Contest the Space of Politics

Revisiting Class Alliances in Abolish Rent

Kolya Ludwig

June 6, 2025

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Haymarket

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,” Julian Francis Park’s “Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?”, Ben Teresa’s “From Policy as Technocratic Exercise to ‘Way Station of Tenant Power,’” and Zara Cadoux’s “Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory.”

Last year, two veterans of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) published a bold declaration of intent on behalf of all partisans in the fight for liberation from real estate parasitism. Abolish Rent, coauthored by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, begins by exposing the antagonism at the heart of the housing crisis: on the one hand, the financialized housing system and its various state expressions, and on the other, the tenants, whom the system mercilessly expropriates. In the course of this oppressive relation, as the authors demonstrate, the hegemonic financial apparatus bestows upon society a pervasive and composite malady that we might call “rent stress”—an antihuman corrosive (both physiological and emotional) endemic to the system of organized rent extraction. The text proceeds with a first-hand narrative of the resurgent movement against this outrage, signaling that our cities have not yet been surrendered as mere playgrounds for the rich.

Drawing from this account, the book makes some assertions about how to think through and act within the contemporary housing struggle; and it is here that the book makes its invaluable contribution to a discourse starved for strategic insights, and where movement developments have far outpaced their theoretical counterpart.

Before moving into the book’s argument and my critique, it is worth noting that Abolish Rent is not a theoretical or philosophical volume; it is an agitational and popular educational text. However, because it marks out strategic limits that have far-reaching consequences for the class struggle more generally, it invites a theoretical appraisal of its claims on these grounds.

In the critique that follows, I aim to: (1) demonstrate that Abolish Rent’s tenant-only strategy is too restrictive, and that the text may not have adequately theorized the nexus between the epoch and the conjuncture to arrive at this strategy; (2) suggest a Marxist conceptual framework, including a theory of hegemony, through which to rethink the conjuncture, its crisis points, and their relationship to the housing question; (3) propose that cross class discontentment toward parasitic finance capital represents both a key crisis point in the present conjuncture, and an opportunity to build working-class hegemony in practice; and (4) argue for a tenant-homeowner bloc, as part of a larger cross class coalition, capable of disrupting the hegemony of finance capital and waging a popular revolution.

The Tenant-Only Strategy of Abolish Rent

For Rosenthal and Vilchis, the increasing precariousness of tenants as a social class (now a majority in cities like Los Angeles) make them the principal locus in the struggle against rent, against the capitalist order in general (now waist-deep in real estate investments), and, ultimately, for communism—conceived of here as collective stewardship and sovereignty over land.¹ In the narrative of the text, then, there are tenants at the beginning—once subordinate objects of oppression, now subjects capable of transforming their conditions—and there is land sovereignty at the end, toward which the tenants march.² What connects these nodes is community-level self-organization (unfolding “block by block,” as the saying goes) whereby the capacity is built for something like a general rent strike, which, combined with the concurrent struggles of other abolitionist movements, finally overwhelms the forces of capital and its besieged state.³ The strategy outlined here amounts to a war of attrition, leading to emancipation, with tenants at its center.⁴

The theoretical basis for this strategy, however, remains unclear. Looking beyond the text, a piece authored by comrades of Vilchis and Rosenthal, fellow members of the School of Echoes (the organization which helped found LATU) gives a possible explanation for the tenant’s position in the authors’ theoretical system: “tenants are the new proletariat” in the present form of capitalism, which they identify as “the real estate conjuncture.”⁵ Beyond the provocative lede and an overview of finance capital’s role in disarticulating urban communities and proliferating this renter underclass, the theoretical ambiguity of the tenant’s position persists. The strategy of Abolish Rent, it seems, is a strategy lacking a defined theory. And to attribute this lack to the limited scope of the book (that is, the contours of the housing crisis), while partly justified, remains dissatisfying; this is a book that calls for communism and proposes a vision for achieving it.

