“I’ve lived in six places in five years,” one mother living in substandard private rented accommodation told me. “I am not happy because I can’t give my daughter the stability she needs while she does her GCSEs.” She showed me a box of anti-depressant pills. “And this is what they give me. I just want a place where I can raise my daughter.”

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a lack of social rented homes and falling home-ownership has forced more low-income families with children into the private rented sector. The proportion of children in the poorest fifth of the population living in the private rented sector has more than doubled to 36%. Many Londoners see no way out of their precarious and poor conditions except by leaving London. Of those who can’t or won’t leave, many shrug in despair and accept the situation. 

A collective response begins

But another pattern is also emerging across the city: someone is in distress with their housing, but rather than suffering alone, suddenly there are others around them, human blockades, collective lobbies working in their favour, campaigns emerging to address the systemic problems. London Renters Union has arrived.

Arthur had been trying to get repairs done on his flat for months when the renters union showed up at his door. “They said, if I have a problem come to a meeting,” he recalls. “That’s when I came to the union. I went to the meeting and told my story.” With the intervention of London Renters Union the necessary work got done within days. “I’d been through hell. I tried to get help from my doctors, councillor and MP – they couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have money for a solicitor,” Arthur says. “You need a union to be successful – they’ll fight for you.”

While the union takes on some individual cases, the point is to bring out the commonalities among renters so they can fight together. Many renters feel too isolated to go up against a landlord who holds all the power. Without support they bear the burden alone of the stress and insecurity that comes from a conflict with a person or agency who can make them homeless. The renters union aims to build support between members in order to create the confidence to take action. As one LRU member put it, “I thought it was just me struggling in this block. Then I got the renters union leaflet through my door and I realised it was everyone.”

London Renters Union’s membership is now over a thousand, and it could be one of the most significant new housing organisations for a generation. Several years in gestation, it is a product of other organisations already involved in housing struggles. “Organising locally as renters had taken us only so far.” says Heather Kennedy, one of those on the initial steering group for the project. “Our members got evicted and priced out to other bits of London all the time, and lots of the problems we face can’t be fixed by the local council. We needed something bigger and stronger, that could bring renters together across london to stand up to the power landlords wield over us.”

A new strategy

London-wide there are many organisations focused on defending social housing from attacks by governments national and local. It is a vital and necessary struggle, and a key front in the battle against housing as a commodity, but all the while the number of private renters has been growing, from the bottom of the market as social housing is lost, and in the middle of the market as buying became more unaffordable. The few organisations addressing private rental issues were struggling to make an impact.

London Renters Union saw the need for a London-wide organisation focused on renters, but don’t claim to solve the problems alone. lRU is part of the movement ecology of housing organisations from which they emerged, and solidarity between organisations as a key part of building a successful movement to confront the housing crisis.

Not only have private renters been growing in number but they have also borne the full brunt of decades of bad housing policy in the UK. When London Renters Union meets new members the same problems appear again and again: poor repair and no way to seek redress, rents too high, bad and even illegal behaviour by landlords, exploitation by letting agents, arbitrary evictions. Sometimes the union might simply help a member with advice, or help write a letter to a landlord. Sometimes members have participated in simple but impactful collective visits to the office of their letting agents: once an agent knows the member has back-up they are usually quick to realise they must do the repairs needed to make a home decent. 

Evictions are particularly difficult to resist in the UK, where, unlike some other countries, bailiffs can return again and again until they succeed. But London Renters Union turned out early one morning when bailiffs were due at a members’ house. Alongside other local people they formed human barricades at the front and rear of the property. When the bailiffs arrived they saw the people and renters union banners, and drove off without even getting out the car. The action bought the member precious time to find another place to live. Other landlords, say union activists, have called off illegal evictions at the mere mention of the union’s name. 

Talking about these victories is important to the union. Meetings aim to be inspiring and participatory, not just about dry administrative tasks or voting on position statements. Celebrating successes creates positive, sociable and accessible spaces in which members support each other. The everyday work of running local branches such as writing meeting agendas still has to be done, but it is shared between members as much as possible, ensuring nobody gets caught up in only doing the admin.

