My Neighbors' Tenant Union Held a Rally Against Rent Hikes and Connected the Issue to Palestine
More and more people, despite the mass media lies, grasp the connection between seemingly unconnected issues
I happened to see this poster displayed in my neighborhood in Boston:
So I went to the rally with a bunch of these stickers to pass out:
and this is what the rally looked like:
There were rousing speeches about the need to organize a rent strike against the particularly large landlord (Fineberg) from whom most of the rally organizers rented. The speeches also were about how tenants who think of themselves as professionals and not working class really are working class too. One speech was about how tenants suffering absurdly high rents, and Palestinians suffering genocide, are both afflicted by the same class—the owning class that oppresses the working class. Virtually everybody at the rally, and almost everybody who walked by it, happily took the sticker I gave them. Many people at the rally also stuck the sticker on their shirt.
On the one hand, there is nothing particularly unusual about tenants organizing against landlords over the issue of oppressively high rents. But I think it is noteworthy that in contrast to typical tenant organization actions, this one connected—not equated!—the oppression of professionals suffering too-high rents with the oppression of Palestinians on the other side of the world suffering genocide.
The ruling class wants working class people to ignore each other’s struggles and to see no connection between them. This makes individual struggles on separate issues far weaker than when they are connected to the rest of the world’s working class.
Truly powerful working class struggles are characterized by the fact that they explicitly connect their struggle to, and act in solidarity with, the struggles of the world’s working class. Dock workers are famous for doing this. American dock workers in 2010, for example, refused to unload cargo from Israel on a ship in solidarity with Palestinians under murderous attack by Israel that year:
The wave of pro-Palestine protests on college campuses today signals a growing desire and determination of young people to stand in solidarity with working class people’s struggles around the world.
The tenants who rallied in my neighborhood against rent hikes are from the same social strata—young, and in many cases college graduates—as the college students demanding divestment from Israel. They understand perfectly well that the problem is not just their landlord or just high rents, but what they called “the ownership class” and its dictatorial rule over the have-nots world wide. This is why an otherwise unremarkable tenant union rally makes me optimistic about the future: it was more than just a tenant union rally, it was a call for world-wide working class solidarity against the rulers of the world.