There is a logical and empirical argument, though, operative in both the book and the School of Echoes article, upon which Rosenthal and Vilchis construct what we might consider the core component of their strategy: that of the tenant-as-subject. According to this argument, tenants have learned that they are alone in their struggle; that other class forces and social strata are not to be trusted in the fight against the landlord. Various actors are named: homeowners, nonprofits, mom and pop landlords. (Small businesses, who pay exorbitant leases themselves, and whose fate is equally contingent upon the mega movements of capital, are not mentioned.) While all of these categories deserve their own treatment, we will restrict our focus to homeowners, where the assumed barrier with tenants is, I think, the most questionable.

Homeowners, for Rosenthal and Vilchis, are structurally invested in the circuits of capital that obliterate tenants. They are the beneficiaries of a “bifurcated” housing system, originally “cemented” in Roosevelt’s New Deal (cheap postwar loan programs, redlining, and racial covenants) and continued through extensive federal subsidies and tax breaks. Their investment in property values aligns homeowners with real estate capital, and against tenants.⁶ Rosenthal and Vilchis take to heart economist Homer Hoyt’s axiom, quoted in the book: “Communism can never win in a nation of homeowners.”⁷ The cavalier statement suggests an implacable conservatism lurking behind every white picket fence.

In light of such observations, the aforementioned middle sectors are excluded from strategic considerations; they are, effectively, a lost cause, bonded to the cold comforts of material interest.

A Theoretical Gap

Where does this leave us, then, in terms of the book’s overall theoretico-strategic framework? It will be agreeable enough, among socialists, that the ends proposed—the seizure and collectivization of all possible footholds for private capital accumulation—amount to the general definition of communism. It will also be agreed that tenants, by and large, necessarily comprise an inner circle of forces in the struggle against the rentier class, for all the reasons given in the text. However, the authors go further than this: for them, tenant subjectivity subsumes the strategic field. And without recourse to a conceptual system that justifies this move (and that situates it within a general notion of revolutionary subjectivity) we are left with a theoretical lacuna, unable to orient a strategy around foundational presuppositions.

A consequence of this aporia is that, between our present and our horizon, the intermediate space of politics is foreclosed in a kind of short-circuit; either left to some Other to philosophize, or assumed to be a relatively straightforward affair (if necessarily marked by the euphoric advances and painful setbacks one would expect in the course of any class struggle). Implicit in such a framework is the understanding that politics will be done in the meantime, but done by someone else. In other words, tenant leadership within society proper is postponed; for now, bourgeois administrators will be compelled to pass state reforms as the movement gains strength, until an imagined point of total rupture from which the capitalist state cannot recover.⁸ Of course, this is too hopeful. And the vast, undertheorized space of politics continues to haunt the tenants movement, as it collides again and again with the unavoidable questions of alliances and of the imminent social crises that cannot be reconciled to the abstract horizons posited in the book.

It is, therefore, Abolish Rent’s effective indifference to matters of the state…that is most concerning about its strategic perspective. And my essential claim is that this strategy is unjustified…because it is undertheorized…in two respects: first, in its unclarified relationship to Marxist theory; and second, and perhaps most vitally, in its underdeveloped conception of hegemony.

The issue warrants its own discussion, but perhaps a reference to one instance will suffice. As we speak, there is a coalition mobilizing in Los Angeles to lower the maximum yearly rent increase from 8 percent to 3 percent in rent-stabilized units (comprising 650,000 apartments—70 percent of the city’s total).⁹ Unlike the doomed statewide campaigns to overturn Costa-Hawkins, this local measure might succeed.¹⁰ If it does, the result would be a significant expropriation of corporate wealth, far greater than a rent strike in any building or a campaign against any landlord. It represents a real opportunity for the tenants’ movement to claim a popular victory at scale. However, LATU (notwithstanding two subchapters of the union) has neither broadly endorsed nor committed significant resources to the coalition.¹¹ The union’s abstention underscores its antipolitical tendency, and its aversion to alliances, even when the matter deals exclusively with tenants and rent—a foreboding sign for LATU’s prospects of achieving grander political goals.