London Renters Union describes itself as a fighting union and a campaigning union. It wants not only to defend individual members, but also to change the landscape of housing. Demands that most housing charities consider radical are just the beginning for the union: rent controls, an end to arbitrary evictions, forcing landlords to take tenants on welfare. “We aim to mobilise our members to transform the housing system in the UK,” said Jacob Wills, a member of the coordinating group. But that doesn’t preclude joining more immediate campaigns, such as the campaign to End Section 21 with their partner organisation Generation Rent. Campaigning pressure from housing organisations recently forced the government to scrap Section 21, which had permitted ‘no fault’ evictions – a sign of the movement’s growing influence.

Long term transformation

The aims of the LRU include organising their membership into a radical fighting body. “Education is a really key idea in the union,” says Heather Kennedy. “We are providing training to all of our members so that we can all learn together how to fight for change.” As the union sees it, skilling up all members – not just a few – to take on leadership roles is key to building a truly mass housing movement in London. Not everyone who joins the union will from the outset sees their housing problems as political, but the union is determined to expose the politics of housing for all to see, and to show that it is possible to fight for change. 

The union is also democratic, and that means training people to be in control. Branches are designed to be largely autonomous, and the coordinating group of the union is elected by members for only six months at a time. Policy and demands can be made by members at democratic general meetings. The union aims not just to build a housing movement but also to create a legacy for London: large numbers of people who know how to act together.

It is still at the beginning of its journey: it has three branches and is focused on building them slowly and surely before creating new ones. “LRU has to reflect the diversity of this city to be successful.” said Jacob Wills. “realistically it’s those most affected by housing injustices who are going to see the changes needed and win them.” This means the union sees recruiting on the street and in existing community organisations as essential to ensure that the organisation doesn’t get stuck at the level of recruiting the usual activists.

While driven mostly by volunteer work, the founders also decided that it would need paid staff to operate at scale. From two staff at present, the union plans to grow its paid staff in 2019. While taking money from funding organisations, it is also asking for membership fees so that it can begin to self-fund its expansion. At the recent Labour Party conference the party pledged  to fund independent renters unions if they get into office.

As the plight of renters becomes more stark, the union are happy to have some policy-makers onside, but they don’t want to be reliant on politicians. “Our union is all about building skills, agency and strong community between renters,” said Heather Kennedy. “Building durable supportive relationships with one another is how we can take on the landlords, developers and politicians we’re up against. We see this as a long term project to build community, as part of building our capacity to fight.”

The ultimate goal of the London Renters Union is to ensure that everyone can have a decent home, to turn anger and frustration at the housing system into systemic change. It is an aim both simple and ambitious, and the members know that to succeed they must help promote the demand that housing should exist to serve people, not be a mere commodity. Just as importantly, they know that for long-term success, the union must continue to build the ability of exploited communities to fight for themselves. 

Republished from Tribune Magazine

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London Renters Union is starting up with the aim of transforming the housing system in London. In particular it wants to make life less terrible for those who have to rent privately in one of the most absurd and brutal housing markets in the world. The renters union is a way of saying ‘no’ to rents that damage our quality of life, to evictions at the drop of a hat, to abusive landlords, to slum conditions in one of the richest cities in the world. We are stating that people should have more control over their housing than this, and we are willing to fight for it.

The birth of the union

It began with the coming together of organisations. After decades of absurd and damaging economic and housing policies creating a ‘housing crisis’, many organisations had sprang up across London to fight for better housing. Some of the people involved in existing housing struggles began to see a need for a new organisation, one focused on the private rented sector, designed from scratch to be a mass-membership London-wide organisation with a stomach for a fight.

An initial steering group for the project was made up of representatives from existing organisations, all experienced activists. After some initial groundwork the group opened out to other people. It attracted first other experienced activists, then more and more people new to political organising. The need for a renters union in London is so clear that recruitment among the politically aware is almost effortless. But in order to expand, and in order to create a truly broad and diverse membership base, we had to go out and begin talking to those outside of our usual circles.

First though, we had a lot of planning to do. Starting a truly mass-based democratic membership organisation is, it turns out, tricky. One of the difficulties is that not many people in the UK have done such a thing recently. There isn’t a long history or extensive experience to draw upon. Instead we had to refer to, for example, the co-operative sector, in order to come up with a formal constitution. For the organising we wanted to do we had to draw on the few groups in London that have really tried organising from scratch and at scale. As for how to run large membership organisations, we had to learn about organising in other countries, primarily the US and Spain. Such a large project always has ancestry, and London Renters Union has international roots.

