advice wanted for a housing struggle
Jun 17 2009 19:30
Hello everybody
I could do with the benefit of everybody´s collective experience. I´m involved in a housing struggle in Seville, Spain. We are in a block of cheap (about 150E below normal market rates) flats where the landlord wants to evict the tenants and sell the flats. The active people are four flats of tenants and three flats of squatters (four flats tomorrow if things go well tonight!) we are members of a new group which is linking different people who are in some kind of housing struggle, which is called Barrios en Lucha (neighbourhoods in struggle) and has about 8 different groups such as a shanty town, old people who are squatting flats that belong to the state and demanding rehousing or tenancies, and people in flats similar to council flats who are demanding repairs.
So my problem is- its kind of very exciting but also not going very well. Less people come to every meeting (the meetings are once a month.) We´ve gone from fifty to twenty. The last action we planned had to be cancelled as hardly anyone was going to turn up. I´m not sure of the root cause but we want to make the group stronger from the base up. Most of the tenants/squatters involved are very old and are scared of reprisals. There is a problem that a lot of our demos and actions only work at all because all our young loyal supporters in the squatting movement turn up and bulk up the numbers and do loads of the work. For most of the groups involved, only a small minority ever come to BenL meetings. Eg in the shanty town there are sixty houses, the last meeting was there and maybe ten people came from the shanty town.
So, my questions:
How do we get people to feel that it´s worth getting involved?
How do we make sure that the decisions and proposals are not all being made by the politically experienced, the educated and the bigmouths?
How do we actually win and not get evicted?
How do we get the voice heard in the group of the people who can´t read, who are very old, who have no confidence in themselves?
Do these kinds of groups ever work?
And last but not least, how do you paint a banner without the newspaper you put down on the floor sticking to the back of the banner?
So- please give me the results of your worldwide accumulated wisdom.
Thanks.
And if we win, I will squat a flat for you all to come to Seville on holiday.
Jun 19 2009 23:56
#2
good stuff, sounds like an important struggle.
there aren't any shortcuts to movement building and getting people involved as most people on these forums are probably aware.
passivity is a problem people organising face all over. from my experience on the other side of the world. heres a few answers.
How do we get people to feel that it´s worth getting involved?
Ask the people themselves. I know sounds funny but go and talk to all the people who no longer come to meetings and ask them why they aren't involved anymore and what would make them get reinvolved.
go doorknocking in your block of flats with a leaflet and/or a survey. get people to fill the survey out there and then with questions like
What do you want to see changed around the flats? How much rent do you pay and how much do you think you should have to pay?
Quote:
How do we make sure that the decisions and proposals are not all being made by the politically experienced, the educated and the bigmouths?
Do a survey. A lot of people will fill out a survey before speaking up at a meeting. I use surveys all the time in my union organising work because you get to hear from everyone. every decision you make should be on a leaflet and delivered to all impacted by the decision, explaining why your doing it.
Quote:
How do we actually win and not get evicted?
keep struggling.
Quote:
How do we get the voice heard in the group of the people who can´t read, who are very old, who have no confidence in themselves?
\
one on one conversations where you write down what they say. public speaking workshops if need be.
Quote:
Do these kinds of groups ever work?
dont know.
Quote:
And last but not least, how do you paint a banner without the newspaper you put down on the floor sticking to the back of the banner?
use some form of plastic material : )
Jun 21 2009 11:18
#3
Thanks very much, that´s very helpful. We are going to think about how we can do a survey. Will keep you posted. By the way, which country are you in?
Jun 21 2009 12:41
#4
How are you running the meetings in terms of chairing and decision making?
Jun 21 2009 21:06
#5
We don´t usually have a chair or facilitator in the meetings. If everybody starts talking at once maybe somebody starts to take names so people take turns. There is an awful lot of interrupting and talking loudly over people.
Decision making- bit complicated. We allegedly make all the decisions in the general assembly. We also have to discuss things and make decisions in our small neighbourhood assemblies and then take them back to the general assembly. We have the usual informal power imbalances that you would expect and there are probably quite a few decisions made by four blokes in a pub. In my block everybody has been to the Barrios en Lucha general assembly a couple of times but in other groups maybe most people have never been or don´t know what it is, or don´t agree with it and think it´s threatening. Each group is quite different in the way it functions internally and relates to BenL. We also set up a co-ordinating group last week which is some kind of delegate group that will meet in between the monthly general assembies. It may turn out not to be a delegate group as we don´t know if every barrio will actually send a delegate. Some people (me for instance) want to insist that the delegates are not all the same people all the time but this wasn´t taken up.
