Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?

Julian Francis Park

March 13, 2025

Abolish Rent

by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Haymarket

2024

The Commune Form

by Kristin Ross

Verso

2024

Spectre is elated to present the following essay as part of a dossier on Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. This dossier brings together voices from the tenants movement and academia to discuss the book’s major themes—how tenants are organizing for better conditions and what can be done to address the root causes of the crisis. Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, founding members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, is available for purchase at Haymarket Books. We anticipate a response from the authors in the coming months.

For other entries in the dossier see Holden Taylor’s “Is Rent the Crisis: On the Tenant Union Movement, Old and New,” Ben Teresa’s “From Policy as Technocratic Exercise to “Waystation of Tenant Power,’” and Zara Cadoux’s “Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory.”

Two summers ago I sat among a crescent of tenant union members in the ballroom of a debt-burdened collectively run community center, the Omni Commons, in Oakland. My union, Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) was hosting the West Coast convening of the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN). In a dozen or so small groups throughout the hall, unionists shared long term hopes for the movement. In notes, I spun the fibers of our group’s conversation. Then, I raised my hand to offer the thread another person had transcribed on a giant sticky note: “In 20 years, we will have built an international land & tenant movement connected across rural & urban geographies, composed of a mix of growing & increasingly militant tenant unions, communes, & seized productions in some regions, bringing up the next generation with full communism and a habitable earth on the horizon.” We had revived a classic communist theme, the abolition of the separation of town and country. As photographer of that day’s stickies, I was fortunate to retain this original, which now hangs framed by my desk. I find myself looking toward it whenever I need a lodestar. Regardless of its brightness, its direction is still unclear. Each of that sentence’s phrases points somewhere, but where?

Words are more easily spun than social movements. What would it take to connect rural land struggles and urban tenant unions? Communes and seized productions? Whatever all those terms refer…(Only one of them, those of us in that room had shared experiences with). And what would full communism and a habitable earth even look like?

Linked together through these common themes are two recent books, both published on the same day in the September of 2024: Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis and The Commune Form by Kristin Ross. The former is addressed to the US tenants movement, while the latter to international rural land defense. By comparing the representations of struggle in these two books —their figures of militancy, analyses of social conditions, and theories of movement practice—we can find some negative space where these movements of country and town might be united.

Ross, Rosenthal, and Vilchis do not themselves illustrate the map for a revolutionary abolition of geographic separation; our hopeful destination appears decades off and providing such a map would be too much to ask for now, since such movements scarcely exists outside aspiration. However, comparing these books allows us to draw a rough sketch of a shared revolutionary project. Abolishing the separation of town and country is another way of saying the abolition of capitalism in which each one—town and country—must be brought into dialectic. The Commune Form and Abolish Rent are exceptional, concise works on the prospects of communism in rural and urban areas., respectively Many of their limitations can be partially tied to the limits of their territories—since only a communism that can span geography will be long for this world. In short, while somewhat unfair, these books must be judged on this land-roving basis—that is, the basis of communism.

The singular feature of cities and towns is that people live in them in great, often growing, numbers. As the proportion of urbanized land grows globally, so too does the proletarian share of the population (whether employed or not). The bulk of commodity production, circulation, and consumption occurs in these areas, increasingly revolving around home life—political economy returning transformed to whence it came: polis to the city, economos to the rule of the home. In the United States, around two thirds of households own their homes, living mostly in and around towns and villages, while the majority of tenants live in cities.¹ In Abolish Rent, Rosenthal and Vilchis tell the story of the “resurgent tenant movement” in today’s cites. They do so by following Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), a member-funded and -run—that is, autonomous—tenant union, which they (among others) cofounded in 2015 to stop gentrification’s “displacement and replacement of the poor by profit.”² Rosenthal and Vilchis polemicize against rent itself, hence the title. They sketch the preceding century’s political economic war against tenants and find signs of revolutionary potential in the rent strikes, occupations, and conviviality of Los Angeles’s organized tenants struggling for collective control over land.

But urbanization occupies only around 3 percent of land globally; the rest is, more or less, countryside.³ Still, about 40 percent of humanity lives scattered throughout this vast territory, gradually dwindling while increasingly subject to the capitalist demand of the urban majority—to produce something that we can use for profit or get out.⁴ Production here usually means agricultural cultivation and resource extraction, except when it means building infrastructure (that is, turning country into town or at least into a corridor from one town to another).

