Praxis (Glasgow)

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Do residents have any role to play in the development of a mass revolutionary movement? As socialists we aim to establish workers control of the means of production. This must be carried out by a mass movement of the working class if it is to be achieved. That requires a mass movement based in our workplaces and communities, so it is worthwhile addressing the question – do residents associations have any role to play in the development of such a movement? If they do what then should be our involvement in these bodies and at what points do these bodies intersect with class struggles, and based on their history what potentialities do they present to us as socialist militants, and what factors are shaping the future direction of residents associations today?

What they are

First off we’ll start with some definitions – the term residents association refers to an organised group of local residents in a specific area. There are numerous different forms such a body can take. However all such bodies share certain principles in common. They aim to represent the interests of a neighbourhood, or group of people in an area, improve the quality of life of those people and achieve what they perceive to be positive advancements for the given areas residents in a variety of different fields. What is also common to all residents associations is that they are voluntary bodies, which do not employ staff, are not contractual arms of the state, or a voluntary sector enterprises, and exist solely as voluntaristic bodies functioning in the community, in some respects, as unions and professional associations do for workers in the workplace with varying degrees of success. Throughout reference is made to residents associations and ‘community unions’ (which in effect residents associations are) interchangeably.

Some types of residents associations which readers may have come across are tenants and residents associations (usually in areas of high tenant occupancy, as opposed to home ownership), neighbourhood associations (usually in North America), block committees (which represent groups of people living in a block of flats for instance), wider residents associations like community councils (which aim to form a quasi-governmental consultative function, and so forth. The list and possible permutations is quite large, and not all residents associations carry out activities which as socialists we might feel entirely comfortable with, but it is important for our purposes to understand the intersections these organisations make with the class struggle.

Popular Struggles

Many ways in which residents associations operate lead to them forming the base organisations for mass popular struggles. In Glasgow in 2005 local tenants and residents associations (traditional residents associations in areas of high tenant occupancy) fought the Glasgow Housing Association – the city’s major ‘social’ landlord, and the biggest of its type in Europe, which came into being following stock transfer [1] of the city’s council housing – to a standstill over plans by the Housing Association [2] to remove concierge provision in tower blocks [3]. The removal of the concierge system was widely ssen as anticipating the GHA’s moves to demolish 30,000 homes out of its 80,000 stock because it would have inevitably caused increased anti-social behaviour with increasing isolation of vulnerable tenants and a flight from these areas of everyone who could afford to leave (as could be seen through the experience of neighbouring town Clydebank which does not have concierge provision). This demolition plan itself is and remains part of governmental and multi-agancy masterplan to develop much of inner city Glasgow for luxury housing marketed at yuppies. Ex-Council housing schemes and those that live in them stand in the way of that agenda and as such the victory here was part of an overall pattern of resistance to the neoliberal restructuring of Glasgow, as well as a popular victory in its own right. It was a struggle fought not exclusively by residents associations (the GMB union also objected to the plans and took an active role in opposing them), but the intersection of this growing community struggle with trade union activity was what led to victory. The GHA caved in and then claimed it had never planned to do away with the concierge service at all. This is just one recent example of residents associations playing a leading role in the class struggle, others in Glasgow alone include the role of some residents associations in supporting the campaign against 28 local primary school closures, or in the campaign against the privatisation of social housing. Indeed some local residents associations in Glasgow have been active in opposing sheriff officers from entering the homes of local right-to-buy [4] homeowners who have refused the GHA access to their property to carry out unwanted works. Badly organised and incohesive as it is Glasgow’s residents association movement is one of the more likely places where mass struggle in the community is likely to issue from. Indeed active local residents associations are often more noticeable in their absence.

