rent strikes

What follows is a brief and rather belated update on the East Hamilton Rent Strike, a seven-month campaign waged by tenants of the Stoney Creek Towers against their landlord, InterRent Real Estate Investment Trust and property manager, CLV Group.

Members of the Holgate Manor Tenant Union in Portland are now in the third month of their rent strike against Princeton Property Management and their California landlord, millionaire Fred Kleinbub, who have largely failed to meet the union’s demands.

Last weekend, striking tenants from the Stoney Creek Towers in Hamilton trekked to Ottawa with their supporters to confront the executives from InterRent, a Real Estate Investment Trust with an investment strategy based around displacing working-class tenants from their neighbourhoods.

This pamphlet poses a set of provocations to the contemporary tenants’ movement. The provocations are "Some Communist Theses for the Tenants' Movement" and "Abolish Rent, a note." As the pamphlet title declares, the provocation focuses on the proposition that “abolish rent” should be the slogan upon which militants promote a distinction in the movement between anarchists/communists and social democrats, toward the end of building a revolutionary tenants’ movement. (Not here, but to-be included in a future iteration, is an in-progress "Annotated Bibliography of Rent Abolitionist Tactics")