In The Commune Form, Ross tracks a global trajectory of land defenses against such capitalist development projects like police facilities, oil pipelines, monocultural agribusiness, military bases, malls, and (most of all) airports. For Ross, a retired French literature professor, the exemplary campaign was the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes, France (usually called the ZAD in English, a backronym meaning the Zone to Defend). By 2018 the ZAD had prevented clearance of four thousand acres of farms and countryside for an international airport.⁵ These defenses constitute a contemporary variation on what she calls the commune form, based on the experience and imaginary of the 1871 Paris Commune, whose poetics and politics Ross reanimates in earlier books.⁶

Revolutionary Subjects?

The figure of Ross’s militant in the commune, the “defender of the earth,” comes to the fore under two guises. In the first—in the Sanrizuka struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Japan’s Kantō Plain against the Narita International Airport, and the 1970s fight for the Larzac plateau in France against a military base expansionism—the defender’s name is a social class: paysan, translating literally from French as peasant. Paysan refers to the small holder rather than agricultural worker producing commodities.⁷ Residual to older productive modes, the paysan represents a defense of ecologically inclined subsistence living against capitalist redevelopment for profit and dominance; the paysan is conservative as in conservationist (rather than reactionary, contrary to their representation in some strains of Marxism after Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire”).⁸ They also represent solidarity, according to the example of the Nantes Commune, where paysans during May 1968 supported striking workers by extending their networks of food provision.⁹

The second guise of Ross’s militant, identified in some recent struggles, is that of a “composed,” or a “collective subject formed out of the many.”¹⁰ According to Ross, these struggles are marked by the defender’s shedding of specific class (or other) identities. Those struggles in which paysans, or Indigenous or Black people for that matter, lead decisions, rely more on defense of an imposed identity than what she calls composition (a practice considered essential to this commune form). The author pursues this claim without regard to contravening evidence. At times, Ross implies that groups like the Black Panthers or the Standing Rock Sioux lacked class and cultural diversity within their formations (which is false), while French countryside militants have an “improbable assortment” in theirs (a classic Eurocentric error).¹¹ That said, in the case of Standing Rock, Ross comes around to acknowledge that the water protectors were able to rally non-native militants because it was “at the heart…an unprecedented alliance made up of over 350 Indigenous nations.”¹²

Communism must mean the defeat of capitalism across interdependent regions or it will be eventually lost.

In the case of Abolish Rent, the subject of struggle is the tenant, a proletarian class fraction, a composed identity, or both. Rather than a synonym for a renter, here the tenant refers to anyone who “inhabits but doesn’t own,” according to Rosenthal and Vilchis’s interpretation of a definition popularized by LATU.¹³ Tenant thus offers a name to such formations as Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos of Boyle Heights (who fought and won a rent strike from 2017–2018, beating back unbearable rent increases and landlord negligence) and the unhoused encampment of Echo Park Rise Up (who collectivized supplies and maintained their own amenities while defending themselves against eviction from 2019 to 2021).¹⁴ On the compositional potential of the term, the authors write “the tenant as a political category collects the landless and the propertyless, the disenfranchised and undocumented, those placed outside the category of citizens, even outside the category of human.”¹⁵ But in a double contrast to Ross, Rosenthal and Vilchis emphasize the unity rather than supersession of multiple identities, contending that “a tenants union is a vehicle for class struggle” for the poor and working class.¹⁶

Still, the movement has a distance to go toward organizing everyone who could call themselves a tenant. The authors emphasize the potential sometimes more than the reality; they seek to inspire, but the gap between the two presents itself. While Rosenthal and Vilchis tell much of the US history of Black tenants’ heightened exploitation and domination by landlords in the chapter on the last century, and though the book ends with the words of the well known spiritual, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” Black Angelenos only explicitly appear among contemporary organizing in the example of Echo Park Rise Up, a struggle supported but not led by LATU.¹⁷ This is one out of about ten recent stories in the book. Nonetheless, the inclusion of unhoused peoples’ militancy, based on LATU’s solidarity, fulfills more of the promise than most prior writing, which tends to keep housed and unhoused tenants’ organizing divided. Tenant power—across cities as tenant unions, through neighborhoods as union locals, and in buildings as tenant associations—needs to be built, write the authors.¹⁸ In any case, the Latinx tenant majority of Los Angeles are Abolish Rent’s usual protagonists, and a book about Philadelphia, Kansas City, or the Bay Area might have been different.

