Building a Base
A base-building approach to project work requires that we examine how our various projects build the collective organizational power of the working class in the long term. We should prioritize tactics that, whether we win or lose an individual fight, increase the capacity of working class people for struggle over ones that produce immediate gains but do not build toward the next fight.
Our chapter’s Housing Working Group has been doing great work canvassing with CLVU. Several comrades have taken a lead in the mobilization against the injustices ICE has inflicted on Siham Byah and her friends and family. We believe that Boston DSA can formalize and combine these kinds of efforts, with the eventual goal of building a set of tactics and internal structures to build a base constituency and mobilize that base to win specific issues.
Our organizing cannot slip into paternalism and must respect the autonomy of oppressed people to choose the ends and means of their own struggle. We must reflect critically on our organizing to ensure that we do not attempt to force our solutions on others. Rather, we must build relationships and coalitions that develop solidarity across class, race, gender, and other oppressed groups and allow the most exploited groups to seize existing levers of power while creating entirely new and parallel ones, including mutual aid networks and radical tenant and labor unions. Haphazard strategies that are not grounded in a Marxist, socialist understanding of the multitude of oppressive systems and the United States’ uniquely racist history will lead to superficial community service at best and tokenization, poverty tourism, and white saviorism at worst.
With these principles in mind, we see the following opportunities to develop base-building projects:
- Housing and Tenant Unionizing
- Mass Against HP and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaigns
- Uniting the Precarious: Other Projects to Build Solidarity Among the Working Class
Housing and Tenant Unionizing
Boston, like nearly every American city, is facing a housing crisis. The current reality of speculation in the housing market, ever-greater extraction of rents by landlords, and the resulting precarity and displacement are the natural results of a capitalist system of housing. The production and exchange of housing as a commodity directly causes violence across Greater Boston. In a city as segregated as Boston, landlords and developers exercise the weapons of rent increases and evictions, particularly mass evictions before or after a sale, most freely in working-class communities of color like Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, Roxbury, and East Boston. The problem is not a lack of housing or development in and of itself; it is the production and control of housing as private property, a system that creates new luxury housing to remain empty even as thousands are homeless and many more are displaced.
On the basis of our previous work with City Life/Vida Urbana, Boston DSA is prepared to begin to undertake the challenges of tenant organizing to confront these injustices. We must be clear in our organizing goals and methods: capitalists who seek to profit off of housing and the state that enables them are exploiting basic human needs in order to create and sustain their own wealth and power. Housing is a human right, and our organizing must be aimed at the goal of universal, safe, and healthy housing for all. This goal will only be met by growing the power of tenants and the working class, both housed and homeless. We know that liberal reforms that take conciliatory stances and seek to partner or collaborate with landlords and developers are insufficient for winning power for the working class. Instead, we must trust in the collective power of tenants organizing around their needs for safe housing and democratically planned communities. We can make concrete interventions by organizing around tenant struggles which will hopefully build lasting structures — tenant unions — that can win bigger material fights in the future, around housing or other issues.
In organizing for housing justice for our neighbors and ourselves, we should build on our existing work with City Life/Vida Urbana by beginning to move from canvassing to tenant organizing. We recently took a first step in this direction by providing ride support for a disabled tenant to CLVU’s weekly mass meeting. There are several different strategies that we could take to begin organizing tenants, and any number of problems we could organize around, but all share some key characteristics: bringing together tenants to fight for material wins in the short term and creating long-term networks of people willing to fight for socialism. In the immediate future, we should look to expand our role within CLVU’s work from canvassing to supporting tenants in their struggles against eviction and predatory rent increases of hundreds of dollars. Our canvassing to date has primarily taken place in Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester — working-class communities of color in Boston targeted by landlords for huge rent increases and evictions, including mass evictions, for the sake of profit. It is imperative that we support tenants who are fighting, or want to fight, the worst violence that landlords are capable of, while also respecting the right of those tenants to lead their own struggle. We should continue to explore the possibility of adapting insights from Metro DC DSA’s Stomp Out Slumlords campaign to contact tenants we know are facing eviction and bringing them into the City Life/Vida Urbana movement, with the ultimate goal of helping to create new tenant unions.
