[discuss-dan] Buying versus Rent Strike in Denver

[Allen Butcher <allenbutcher@netzero.net>]

Bob and Mark and JB

I have to ask you guys, if as you say, you believe that property is theft 
and you therefore must believe in common ownership of property, then why 
don't you live communally?  (I assume that you don't currently.)  I'm 
hearing you say one thing while you do something else.  Can you explain 
that to me?  Is it that you don't know how to construct a communal 
economy?  Have you never visited or lived in one?  Do you have plans to do 
so?  Or are you happy to say that you belief in something while not 
actually do it?  (Lots of people do that, after all.)  I'm not going to 
call you hypocrites, as I know how hard it is to live by one's ideals, and 
besides that, I'm really in the same boat with you right now  :-)  But at 
least I do know what communal society is and I can help you create it if 
you seriously want to make your lifestyle consistent with your 
beliefs.  And I might even join you.

My beliefs, I must explain, are a little different.  I believe that we can 
justify some degree of private ownership of property.  I believe that 
people must have a choice, to live in the private property system or a 
common property system.  We can't make people do one or the other, we can 
only seek to build alternatives and let people choose.  That is what I 
refer to when I discuss the idea of the "parallel culture."  Some people 
will want one, some the other, and some will change how they live during 
the course of their lives depending upon their changing needs and ideals.

The question is, how much private versus common ownership of property do 
you want?  And that is really the first question in building an alternative 
culture, or one of the first questions, anyway, and it is also a big 
question in anarchist theory (talking about that recently on another list 
service ....)  I suspect that that question is also the big issue that 
keeps you all  from joining with others to build a society respecting 
common property ownership.  I imagine that you haven't put the time into 
working toward such agreements.  When you are ready, let me know, I can 
help.  Seriously.  I've put together a whole presentation on the subject, 
and I'm planning to bring introductory material to next Tuesday's DAN 
meeting for people to look at.

Now of course, there is also that age old issue here of which 'tis more 
revolutionary, reforming the existing system or building the alternative to 
it.  Now I've talked about this before on this list and I don't want to 
repeat myself, so I'll just say that I believe that we really need to do 
both, in a way that is mutually supportive.  Intentional community provides 
a base of support for activists to be free to engage the status quo, even 
to the point of support for those doing jail time, and provides the working 
model for the alternative, affirming that TINA is wrong ("There Is No 
Alternative" is false, because we are building a model of an alternative.)

Similarly, the reform effort provides the means to relate the model 
alternative to issues of the failings of the dominant culture, and serves 
to help provide education for the need for change toward the ideals and 
goals which are brought out of idealism and made relevant to the real world 
by their development in intentional community.

However, Mark wrote as though he felt that reform efforts were less 
important than "more radical ones."  So I have to ask, Mark, what are these 
radical efforts to which you allude?  Perhaps you refer to street actions 
as being radical efforts, and I agree that they are more radical than 
merely talking a good line, but I would argue that creating a replicateable 
model of a society that affirms individual responsibility for self, society 
and nature is just as radical as street actions, they are just different 
means to the same end.

Now Mark brings up another point, that "... buying into private property 
and capitalism is delusional - and such reformist efforts take energy away 
from more radical ones."  Okay, I have to ask the same question, so what is 
your living situation?  Do you rent? Do you own your own home?  Do you live 
in a community land trust or collective household or cohousing community or 
housing cooperative or communal society?  I presume that you either rent or 
own your home.  So aren't you buying into the system?  Aren't you throwing 
stones while living in glass houses yourselves?  You state a challenge to 
my strategy for change yet you offer no alternative strategy.  What is your 
radical strategy?

I'm sorry to get into this "more radical than thou" argument, but I feel 
that I've been attacked without being understood, so I'll state clearly, I 
think we need many efforts to confront and address the issue of social 
change, including but not limited to:  reform, alternative culture, and 
protest.  And I've tried to stay active, for over 25 years now, in all 
three, currently being active in the Green Party, intentional community / 
cooperatives, and some DAN activities (currently with the latter being the 
least of the three, but that was not always the case with me).

The understanding that I received while living in communal society is that 
building an alternative culture is like pushing the dominant culture out of 
our lives, creating a bubble around ourselves such that we can live the 
alternative inside that bubble ("fish bowl" we sometimes call it).  And 
this is necessary because we do exist in the real world, we cannot escape 
from it.  The best we can do is make a clear and strong enough 
bubble-membrane around our community such that we control what real world 
influences we permit in, rather than have dictated to us how we must live, 
so that we don't have to be beholden to a set of values that we 
reject.  But remember, this bubble still exists in the real world and the 
only way to keep it intact is to carefully manage the interface between the 
community and the outside world.  I could say more about that .... but I 
don't want to get off on that tangent, the important point to keep in mind 
is that such a community makes it possible for us to affirm our values and 
to carry on an ongoing challenge to the dominant culture, working together 
creating and maintaining a community of resistance and change that will 
live beyond our natural individual lives.

Again, to be clear, it is not necessary that everyone do this, just those 
who really want to.  Don't get me wrong, people don't have to live in 
community to effectively work for change.  Intentional community is just 
one strategy, but one that people who are involved in working for change 
really ought to at least understand, and the comments I'm responding to 
indicate a lack of understanding.

And we don't have to be rich to do this.  We just need to work together 
effectively, combining and sharing our resources, and knowing how to make 
the best use of what we've got.  A very good model is what is said about 
Oriental and Hispanic families (at least those) in America.  They work 
together very closely, starting out poor and not even knowing the language 
or the culture, yet in a generation or two they are doing 
well.  Intentional community does that, too.  All that is needed is the 
desire to make it work, and some knowledge about how to do it, beginning 
with agreement on the social contract or basic agreements on values, goals 
and methods.

