Defragmenting our selves
Participating in London Renters Union has been a life-changing experience for me. It has been a major presence in much of the last five years of my life. It was an organisation I loved as soon as I understood what it would be, and I still love it. For the last three years I have…
“It’s class, you don’t have to talk about class but maybe talk about money and income. Documented or undocumented or black and brown communities and being immigrants, so there’s an intersection, so the issues are connected, but it’s also about, you know, the structure [of the union] is about…’we need to do meetings’. Not everyone…
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…
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…