The problem of politics and scale is in play whether the issue is a law affecting the relative rights of landlords and renters in a city, or a major social restructuring to address bigger crises like the commodified housing system. All such struggles take place within a complex class society and require the consent of diverse elements, which will be either more or less amenable to the cause of tenants. It is, therefore, Abolish Rent’s effective indifference to matters of the state—as reflected in the practical activity of its authors’ organization—that is most concerning about its strategic perspective. And my essential claim is that this strategy is unjustified not because of its political defeats, but because it is undertheorized, and is so, in two respects: first, in its unclarified relationship to Marxist theory; and second, and perhaps most vitally, in its underdeveloped conception of hegemony.

Thinking the Conjuncture through Lenin

The impasses of today’s mercurial social movements are clear. The disintegration of the working class, the immolation of its theoretical tradition, and its replacement by unconvincing post-Marxist schemas have devastated the political confidence of the workers’ movement. Despite these retreats, an adequate strategic analysis must proceed from a definite conceptual framework. And there is no way around it: we are still living in Marx’s world. The worker is still the revolutionary subject; the tenant is a proxy. The specific kind of production that creates society is still the proletarian production of commodities (and their realization as value in the act of exchange). The parasite, however enlarged and grotesque, still requires a host. This is our epoch, these are our conditions. Marx’s theoretical labor has not been surpassed, and historical materialism, with all its stubborn presuppositions and avowed limits, survives. Of course, contemporary social movements can choose to sidestep the question of Marxism—but this leads either to ambiguity or to the burden of a lesser theory. When we lose touch with the accumulated knowledge of history, we find ourselves strategically adrift, lacking the very tools to intervene in the complexity of the political moment.

At the most fundamental level, then, we have the Marxist concepts of the irreconcilable antagonism in the mode of production, its determination of the totality of relations in the final instance, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.¹² The precondition for communism in this framework is not just an amplification of the various communal struggles (for example, in the form of the general rent strike), but workers’ hegemony over the state. And here we arrive at the limits of Marx himself, and require a serviceable theory of hegemony; because to recognize the antagonism in the mode of production is to say nothing about the nature of the political struggle over that antagonism.

In this necessary ingress of Marxism into politics, we might seek counsel from “the greatest modern theoretician of the philosophy of praxis,” to invoke Gramsci’s extravagant pseudonym for Lenin. Lenin understood socialism as the struggle for leadership over other classes in the democratic revolution.¹³ The democratic revolution—an intermediate horizon of struggle, specific to Lenin’s conjuncture—organizes broad social forces around a popular objective, through which the working class proves itself politically capable of solving the major social crises.¹⁴

The term “intermediate horizon” may be understood using the opposition that Raymond Williams establishes between “epochal” and “actual historical” analyses.¹⁵ The general principles of Marxism deal only with the question of the epoch, and uncareful practitioners can find themselves shackled to its abstractions, unable to think in terms of the moment and of hegemony. “Intermediate,” for our purposes, refers not to a teleology of historical successions, but to the “weak link” between the current conjuncture and the next: a point of “ruptural fusion” which is never the pure battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but is instead a complex, “relatively autonomous” (meaning, autonomous from the mode of production) site of “conjunctural crisis.”¹⁶ The critical point of rupture here is a moving target not solely determined by economic relations, and is, for Lenin, the alpha and omega of revolutionary practice. And why conceal the fact: it is never anything but a guess.

From this, we could distill the essence of Lenin’s theoretical legacy into three points: the elevation of the analysis of the political conjuncture, above any generality, as the point of strategic departure; a conception of the strategic horizon as overdetermined, and in dialectical unity with the forces actually capable of reaching it; and a definition of hegemony as political leadership over other classes in the main social struggles of the day.¹⁷ And if the present object of critique—Abolish Rent—bears an ambiguity in its relationship to historical materialism, I argue that its departure from Leninist philosophy is completely decisive.¹⁸ The two perspectives operate in different universes of thought.¹⁹

The Tenant-Homeowner Bloc

If we accept the theoretical perspective just describe—summarizable as Lenin’s strategic logic of hegemony—how might we evaluate Abolish Rent’s proposed political strategy?²⁰ First, the tenant unions that have sprung up around the country are, I think, responding to important aspects of the present conjuncture. There is an implicit recognition in them that the vast majority of people despise the rentier capitalists. These repulsive entities, carrying vacuous signifiers like Equity Residential and Blackstone, are pure parasites, with no claim to any productive role in society. The contemporary American state amounts to a reflection of such creatures (and their monopolist cousins); American politics is, functionally, a politics of the scam, and everyone knows it.