Then there were the meetings. You cannot set up a small organisation without meetings. You cannot set up a big organisation without a lot of meetings, or not if you want to be democratic. The way we organised together was important to us: we do not want to organise on behalf of other people, we want to organise together with each other. This requires, besides people’s time, space to meet in a city where nearly every inch is exploited to the max. We have drawn on nearly every radical organising space in London at some point in our formation. Resources put together when the renters union was not yet dreamt of were happy to accommodate us. The level of understanding extended to us by other organisations has been a joy to experience.

A union needs people

Not only space has been made available: advice and expertise has poured in from so many organisations that it would be difficult to list them all. When we have felt stretched to the limit people with experience in other organisations have joined us. We have recruited amazing paid staff with years of experience in other political projects. The impossibility of the London housing market draws people in, and so does the ambition of the renters union. It sometimes feels as though there is a collective wish among organisations and individuals to create a new grassroots force against the London housing market. It needn’t necessarily be a force called the London Renters Union, but many people see in us a chance to create something big and powerful in opposition to the rule of landlords and investors.

Having built the framework of an organisation, we went out and began meeting individuals on the doorstep and on the street, starting in the borough of Newham. We confronted people with a request to join an organisation of mutual aid, different even to the unions they might join at work, more democratic, more led by the members. The novelty of the request often surprises people, but there is also widespread agreement that the situation of private renters in London should be improved.

One of the big factors that determines whether or not people join the union is whether they believe that action they can take is able to improve the situation. Part of the renters union’s task, it turns out, is to create a collective self-belief, to challenge the depression and lassitude into which many people have fallen, beaten down by the market and the authorities. It is heartening to watch people move from conviction that nothing can change to conviction that they can make change. Hope is one of the most beautiful things the union can offer, but it also sets up a strong expectation – as does asking for membership fees. It feels like there is no choice now, having drawn so many people into a commitment and a promise. We have to make it work.

The union is relationships

What does it mean to make the union work? We are just at the beginning and will launch a London-wide membership drive this summer, so this is still an open question. Of course we want to make renting in London less awful, we want to see changes in law, changes in culture, changes in political attitudes, we want to question even the notion of renting. But it has become clear that this starts somewhere more basic: with the way people relate to each other. As the union has grown I have met people I do not normally meet, I have started to develop relationships of solidarity with those beyond my circles of friends. This can be difficult and demanding. Where are the boundaries when a tenant you are organising with calls you up on a holiday to ask you to solve a problem in which you have no expertise? I won’t say I always feel relaxed about these new relationships, but I’m happy to be exploring them; it is part of the work we want to do against the atomising housing market.

To build a union then is to draw on all the resources that other people and organisations offer up, but it is also to build new bonds, to replace relationships of commerce or convention with relationships that bind us together in order to increase our own power. The housing system is the obvious battleground, but the other battle is against alienation and resignation in a city so difficult and lonely for so many. We all live in London; in order to take control of the housing system we are pooling our knowledge and our resources and learning to live in London together.

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Spending some time in Cuba recently was a good opportunity to consider the problems of trying to common institutions from the inside, that is to say, bring them under the control and effective ownership of those who they affect, and particularly those who work within them. Applying this to the institutions that structure our daily life would require a radical transformation in the way we think. It is not natural for us to think of them as our institutions, to take responsibility for them, to work together with others to nurture them. It is tempting, given the radical change needed, to say that we should scrap the old institutions and start again. Yet in societies as complex as ours, it doesn’t seem viable to suggest a clean slate. We are up to our necks in authoritarian, undemocratic institutions – workplaces worst of all – and we are entirely reliant on them. We can’t abolish them and start again, for ordinary people would suffer at least as much as the owners of the institutions. So it seems we have no option but to change them to suit ourselves.

To be in Cuba is to remember how difficult it is to change authoritarian institutions. It is difficult, and not always illuminating, to talk to Cubans about politics directly, but most people are happy to talk about the economy. Many are appreciative of the welfare state elements of the Cuban economy, and as someone who has been to many Latin American countries it was a pleasure to see so much less deep poverty in Cuba than in most of the continent. But it seems that nobody, including the government, knows how to get an increased standard of living out of the state economy. Increasingly then the government response has been to open up to the private sector, with a mixture of large infrastructure contracts and small businesses for everyday services. Having a tightly controlled private economy would be the dream of many people, and some Cubans are undoubtedly happy with the government’s direction, but for many Cubans the centrally-controlled market/state economy is a constant obstacle course to negotiate. They do not feel in control of the decisions the government makes about which parts of the economy to privatise and how much, or where the resources of the nationalised parts of the economy are to be spent. The markets that develop out of the privatised sectors can be highly anomalous – second hand cars costing tens of thousands of dollars being an example.