A lot of people don´t talk so you don´t know if they agree or disagree with a decision.
I think our decision making process is quite unclear really now I´ve had to write it down.
Jun 21 2009 21:44
#6
fingers malone wrote:
How do we get people to feel that it´s worth getting involved?
How do we make sure that the decisions and proposals are not all being made by the politically experienced, the educated and the bigmouths?
(...)
How do we get the voice heard in the group of the people who can´t read, who are very old, who have no confidence in themselves?
Do these kinds of groups ever work?
if fear of reprisals are part of the problem, stressing that together you're strong but alone you're weak is important. historical examples of successes could help too, especially if they're local. i know the CNT won rent strikes in Barcelona in the 1930s, don't know much about Andalucia or more recent history, but i'm sure there are inspiring victories to draw on - you could potentially invite a speaker to talk about a victory elsewhere. Puerto Real is in Andalucia right? Are there older CNT comrades around who could share experiences of the community mass assemblies in the shipyard resistance there in the 1980s?
the meeting structure (or lack of) could also be putting people off. the most healthy and successful groups i've been part of have always had clearly structured, well-facilitated meetings which make sure there's an atmosphere where everyone feels they can contribute, people don't talk over each other and you don't end up with a tyranny of the loudest (which often is gendered male too). the kind of meeting culture you describe can end up being disempowering to quieter people or those not used to public meetings/debate, when it's meant to be empowering!
electing a chair/facilitator at the start and drawing up an agenda, sticking to it and ensuring people speak one at a time, prioritising people who have yet to speak if necessary can really help retain peoples interest, and make more shy members feel they are an equal part of the organisation, even if they don't speak that often.
fingers malone wrote:
How do we actually win and not get evicted?
direct action is the generic answer, but specifically; being prepared to occupy and resist. if the landlord knows you are, and this will cost him time and money it will force him to rethink, since he's motivated by the bottom line. solidarity would be crucial to this, but it sounds like things might be going in the wrong direction with meeting participation falling.
you might be doing this already, but there's no substitute for going door to door, spending time talking to people in a one-on-one situation where you can make them feel comfortable, and most importantly listening to their concerns - about eviction, and about the potential for reprisals etc. that face-to-face contact really is the way to build trust and solidarity, especially if coupled with making the meeting structure more formal and participatory when people do come along.
a complimentary approach is to broaden the struggle. what do you know about the landlord? does he have other properties? do the tennants there have grievances and could they be encouraged to take action fo some sort? does he have any businesses or commercial ventures that could be targetted (or even workers encouraged to strike, depending on the CNT's local influence)? if it looks like it might spread and get more costly for him, the landlord is more likely to accept it's easier to just meet your demands. if you know him personally or he has a public image, it might also be possible to embarass him or hurt his image, perhaps using press releases to the local media alongside direct action targetting his businesses. he presumably lives in a nice big house, maybe organise a demonstration outside?
¡buena suerte camarada!
Jun 21 2009 21:55
#7
Oh, quite a lot of interesting comments / info here. There are three groups of activists involved in three different tenants groups in Warsaw - lately we've been doing a lot with one, but not the other, and probably this reflects a difference in how they are run.
You were asked: how do you run the meetings? This is MAJORLY IMPORTANT because many meetings amongst activists are terribly alienating for both people outside the scene and who are not so aggressive / able to speak at meetings. It is possible that chaos at meetings can drive people away, although it's not clear from what you said that you feel this is the case.
You also mentioned that you have meetings once a month. Depending on the organization and what's going on, this might be to infrequent to give the movement impetus. We saw this directly since people from the other group we are now cooperating with were having meetings once a month and they were complaining to us that they don't get anything done. We have a lot of concrete campaign work going on; there are office hours twice a week for tenants, there's one or two tabling events per week, sometimes other meetings. Not everybody comes each time, and we even don't expect it, but people have a chance to meet with each other at least once or more times a week, and more of the neighbourhood people are likely to show up because they see that a lot is happening. Of course there has to be real activity behind this, and enough rotation so that people don't get burnt out, but from my discussions with people who were having meetings once a month, it was demobilizing for some.
