Rent strikes

112 years ago, in the last months of 1907, a spirit of struggle and activism spread among the impoverished working-class tenants of several multicultural neighborhoods in New York and Buenos Aires. Although most of the participants were unaware of the events taking place more than 8,500 km away, both strikes had many things in common. Thousands of tenants, many of them migrants, with a strong prominence of women, acted together in order to put an end to the voracious and predatory rule of landlords. They all had to face attacks from the media and the state-they all had to build on their experiences of resistance in order to develop the necessary organizational resources to accomplish their goals. Both labor and social historiography paid some attention to tenants' strikes throughout history, but comparative studies are still very scarce. Case studies are extremely important to help us understand the peculiarities of past struggles, but broader and more comprehensive assessments are also critical to evaluate the general trends that shaped working-class resistance in different times and places. Moreover, as shown by recent developments in Global Labor History, it is important to include the so-called Global South into the picture to avoid a kind of labor history that all too often was exclusively focused on events in Europe and the United States. Drawing upon a variety of secondary and primary sources, this paper develops a study of the tenants' strikes that took place in 1907-1908, with a difference of some months, in Buenos Aires and New York. It focuses on the peculiarities of urban development and working-class formation in both cities in those early years of the 20th century, in the motley population that filled its tenement houses and conventillos, in the role played by socialist and anarchist organizers, in the reaction of the state and the ruling class towards the tenants' struggles. It will pay special attention to the prominent role played, in both cases, by migrant workers and women. Its goal is to highlight similarities and differences of these two cases of tenants' strikes in the North and the South, in order to enrich our understanding of the global historical roots of the ongoing struggle against landlords and capitalist market forces.

Britain and Ireland are in the grip of an entrenched and escalating housing crisis. This book exposes the causes and consequences of that crisis, revealing its more permanent character, and showing how tenants and residents have been challenging it. The book was inspired by the centenary of the 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, which played a decisive role in establishing rent controls in Britain for the first time and ultimately forcing the government to introduce public housing provision in 1919. It reexamines this formative moment of tenant organization in light of new empirical research and new theoretical understandings, exploring its relevance through a largely hidden continuum of tenant struggles following 1915 and through multiple contemporary case studies from the most significant housing struggles in Britain and Ireland today. The primary focus is on the particular context of Britain and Ireland, 1 but given the depth of the housing crisis across multiple borders, these studies will resonate with those attempting to comprehend and contest housing tyranny internationally. Here, I provide a brief historical overview of rent unrest in Britain and Ireland, focusing initially on the 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow but also on the many, largely hidden, tenant and resident struggles in the sphere of social reproduction before, during and after 1915. Such a summary is politically vital because the labour movement and related trade unions have often viewed the housing question as merely secondary to workplace struggles in the sphere of direct production (see Moorehouse et al. 1972; Sklair 1975; Englander 1983; Bradley 2014). Yet, as Bunge (1977) observes, it is precisely on the 'second front' of social reproduction that the everyday life of the working class (in all its diverse dimensions) is located. Exploring this blind spot is all the more crucial because the capacity for radical change in the workplace

Recent scholarship on civil disobedience in Northern Ireland primarily focuses on the immediate period before the breakout of violence in 1969, and in some cases, on the mass protests of the late 1970s around the H-Block/Armagh prison protests. This paper attempts to fill the gap between these two periods in its analysis of the rent and rates strike of the early 1970s, which was initiated in response to the re-introduction of internment without trial. In doing so, it positions itself against simplistic approaches towards civil disobedience as either oppositional, or causally linked, to armed struggle. Instead, it probes the complexity of its relationship to armed struggle in relation to the Northern Irish and British state's security policies.

In 2016, the Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh published an anthology of 'May Day essays'. These " occasional " essays cover broad themes that link together temporally and spatially disparate events. This paper seeks to extract the theories that underpin these texts as part of a practical attempt to outline a framework for future 'May Day essays'. Beginning with a detailed explanation of the rationale underpinning the paper, sections examine several key essays from the anthology. In doping so, the meaning of Linebaugh's May Day is outlined and the characteristics of a May Day essay are defined, before two key models are examined in an attempt to outline them as coherent theories. A close reading of the essay May Day with Heart is then undertaken to draw stylistic guidelines from a complex text. The conclusion briefly examines a 'May Day essay' themed around housing struggles drafted using the framework outlined in this paper.