Our own markets are equally full of such strange distortions: the price of houses, the failure rate of small businesses due to rent, the externalisation of environmental damage. This gets naturalised as something we can do nothing about. In Cuba, people at least know it is a result of government decisions, and to some extent a result of the US embargo. They know too that they can do almost nothing about it, for the government reacts to protests with violence. This seems to me to be very sad, because people have an instinct to make institutions they are part of work for them. It is one of the failures of Cuba that it has not permitted this type of institutional democracy. But no less sad is the resignation many people feel at market strangeness and authoritarian work environments in Western economies. They can’t be put in prison, it is true, but poverty is another type of prison, and not playing the game means exactly that.

Cuba provides another warning here. The lack of support of many for the Cuban government springs from one main well: dissatisfaction with the material standard of living. This is for many people the main objection to the government, rather than a lack of political freedom they often barely notice in reality. For a time nothing marked the success of the regime as much as the government’s ability to provide. Now nothing marks its failure so much as the government salary and the failure to provide. There is a collectivity felt by many Cubans, they like to work for the government, aware they are contributing to their community and nation, but even these people throw up their hands in despair at the government salary. It is a stark reminder that support for any economic project is contingent on its ability to meet people’s needs and desires. We could invent the most theoretically sound economy in the world, but if the shops were half empty as in Cuba, it would get little support. We should think carefully about whether transitions to a new economy are politically viable. If we cannot maintain broad political support for a commoning economy it would not last long.

Challenging the institutions

But on now to glimmers of hope: one of the most interesting phenomena in Cuba at present is that of ever-increasing internet access. Most people can only access internet on Wi-Fi in public parks, but increasingly even private homes are able to obtain Wi-Fi routers. There is a vibrant Cuban blogging community, and sites such as the Havana Times emerging to criticise the government from left as well as right. For people who fear to communicate with each other, the internet is a gift.

If we follow the parallel with authoritarian institutions in the West, particularly workplaces, one wonders whether the internet has truly been exploited to the full yet. A few websites such as glassdoor.com allow employees to take a measure of revenge on bad employers, but this is tinkering around the edges. We need to ask whether we can find a way for people of an anti-authority persuasion to begin to interact with each other from within the belly of the beasts. Trade unions, it is true, have been the traditional vehicle for exerting employee power in the workplace, but they have their limits, and one of them is that they have rarely sought to undo the boss-worker relationship.

Yet the task of challenging the bosses feels too intimidating for us to even begin, for any open declaration of intent would be met with the termination of our employment. If we want to undo that relationship, if we want to common our institutions, we will often have to campaign in secret. Now on online blogs such as this, we can at least begin to imagine it. The next step is surely to ask whether we can we build platforms specifically for those who live in fear of their bosses, for those who don’t accept the authoritarian rule of the markets. Can we bring together those people in organisations who know they should have their say in the running of the organisation? Where are the anti-authoritarian workplace apps? Where is the wikileaks for circulating documents within a company or within an industry? Where are the apps to link garment workers in Bangladesh with shop workers in London? We have the opportunity to develop a new movement of resistance to authoritarian institutions. Are we only slow to move because it is hard to fund such platforms? Or are we still frightened?

There is every reason to be scared, but perhaps we can start to use our new communications technologies to face our fears. One of the lessons we can learn from Cuba and many other countries around the world is that it is sometimes the internet that makes opposing authoritarianism go from feeling impossible to feeling merely difficult. Difficult is fine. We are just at the beginning.

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There are many types of commoning and so there are different experiences of it. We can talk of digital commons, where abundance reigns supreme, or of limited resource commons, we can talk of commons with only a few dozen participants and commons with millions, we can talk of commons we establish and fight for deliberately, or commons that we find ourselves caught up in. So when we talk of experiencing the commons, we cannot talk of one experience, yet if there are features that tie all commons together, perhaps there are also experiences that are shared – common experiences of commons, if you will. In the absence of large scale studies on these experiences I shall examine the issue from the perspective of my own experiences, offering by necessity a partial and incomplete picture, the beginnings of a conversation.

