Against Landlords by Nick Bano

Author:Nick Bano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2024-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Here to Stay, Here to Fight

Engels’s pessimism stemmed from the fact that he viewed housing through an exclusively economic lens. He saw it as a secondary site of exploitation, which was less important than the struggles that take place in the workplace. Because it was labour, he claimed, that produced surplus value, the set-pieces of class struggle must take place in the employment setting, and housing was fundamentally only concerned with the act of buying. By that logic, he argued that housing movements were theoretically akin to a consumer rights group, rather than a labour union or political organisation proper.

But just forty years after The Housing Question was published, 20,000 women and men in Glasgow demanded and won rent controls, which went on to have fundamental consequences for the political economy of land: within sixty years of the revolt on the Clyde, landlordism was brought to its knees. Thereafter, it was then the deliberate re-ignition of landlordism, and the associated turbo-charging of the housing market, that furnished the fundamental basis of the broader national economy of the present. Housing matters beyond the dimension of economic transaction, and thus housing movements matter, too.

Tenant organising is done best when it is done sincerely – that is, for its own sake. For decades, a common mistake has been to use the low-hanging fruit of people’s misery as a recruiting tactic or brand-building exercise. While there is of course a need for political education and bringing together different strands of struggle, it does a tremendous disservice to tenants to dip into their lives without any intention of committing to resolving their housing issues in the longer term.

The most striking features of groups like HASL are its longevity and dedication. HASL members have developed incredibly useful local knowledge about, for example, the council housing allocation rules and likely behaviour of local authority officials. Their longstanding experience of dealing with private-sector landlords has given their members a sense of what works and what does not. Successful housing groups have worked hard on this, to build effective organisations. Effective groups also know their limits, and help people to identify other options when something comes up that is beyond their abilities. Housing is very complex, and those with general activist experience can often cause more harm than good if they dabble in it.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this unserious brand-building ‘activism’ was the dispute in Camden behind the 1939 lawsuit that established that rent strikes are illegal. Reading between the lines, it seems that the disastrous Camden rent strike might have been intended as a recruiting operation for the Communist Party. The Camden flats had been organised with the help of the St Pancras Tenants’ Defence League, which had recently held a successful rent strike in a neighbouring street, and which had strong Communist Party links. The landlord sued two of the tenants for all the missing rent, and won. The League ended up sticking two of its new recruits not only with ruinous personal liability for

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