Beyond anti-eviction work, we should also look for other opportunities throughout the Greater Boston area to form tenant organizing campaigns around material conditions imposed for the interests of capital. We should develop class consciousness among our members around their position as tenants and support them if they want to organize their buildings. Because of our limited capacity, it is not possible in the short term to pursue all of these approaches at once, but by strategically choosing issues around which to organize, we can begin to create or support tenant organizations that can win material victories. As a result of successful tenant organizing, we will be able to use our relationships with tenant unions to build campaigns around issues other than housing.
Mass Against HP and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaigns
As we begin to implement our volunteer endorsement of MAHP’s campaign in Cambridge, we should seek to explore ways we can organize supporters of the campaign as socialists in the long term. This campaign will be repeated in other cities after Cambridge; if we continue to work closely with MAHP, we will have the opportunity to talk to and organize with hundreds of people that we would not reach otherwise. The most active community supporters of the campaign will come to it in various ways — as Palestinians in the U.S.; as indigenous people or other people of color standing in solidarity with Palestinians while fighting for their own liberation; as abolitionists struggling against the carceral state; as anti-war activists; as self-identified socialists; and others who do not fit neatly into any of these categories.
We must approach our involvement with the campaign in a way that highlights the connectedness of these injustices and our commitment as socialists to ending all of them. We can create new socialists, not by explicitly recruiting community members to socialism, but by communicating how the interests of the international capital class intersect as HP profits from providing the tools to administer the occupation of Palestine. We should avoid making transactional asks of community members in favor of strategies that develop their political leadership. By viewing the Mass Against HP campaign as an opportunity both to show material solidarity with Palestinians living under the occupation and to build the socialist movement in Massachusetts, we can increase our capacity to organize around other issues in the future.
More broadly, we want DSA to demonstrate a more militant resistance to settler-colonialism and imperialism, in oppressed nations across the world and in Boston itself. We hope to build awareness and understanding of how imperialism intersects with healthcare, housing, education, finance, welfare, and crime policy. Through the BDS campaign, we want to take direct action against capitalists, like Hewlett Packard, who prop up Israel’s colonialism. We want to take a more committed, vocal stance against local defense contractors and the militarist Democrats allied with them, including Elizabeth Warren. We want to expand the BDS fight to defend all victims of colonization, but especially local immigrants and communities of color threatened by ICE raids, incarceration, erasure, deportation, or eviction.
Uniting the Precarious
Large swaths of our membership are young, and precariously poor, living check-to-check in unstable jobs, often dealing with high rent, student debt, mental health problems, and medical costs. We need a serious discussion about how we might reduce harm in our daily lives and better organize ourselves within and beyond the union, which has failed so far as an institution to empower or even address many casual or unstable workers. In DSA, we struggle as retail workers, the unemployed, Uber drivers, independent contractors, tech workers, non-profit workers, nurses, university administrators, students, and tenants. We should think about how we can better meet our own needs, and fight for our own freedom and collective future. We should broaden the base of DSA to include our friends, neighbors, and co-workers, and more distant sections of the precarious poor, including sex workers, prisoners, and the formerly incarcerated.
Some of this organizing will take place in tenant organizing campaigns, as we unite with our neighbors against increased development that will only lead to further and further displacement. Some of this organizing will take place in student organizing campaigns, as we battle the instability of academic work. Some of this will take place in direct service campaigns, as we attempt to assuage some of the damage done to our neighbors by capitalism. We must recognize the ways in which precarity harms ourselves and our neighbors, and build our organizing model so that it is truly liberatory.
Read the rest of Boston Refoundation’s 2018 platform here.