Common experiences

From some years I helped to run an independent community centre in London. I learned a lot from this and one lesson was learned from organising work days. Some of us had thought about what it truly meant to work together, having been involved in other projects, while others had not had opportunity to do so. Those with less experience would turn up and wait to be told what to do. Many would become confused when no-one seemed to be in charge, and in some cases would attempt to take charge themselves, their instincts causing quiet amusement. In fact, all that was needed to get the work done was a little sharing of knowledge. A director of work was superfluous to requirements, but the assumption that such a post was necessary was clear in the behaviour of many who wanted to help. Among those of us who could work as a group, and those who learned to do so, a small community built up, often fractious and never without difficulties, yet among it all strong friendships were built that I expect to last a lifetime.

Another experience of working together has come from living in a small self-managed community in London. A frequent issue here is for new members in particular to get angry at ‘the co-operative’ for doing this or that, or not doing it. They stomp about frustrated that the service they expected is not appearing, and have to be gently introduced to the idea that they are part of the co-operative. This means not that they are responsible alone for getting done what needs to get done, but that they are going to have to work together with others, and may even need to be initiator of a collective process.

This problem is visible too on the very small scale: I can recall reading groups I’ve been part of that self-managed their organisation and were beset by the same assumptions of service provision and top-down management. I admit to at one time being the person who would wait for others to set dates, find venues and so on. Over time this changed, or I should say, I changed. I understood that collective work required a contribution from myself, even occasional temporary leadership. It was my job as much as anyone’s to put in the little effort required to make good things happen. Again, these groups have been the basis of enduring friendship, not something I can say for any paid evening courses I have done.

When organising online the assumptions of top-down culture are often less apparent – there has been a widespread rebellion against it. This is the great hope the internet offers to those would take up the challenge. Yet often too it is disrupted by individuals elevated as heroes of this or that digital change. Few recognise that high profile icons were often simply in the right place at the right time to benefit from the work of many individuals; the assumption is that it is not a collectivity that has achieved the digital commons but a leader. Meanwhile something frequently left unsaid in the virtual world is that many digital commons also rely on relationships, whether that be among the technical teams behind them, or among, for example, the more active Wikipedians. The work flows better when people know each other, whether that means face to face or online.

The negative and the positive

The negative experience that creeps in again and again when organising commons is the assumption that someone should be in charge. There must be a controlling mind, we think. And if something is wrong, someone is to blame. In a weaker form this appears as a simple assumption that someone else will make it happen. Such assumptions are rarely explicitly stated – for that would sound selfish – but are simply lived assumptions that come to us from a controlled, managerial culture that begins in school. The classroom is a managed environment in which the agency of children is minimised, even when more modern curricula try to emphasise participation rather than passive learning. When we enter the workplace we find – no accident of course – that it is very similar to school. Someone else is in charge, except in those instances where I am in charge. For those who hate their subservient class position the ambition, drummed into us from a young age, is to join the ruling class.

Meanwhile the positive experience that most forms of commoning share is that they are about relationships. I have lost count of the friendships I have formed through commoning, but it goes well beyond friendships – the experience of community I have experienced is a gift without price. This can be stated even more strongly: in many ways commoning is the relationships that form. Or to put it another way, commoning is in part the attempt to manage resources through relationships rather than through financial transactions.

Relationships of commoning are relationships between equals, but that is not to say that the commons never requires leadership. Particular projects often need someone to take a leadership role. But the leadership, when it works, tends to be temporary and revocable. It never becomes managerial or dominatory in nature; when it does, the commons is lost. The price then of being a commoner is constant vigilance against the managerial beliefs that permeate our culture. If this seems a high price to pay – and I agree it is no easy task – in return we can win positive relationships, and the promise of life beyond atomised individualism.

A learning process

This is intended as a conversation opener about the experience of being a commoner. It may not mirror the experiences of others, and undoubtedly many aspects of common experience are missing. Another positive experience I’ve had of commoning is that of exhilarating creativity. This isn’t always a constant, but frequently working together as equals for the first time unlocks potentials people had never before seen in themselves or in each other. Ideas and ways of working are invented that could never have been produced by the individuals alone.

Yet I have opened this conversation with a big negative because I feel it is worth being honest about the experience of being a commoner. It can be hard work, for our culture militates against it. Working together with others requires a lot of learning, a constant process of mutual and self education. It is often frustrating, can create stress when groups are not functioning well, or falling into conflicts about who dominates. But it is important too to remember the reason why it can be so difficult: the positive and negative experiences are linked. Commoning is about creating positive and equal relationships, and so must constantly struggle against the relationships of domination we are accustomed to. Those dominatory and managerial relationships have surrounded us our whole lives. We internalise them without knowing it. To establish new and better relationships is a battle with ourselves as much as with the norms of society.