When you’re down

In areas with no active local residents associations, it is more common to see unwanted developments waived through without objection, to see large-scale privatisations succeed unchallenged, and to see crime and poverty of the lived environment spiral out of control. Areas such as Possil in NorthWest Glasgow are often desperate and hopeless. Without the civic participation and positive differences residents associations can make, in areas of poverty people with the capacity to do so are far more inclined just to up sticks and leave; indeed for a number of people living on deprived housing estates that’s a lifegoal. Many of us are acutely aware of this through our own experience. However where this intersects with social struggles and ceases to be about hard luck stories is that, as we have said, poor areas which have no locally accountable bodies to fight for their interests are the most likely to have things done to them, and usually that involves shafting the already proportionally shafted a wee bit more. Add into this the fact that without locally accountable and controlled bodies like residents associations, when struggles do emerge they are often badly organised. Participants, particularly in areas of low life expectancy and long-term chronic unemployment, often have no background in trade union activity to apply to struggles, and are often confused as to the modalities of how to move things forward. This leaves the ground open to community campaigns from areas without residents associations to be hijacked by political organisations who are not interested in the long term success or victory of these campaigns. Once the campaign is over there is also the problem that without a continuing local residents association the experience and political savvy gained from participating in a popular struggle can be dissipated or lost altogether if it is not ‘invested’ in a long term community representative body. In Glasgow in recent times we have seen the crushing of independent tenants organisation precede with calculated poise the privatisation of the city’s council housing [5]. This has been a disaster for the working class as a whole. The retrenchment of public housing represents one of the most fundamental attacks on the gains of the class made in the 20th century, perhaps, although it may prove unpopular to say, in fact just as much of an assault on our gains as those made on the labour movement. Unesco for example notes that, “In most large cities in the developing world, the formal market serves only a minority of the population. It is estimated that between 30 and 70% live in ‘irregular’ settlements and that up to 85% of the new housing stock is produced in an extra-legal manner.”(1) That could just as well have been true of Glasgow up until the 1940s, where vast numbers of people lived in slums, many in ‘illegally’ overcrowded “backlands” and housing not so dissimilar to that more common in ‘the developing world.’ In the 19th and early 20th centuries the Gorbals in Glasgow was one of the most populace places on the planet with 90,000 people living where there are now much less than 15,000 (2). Public Housing, which is being lost at an alarming rate, eliminated this completely in the UK and was one of the major factors in the social democratic settlement, and had been one of the major demands of reformers and revolutionaries in the run up to it. Before public housing it was common to find over 100 people living per hectare in Glasgow (3). That ruling class victory was made possible due in part to the failure of residents association organisation throughout the city, and the policies of successive Thatcherite governments. Like many other places in the UK, this allowed many housing estates to become such unpleasant places to live for many, that even widely held social democratic convictions against privatisation were set aside because things could hardly get worse (according to the Guardian newspaper, in 2003 1 per cent of the population of the UK suffered 59 per cent of all violent crime, 2 per cent of the population suffered 41 per cent of all property crime, and a lone 18-year-old woman with a child was more than five times more likely than the average victim to suffer from crime; most crime is carried out within 1.8 miles of the perpetrators home – the vast majority of that is in housing schemes(4). There is no reason why things need be like that. With strong and active residents association in housing schemes a lot of social problems can be overcome, and moreover an actual capacity for engaging in struggles, not just against the tide of neoliberal cuts and privatisations but actually for improved housing and social conditions can in fact be won if a residents association movement is well organised. Experience however shows that in the current climate this is not likely to happen without sustained development from committed radicals and reformers[6].

In the past

Indeed it is among the poorest housing conditions and the poorest individuals where residents associations draw some of their more radical history. Council housing in Glasgow and much of the rest UK owes much to the struggles of, primarily women run and operated residents associations and committees during the rent strike, which was one of the major struggles fought during the, 1910 to 1932, Red Clydeside period (“At the height of the rent strikes all of the main munitions districts of Glasgow, including Partick, Govan, Shettleston, Ibrox and Parkhead, were affected, and upwards of 20,000 tenants where involved in the campaign of non-payment of rents. By December 1915, with the threat to war production on the Clyde uppermost in their minds, the government led by Lloyd-George was forced to introduce legislation which not only prevented further rent increases in munitions districts but also established rent levels at pre-war levels for the duration of hostilities.”(5)). The success of this struggle and wider housing agitation led to the formation of the Scottish Tenants Organisation, which still exists today despite government attacks [7], and a consensus in the political classes that council housing had to be built across the UK, to prevent further agitation. Much of this agitation derived from slum dwellers, in areas with chronic social problems; in 1915 the average density of housing was 100 people per hectare.

