@SeanHun@Englishpete08 and I thought it would be good to create a short training on effective organizing conversations. This training will serve both our members and future tenant organizers. If we want people to step up as Tenant Association leaders, we must equip them with the necessary skills!
We’ve scheduled the meeting for Saturday at 6PM (zoom link here). All members are welcome to join. If you have materials you’d like us to review before the session, please share them in the replies.
EDIT: Moving the meeting to Saturday.
For reference, we’ll be building on the organizing conversation resources we used in our initial trainings:
We condensed the six articles linked above into a 4-page outline that works as a quick reference guide on organizing conversations. It still requires editing though.
Our next step involves creating a 30-minute group activity highlighting key points with examples and role-playing exercises. If you’d like to contribute to that project, please respond below. I’ll post here when there’s a date set.
One thing we talked about but did not include our own language for was warning against appealing to “liberal sentiments” that frame workplace problems as deviations from how capitalism “should” operate. It confuses individual rule-breaking by a boss/landlord for capitalism’s basic logic.
Class conscious organizing recognizes exploitation as a key part of capitalism. That bosses/landlords are not just jerks. Their material interests are directly opposed to the worker’s/tenant’s material interests. That they are compelled to maximize their profit through reducing wages + increasing productivity, because otherwise, they will not survive either.
And that we should not be focusing on a boss/landlord’s individual behavior. Instead, focus on workers’ structural position: their dependence on wages and their power to withhold labor. I know paying rent complicates this a bit. But by targeting capital rather than individual grievances, through these conversations, it would help people see their conflicts as expressions of opposed class interests, not personal fights. If we are able to maintain long term contact people, and they start seeing that elsewhere, then that is what could raise class consciousness and help them understand real power existing in economic relations.
But we could not figure out how to make that fit into the outline or how to write a guide in making those questions feel nature (for now).