Those of us who have been deliberately commoning for some time should be able to offer reassurance to those just starting out: escaping strongly top-down relationships does get easier. It is possible for everyone to learn how to be together with others, to cultivate resources with equals. Having put in this hard work, the potential rewards are without price: a life full of rich and equal relationships outside of the authoritarian structures of market and state.

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Why systems are failing

What is visibly failing is management of large scale societies, management of us, by those who seldom fully understand our problems, management regimes too big to adapt as needed. It is not stated often enough that we live in a heavily managed society. Yet people instantly understand what is meant by this: they have experience of being managed. Sometimes we are managed well, sometimes badly, but at some point in a large system, the former state will always give way to the latter. Eventually a sense of lost control comes over us all. We must take back control, we feel. It is hard to know how, hard to know who to target, for no leaders or parties seem to return power to us.

Many see that capital has become a dominant force in these large systems, re-shaping our cities, our very lives, flinging aside humans as detritus of the development process. As a solution we are constantly offered better management. We can keep casting around for better managers, but as the ‘Accidental Anarchist’ Carne Ross has been arguing, we live in complex systems that cannot successfully be controlled from the top down. The point is not to simply be angry with the managers for doing the wrong things, or for being the wrong managers, or for not advantaging us rather than others in these huge dynamic networks around us. Intention anyway becomes lost in such large systems. It’s true that some managers do transfer wealth from poor to rich, and others attempt to do the opposite. But each of the managers fails at some point, often fatally undermining any good work they have done. Perhaps it’s time to start entertaining a new line of thought: perhaps we should stop asking to be managed.

Escaping management

This requires a deep shift in thinking and a new set of institutions. Almost all previous political claims, from both left and right, assumed that people must be managed. Elections every four or five years do not undo management: elections are a method by which we find the correct managers, not a form of self-rule. Those who think that a single decision every four or five years means we are in control are invited to reflect on the absurdity of the proposition: mere ownership of your house or car involves dozens, even hundreds of decisions in a year. How then can ownership of your government require fewer decisions?

Why have I begun talking about ownership? It isn’t the usual language of making democracies work, except in that vague and dishonest usage where we are encouraged to ‘feel ownership’ of decisions made by others. Socialism and communism did once talk about ownership, but created a dichotomy between private ownership and central state ownership. Neo-liberalism bought into the same dichotomy and propagandised private ownership, or sometimes mixed forms of the two in unwieldy pseudo-free markets. It feels like we have not had a thorough, open-minded discussion about ownership for a long time. Doing so might begin to reveal how new institutions can move us beyond the current system failures.

Ownership, stripped back to its real meaning, is about control, and control is what we lack. The point of owning something is that we can do as we wish with it. To be made to feel ownership is a con, but to have ownership is to have control. The logical conclusion is that we should have ownership of as much of the world we inhabit as possible, and since we do not inhabit the world alone, we must own together with others. Others have reached this conclusion before: digging at the practicalities of Lefebvre and Harvey’s ‘right to the city’, which sounds a little ambiguous in its meaning, it emerges as something like a ‘right to own the city’. We should have control, says Harvey, not just of public space, but of our housing, our energy sources, our data infrastructure, our food supplies and of course our workplaces.

A culture of owning together

This sounds difficult, and it is. Owning our world would share some of the problems of managing it: our world is so big, there is too much of it and too many of us. Yet what an ownership framework offers that management does not is that it works at multiple scales rather than being always top down and so concerned with controlling entire systems. Where an overview is required – owning our atmosphere for example – we can construct decision-making systems that allow all to take part, but where detail is required we can conceive of much more localised forms of ownership, in which those most affected have the most say. This leaves plenty of room too for those things we should own individually: those things that mostly effect ourselves can be ours entirely.

One starting point is to look at digital commons which have arisen out of both the collaboration that the internet enables and the almost zero marginal cost of replication online. What the genuine digital commons distribute is control; what they have in common is mechanisms in place to de-centre individual or corporate ownership. The Wikimedia foundation opens up editing control as well as literal ownership rights; that it does both is key to understanding why it works, and why we can justly talk of a Wikipedia community. This can offer us clues about how future institutions might look.