>How do we get people to feel that it´s worth getting involved?
There are different ways, but ultimately, if people have campaigns that will tackle and improve real issues in their lives, they are more likely to get involved. It is also important that they see their neighbours involved.
>How do we make sure that the decisions and proposals are not all being made by the politically experienced, the educated and the bigmouths?
The decisions have to be made in a clear way. From what you say, you don't know people's opinions - which means that you do not go around in a circle, ask each person for their opinion (uninterrupted by big mouths) and have a vote.
As far as proposals are concerned, people should be able to make some proposals - maybe you need to ask in the right way. For example - not too wide-open questions like "does anybody have any proposals" but something like "we are thinking of different methods of fighting X.... does anybody have any proposals". If there is silence, you can say "we heard of this experience in X.... - what do you think of it?" and then ask if there are any proposals. Of course sometimes you can ask people just wide-open questions for proposals, but here it sounds as if people are not to eager to speak, so maybe they need direction, but the activists should be more laid back and wait a bit more for ideas to generate than rushing with their ideas.
>How do we actually win and not get evicted?
That depends on a lot. What about overall social support for the struggle? Who else can support it from the general society?
>>>How do we get the voice heard in the group of the people who can´t read, who are very old, who have no confidence in themselves?
This question requires more information. We don't have this problem - a lot of the people in our group are over 60 and we have a totally different problem - getting young activists to support this movement. Surely it can't be that all the people in the group who are old have no confidence - if this is the case, something is surely not right. You need a lot of reflection, perhaps self-criticism, perhaps strategic brainstorming to figure this out. Is it that really these people have so little confidence, or do you create an intimidating or alienating environment for them? This is the first big question. Then the other question is how to draw people out of their shells or whether it's even possible. Some people can change their habits given the right conditions, but some are that way and maybe it's a bit late to change them radically.
We have two women like that. One of them comes to every protest and likes the radical parts very much - she also even came to anarchist protests. If one person speaks to her personally, not in the big group, she loosens up and is quite open, but in the big group she's more quiet, even if you try to be gentler and draw her into the discussion. So it's not really in her personality - but it hasn't scared her off some activism. She just does different activism than some others. Because some people who, for example, love to chat with people, are the best people to do information tables. Not everybody feels comfortable with this type of work - some of my colleagues for example stand on the street and talk to everybody who walks by. Other people are good foot soldiers - who maybe go around the neighbourhood and deliver leaflets and feel good with that work. Some other people might like to make an internet page or write texts. We have to remember that, as anarchists, it would be ideal to live in a world where all people had good social / activist skills, were able to speak at meetings, etc. - but we are really far from the type of socialization which would create these conditions. Sometimes we have to encourage, but also feel the limits because if we push people too hard into roles they are not comfortable with, we are likely to scare them off. So maybe at this point, you should be brainstorming in a smaller group about what kinds of different ways of engaging might be encouraged in your group and, when thinking of this, you might really want to try to find skills which fit lots of different people.
Also, if you eventually deal with a larger group of tenants or poor people and you have people, as you said, who can't read, you have to find ways not to make your struggle too heavily focused on activities which require reading and writing. For example, some groups have their "theorists" who tend to be better educated and often wind up high in the group hierarchy. If some of these people have interesting experiences, you might want to do some video work with them.
Jun 22 2009 07:06
#8
Hey, loads of brilliant ideas here everyone.
Joseph- there was a rent strike in Seville that succeeded in getting the rents cut by 50% in 1936, I would never have thought of organising a historical talk in the group but that´s a great idea and I will try to get someone from the CNT to do it. We have been thinking about getting someone from Barcelona, where they have a more organised housing movement, to come down and talk to us about their struggles and how they organise.
About the landlord- I think we should be doing more to make the landlord miserable, he has made a few threats of violence but he hasn´t ever carried any of them out so far and I think this is one of the major advantages of having the squatters here- I was a subtenant in this block before I was a squatter and I definitely felt ten times safer after the squatters started moving in. So I think being more in his face is a little bit risky but probably worth it. In Spain landlords often use dirty tactics to get rid of tenants (who they call ´bugs´) as the tenancy laws don´t make it so easy to get rid of people quickly in the courts, so the landlords use a lot of harrassment, cutting off the water, violence etc. But they´ve never tried that with us so far.