These books both implicitly return to the question of the revolutionary subject under contemporary capitalism. Between them, Ross and Rosenthal and Vilchis conceptualize three possible candidates for this revolutionary agent, with each theorization raising attendant contradictions. At first, in The Commune Form, Ross considers it to be the peasant—an answer to struggles, both earlier and throughout twentieth century, especially in anticolonial revolutions. Ultimately, as we have seen in discussion of her notion of composition, Ross renounces this class subject while preserving its political content as defender of the earth, praising those movements around which a composed defender identity has formed. Though unstated, Ross’s renunciation of the peasantry has some historical basis in their progressively diminishing numbers. Composition, then, is the collective subject as a process; rather than a fixed notion of class position, it exists mainly in its acts in the present and recognition in the past, with only the contingencies of struggle to see it endure. I suspect we need more than contingency on our side to defeat capitalism; composition must be thought of in relation to the conditions that determine it, class among them.

In contrast, Rosenthal and Vilchis uphold class struggle, through the poor and working-class tenant. In their telling, this subject is composed in a different way that unifies identities without transcending them (at least, they hope). While Rosenthal and Vilchis have a sense of the tenant’s revolutionary future—transforming dispossession into communal possession—the all-inclusive tenant union appears to be expected to emerge through extending the tactics of the present. The marginality of Black tenants in the union organizing chapters of their book, in contrast to their import in US tenant history, indicates that these tactics may not be enough to unify tenants as a class fraction. The limits of tenant identification will not be fatal, for Rosenthal and Vilchis see that revolutionary struggle must be carried out along other axes, including Black and international liberation struggles.¹⁹ The classic question, unanswered, can be asked again, with further specification: facing what conditions and through which practices can the socially and geographically divided oppressed classes of capitalism, proletarian tenants and peasants among them, be composed into a revolutionary force?

Rosenthal and Vilchis treat the conditions faced by tenants in discrete theoretical and historical chapters. In both, they cover tremendous ground, both polemically and via sketch, which turns out to be both a strength and weakness. The core of the first chapter, “Rent is the Crisis,” flashes through a flurry of answers to the question “What Is Rent?” amid an extended rebuttal of capitalist urbanism (called YIMBYism).²⁰ The answers are often pithy, the pithiest being, “it’s illegal to not pay rent.”²¹ In a way, it includes all the others, which establish the inescapable, antagonistic, racist, privatizing, violent, and unhousing dynamics of “this unequal power dynamic” between landlords, the state, and tenants. I’m not aware of a more comprehensive list of anticapitalist and antiracist critiques of rent—a powerful rhetorical feat likely to raise plenty of readers to anger. This comprehensiveness comes, at times, at the expense of coherence. Rosenthal and Vilchi’s underlying theoretical stance is eclectic, making it difficult to track the flow of their argument. In the end, they argue, “that we need to put class conflict at the center of the housing question, and the housing question at the center of class conflict,” since rent exploitation has been a means to enforce wage exploitation and capital increasingly preserves itself through real estate investment. Rosenthal and Vilchis overstate their case; they establish the importance of tenant struggle for many, but they do not prove that the tenant struggle is integral to the broader class struggle. In the United States, to do so would require showing either that the movement of the tenant minority can serve as a vanguard or that a proletarian coalition without tenants would necessarily fail. This is beyond the scope of their polemic, which they indirectly acknowledge.²²

…the homes and lands that these communities share and cherish form the basis of their residents coming together in their defense, and in that defense, they coalesce their side of the struggle into a community. This community, perhaps commune form, is renewed in opposition to those who would destroy what they love. One can call it class struggle or composition.