A crowd gathers in Partick to resist Sheriff Officers, 1915

Indeed it could fairly be said that housing struggles, were to play a role in politicizing a generation. It is through struggles such as this, which were born out of residents associations, that socialist fighters such as John MacLean came to the fore. Furthermore the high profile of the struggle enabled labour agitation through the rank and file Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) to be combined with community agitation. This lent credence to both, and built a community based movement which was able to succeed (“The success of the rent strikes of 1915 was made possible by the fusion of female-led community agitation, the political leadership of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and the support of the skilled workers in the munitions industries [8]. It was this triple alliance which enabled the working class of Glasgow to achieve their victory over the landlords”(6)). Undoubtedly then residents associations can have a role to play in revolutionary movements, as they provide an organizational backbone and capacity to sustain longterm mass struggles, as well as being a locally accountable form of organization. This example, of the successful Glasgow Rent Strike, is in fact illustrative of what happens when movements of this nature and composition ‘work’ leading us onto the next point.

The success of the Glasgow Rent Strike shows the pivotal nature of socialist involvement in the residents movement. It was this involvement which led to the munitions workers of the CWC getting involved in the rent strike (most rent strikers were not munitions workers). It is here too in modern times where socialist involvement, particularly platformist involvement may prove to be important. Many residents groups exist in isolation of one another. They have a natural tendency to deal with their own parochial issues, for obvious reasons, and they must avoid being seen to take a different political stance from those in the neighbourhood they represent or run the risk of losing the popular support where they draw their ‘mass’ strength from. If they don’t do that they run the risk of becoming a local political organization. It is therefore vital for developing a wider movement to have the active involvement of socialists to make the case for why we might need a wider movement. It is also doubly important to have a platformist voice at this formative stage because, just as in the trade union movement there are different ideas about how to organize – some of which will guarantee that an organization behaves as a flexible outfit capable of taking on The Man and winning, some of which will lead organizations to adopt a partnership approach or one much less likely to lead to local victories. If an anti-partnership independent approach to representing communities, whose modus operandi are directly democratic is not the dominant paradigm then residents associations risk making the mistakes of the past again afresh [9] as they start to regroup in wake of societal changes.

The context today

In the UK now is a critical time for the future development of independent resident associations. The government in Scotland has brought in a system of accreditation for tenants and residents associations, the idea being that the Registered Tenant Organisations (as they are known) will have the right to be consulted and air their views, but that they must also register with their landlord, keep audited books, adopt the government’s chosen constitution and run the risk of being de-registered should they choose to air their views too much, all in return for a tiny sum of money. This has been enough effectively to stifle many conservative residents groups from being vocally critical of housing policies. In some places this agenda has gone very far. As I wrote in another piece on this issue:-

“In Maryhill the tenants association for the Kilmun street area, which existed for some 25 years or more was asked by the local housing manager if they might consider ‘winding up’. The rationale was that the housing manager knew that shortly compulsory purchase orders would be made on a number of houses, in order to facilitate demolition. He expected some resistance, and wanted to see the tenants association wound up so that nobody from the scheme would join it and cause problems. In the following meeting the association was duly wound up. You have to wonder… A year later we have the situation in the Cumlodden estate, where a mass meeting of tenants decided that they wanted to reject the GHA’s plans to carry out less work on their houses than they had previously promised. During the meeting the chair of the local tenants association, obviously embarrassed, said she would have to consult with the housing officers to see if they were technically allowed to go on record as making such a demand to their landlord. Crazy.”

