes organizing. Our current bank organizing has developed the concept of “collectivized casework” to a higher level. Hundreds come to weekly meetings to get help with “their cases” and find that help in collective action.

3) Organize against private capital – the real estate industry, the banks.

We are outraged that government doesn’t serve us. But, who does it serve? Our analysis is that, in housing, government tends to serve the interests of powerful and wealthy real estate interests – landlords and developers – and of course Wall St. Banks. To oppose this influence, it’s important to make demands directly against private capital in real estate. This is effectively done by organized residents. In 2011, the Bank Tenant Association is organizing two protests per week against Banks. This kind of pressure directly against capital has helped win new legal protections.

4) Challenge the right of profit.

Aristide once said that we live in a society so corrupt that to demand a plate of rice and beans for everyone is to preach revolution. We live in a real estate system so corrupt that to demand a balance between real estate profit and human need is to make a system-challenging demand, an anti-capitalist demand. The policy demands raised by City Life challenge the role of profit. Tenant organizing challenges real estate profit directly. The central demand of our Bank tenant organizing is principal reduction, reducing the amount owed. This organizing brings a moral dimension to the drive for profit. The market either does not work as a just force or does not exist. The way the Banks produced the real estate bubble is astounding evidence of the latter.

5) Expose other assumptions of real estate capitalism.

We don’t try to convince big landlords to do the right thing. We know that won’t work. We raise moral issues in order to create the space for our people to fight. It’s hard to fight, even when your home is at stake. It can be scary. In particular, it’s hard to fight when you are undermined by your opponent’s assumptions:

• The fair rent is the market rent. Anything less is a subsidy by the owner.
• An owner has the right to do whatever he wants with his property.
• All property is the same, a 100-unit apartment building or a single family home.

These assumptions are all the more powerful because they are generally unstated and unexamined, even though they have become part of the cultural norms of our society. Yet, when held up to scrutiny, they begin to collapse. This liberates tremendous energy.

6) Expose assumptions of the financial industry.

As City Life tenant organizing more and more took the form of organizing against massive numbers of bank evictions, former owners have become some of our fiercest tenant fighters. Out of 30 eviction blockades between January, 2008 and July, 2011, 28 have been to defend former owners. This level of resistance also requires putting forward a new narrative that challenges your opponent’s assumptions:

• Wall St. Banks deliberately created a housing bubble with inflated prices nationally. When that bubble inevitably burst, millions were left with underwater loans. The Banks should reduce principal to real current value.
• Any bank made insolvent by thus reducing principal should be insolvent. Any Bank too big to fail is too big to exist.
• Bank evictions after foreclosure are all “no-fault”. Families willing and able to pay rent should never be evicted by banks after foreclosure.

7. Oppose privatization.

It isn’t just that real estate interests seek to increase their profit at our expense. It is also that they seek to privatize social investment – public tax investment in parks, schools and transit, and the time average people spend building community institutions. Radical organizing must openly expose these bizarre contradictions of the market.

Race, Class And Gender Intersections

There is a class, racial and gender content to all organizing, whether it is conscious or not. A radical model of organizing is conscious about it. It brings into the open the class and racial oppression in a given locality and connects it to what’s happening nationally. Large real estate investors say that their activity is the normal functioning of the market, not class oppression. Radical organizing tries to remove this market “fig leaf” from the real class oppression it masks. Similarly, the same investors would not want to be described as racists. Yet their normal activity causes disproportionate suffering to African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color. The effects of their actions are racist.

Similarly, large banks once imposed red-lining on communities of color, refusing to give loans. When the same financial industry created the housing bubble, it was done partly by “reverse redlining” – steering sub-prime loans to communities of color. When this inevitably produced a rash of foreclosures, the same industry has re-redlined, refusing loans to areas with high levels of foreclosure.

Making Connections Between Different Issues–Building Solidarity

The answer to this problem cannot be for everyone to go to more meetings and rallies, or to work harder. Organizers and activists work hard enough. The answer has to be in how we do our work. Do we work on each issue, in each neighborhood, in a way which presents an analysis of how these issues are connected?

Affordable housing, for instance, is part of the “social wage” – subsidized housing, welfare, SSI, Medicare, unemployment, etc. When there is less of all these things, working people are more desperate. We are forced to take jobs at lower wages, and therefore, wage rates tend to fall. Explaining affordable housing and fighting for it as part of the social wage links that fight to many other issues.

In 2011, Wall St. Banks refusal to solve the mortgage crisis by doing loan modifications with principal reduction is undermining economic recovery. SEIU research shows that if Bank of America reduced Massachusetts loan to real value, over 8,000 jobs would be created by the increased economic activity.

Space For Political Discussion – Theory.

Organizing is not just about fighting an immediate battle. It’s also about understanding what made the battle necessary in the first place. It’s about developing “theory.” It’s not just about action; it’s about thinking, too. City Life makes a priority of creating space for reflective, political discussions that are not tied to immediate campaigns, but are based in our experiences. At weekly Bank Tenant meetings, we have a period of reflection where members talk about some larger theme. City Life has held many 5-part discussion series. We have played a leading role in organizing 6 Radical Organizing Conferences between 2003 and 2008 and 4 Radical Organizing Summer Institutes between 2008 and 2011. We have sent our members to the US Social Forum, Solidarity Economy Conferences, and more.