Organising for Popular Power

(This article was included in our submission to TWT 2025 alongside 5 practical proposals for party organising, focused on workers and trade unions, renters and tenant unions, social infrastructure & culture, anti-imperialism and party branches.)

This proposal is largely focused on tenant union organising as a key component of community organising for a mass left party. This focus is because of the skew of experience in the writing group; other important areas of community organising still need to be thought through.

What should the approach be?

Your Party local branches, particularly in areas with severe housing inequality, should hold tenant organising as a priority. However, rather than duplicating efforts or setting up party-affiliated unions, we propose that Your Party trains and funnels members into existing tenant unions and resources existing tenant unions to support new ones to develop around the country. Your Party local branches can also provide a bridge between different community organising efforts to fill some of the difficult gaps, for example, by linking tenant organising, food coops and baby banks, or by building cross-cutting community defence teams that respond to evictions, to immigration raids and to fascist street mobilisation. 

There are two dimensions of the approach: one is the set of actions that local branches can already begin to take if the tendency can provide a blueprint and tools, and the other is the set of mechanisms that would require the national Party’s resources. There is a list of practical ideas under both these dimensions below. We will need to begin with the first element, so we can already start doing the work.

Why should we take this approach?

Since 2015, a set of new tenants and community unions have emerged across England and Wales (London Renters Union, ACORN, Greater Manchester Tenants Union, Southampton Tenants Union, Peterborough Tenants Union, Liverpool Residents Action, Sheffield Tenants Union, Lancaster & Morecambe Tenants & Community Action, Newcastle Food and Solidarity), as well as in Scotland (Living Rent) and the island of Ireland (Community and Action Tenants Union). 

Tenants unions organise where people feel the sharp edge of capitalism – their homes and communities.  They play a unique position that builds solidarity across different communities, activating various demographics and transforming private frustration into collective action, and winning tangible victories. Unions mostly take a ‘basebuilding’ approach to community organising: they have a membership structure aiming for local density and take direct, collective action against landlords to win individual, block or borough/city-wide demands. 

Many are still new or small, and can struggle to move beyond an activist membership, whilst others have grown to thousands of members. Where tenant unions succeed in this approach, is activating different demographics of people, rooting into working class neighbourhoods, and where they have a member-led, democratic structures, to ensure they are an essential organisation for working class power. 

A mass left party should prioritise strengthening these organisations, and should take guidance from tenants unions’ experience on: how to meet people’s immediate needs with an orientation to collective action and power rather than service-delivery, how to do community organising without reinforcing community inequalities, and how to move at a pace that builds trust and relationships.

At the same time, tenants unions’ could benefit significantly from the Party’s resources and reach. They are still very small compared to the number of tenants in the country (there are 2.7 million private renters in London alone) and are mostly concentrated in major/mid-size cities. Tenant unions have the opposite problem to trade unions. Where the role of the Party for trade unions may be to cohere a militant, anticapitalist rank and file vs bureaucratic stagnation, most tenant unions are currently militant, anticapitalist, member-led organisations, but they tend to struggle for scale, capacity and national integration. But, there is on-going work happening to form a network of tenants unions in Britain and the Island of Ireland to bridge more effective mutual support. 

However, the relationship between tenants unions and Your Party could be tricky ground. As with other areas of basebuilding, tenants organising cannot risk being subsumed under Your Party. Tenants organising should not be subordinated to an electoral logic, overly dependent on resources, or diverting energy out of building the unions themselves as independent organisations. Positions on housing and landlordism are likely to be contested within the party given the presence of landlords in the national leadership and at the local branch level in some areas. 

As a result, our proposed approach involves Your Party branches or centres providing support where there are important openings for greater resources and scale for tenant organising, but without compromising on tenant unions’ leadership and democratic control over the work.

How these resources and reach can be best used will be very different in areas where there are established unions and where there aren’t. Additionally, although tenant unions need more staff capacity and are currently partly reliant on grant funding on top of membership dues to cover staff costs, we should not aim to direct resources primarily into staff salaries. Where we can tap Your Party resources, they should be dedicated to expanding and politicising the membership base, providing infrastructure for action and community, and resourcing members of different unions to support each other. 

How do we think this will practically happen?