Laurakai- your suggestions about meetings and different roles are really really good. I have raised the issue about chaotic meetings and interrupting people etc. with the ´leaders´ but they were pretty dismissive. They say if you want to make a suggestion you have to shout and that´s it. I´ll try to think of a different way to address this and make some positive suggestions to change things. I think going round asking everyone their opinion is important but people say it takes up too much time. About the monthly meetings- yes, I think it´s not often enough.
Ok, about the old people... In every barrio there are usually a couple of old women who do nearly all the organising and know everybody, and who do a lot of work, but they tend to be very quiet in the big meeting, it depends on the meeting, some are better than others, but the big meetings are sometimes very dominated by the more politicised ´leaders´ (all men). I think some of the old people are very fearless and militant and know they are right on their home territory, but find the big meetings very difficult. They also tend not to do the public speaking, the media work and so on. People are always telling me that the older people are scared of speaking up or doing anything because of the repression under Franco, which sometimes I find a bit strange (he died when I was two, come on) but I think it is a genuine factor.
I think, as you suggest, that we could come up with lots of different ways to involve people that they will feel comfortable with. In my block we have a big division of labour (one guy always speaks publicly, I do the cooking and the flyposting...) but the last fortnight we really did start to break it down, and this weekend we went to an event and every single person did something.
I think personally I have been too nervous of going up to the people from the other neighbourhoods and just sitting with them and speaking to them, as I think they will judge me as an outsider, but I think I just have to stop worrying about that. Recently I´ve been trying to do it and it really works.
Please keep writing everybody, this is really helpful. And tell me what is most interesting for you to know about our struggle and I will try to describe it.
Jun 22 2009 10:21
#9
I agree with what people have written above, and have a couple of quick thoughts.
In terms of trying to increase participation in meetings, organising them well is very important, and making sure that they are actually worth while, so that decisions that get made actually get followed through is as well.
So like people suggested, having a facilitator or chair with an agenda to go through, who should try to encourage those who haven't said much to contribute, and stop the more dominant personalities from controlling the meeting.
Also, making sure that minutes are taken, these don't have to be long and detailed, you just have to record key decisions and action points - what was decided it needed to be done, who was going to do it, and by when.
Then the facilitator can follow these actions up in the future.
Jun 22 2009 13:49
#10
I think that there was something interesting said here: there are lots of older women doing a lot of work, who know lots of things, are really valuable to the movement - but then when it comes to meetings, they are quiet and lots of political leaders, all men, talk.
I think that in this situation, the responsibility for changing things has to fall on these political "leaders" - if they really are "leaders", they have to come to understand that they will get better results in the long run by creating a less hierarchized structure. I would talk to them about this subject.
I know a couple of people like this, and the worst situation is when somebody is really loud, doesn't want to pause and doesn't even let people break in when they try. I recently ran into people who I could not, short of physical violence or screaming, get a word in with, despite the fact that I'm not at all shy. So if I can't really do it, somebody less outspoken than I has no chance in hell. It's also problematic if two or three people keep going back and forth and the conversation doesn't move.
I like fairly relaxed meetings and do not believe that every meeting needs a facilitator, but certainly if you have noticed such problems, you DEFINITELY need a facilitator AND that person must have a little bit of training / experience with it, because a facilitator who cannot control people who dominate everything is not useful. Also, a facilitator should not be allowed to abuse the facilitation - for example I've seen ones that comment on things before giving the next person the chance to speak. So people who have a tendency to dominate meetings and are clueless to the existance of others should not really be encouraged to facilitate even though they often volunteer. 
))
Jun 22 2009 19:43
#11
Hello everybody
Thanks for taking the time to write about this, I really appreciate all the advice. Well, facilitation, this is a bit of a tough one as I did raise this with the leaders but they dismissed it basically, so I don´t know where I go from here.... I will try to think of a way to raise this again without getting everybody´s backs up.
Laurakai, you have written such a perfect description how some people behave in our group, its scary!
I´m making a list of the main ideas to translate and then take to the next meeting of my block, to see what we can do with them.
