Jeff Roberson/AP Photo
The words ‘Rent Strike 4 Ever’ are written in large letters on the side of the Compton Hill Reservoir wall, April 2, 2020, in St. Louis.
Not since the 1930s has America seen the combination of working-class vulnerability and working-class militance that we’re beginning to see today.
Tomorrow, we’ll see what may likely be the first nationwide rent strike in our history. We’ve had plenty of rent strikes before, of course, but they usually are limited to a single building or group of buildings owned by a particularly negligent and abusive landlord. During the Great Depression, however, such actions occasionally expanded across whole neighborhoods where a pervasive loss of income led to an equally pervasive inability to make the rent. Such spontaneous, self-organized actions as urban rent strikes, farmer mobilizations (sometimes at gunpoint) to prevent evictions and property seizures, and neighbors’ restoration of water and power to homes that had been cut off were common. In a few big cities, neighborhood rent strikes, such as those in Harlem, were organized by a combination of local tenants and such radical organizations as the Communist Party.
The two groundbreaking aspects of tomorrow’s rent strike are its nationwide scale, and the fact that it’s been organized by local tenants and many mainstream militant working-class organizations—that is, groups without an avowedly revolutionary ideology.
Initiated by the Action Center on Race and the Economy, the organizing sponsors include the union-backed Jobs With Justice; such ACORN-successor community groups as the Center for Popular Democracy, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and New York Communities for Change (which initiated the Fight for $15); the living-wage/worker-power advocacy group Partnership for Working Families; the labor militants of Bargaining for the Common Good; People’s Action Homes Guarantee; and a host of local tenant groups.
In a joint statement, the groups demand rent and mortgage payment cancellation and a halt to foreclosures and evictions for the duration of the pandemic, and measures to block major investors, private equity firms, and the like from buying up properties in economically damaged communities, as happened on a massive scale during the foreclosure crisis that followed the 2008 crash. The statement says that 31 percent of tenants failed to pay some or all of their April rent—certainly a possibility in a nation where 30 million workers have filed for unemployment in the past five weeks—and that the number of tenants who have signed up to join the rent strike exceeds 180,000.
Over the course of the Great Depression, the tenant organizations and leagues of the unemployed won occasional local victories over specific demands, but failed to become ongoing institutions. They did help create a more militant zeitgeist, however, and as such helped form a climate in which other militant working-class organizations—unions—arose to become ongoing and, for decades, effective organizations that won power for the nation’s working class.
A similar dynamic is conceivable today. We shall see.