1. Mass training/cadre-building programme & support to set up tenant unions in new areas

• Funding and facilitating logistics of a national scale political education and training programme to draw in and skill up huge numbers of new people;
• Gateway trainings to tenant organising (e.g. Know Your Rights), organising skills trainings for politicised people with less practical experience (e.g. doorknocking; facilitation; action planning), and deeper political education programme for existing tenant union members;
• Trainings should be organised under the leadership of tenant unions, but with funding and logistical capacity from Your Party, as well as connections to new areas through Your Party’s reach;
• Where there are no existing tenant unions to get involved with, these are some options for approaches:
  • Roll out through local branches, with tenant unions/branches in different areas acting as a regional hub (building on how Greater Manchester Tenants Union has been supporting new tenant unions in the Northwest): possible to begin now and keeps initiative with branches // but likely to be stretched resources, concentration in areas with greater existing capacity and experience // easier at level of just training, more difficult at level of supporting new tenant unions to set up;
  • Potential to roll out through fledgling tenants union network, with capacity support from central Your Party: possible to roll out to further reach, more dedicated money and capacity, greater possibility of new tenant unions developing // but network only in very early stages, and risk of relationship between unions and party forming primarily at the bureaucratic level as with Labour Party and trade unions; not tailored to needs of different local areas.

2. Community advice clinics/coffee mornings

• Your Party local branches can host regular events that are a universal front door to tenant unions and other community organisations that work around immediate material needs;
• This will be a collective and power-building alternative to top-down MP surgeries, though local Party councillors or MPs where we have them, should be available to support casework and answer questions;
• This idea is linked to one from the social infrastructure working group;
• These can be run either as slightly more service-oriented advice clinics (people speak with the tenant union rep on an individual basis, and are later connected to the union’s collective dispute system), as meetings with groupwork sessions (people with similar issues are grouped together and support each other to come up with a plan of next steps) or as more social-style coffee mornings, where visitors meet the organisations and can later join and get in touch with issues;
• This approach won’t be viable in contexts where there aren’t strong existing tenant unions or other community organisations;
• Where tenant unions don’t have the capacity to take on additional casework, it will be important that new capacity is being created through the training programme.

3. Community Defence teams

• Tenant unions have developed very effective tactics of preventing tenants from being evicted, in a similar way that Anti-Raids groups successfully intervene against immigration raids;
• Both eviction resistance and community support against raids require large numbers of people to mobilise rapidly on short notice, and to have some key information about rights and tactics, while more experienced members can coordinate the group. Physically resisting a large immigration raid is an action with higher legal risk;
• Your Party branches could recruit large numbers of local residents into Community Defence teams, with regular intro and refresher trainings on resisting evictions and raids, and potentially also intervening in Stop and Search (although this is more likely to be rapid, individual interventions than large collective mobilisations);
• This would be a significant form of capacity support as both evictions and raids require significant numbers and logistical effort – often particularly burning out Anti-Raids groups during a period of high intensity – but relatively simple training for the average person to take part;
• Linking stopping evictions (which most people will support) with resisting immigration raids (which we will need to change some people’s minds about) as a joint form of community defence could be an important form of political education;
• Community Defence teams could also form part of the backbone of counter-mobilisations against fascist street marches – though the strategy behind this needs greater thought.

4. Supporting tenant unions’ escalation plans

• While tenant unions have had some great successes with block or estate organising and some at a larger scale by lobbying for council or central government policy changes, they have struggled to scale deep organising and extract major concessions through structural power at a base level;
• Tenant unions also do not yet have the structural power to contest the financial speculation driving the housing crisis;
• Your Party could support tenant unions’ ambitions of e.g. connecting private tenants under the same corporate landlord, or estates under the same housing association by building databases, providing logistical support to host connecting meetings and resourcing training at estates that want to organise;
• Party branches can support large-scale mobilisations at key moments in campaigns.

5. Linking with/providing community infrastructure for organised estates

• Estates/blocks organised under a tenant union often struggle with severe peaks and troughs of activity, and without the consistent structure of a workplace, and with the additional pressures on members (often mums, etc), these can result in the dissolution of months of effort;
• As a cross-cutting group, a Your Party branch could support with linking to or providing the community infrastructure that holds relationships between neighbours strong in the trough period after an intense escalation for a campaign;
• Consumer food coops would be a strong option to trial rolling out on a larger scale – an estate unit of a tenant’s union branch could be organised at the same time as setting up a food coop. Members of food coops meet weekly to collect the food delivery. Setting up networks of food distribution that bypass supermarkets is also essential to a broader horizon of economic transformation.