Muchas gracias compañeros!
Jun 22 2009 19:58
#12
Hope this isn´t too long but I´ve written a little description of the main groups involved. Hope it´s interesting, tell me what kind of stuff you want to know.
Pumarejo- this is an eighteenth century building in a poor but gentrifying bit of the historic centre of Seville. It´s the old style- flats around a central patio. Absolutely gorgeous but in bad repair with scaffolding everywhere. Nine years ago the owner wanted to evict all the tenants and build a luxury hotel. The tenants started a campaign and squatted the empty bits of the building to make a neighbourhood centre and a room for meetings. This place is now used by dozens of different groups and is one of the focal points for political activity in Seville. The hotel idea is now a dodo and the city council is negotiating to buy the building off the landlord, but they won´t do any repairs until they´ve finished the negotiations so the people are kind of in limbo.
San Bernardo- The granny squatters. Four years ago a group of old people who were in a gentrifying bit of Seville decided to squat empty flats belonging to the state. Their own flats, which are rented, were in such a state they were unlivable- really unlivable. The landlord was refusing to do repairs so he can make the tenants move out and then make a fortune with the flats. So people from the squatting movement went and opened up these empty, brand new, state owned flats which had been sitting empty for three years and the old people moved in. The squats are just palacial. There was a big struggle, standoffs with the police and the police were blocking food and water from being taken in! Now some of them have 5 year tenancies but some of them have court cases for eviction. The women from this squat are absolutely brilliant, if you can get them to sit down over a glass of sherry and tell you about their grandads working in the cigar factory where they set ´Carmen´ it´s unmissable.
Begoña- this is me. The neighbourhood is poor but just starting to get more expensive. It is in northeast Seville and a working class neighbourhood with lots of immigrants. The flats have little symbols of the Falange above the doors as they were built by the Francoist state in the fifties. Now it´s owned by a private landlord. The landlord said two years ago that all the tenants had to leave because he wants to sell the flats. There were a lot of tenants involved in the struggle but when they got papers for eviction they were frightened and moved out withhout resisting. You don´t need to chain yourself to the door to resist, just don´t move out and make them take you to court, which takes ages, but they were afraid and didn´t think they could get anywhere by struggling and they moved out. So now only the obstinate and the desperate are left. I moved in 9 months ago as a subtenant but now I´m squatting. We started to squat flats in October. We have squatted seven flats but three have been evicted and we have courtcases with potentially big fines. One of the squatters was the son of a neighbour, who squatted the flat next door to his mum! One of the tenants is in her eighties, one is a single mum and a cleaner and will not be able to afford market rent anywhere.
Bacchiera- A shanty town built in the sixties, the people living there have some kind of legal status (it´s difficult for me to understand I´m sorry, it´s a very different legal system). They have had stability for a while so they have improved the houses and infrastructure and the shanty town looks quite pretty. About sixty families live there. The city council wants to build a road through the middle which will mean evictions. Also a lot of the houses are too small for the families that live in them and some are in bad disrepair. They are very hot in summer and very cold in winter. The community spirit here is very good but the head of the official residents association is one of those people who blocks any autonomous action- he just wants to talk to polititians and thinks that they are listening to him so he is putting down the residents who want to do things differently. The squatters from Begonia have been going there at weekends to help do up the kids´ playground, which is a tip. We have painted it and made a mosaic.
Jun 24 2009 21:06
#13
To make this discussion more useful to everyone else, (it´s been very useful to me, thanks) how about we open it up and people write about housing struggles they were in and what went well and what went badly?
Jun 25 2009 09:57
#14
This is a great thread, and was very interesting to hear about the gropus involved in Seville. What seems particularly impressive is the way you have linked up these different groups together - tenants, squatters, a shantytown, and from different parts of the city. In my experience this is pretty unusual - people in one area with the same tenure conditions and issues uniting can be hard enough, so to make these kinds of links is a great achievement. Certainly keeping momentum up can be really hard, but it sounds like great work.
To broaden the discussion - I've been involved in quite a few housing struggles in different settings. I started by helping organising a tenant association on the council estate where i lived in central london (this was about 11 years ago now) and from there got very involved in housing activism in London and the UK. More recently I've been living and working in shantytowns in Brazil, so I can say a bit about a very different kind of housing situation there.