The overall national backdrop Scotland-wide is even more concerning. In the run up to a wave of stock transfer ballots (the main way in which council housing is privatized) several years ago the government, it appears, smashed the Scottish Tenants Organisation, the national federation of tenants associations, which was critical of the policy. They now have a dedicated team of civil servants whose sole job is to construct 10 regional networks of tenants associations, only composed of Registered Tenants Organisations, to act as the STO’s ‘replacement’. While the STO is still in existence and is being gradually rebuilt, the government are at pains to refer to the organization as ‘the former STO’ and have refused to negotiate with anyone who isn’t part of the networks they are establishing (and ultimately control). This obviously has serious implications for the future independence, autonomy and practice of many residents associations, particularly those in social housing, but it is only one part of the picture. The British government state-wide is implementing new policies which entitle residents associations to issue anti-social behaviour orders. This goes hand in hand with other partnership agendas. It does not take a very profound social analyst to realize that the government in the UK is taking steps to neutralize the capacity of residents associations to act independently. There has been no leftist outcry against this, and it is coming in without fanfare or comment by and large, but it is coming. In effect the government in Britain is trying to engineer a paradigm shift in what is generally conceived of as a residents association, as they did with union registration in the 19th century, and early 20th centuries. Surely the hope from official circles is that in the future when issues arise and people seek to form a community union/residents association of some kind to defend their interests they find instead the ready-made formula handed down from the government, and a controlled network or federation of groups which operate a kind of social partnership in the community, is the only organizational paradigm available, thus neutralizing much of the remaining dissent in communities and isolating radical residents associations which actually fight for their communities. Now as an international picture perhaps some of this is not generalisable, but you can be sure that if the most sophisticated state in Europe at neutralizing domestic dissent is trying out something new, then the rest of Europe will soon follow suit. That means that now more than ever socialists ought to be involved in helping to build federations of local residents associations, which have at their core principles of independence and autonomy from the state and landlords and directly democratic procedural structures. When these mass bodies are built we can start to construct some kind of power for communities and win the arguments for our kind of politics. Without such bodies any revolutionary movement or popular struggle will be very weak and more easily coerced into the dead end of parliamentarism. With well established federations of local residents associations which work with trades councils, unions and workplace bodies we can start to begin the process of building some kind of popular power.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is in this popular power in the communities that residents associations can offer revolutionary movements. Clearly outside of rent struggles the modus operandi of residents association is not one that intersects directly with the point of production; as such community unions of any nature are not as straightforward to theorise as struggles in the workplace. They however a vital component of fighting for better lives for ordinary people. They are a training ground for popular struggles, and an organizational memory of the working class. They are latent capacity for social movements of all kinds, and they are a point at which workplace struggles and community struggles can meet and promulgate serious co-ordinated agitation (as we saw in Glasgow in 1915). What they are not however is sexy. Karl Marx never wrote that in the beginning there would be public meetings about the lift maintenance schedule in a tower block. Mikhail Bakunin never conspired with Nechayev about gaining control of the Grovepark Street Neighbourhood Association, and Lenin never ordered the liquidation of South Pollok Community Council. They are however one important part of building up people power and a movement for a popular democracy, and I would urge every committed socialist seriously concerned with developing dual power to get involved in their local residents association and work tirelessly to start joining the dots. The potential is there, what’s lacking is the vision, will and the programme to realize it.

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Explanatory notes – marked by [*]

