Martin O Neill continues to debate about Housing Collectivisation
To clarify I am not advocating Housing Associations as they exist now, but
genuinely self-managed new Housing institutions. I get the point about
state appointees having to be on management committees of Housing
Associations to get funding, but there still may be ways around this.
I'm also not in favour of telling people who are in Housing need now,
"Sorry mate you will have to wait until after the revolution to get a
house, because we can only collectivise them then". We may as well be
Christians telling people they will be getting their pie in the sky when
they die.
Self-managed housing is not complete airy-fairy nonsense. Just say they
build the new yuppie flats at the bottom of the Shankill. Just say the
local community take direct action and occupy the flats. I have my doubts
that this particular campaign is an example of genuine
class-consciousness, but it is not impossible that such actions could be
taken.
From my experience of the occupation of Govanhill Swimming Pool in
Glasgow, even if there is mass community support, this form of direct
action is only sustainable for a matter of months. The State will
eventually forcibly end the occupation. However there is a recent
historical precedent here in the early '70s where the State, because of
scale of the problem, accepted, after a period of years in some cases,
squatters becoming tenants. Because of the sectarian way this situation
arose I am not advocating this as a way forward.
This may be the politics of defeat, but to be practical I would advocate
the setting up of a self-managed community trust to take over the flats in
such a scenario. Where the money comes from for future repairs is the
obvious major problem. At least we are beginning to deal with near reality
rather than future dreams. There is the possibility of lottery money or
private charitable trusts funding repairs, which at least keeps the state
away to a certain degree. To be sustainable, currently you do need State
funding. Lets look at this as a hurdle to overcome rather than a reason to
abandon the idea of self-managed housing in the here and now.
Below is a response by a member of Organise! to a proposal by a Workers Solidarity Movement member to hold a joint public meeting on the "Collectivisation" of Housing in Belfast
If "Collectivisation" means advocating tenant and resident initiated
self-managed community housing trusts and housing co-ops then I would be
interested. Such a strategy may be feasible even without forming a
citizen's militia and reclaiming a local district. There is a degree of
local historical precedent with Free Derry. I would have to re-read some
stuff to give some specific examples of how the local state started
becoming irrelevant in this particular case.
There are a number of major problems with such a strategy. Councils in
Britain have offloaded public housing onto Housing Associations, Trusts
and Co-ops as part of a neoliberal agenda to privatise and reduce public
services and reduce council and national taxes for the middle and upper
classes. Promises of more money spent on repairs and greater tenant
participation rarely materialise. Such policies have also been part of a
process where council housing and parks departments have to take part in
compulsory competitive tendering where services are either transfered to
private companies or working conditions, pensions, overtime payments etc
are signed away by trade unions to win the, often short-term, contract.
Most working-class people in England for example either own their home or
aspire to own their home. Although homelessness is a social problem and
not the fault of the individuals involved capitalism in the developed
world has already provided housing (no matter how crap in what is in
increasingly the minority of cases) for most people. Therefore the
"collectivisation" of housing as a class wide solution may not be
feasible. A collective solution involving political activists or community
activists in a local area may be feasible and also the federation of such
new institutions in the future. If these institutions start getting
involved in community planning then you really are starting to make the
local state irrelevant or creating a dual power situation.
There is another major problem specific to here. The Housing Executive was
originally set to take housing policy away from sectarian Unionist
Councils.
If the Housing Executive further decentralises power to local communities
it could result in the continuation of the geographical sectarian divide
for another generation and in some case discrimination against outsiders
and foreigners. Some community workers who would probably end up running a
decentralised Housing Association would continue the sectarian divide.
Others who have tried to open up lines of communication for example
through the Upper Springfield Road/ Springmartin interface probably would
not.
Even if you had a self-managed community housing trust, (with elected and
recallable delegates attending management committee meetings or general
community assemblies making decisions), you would end up with
working-class residents effectively being the bosses of the workers in the
the housing trust departments that do the repairs, cut the grass, do the
admin. etc.(even if departments are collectivised workers' co-ops) Even if
everything is decentralised to street level where employing a repair
worker would differ little from someone in a private house employing
someone to fix their boiler, (i.e. they are not really their boss) do we
really want to add to the culture of the white van man undercutting his
former council department workmates and probably doing a crap job?
In Glasgow I was involved with an independently run community centre,
occupied the local swimming pool, debated who should run it - the council
or the local community in large community meetings in a working-class area
and got non-state funding for another self-managed community building. You
can apply this experience with single buildings to lots of buildings so
"collectivisation" in the the here and now isn't entirely pie in the sky,
I just think you need to be intimately entwined with the community you
live in to advocate such a policy.