What the Rent Moratorium Meant for the Oct. 15th General Strike
On Sunday the federal moratorium on evictions was allowed to expire. Monday morning, some 10 million tenants and 2 million mortgaged Americans looked upon the streets to find them lit in a strange, new, hazy light.
One could claim — crudely and cynically — that the coming wave of social unrest will be put directly to the advantage of the planned October 15th General Strike. Although politicization is both natural and necessary when crises reach biblical scale, this would be a naïve way to do it.
Had the moratorium been extended into October, this would surely have been good for the strike. Every dollar not paid in rent amounts to about 20 man-minutes of non-economic activity. With the whip of eviction cracking again, countless would-be strikers won’t even consider spending a day non-economically, let alone the fortnight I argued would be required.
If there is any advantage to the end of this moratorium, it is that some noise has been removed from the signal. Under the moratorium, any actions by tenants against their landlords would not have contributed to the strike’s signal, but now there is an opportunity for tenants to show solidarity with their ex-neighbors. There may be some advantage in a rental strike.
I have already expressed my doubts about the efficacy of the strike planned for Oct 15th. However, I will continue to detail the connections between a rent strike and the larger, general action for the purpose of clarifying the strategy of economic warfare.
Any general strike occurring on a level higher than that of the city must have economic and not material warfare as its strategy. The goal is not to directly take control of the means of production; The aim must be a signal crisis, such as the discontinuities which occurred in the common graphical metrics for the economy in February and March last year.
Within this context, what role could a rental strike play?
In decades past, the possibility of realizing profits in property would have actually increased the weaknesses in these graphical metrics. If there was a stop in economic functioning in times gone by, money could flow out of stocks and into property, increasing the elasticity of the critical economic lines. Under such conditions it could easily have been argued that a rental strike would be beneficial to a general economic action.
Conditions are different today; The management of rental property has become financialized to an unprecedented degree, with firms like BlackRock outlaying billions to vacuum up housing in the wake of the various economic crises this century.
A blow to confidence in rental properties wouldn’t be enough to tank these trillion dollar behemoths on its own. They are heavily weighted towards economic assets. We saw this in the overall results of the government propping up the stock market on the one hand while imposing the moratorium on the other. However, its not like these companies haven’t felt the pressure of their rental assets at all. Property can act as a safety valve for investment, because while a crises might reverberate though the economy for years, property values will still rise — and indeed they did — so long as investors are confident the government will finally get the renters to pay once the first wave subsides.
Now recall that the Biden administration is suckered up to the neck with ex BlackRock executives.
Herein lies a big reason why the moratorium was allowed to expire with so little struggle from the Democrats. As it approached its anniversary, inconsolable anxieties were emerging up on the commanding heights regarding the ultimate duration of the moratorium. This scares firms like BlackRock for the same reason widespread rental strikes would, it threatens their ability to predict future profits and thus for their assets to appreciate in the here and now. It is a threat in the sphere of economic war.
Herein also lies an active link between the economic and the political, one that may end up being the link in the signal change which gets the politicians to respond to a strike.
Now we must consider that rental strikes pose certain risks to tenants, risks which are more immediate than those faced by other strikers. While every worker continually faces homelessness at a distance, rental strikers face it right outside their landlord’s windows.
But assuming conditions are right, rental strikes can also be organized faster than work strikes, as they do not require keeping secrets from the ever present management. In the limited time we have, The likeliness that groups of renters will be able to organize themselves sufficiently to get some safety in local numbers is higher than that of ununionized workers.
So here is a good source for some info on how to organize a rental strike.
In an ideal world, a rental strike starting October 1st (The day after the extension for rental units financed by the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, or Veterans Affairs expires) would be the first salvo of a general strike this fall. Signals take longer to run through the rental system, and risk will be mitigated for tenants if the courts are still tied up from the current wave of evictions. If this were to happen, firms exposed to both the stock market and the rental market might just lose their cool come October 15th.
The Biden administration, who’s main function has so far been to chew the dictates of their large financial interests and spit back up a sort of soothing pablum, palatable to the masses, might then find itself with a bit of a lump in its throat. Should the administration decide to finally cut the malarkey and act — however it acts — the general strike will have succeeded in its aims.
In the left’s current position, the greatest victory it can hope for is to demonstrate that it has forced its opponent to act. This would be to prove to itself after half a century’s reverses, that it is possible to take a step forward.
Finally, the end of the moratorium on Sunday has added one critical thing to the movement for a general strike: a sense of urgency to take that step forward. Even if tenants do not commit to a rental strike in significant numbers, hopefully the strikers will have greater resolve knowing that they are the only ones fighting against the conditions that have lead to this rental crisis in the first place.