1. Housing Stock Transfer is a government policy in the UK of transferring local authority controlled council housing over to Arms Length Management Organisations, or to Housing Associations. While it is rarely expressly stated in public the aim of this policy is to transfer control of what is now referred to as ‘social housing’ (a term coined by a Tory minister to obfuscate the differences between housing associations and municipal housing) over in full to the private sector. This process is furthest advanced in Glasgow, because the Scottish Executive elected to avoid the piecemeal transfer of selective chunks of housing over to housing associations and similar bodies and instead push through a raft of wholesale transfers.
2. The vehicle which is being used to transfer Glasgow’s 80,000 council houses, and 25,000 owner-occupied right-to-buy homes which the local authority factored, over to the private sector, is the purpose created quango, The Glasgow Housing Association. It is notionally the largest Housing Association in Europe, but in effect it is a clearing house as central government wishes to break it up into seven housing companies within the next few years.
3. Decades of agitation by tenants groups resulted in on-site concierge provision being provided to tower blocks on a 24 hour basis across the city. It was a big victory, achieved relative recently (I don’t know the specific date but it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s). Many housing planners throughout Europe have visited Glasgow to see the system in operation.
4. Right-to-Buy was a Tory housing policy aimed at socially engineering a change in the pattern of tenure throughout the UK. It is still in force (although local authorities can choose to limit its use) and allows sitting tenants to ‘buy’ their own homes at hugely discounted prices. The new ‘owners’ can then sell their home on the open market. The deeds of condition for the purchase though are often very onerous, and outside of Scotland (where the Housing Scotland Act 2001 applies) owners have no opportunity to change their factor. This has led to many new ‘owner-occupiers’ being charged exhorbitant fees for maintenance of their properties, which they often have little or no say in. During the early 802 the pattern of renting to home ownership was roughly 75%/25%. Due in part to the success of this policy the reverse is now the situation.
5. A history is yet to be written about this process and is desperately needed. However an in-depth discussion of this is beyond the scope of this essay.
6. Residents Associations, particularly in poor areas with low social capital can be very difficult to organise, unless a culture of organising exists. The last thirty years has seen that culture eroded. In the UK many residents groups had a crossover with the Labour Party activists, as Labour Party activists die off or retire from political life, they haven’t been replaced by younger generations living in housing schemes etc. There is also the fact that social networks are less straightforward and geographically based, and community associations, church groups, clubs and societies have been greatly diminished. Very often too residents associations have no ideological or immediate reasons to combine with other similar groups, seeing their interests purely in terms of limited goals for their particular circumstances. This limits the potential of such groups to develop real political power. The left too has taken next to zero continued role in residents associations of late. This means that there have been few to argue for socialist principles and many groups have taken rather parochial approaches. It has also led to the dominance of forms of organisation which are inflexible and often ineffective.
7. The former Secretary of the STO, which is ran by a central committee, was well liked by many members on the executive. She was involved in a successful local organisation and played an active role in developing an internet presence for the STO. The organisation had been involved in negotiations with the government over the Housing Scotland Act 2001. Then as now the organisation took an uncompromising attitude to opposing the government’s stock transfer ambitions. It was around this time that the secretary (which was heavily government funded at the time) started to publicly embezzle money by spending STO funds on restaurant bills for her friends and cronies. When this became clear many affiliate groups left the STO in disgust and it took some time to have this woman ousted from the central committee as she had built a substantial number of loyal supporters. After she was ousted she then disappeared and nobody has been able to trace her since. She held all of the documentation relating to the membership personally, as well as the organisation’s computer and some other finances. Subsequently these have been found to be destroyed. The government have since the incident refused to meet with the STO or acknowledge the organisation and almost immediately afterwards have referred to ‘the former STO’. The events preceded a wave of stock transfer ballots.
8. The munitions workers didn’t tend to live in areas where the rent strike was strongest.
9. It’s clear in the case of the STO that much of the reason the organisation was able to be torn apart was done to a number of inherent structural problems. Many residents associations operate in a very top down fashion or on a very undynamic basis. Many associations and federations in the UK have also been all too willing to accept funding from the government, with some serious strings attached.

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Citations – marked by (*)

1. Learning from informal markets: Innovative approaches to land and housing provision -
http://www.unesco.org/most/bpcrop2.htm#berner – Erhard Berner, Institute of Social Studies
2. Children, housing, and health: from Glasgow slums to displaced persons -
http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/58/9/778?ck=nck – Catherine A
O’Donnell, Graham C M Watt and Jumanah E Zabaneh, 2004, Journal of
Epidemiology and Community Health
3. Ubic
4. Council Estate Decline Spawns New Underclass -
http://society.guardian.co.uk/housing/news/0,8366,1096433,00.html – Amelia
Hill, 2003, The Observer
5. Clydeside rent strikes 1915-16 –
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redclyeve05.htm – Glasgow Digital
Library
6. Ibid.