Housing, then, is key, not only because tenants are expropriated and rent is a moral outrage, but because it is perhaps the site of capitalism’s weakest link in a conjuncture overdependent on idle extraction. It is not just that the big firms are structurally vulnerable (tenants can go on rent strike, debt can be withheld, and evictions are costly); there is also the political “froth” generated by the infrastructure, which speaks to a sweeping discontentment: social movements that have taken aim, in more or less conscious ways, at parasitism and its effects.²¹ We know them well: Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter. (Let us also not forget that the broad response to the public assassination of an insurance executive was a collective shrug). The state apparatus is deeply unpopular and ripe for a revolution. The strategic question—the question of hegemony—is: who will lead this revolution, and navigate the convergence of contradictions that is the basis for its crisis? The text, although it speaks to the universally malignant effects of finance capital, consigns the question of political power to an indeterminate future, and—in one and the same gesture—establishes a strategic boundary before theorizing its legitimacy.²² Alliances are barred; ambivalent companions are turned away. The tenant’s lonely passage leaves no quarter to would-be associates from the vacillating strata.²³ Is it really the case, though, that the middle sectors are so unreliable? This would indeed be unfortunate in the national context, where two thirds of the population are, according to such parameters, banished from our ranks.²⁴

Rosenthal and Vilchis define a tenant as anyone who does not control their own housing. By this definition, I am sure they would agree that social security recipients, who are now weighing the prospect of a bankrupting roof repair against displacement to a distant suburb, are tenants.

Putting aside, for now, the economic anxieties that befall even a large fraction of homeowners—whose loosening grip on their family’s last tangible asset we might hesitate to conflate with the interests of the private equity firms circling overhead—their strategic exclusion points to a dilemma: given the complex array of social layers between the ignoble tenant and the speculator apparati—including, it must be said, workers who are not themselves tenants—and given the refusal even among tenants to embrace that miserable signifier, tenant, and its requisite class struggle valence—what prospects for victory remain? The fact is undeniable: our forces are weak, and theirs are strong; and this, despite the state’s innumerable failures, which continue to breed contempt and despair across class lines.

Perhaps the strategic value of the Marxist framework is now becoming clear. The proletariat cannot become for itself by only fighting for its own distinct political interests. Consciousness does not incubate within a discrete class. To gain consciousness, the workers’ movement must assume the responsibility of leading a general revolutionary struggle. Such a struggle, if it is to be a socialist struggle, requires working-class leadership in the form of strategic guidance. The capitalists have claimed the equivocating classes as their provenance—yes. They have a tentative hold over them (just as they do over the workers and tenants themselves). Do we then accept this as an enduring feature of the political landscape? Or do we treat the uneasy hegemonic consensus as a site for contestation?

To this end, isn’t the general disdain for parasitic finance capital an auspicious precondition for winning over, for instance, the 62 percent of recent home buyers who struggle to make their monthly payments to large lenders?²⁵ What about the 36 percent of homeowners who report difficulty paying for basic needs like food and medical care?²⁶ There are other nonmortgage concerns—skyrocketing insurance premiums, prohibitive maintenance and utilities costs, natural disasters—that make it increasingly untenable for fixed-income owners to refuse cash offers (gentrification is not a tenant-only problem, even in post-Jarvis Los Angeles).²⁷ If the single-family homeowner consents to the political project of real estate capital, it is, at best, a “disaffected consent.”²⁸