On the positive side, I have seen and been part of some inspiring victories. The tenants association I helped start won a lot of the battles we faced. We managed to create a very strong association - our first meetings were packed out with over 100 people, and we got the landlord (our local council, LB Islington) on the run, basically we forced them to do repairs and eventually by constant harassment, publicity stunts and grabbing all the local press attention we could. To the poin that they eventually relandscaped the whole estate, built new sports facilities and a social centre etc. Our position was quite simple - we pay rents that more than cover the services you provide as a landlord, so we demand our due. Because of the serious problems on the estate (disrepair but also big social issues) there was a lot of anger and energy for change from tenants, so it wasn't hard to build up a momentum that got the council running scared until they were forced to meet our demands.
This was around the end of the 90s to 2000, which was when the labour government in the UK started pushing a big new plan for council housing - "stock transfer", or privatisation. I.e., their argument was that local councils couldn't afford to do repairs, so housing would have to be sold to "social landlords", supposely non-profit private landlords, who would be freer than local government to borrow the money to do the work on private capital markets. This was proposed to council tenants as the "only solution" to get repairs done after years of neglect by landlords. What wasn't said was that the consequences would be higher rents and less secure tenancy agreements.
Well there is masses to say about the council housing and anti-privatisation fights in UK over the last 10 years - which may well have already been said on other threads here. It was an important focus of activity for a lot of activists living in council housing, including a few anarchists (though plenty more trots, for sure - though plenty of people too who weren't members of any party). I'll just say that in my own experience we had some solid successes where I lived. The council employed consultants and spend hundreds of thousands to get tenants to support privatisation (in stock transfer schemes there is usually a legal requirement that tenants have to vote in favour). We took them on with a few photocopied leaflets and talking a lot on doorsteps and fought them off in most of our part of London. Of course they keep coming back and have much more resources than we can muster ... and I've been out of the UK for a few years now so I can't talk about recent developments.
The key thing for me was that we demonstrated that groups of tenants uniting and forcing our landlords to meet their responsibilities could get what we needed. Little examples of successful collective action on a local scale. Then trying to spread the word to other areas that were under threat, with leaflets, public meetings, stalls, events, but mainly lots of just going knocking on peoples' doors and talking about our experiences face to face.
I'll emphasise that point about knocking on doors - meetings are one thing, but yes they very often do get dominated by the most vocal and most confident. I think it can be important also to meet people in other settings, and to talk one to one. Going to see people in their own homes and talking over a cup of tea (or glass of manzanilla) can be invaluable and bring you into contact with other people you never thought of. Or try meetings of different kinds, different times of day, combined with play stuff for kids, ...
Basically in council housing struggles in the UK we are standing on rights that had already been won by previous generations of working class militancy, and now the state is trying to take back. The situation in Brasil is clearly very different. The centre-left PT government is just starting some steps to grant formal land rights to people in the more established favelas. In any case, formal or not, the favelas are allowed to survive on sufferance, but it's a delicate balance - maybe a quarter of the population in Rio live in favelas (I don't know in other cities) so there is no way the government can push mass evictions. There are still small scale evictions of newer settlements, but no major policy of eviction since the 60s really, and the favelas just keep on growing.
Within the favelas there is an informal property rights system that's simply a copy of the one in the formal world. People own their own homes or rent privately. There is a normal property market in bigger favelas, including slum landlords and all. In more established favelas the residents associations act as a kind of planning authority and issue residents permits to recognise property claims. The formalisation schemes going on now involve the government working with these residents associations and officially stamping their registers.
I can't speak for all of Rio or Brasil at all, but from what I saw there is very little organisation by residents to fight for improvement in housing conditions. There is a lot of corruption, and residents associations are very bought off and pretty much little mini-bureaucracies within. They take money from the city council and run services like street cleaning for it, positions like president of the residents association are powerful and come with financial interests, and are contested in elections. There is also the whole other big question of the power of the criminal factions and state-backed militias.
There is one big positive thing though I will say about what I learned from favela activism, which I think housing activists in the first world could learn from. When the state gives sod all, communities know well that the only way they can get improvements in their living conditions is to do it themselves. So if you want a new football pitch maybe you talk to your friends and neighbours and meet every sunday and clear a bit of land together and build one. There are strong community ties and people are used to doing this kind of work together - the streets, the houses, the social areas, whatever, are built directly by residents themselves with their friends and neighbours.