One in-cover blurb rightly refers to the book as a manifesto, a feature further on display in the chapter on “The War on Tenants.” Rosenthal and Vilchis run through the post-New Deal century that saw the conversion of the United States to a homeowner majority nation, in which proletarian tenants (especially Black and immigrant ones) pay growing rents for low quality housing in slums and are displaced by gentrification and its precedents. It also deals with the anticommunist transmutation of public housing into publicly subsidized private housing. Again, this argument is a persuasive one: Here, the biggest problem is the frame of war they fit the story into. To present this as “one-sided,” where “the state has chosen [landlords’] side in the class war,” they abandon the “tenants’ perspective” which the authors usually proudly adopt.²³ Doing so, they skirt key events that would have shown more consequential, if intermittent, militancy. They acknowledge some events, such as the fights to preserve World War II-era rent controls and the organized squatters campaigns of the 1970s–1990s, only in passing.²⁴ Rosenthal and Vilchis write around others—such as the nationwide court battles that won tenants the doctrine of implied warranty of habitability, which established rent withholding as a right when living conditions are substandard—by pointing to the Black Freedom struggle which preceded those wins and to the existence of those laws after (mentioned in another chapter).²⁵ In doing so, they neglect to establish the sequence or chronology of events.²⁶

Ross devotes less of her book to an analysis of the social conditions that paysans and composite defenders have battled. She identifies plenty of capitalist, “state-imposed infrastructure projects” they oppose, but beyond that she mainly details the colonization of everyday life by the “ubiquitous…logic of the ‘airworld,’” through which the smooth and interchangeable spaces and interactions of the global luxuries of airport ‘mall culture,’”and to a lesser extent the redistricted enclosures necessary for monoculture agribusiness, increasingly replace the ecological and social supports for human subsistence.²⁷ It’s a grand argument without much newer ground except Ross’s case for the centrality of international airports. It needn’t be more than that, and at that it succeeds.

For inciting conditions, Ross’s main intervention pertains to movement history. Throughout, she argues that the ZAD, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City in Atlanta, have not only “revived aspects of the commune form,” but altered “what is perceptible about the recent past, and especially the 1960s and ‘70s.”²⁸ Land struggles like the Nantes Commune, the Larzac in France, and the Sanrizuka in Japan, now appear to have more importantly shaped global social movements today than the more well known urban factory occupations of 1968. The students of university occupations blur as others come into focus, the “Maoist students from Paris and other large cities [that] began their ‘long marches’ to the countryside.”²⁹

Based on their necessity, Ross overestimates the degree that ecological land movements have become central to global prorevolutionary trends in practice.³⁰ Though rural revolutions were integral to the twentieth century, evidence indicates that rural struggles have been on the relative decline in keeping with the declining shares of the population inhabiting rural spaces.³¹ The commune form may be revived in today’s countryside fights, making them central to what we might imagine for the future, but this does not establish their practical centrality in the present.³² That said, she’s right that factory struggles in the Global North have been displaced by globalization. But what of urban and suburban uprisings, logistics struggles, or factories in the Global South?³³ Considering land struggles on the whole—including those against colonial occupation and policing, as much as those of tenants and over transit—there’s more truth to Fredric Jameson’s line, which Rosenthal and Vilchis quote, that “in our time all politics is about real estate.”³⁴ The task remains, as my ATUN group thought, to connect rural and urban inhabitants. In this regard, this aspect of Ross’s histories of composition since the Nantes Commune deserves the emphasis given. Stop Cop City, after all, is as much a police abolitionist effort as an ecological one, a fact which Ross scarcely acknowledges. This fact shows concretely that defending a forest can relate to defending neighborhoods from police violence and municipal neglect, particularly when forest and neighborhood are adjacent.

The equally important obverse of the question of the subject is that of conditions. Each book gives a partial assessment (in part, again, due to the limits of their purview). From the contemporary city, one can see rent in reflections of the windows of the whole built environment; from the country, one can see ecological survival in every root, shoot, and stream and in their uprooting, paving over, and damming. Across these landscapes, proletarians and peasants theoretically share their struggles for subsistence against repressive state and private ownership of land. While capitalist land ownership and development is both combined and uneven, the land struggles of the oppressed remain uneven without combining in practice.