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Some International Context

Campaigns for secure affordable housing and against gentrification are major areas of struggle in most all cities around the world. Those in the United States, which led the way in the whole process, are best known – especially in New York City, but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. There have been some US-wide networking of those campaigns, but none so far across international borders.

Tom Wetzel, prominent member of the anarcho-syndicalist Workers Solidarity Alliance, has been involved in anti-gentrification campaigns in San Francisco, and in that cities Community Land Trust. His “What is Gentrification” article at http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/gentry.htm delves into the fundamentals.

Despite all the sound and noise and activist time spent so far on housing campaigns, achieving success has been elusive. Where successes have been achieved, it has only been after many years of dedicated tenacious campaigning, requiring progressive groups which have staying power. One of the relatively few successes has been the saving of the 21 apartment Fong building in San Francisco’s Chinatown, reported in Dollars and Sense Magazine http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/FongBuildingvictory.pdf . The seven year campaigning effort required there corresponds to the eight year campaign which will hopefully result in 40 flats retained in Glasgow’s Botany project http://libcom.org/news/glasgow-botany-betrayed-16042007.

But the effort required for success is matched in the value of victory – often greater than that achieved in collective workplace bargaining deals. And private property developers don’t like loosing money any more than private employers do. This – from the above Dollars and Sense story – must have hurt them in San Francisco last March:

“the San Francisco Board of Supervisors set aside $1 million for land trusts as a result of tenant organizing and the tenaciousness of the Fong tenants.”

In and around Dublin affordable housing and gentrification/regeneration were recently huge issues. That cities ‘Tenants First’ group has produced this useful introductory leaflet to the process – http://afraser.com/housing/RealGuideFinal.pdf.

In Israel, the same issue was reported on last week, and Haaretz’s elegance is worth quoting here:

Battling purveyors of gentrification

By Danny Rabinowitz

Haaretz 8th May 2007

There is a clear, ethno-national aspect to the commotion brewing in Jaffa over the 497 eviction notices sent out by the Amidar corporation to families living along the shoreline. Most of those affected are poor Arab families, who have been living in their homes for decades. The recent measure taken against them, carried out as part of a project to complete the promenade all the way to Bat Yam, has already become a dramatic milestone on the path toward banishment, and opposition to it has united all of Jaffa’s Arab residents. The appetite for separating Arab citizens, individuals and communities alike, from the remnants of their physical assets and their cultural heritage, is insatiable.

But anyone who thought that what is going on in Jaffa is a problem of the Arabs, and of a few Jews who are still capable of recognizing such injustice, should think again. The crisis surrounding the evictions in Jaffa, which is still far from being solved, represents a phenomenon that should trouble every citizen in Israel. The urban landscape – that which is planned, human and socially conscious – has been expropriated from the hands of the democratic institutions supposed to supervise it. The ones who decide their fate, and ours, are a handful of real estate corporations, which, under the auspices of the religion of privatization and the cult of the market, are systematically taking control of our future.

For decades Jaffa had been undergoing a process of gentrification – a term that evolved from the word “gentry” (lower strata of aristocracy): In it, a population with means “discovers” a peripheral urban neighborhood that is old, socioeconomically weak and characterized by insufficient planning and underdevelopment, and it begins to buy up property. The value of real estate rises; the veteran residents agree to sell their property for a price that, to them, seems high; and they leave. Those veterans who rent apartments are unable to pay the rising rents, and they are also pushed out. Thus a new socioeconomic reality is created – one that is foreign and detached from its environment. At the end of the process it turns out that the return veteran residents received for their properties was relatively low, and most of the “added value” of this physical and image-related transformation remains in the hands of its instigators.

[Continued at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/856312.html]