Defragmenting our selves
While having staff in the union does increase capacity in some ways, I had assumed that taking on more staff would mean that the ordinary members would feel less pressurised, and that burnout among them would become less of a problem. Instead what seems to have happened is an expansion of the work that everyone…
And if there is, what can we do about it? At the UK Climate Camps of a few years ago a certain difficult dynamic arose: the founders of the movement were left activists with anti-capitalist politics, while some of those who joined later had more reformist ideas. This caused much open division and contributed to…
It is my conviction that the most effective organising in the Global North involves a partnership of class groups. The partnership is between the working class and what is sometimes called the middle class, mostly meaning a fairly unmoneyed middle class – though moneyed people do join too sometimes. Dan Evans’ new book A Nation…
For a long time left housing campaigners have repeated constantly that the problem of housing in London is not that there isn’t enough, it’s that it’s poorly distributed. Housing clearly is poorly distributed in London, with many new-builds, old-builds, and ex-council houses snapped up by landlords. And perhaps sometime around the early 2000s it was…
It’s surprising perhaps that we haven’t had more left political strategy books about the post-Corbyn period of UK politics. Paolo Gerbaudo’s The Great Recoil does make strategy proposals but is not entirely focused on the UK, drawing on examples from across the world. Keir Milburn’s Generation Left alas became rather outdated in the year it…
A recent visit to Berlin has given me much cause to reflect on the thorny topic of how to win better housing for everyone. I have been part of the London Renters Union for 5 years and while little in housing has improved in that time, we have always been able to comfort ourselves with…
One of the things I’ve realised through my research is that it is a vain hope that everyone who cares about the issues you are organising around will get involved in intensive community organising. The meetings and one-to-ones and campaign building are all very time-consuming. Many people – the majority of people, if we are…
An organisation like London Renters Union sees itself as part of a renters’ movement, or sometimes a housing movement. Like all movements it is not clear where the boundaries of the movement are, nor should it be. However activists in LRU do sometimes talk about a ‘renter identity’ that LRU is trying to marshall into…
Is it better to be right or to win? And under what circumstances we you do both? These are big questions for a movement of renters in the UK. From the point of view of renters, there is a strong desire to morally judge landlords for their extraction of so much wealth, often for very…
I’ve been talking to a wide variety of union members lately for my academic research and one of the conversations that I’ve fallen into with more precariously housed members – even when I haven’t brought it up – is how the union can do more to help members like them to be involved. Of course…