So, one comparison - in the UK I'd say there is a tradition of rights and of organising to defend those rights, with trade unions, tenants movements, etc. Brazil has little of that culture of "political" organisation - a very different history of slavery, extreme poverty and dictatorship. But instead very stong community, and culture of mutual aid and "do it yourself" that goes way beyond what's usual in the UK.
There are also a lot of similarities though. In both cases I'd say one of the main problems is institutionalisation, and corruption, of residents organisation. E.g., the privatisation struggles we lost in London, i'd say were very often lost because areas have fallen under political control of crony gangs of tenants who become part of the local political machine.
On the positive, the point I'd emphasise is that the communities we live in actually contain a wealth of experience, skill and possibility for activism. It always amazed me how often I'd knock on peoples' doors on one campaign or another and meet someone who had been a militant in the past, involved in some old rent strike or whatever, or had some skill to offer. It's true that people get burnt out and hopes can easily turn to disappointment. But if you can spark a bit of hope again and show your neighbours that someone is organising something, then you may help bring all this potential militancy back to life.
I think the best way to encourage people to get involved is usually to give examples of real concrete successes - most people stay away because they think action will have no results, or even negative ones. So e.g., if you have a victory in one area, even just something small like getting a repair done or a rent frozen for a while, then spread the word of that to other areas, which shows people they can achieve real victories too by collective action. I wouldn't expect to build a mass movement - there will be great moments, and lots of other times where it seems no one gives a damn. Maybe your group achieves something then disappears again - that happens a lot. For me personally the being an activist is about spreading hopes and possibilities, sharing experiences and creating links, and seeing what comes out of it - which may be very different from what you expected.
Jun 26 2009 10:07
#15
Hi Fingers lovely to have you on board. How does the CNT locally relate to the BenL? Are they active in the struggle? As you know they are good folks, but i know that, that in Spain different groups tend to colloese around certain issues and they can be little meaningful commincation and at times a bit of 'this is my turf' thinking going on.
Jun 26 2009 13:27
#16
Good question. There are two people who live in the affected neighbourhoods who are members of the CNT, me and another guy, and we are both pretty active in our barrios and in BenL. When we have a demo or an action a couple of other people from my section usually show up. If I´ve asked for help with some concrete thing (to help me write a leaflet in Spanish, for example) I´ve always got it. When we had the big camp outside the town hall for the weekend loads of people popped by. So- supportive but I wouldn´t say really active. People take an interest, everybody always asks how things are going, stuff like that. I´ve asked people their opinion and they say it would be really good to be more involved in other stuff that isn´t just workplace stuff but that nobody has the time. I think if we were more active, people would also be more interested, as there would be more to be interested in.
Compared to other unions... there are a couple of people from the CGT I´ve seen at meetings and a couple that live in the barrios. Bearing in mind if someone from the CNT turns up on a demo I´ll recognise them and if someone from the CGT turns up I probably won´t. The other radical unions (SOC, SAT, etc) as far as I know aren´t involved, of course I don´t know who´s who necessarily. The mainstream unions of course aren´t interested at all.
More general political interest- some politician from the Communist Party turned up once at our barrio meeting and lectured us about the crisis for half an hour, which is just what I need after a 12 hour working day in midwinter. Some people have been spending a lot of time trying to get help from the Communist Party but they aren´t doing anything to help us as far as I can see. It´s not exactly the Communist Party, it´s a coalition called Izquierda Unida which is in coalition government with the PSOE in the local government here. We got quite a bit of support from a small trotskyist group at one point, but then they got busy with the Euroelections.
Really our big support is from the squatting movement and associated autonomous or whatever movement. They are who turn out en masse for demos, make the banners, bring the cooker... I thought that there would be more animosity from tenants to squatters, but there doesn´t seem to be. Maybe people are pragmatic and can see who helps them and who doesn´t, and we really need the help.
Hey, great post. I don't have time for a detailed response here, but I did think that this article might be useful reading, about a housing occupation in Germany and its internal dynamics:
http://libcom.org/library/cologne-occupation-of-the-barmer-block-housing-estate-2006-wildcat
I will try to chase up the authors and see if they have any advice for you