Homeowners are a titanic, heterogeneous cluster, riven with class anxieties. We should aim for a split of this sector: those who delude themselves into the belief (even after the global embarrassment of the subprime mortgage crisis) that human flourishing is really the passion of the asset managers, or whose racism won’t permit them to ally with the tenants, will not join us. The rest, if we are effective leaders, will welcome a sincere battle to eliminate parasitic control over every aspect of our lives. Rosenthal and Vilchis define a tenant as anyone who does not control their own housing.²⁹ By this definition, I am sure they would agree that social security recipients, who are now weighing the prospect of a bankrupting roof repair against displacement to a distant suburb, are tenants.³⁰ In fact, might a further (strategic) expansion of the category of tenant be entertained? Doesn’t the 99 percent (to borrow one of our side’s embattled signifiers), in the era of subscription capitalism, effectively produce value for idle property owners in every domain—not only housing rent, but data farming, transaction fees, healthcare premiums, student debt, and so on—and thus constitute a kind of “renter populace”? Reconceiving the category of tenant, as it pertains to areas of society beyond housing, might give tenant leaders a relationship to the social totality (that is, to the political conjuncture) that they currently lack.

Conclusion

The School of Echoes speaks of needing a “different order of political instrument”, and on this we are agreed; but they then speak of an “autonomous” instrument, and here we must part ways.³¹ Strategic independence is not autonomy; it demands of a subject the responsibility to lead others, not to go it alone. The imperative of our moment is thus the same as that of socialists in any moment: identify the path to victory.

To their credit, tenant unions have developed into fighting organizations in a climate of political despair. Now, though, it is time for another evolution and new protocols. Direct action is a powerful weapon in the tenant’s arsenal, but a weapon is useless without a general plan of battle. To become strategically independent, the working class—which overlaps with, but also exceeds the category of tenant—needs a totalizing perspective; it must break away the middle sectors that dubiously align with the finance hegemon. A cursory reading of the conjuncture will reveal that the practical understanding of the majority of people already agrees with the basic message of the tenant unions: the prerogative of idle extraction defies common sense and perpetuates obvious indignities.

The unions should not be marginal, they should be massive—and they should identify as part of a mass movement against the despised financial apparatus and its state components. This will not immediately be an explicit struggle for land sovereignty, or for socialism. These terms do not yet speak to the forces we need to summon. Escaping the political margins will require, perhaps paradoxically, both a deeper commitment to the socialist theoretical framework and what might appear to be a more compromising political expression, in the form of a broad alliance and popular goals, in the near term. Only a satisfactory conjunctural analysis, and the establishment of an intermediate horizon of struggle, can anchor a project of this kind.

An article such as this one could never provide these gifts in their mature form: a real topography of forces (class, party, cultural, ideological, and so on); a thorough appraisal of crisis points (social, political, economic, existential); a slogan, which commands a larger linguistic arsenal, and which “condenses and embodies the concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” and “names the decisive moment” of the totality, and so on.³²

All I hope to suggest here is that we may already have the shape of the popular task: the expulsion of finance parasitism from American life. Tenant unions will not be expected to formulate this project from start to finish; this is not their burden. However, they can avoid the trap of prematurely ruling out the alliances that make the task possible. What is at stake is a multivariate crisis, of which housing rent constitutes only one feature. That is to say, housing represents a particular struggle whose fate hinges on its theorized relationship to the complex whole.

Openness to a revolutionary coalition doesn’t negate the core proposition of socialism—working-class leadership—but arms it with the forces necessary to win a decisive battle. The depth of the alliance’s success in rewriting the priorities of the state remains to be seen. However, advancing the hegemonic position of workers in any serious way demands a willingness to contest the intermediate space of politics. We might begin with a vision that millions of people already desire: freedom from the pure parasites.

Contest the Space of Politics

Revisiting Class Alliances in Abolish Rent

Kolya Ludwig

The Tenant-Only Strategy of Abolish Rent

A Theoretical Gap

Thinking the Conjuncture through Lenin

The Tenant-Homeowner Bloc

Conclusion

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Marx’s Republican Communism

The Broken Clock

Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory

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