Another starting point is the very common-sense idea that if it affects your life, you should be able to have a say in it. This isn’t a particularly radical idea – even private ownership of property in our current capitalist system is compromised by the imposition of planning laws. ‘Compromise’ sounds like a bad word, but here it is a recognition that what people do to their properties has a public impact, so there should be some level of public control over this most private of ownership forms. Where the planning rules fall down in the UK, and in most countries, is that local authorities and the planning systems are astonishingly undemocratic. Yet the underlying principle is established: in this most capitalist of societies we already recognise that we need some sort of collective, democratic control of our environment, and that it can take mixed individual/democratic forms. Ownership and democracy are closely overlapping ideas. What owning together means is that we decide. What democracy means is that where we must make decisions together, there is a process in place for that to happen. A call to own everything is a call for a democratic society.

To address the complex ownership claims, we must develop ideas of blended ownership, different types of ownership, overlapping ownership rights for different scale collectivities, all imagined beyond the private-state dichotomy. The recent UK Labour Party-commissioned paper Alternative Models of Ownership proposed three forms of ownership: worker co-ops, municipal and community ownership, and forms of state ownership with increased democratic accountability, but the commons of old that are inspiring many to establish new commons today often had very complex ownership and usage structures that endured over centuries. We should aim to construct what we might call full spectrum ownership, that is to say, an infinite variety of ownership types and overlapping ownership forms designed to give us control over our own lives.

The link to new digital commons is not merely an inspirational one. Emerging technologies are making it easier for more people to be involved in discussion and decision-making. Taiwan and radical Spanish cities are currently experimenting with intense public participation in creating legislation, and it’s only a matter of time until other countries follow suit. The ability to rapidly process data may also turn out to be key to working out who should have a say in what, and keeping ownership clusters up to date, so that we know who is actually affected by a particular issue.

Towards owning everything

I will return to housing for a practical example of how the right to own the city (and everything else) could work. We could escape from the dichotomy of privately owned homes versus publicly owned homes, and instead establish systems in which the individual would have ownership rights, yet the surrounding community would also have rights, perhaps to regulate the re-sale price or rents, as though the entire city or country were a network of community land trusts. In order to prevent islands of privilege developing, regional and national ownership bodies would also exercise some rights within a neighbourhood. Again, this isn’t a million miles from how the planning system works now, but this would need deeply democratic bodies at every level, starting from the street or neighbourhood up, to regulate the system, rather than a central government prodding bureaucratic local authorities to try to get the results they want.

I’m under no illusions that creating a culture of owning together is an easy thing to do, for we must all learn how to work with each other, undoing what we have been taught at school and at work. This requires a shift not just in institutions but in our own thinking and acting. But think of the prize: to own together is to live together, to undo the atomised society that management has given us, to create a more caring and less isolating society. A more convivial world could be seen as a by-product of taking back control, but it could be seen as potentially the best outcome of a culture of owning together.

Such a culture is already beginning to form offline as well as online. Thankfully we embark on this vast project without having to start entirely from scratch. The world of cooperatives has always been the ideal training ground for those who want to run the world together. Co-ops’ radical potential is not that they eliminate the dominance of capital in themselves, but that they prepare us for a world that we control. They teach us what a liveable system might look like, tied together by ownership that relies on relationships.

Radical campaigners have also begun asserting a culture of owning together in campaigning work. I am involved with a new organising fighting for renters’ rights in London. What excites me is that we have begun to embed a culture of owning together in our campaigning in two different ways. Firstly we are ensuring that the planned renters union itself will be owned by those it aims to help. This will be guaranteed by a truly grassroots democratic structure to the union, meaning the members will be able to launch their own fights within a mutual support network. Secondly we are not shying away from the key issue of who controls property: renters, we assert, should have more control, landlords should have less. This amounts to a transfer of  ownership rights over the properties we inhabit. Thus a renters union owned by renters can be envisaged as a way to collectively achieve a re-distribution of control, a re-distribution of ownership rights.

In the same way we can try to weave owning-together into all our projects, from campaigns, to local economy work, to political party building. At the governmental level we have the example of a few radical cities, but progress towards a government we can call our own seems painfully slow. What would the world look like if we started acting as though we owned everything? What if we identified as owners-together in our workplaces, our tech projects, our food growing projects, our campaign platforms, and began to assert full spectrum ownership of our world? We could begin to challenge those who think they own everything now, and at the same time gain practice in working together. Intertwining a culture of owning together into our everyday work would mean we spend more time interacting with our neighbours, and with those who share our interests, more time learning to interact as equals rather than as bosses and subordinates. The journey towards a world we truly own is bound to be a long one, but we needn’t await arrival at the destination to begin living in a more controllable and more convivial world.