Using spatial composition analysis, I aim to show the ongoing relevance of the 1915 Rent Strikes by situating them within wider concerns over social reproduction and rent; concerns which have often been obscured historically by the theoretical separation of productive and reproductive spheres. Manuel Castells (1983) typifies a certain reading of the Rent Strikes within the Marxist tradition, designating housing and social reproductive struggles as a secondary contradiction behind the primary contradiction of workplace struggle. With this analytical framework, the ongoing relevance of women-led direct action by tenants in the Rent Strikes has often been relegated behind a ‘forward march of labour’ that has since lost its way in the factory desert.

Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.

This article deals with Alain Badiou’s practical and theoretical engagements with the SONACOTRA rent strike, which ran from 1975 to 1979 and mobilized tens of thousands of immigrant workers across France. Drawing on the work Histoire politique du mouvement des foyers Sonacotra, a retrospective study written collectively by members of Badiou’s Maoist group L’Union des communistes de France marxistes-léninistes, we demonstrate how the practical stakes of the movement were taken up in philosophical form in the contemporaneous text Theory of the Subject. Finally, we suggest that this interweaving of practice and theory is an exemplary instance of Badiou’s conception of politics as the immanent construction of a universal—a conception that links Badiou’s Maoist engagements with his current philosophical and political commitments, from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds.

This paper is a companion to the author's Hooray, Hooray, The First Of May: Sketching A Theory Of Peter Linebaugh's May Day (2017). Drafted to demonstrably implement the findings uncovered in that study, this 'occasional' essay retells the narratives of the rent strikes in St Pancras (1960) and University College London (2015), alongside resistance to the M11 motorway (1994). The theoretical framework used to link these temporally and spatially distinct narratives was developed from a close reading of several essays published in Linebaugh's The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day (2016). These theories are outlined in the companion paper. Here, Linebaugh's model of a red and green May Day structures the essay, drawing on the ancient festival of fertility and the modern celebration of class struggle respectively, and the narratives are linked directly to resisting exploitation and expropriation. Stylistic techniques observed in Linebaugh's work are also replicated.

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

Against a backdrop of unaffordable housing, students from University College London (UCL) undertook rent strikes that won concessions from University landlords. This paper examines one of the first UCL strikes - the dispute at Campbell House Halls of Residence.

The UCL, Cut the Rent (UCL,CTR) group was arguably crucial in this struggle. One of the outward facing tools for organising was the Facebook page - and this paper begins by presenting an account of the strike assembled solely from material posted on this page.

The process of assembling this account is outlined, describing the criteria for inclusion as a source, before drawing on Walter Benjamin and Steven J. Jackson to present the epistemological position that underpins the paper. The historiographical concerns that arise from this process are explored, with Eric Hobsbawm's lecture 'The Present as History' referenced as a basis for these discussions.

Feedback on the account by the minority of UCL,CTR activists who engaged with the researcher highlights a desire to construct an accurate narrative - albeit from differing motivations. Finally the narrative presented is closely examined and gaps in the account are highlighted. To demonstrate the limitations of the methodology, these gaps are addressed using material from oral history interviews.

For a long time now, the sociology of social movements has preferred to historicize the protest process rather than analyze its spatial and localized dimension. Using the example of the “rent strikes” in SONACOTRA households in the 1970s, this paper demonstrates the importance of putting collective action in the context of its physical environment. Although space must be reintroduced as a central dimension in collective action, this can only be done by examining the mechanisms used by individuals and groups in interaction with the space and the places they create, manage, or occupy. In fact, understanding how this particular game affects collective action is only possible through a localized analysis of the social strategies for creating, appropriating, and reappropriating space.

Against a backdrop of unaffordable housing, students from University College London (UCL) undertook rent strikes that won concessions from University landlords. This paper examines one of the first UCL strikes-the dispute at Campbell House Halls of Residence. The UCL, Cut the Rent (UCL,CTR) group was arguably crucial in this struggle. One of the outward facing tools for organising was the Facebook page-and this paper begins by presenting an account of the strike assembled solely from material posted on this page. The process of assembling this account is outlined, describing the criteria for inclusion as a source, before drawing on Walter Benjamin and Steven J. Jackson to present the epistemological position that underpins the paper. The historiographical concerns that arise from this process are explored, with Eric Hobsbawm's lecture 'The Present as History' referenced as a basis for these discussions Feedback on the account by the minority of UCL,CTR activists who enga...