Convivir, Commune

Both books hold that “we make our community by defending it.”³⁵ In the chapter “La Lucha Educa,” Abolish Rent’s authors quote that sentence at the end of the first of five sections, illustrating how LATU has constructed the tenant union on building community. There, they describe how the Flower Drive Tenants Association generated solidarity among a block of rent-stabilized tenants threatened by displacement for university- and sports-centric redevelopment. Refusing developer buyout deals brokered by local electeds and nonprofits, tenants got to know each other closely. “Working together as a community, it makes you feel you have this power in you,” said tenant Inés Alcazar.³⁶ In a comparable chapter on four practices of the commune form, “Defense, Appropriation, Composition, Restitution,” Ross also ends her first section on defense with the shared sentiment that community is made through collective action. Citing examples already discussed, Ross argues that “the act of defending [is] more conducive to the creation of solidarity than the political action we are frequently called upon to perform: resistance.” For Ross, the beginning of defense, unlike resistance, begins with what people already cherish.³⁷ Further, she reasons that defending a place allows no room for fence-sitting because the stakes are mutually exclusive, “farmland is either farmland or it has become something else—a mall, or an army training ground.”³⁸ The sentence shared in both books—that “we make our community by defending it”—is thoroughly dialectical; the homes and lands that these communities share and cherish form the basis of their residents coming together in their defense, and in that defense, they coalesce their side of the struggle into a community. This community, perhaps commune form, is renewed in opposition to those who would destroy what they love. One can call it class struggle or composition. In plenty of cases, the sense of community that precedes this renewal through struggle is the residue of a prior twist of this sort of dialectic.

Rosenthal and Vilchis introduce a verb, after the words of tenant Isabel Garcia, to express at least the prefigurative side of this: convivir, which “Spanish speakers often complain…is untranslatable.” In their attempt they offer many translations, among them “to live or coexist with” and “to get close to.” The verb that comes to mind in English: to commune.

At the conceptual heart of both books, these chapters are among the most valuable. These writers, like these movements, don’t limit themselves to defensive action, but also detail the occupation of spaces which had been taken away or lost. For Ross the term that best captures this is “restitution.” Restitution refers to restoring land from private possession to common care and use, an essential need now that arable land has been reduced to a quarter of its 1960s range.³⁹ Moreover, restitution is a term for Indigenous and paysan struggles, where a history of symbiotic land use is the context for demands for land back. She contrasts restitution to practices like collectivization and nationalization particularly with regard to these histories of land struggle.⁴⁰ Restitution may be the only way to preserve the ecological conditions for human subsistence.

In Abolish Rent, Rosenthal and Vilchis tell the story of a group of Boyle Heights neighbors who reclaimed public space. After a neighbor was hospitalized by a back alley robbery, this neighborhood committee decided that rather than call the police they would reclaim the space of the alley, not by targeting the gang members that also used it, but by cleaning it up, screening movies, decorating it with tenant propaganda, and more.⁴¹ Gang members ended up supporting the movie screenings. The authors argue this reclamation shows how tenants can make their neighborhoods safer while working “to make policing irrelevant,” thus linking the project of rent abolition to abolishing the carceral system.⁴²

With restitution and reclamation, what comes into view is what’s usually called “the horizon,” returning us back to the titles of these books, Abolish Rent and The Commune Form. The authors might question whether we left that vista. Rosenthal and Vilchis reiterate throughout that rent abolition and tenant union militancy are simultaneously “antagonistic and prefigurative.”⁴³ We have already seen this combination at work in the preceding paragraphs, through defense against the state or landlord that also unites a community, and through the restoration of lands and neighborhood space that impedes the accumulation of capital or the training of police. The first big example they give of this is the rent strike, which they call an act of “collective defiance” against landlords’ ownership claims and of “communal life” that gives a taste of rent-free living.⁴⁴ This makes it possible, as I’ve also argued, to imagine rent abolition as a permanent extension of the rent strike.⁴⁵ In the final chapter, which describes Echo Park Rise Up alongside the fight by tenants of Hillside Villa to get the City of Los Angeles to expropriate their building after their rent subsidies expired, the authors write that “rent abolition is a practice of occupation and a process of socialization.”⁴⁶ This sentence, among the most concise and complex definitions of rent abolition I’ve read, gives content to the antagonistic and prefigurative quality of this act that is also a horizon. In their closing pages, Rosenthal and Vilchis introduce a verb, after the words of tenant Isabel Garcia, to express at least the prefigurative side of this: convivir, which “Spanish speakers often complain…is untranslatable.” In their attempt they offer many translations, among them “to live or coexist with” and “to get close to.”⁴⁷ The verb that comes to mind in English: to commune.