Creating that membrane between the community and the larger culture 
requires learning how to use the existing system of the dominant 
culture.  Essentially fighting fire with fire, creating that fire break 
that will enable us to live the safe, strong and free lives of our choosing 
away from the inferno.  In my communal experience we had to be economically 
successful enough to own our own businesses and buy our own land in order 
to create our own culture, and it is the same for any family or even 
individual.

If you don't own property you rent.  If you don't own a business or have 
investments to live off of you work.  What other alternative is there?  If 
you rent you live the way your landlord tells you to live (no pets, certain 
number of cars and housemates, music to certain loudness, you can't move 
walls around, what ever).  Now in ownership, however, it can be either 
private ownership or collective or common ownership, each is different, but 
all three of these do or can give you more control over your living 
situation.  And this is essential toward building an alternative culture, 
and sometimes even to being an activist.  To think it can't be done is 
defeatist.  And to call buying property as a step toward changing society 
"delusional" as Mark did is to suggest that the tools of the dominant 
culture can not be reforged and turned against it.  Swords to 
plowshares!  Finance, property, technology, governance, spirituality, all 
these are tools, and just like any other, they can be used for good or 
evil.  The challenge is knowing how to use these tools to get the desired 
result.

Now when you talk about people not being able to get "conventional loans" 
to buy property this is true, but the thing is that there are other sources 
("conventional" generally means bank loans and other traditional mortgage 
lenders).  I'll tell you, when I bought my house I had no savings, I had 
10,000 in credit card debts and the same amount again in school debt.  I 
had a negative net worth, but I had been working over a year in clerical 
work making about $8 an hour and had good credit, with a record of paying 
regular rent.  I could not get a "conventional loan," but I found an 
organization that would pay a down payment and take a second mortgage, and 
I bought a house.

Now I am getting started as a mortgage broker and I can help others use 
this same source (and there are others) with which to buy a house and get 
out of paying rent.  And if someone can't even do that much alone, they can 
find someone else or a couple people with whom to pool resources and buy a 
property together.   As I said, I have contacts with real estate agents and 
lawyers who support community.  And if that still doesn't work, and they 
can't even get a cosigner, then maybe they have to play the game a while 
and get a stable job for a year and pay off some debts and then they can do 
it.  But it can be done, unless of course the economy goes to hell....  And 
yes, there are also other organizations that can help, like tenant unions 
and the National Co-op Bank and Mutual Housing Associations and others.  I 
can help people take advantage of these resources.

Of course, there are some who will never be able to buy a house.  Some 
people will never get their lives together or will never play the game, and 
for them there must be other alternatives.  Maybe someone or some community 
will let them rent out a basement room, but personally, I would hope that 
their housing payments would go into an equity account rather than rent 
payments, but that is up to the building owner(s).  (See my proposal, "ELAN 
Community" for a design for this.)  The point to be made is that we can't 
do everything and address every problem.  We have to start where we can and 
build from there.  If we don't have a solution for a particular problem 
today, maybe we will next year, but we have to start building, otherwise we 
will forever talk and never realize our potential for making consistent our 
lifestyles with our values and ideals.
Allen

At 04:56 PM 02/07/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>... buying property may be a practical
>alternative to renting IF you can afford it, but to pretend that you can
>bring about the kind of more just society that I hope all of us in DAN are
>working toward by literally buying into private property and capitalism is
>delusional - and such reformist efforts take energy away from more radical
>ones. Putting a band-aid on a wound is certainly necessary, but some of us
>at least want to change things in a way that those wounds don't happen to
>begin with.
>Mark
>At 12:23 PM 2/7/2001 -0800, you wrote:
> >
> >Hi. I'm not jb, but I thought I might reply.
> >
> >I’m not sure that you got jb’s point. I don’t believe that he is proposing
>that the "government" ban property ownership. I felt that he was making the
>argument (that many anarchists before him have made including 
>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
><http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgibin/browse-mixed?id=ProProp&tag=public&imag>http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgibin/browse-mixed?id=ProProp&tag=public&imag
>that property is theft. Of
>course a statement like that comes across as over-simplifying the problem to
>most reform-minded folks, but personally I can’t think of a truer statement.
>I personally believe that the system of property ownership, a basic tenet of
>capitalism – no matter how many collective living communities and what-not
>there are – is oppressive and serves to make the poor poorer and make the
>rich richer. I think that wrangling around within the system to create a
>nice niche for peace loving community minded folks is nice, but it doesn’t
>solve the many problems that capitalism creates for low income people, like
>the homelessness issue that you refer to. And so what you do have is a
>group, perhaps a movement, of people who can afford to make their lives a
>little better for themselves within this system while the rest, the ones who
>can’t afford to buy property etc. continue suffering.
> >
> >I have to say that framing the discussion as ‘Rent strike vs. buying
>property’ or whatever is misleading. This suggests that most people have a
>choice. Most people who rent are not doing so because they chose not to buy.
>They’re doing so because they can’t buy property. 40% of the people in this
>city live at or below the poverty level, most would not qualify for a home
>loan with a conventional lender. If you’re black you’re twice as likely to
>be turned down for a home loan, no matter what your income, than if you’re
>white. A tenants union is an excellent tool to create change in poorer
>communities. Creating a tenants union is building community. And every once
>in a while tenants unions are successful in getting the property turned over
>to the tenants.
> >
> >I do happen to agree with you that if (when?) the working people organize
>and begin to liberate amongst other things property, there will be "a whole
>lot of rage". But not from the working class, this "rage" will come from the
>smallest portion of society, namely the property owners (and I’m not talking
>about the folks who pay the bank every month for the right to live in their
>house).
> >
> >bob
> >


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