Photo by Deivuh

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A large chunk of the book is taken up with Iglesias’ exposition of Spanish history. A kind of ‘how did we get here’, here being neo-liberalism and a failing European dispensation for Spain. What becomes clear through this narrative is that the ‘mistakes’ of the left were, in his view, nothing to do with poor structuring that allowed organisations and parties to become detached from their bases, but a series of strategic mistakes made by their leaders.

Strategic errors are also made by many on the radical left, he claims, when they demand too much radicalism from left wing vehicles. He cites approvingly Lenin’s attack essay ‘Leftism is an infantile disorder’. What is meant here is that demanding too much purist radicalism is childish, because the people aren’t ready for it. There’s some truth in that: most people in Spain, as in the UK, are not political radicals, and any large-scale movements must bring them on board. Yet how does Iglesias think that movements get pulled leftward? Simply by clever positioning by people like him perhaps? Without a radical left wing one wonders what he would be positioning himself between – the centre left and the right?

I’ll admit to not knowing enough of Spanish political history to know what Iglesias gets right or wrong. He may well be mostly right, though his Marxist framework imposes a somewhat deterministic hindsight-view of struggling power blocs over the complex pathways of the past. Yet the broad overview he takes is disappointing from a man heading a party that denounces the current institutions as corrupt. He rarely critiques the institutions in themselves, with the exception of the monarchy and the EU: the easy targets, in other words. What he critiques again and again, whether in the Transition from fascism or in the present day, is those who do the wrong or corrupt things in those institutions. He looks at their decisions as a strategist looking down, yet rarely seems to suggest that it may be the nature of the state and party institutions that cause the problem. The wrong people are dominant and hold the reins of hegemonic power, in his view. He is the right person to wield  power, it is implied, having positioned himself perfectly as the critical yet mild social democratic voice Spain needs.

When the more recently written appendices do finally get onto Podemos, the position of Iglesias is further revealed. He has almost nothing to say about the democratic nature of Podemos. Remember that subtitle about a democratic Europe? It’s a particularly odd one when Iglesisas appears to have little interest at all in democratic organising. Podemos, in his version of history, was born less out of the horizontol urges of the 15M movement, which he more or less classifies as a failure, and more out off the media project of him and his friends: La Tuerka and Fort Apache. It was these, he insists, that won the loyalty of people. In the age of television, he argues, one can create a party through media alone. He has nothing to say about the autocratic nature of the medium. It is simply a prime ideological tool that the left should use to establish a popular leadership with (sufficiently mild) socialistic goals. I agree that media must play a role in establishing a new common sense, yet should it really be in charge? TV studios have become the real parliaments, Iglesias states as though it is an unchangeable fact. The upshot is that one must try to win on TV above all, with a few ‘good’ leaders facing up to the ‘bad’ leaders in the circus of the studio.

It seems curious that a man so obsessed with the ‘old elites’ of Spain should be so keen on setting up a new elite, yet it is difficult to reach any other conclusion about his goals. The democratic structure of Podemos is only mentioned in passing, and without strong approval. Its purpose as an organisation, one reads between the lines, is to launch the leaders of Podemos into power. Unlike every other person and party in history, we must assume, he and Podemos will be untouched by the degradation and capture that besets every new elite. He and the other leaders of the party will do the right thing, they will make the right strategic decisions, and thus, finally, the possibility of socialism will be opened by a party and leader that have sought to defend themselves constantly against the danger of being too radical.

In the same way movements need their left wing radicals, I’m sure they also need to their Pablo Iglesiases, their strategists and positioners. I’m aware that Iglesias has achieved much, and it’s easy to criticise from an armchair. But surely we must be careful of people who see themselves as ideal leaders. In an interview published as an appendix, Iglesias tells us he gave the king of Spain a gift of a DVD set of ‘Game of Thrones’, remarking that this is what is happening in Spain right now. The metaphor is massively disappointing to anyone who wanted Podemos not to create a new elite but to get rid of the elite altogether. There’s little doubt who Iglesias wants to occupy the Iron Throne.

Photo by marclozanobosch

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