Ross introduces temporal and spatial terms that name something that is both act and horizon, calling the commune form “a tendency, an orientation.” It’s possible to think of the commune as such because, she contends, in its revolutionary struggles with the state, the state’s territory wanes as the commune’s waxes, indicating the state too is orientation and tendency. Not too far from occupation and socialization as contents for this form, if weighted toward the prefigurative side, the essential qualities of the commune form that she emphasizes are its “organization of everyday life and…collective and individual responsibility taken for the means of subsistence.”⁴⁸ In such approaches to everyday life and subsistence, Ross finds the “step-by-step dismantling” of the state, in contrast to Marx’s Commundards and their smashing.⁴⁹ The antagonistic practices of the commune form include defense and restitution, while the prefigurative include composition and appropriation (after Henri Lefebvre). Appropriation is a free and conscious experience of lived time and space, which capitalist social relations alienates.⁵⁰ Convivir, or to commune, perhaps are synonyms for this too.

This way of thinking about revolution is beautiful, and can instill faith (another of Rosenthal and Vilchis’s practices), but it can lead to contradictions. Ross quotes a passage of Lefebvre on appropriated living in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The favela, sometimes translated as slum, indicates that “the commune form flourishes best in the interstices of capitalist logic.”⁵¹ If we mistake the commune form for communism itself, then this leads to the false conclusion that communism thrives when surrounded by capitalism. The latter chokes the former, as Ross shows of Paris, 1871 in Communal Luxury. The Paris Communards saw it as a question of town and country, proletariat and peasantry—unity with the provinces was “in fact the Commune’s only hope for victory,” and it failed.⁵² Communism must mean the defeat of capitalism across interdependent regions or it will be eventually lost. This is true, even if, as the author correctly observes, the commune form will vary historically. Ross risks this contradiction more Rosenthal and Vilchis, who make clear that a mass revolution across social sectors and the globe (which movements have not yet brought near) is necessary to abolish rent.⁵³ This does not mean slums are not full of people communing, some even taking on commune forms, but this is a foreground to pass through toward the horizon. To prefigure is neither to figure, nor is it nothing.

The need for communism to span regions brings us back, inevitably, to the lodestar. The revolutionary movement, perhaps twenty years in our future, depends on composing these discrete movements—both rural and urban, of tenants and paysans, proletarians and defenders and liberation fighters of all kinds—into a single movement for a habitable earth, free to inhabit. Land struggles must convivir, commune among themselves. We must come together to defend against the wars on tenants and the countryside waged by landlords, capitalists, and the state, through the rent relation and capitalist development, restoring lands for communal subsistence and building a community across town and country of communes, tenant unions, and seized production. Stop Cop City, and the Nantes Commune before it, should be among our models for cross regional and cross sectoral struggle, while much of what we can learn from the struggles of tenants in the city of Los Angeles will be relevant beyond those bounds. There is one constituent sure to play a role in unearthing shared ground, appearing at the margins of both The Commune Form and Abolish Rent: the landless, rural worker. This worker could be, but rarely is called a tenant, perhaps since the tenant farmer is someone different. Some were once and may once again be peasants. Representative of this class struggle that Ross and Rosenthal and Vilchis all reference but, understandably, don’t stretch either book’s scope to really incorporate is Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which fights for the redistribution of land through a now familiar tactical repertoire, most notably through restitution, and includes nearly two million members.⁵⁴ The path to composing the revolution will pass through solidarity with them and struggles like theirs around the world.⁵⁵

Anti-capitalism, Class struggle, Communism, Tenants Unions

Julian Francis Park

Julian Francis Park is a poet, writer, and tenant organizer in Oakland (Ohlone Territory). Julian has written for publications such as Commune and has previously coauthored a piece for Spectre with Hyunjee Nicole Kim. Julian posts on X as @jfpark3 and on Bluesky as @malcontent.bsky.social.

Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?

Julian Francis Park

Revolutionary Subjects?

Convivir, Commune

SHARE

On This Land We All Get Fed

One Should Not Camouflage Capitalist and Imperialist China as “Socialist”

Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory

HELLO, COMRADE

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More