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Ulli Diemer replies
Ulli Diemer replies:
The reply
from the "Tenant’s Voice" refers to my
article as "a fine piece of fiction" and as "a
cornucopia of inaccuracies and distortions". However, the reader
will look in vain through the reply for any indication of just which
facts in my article are supposed to be untrue or distorted, since
the "Tenant’s Voice" addresses itself solely to my real
and imagined conclusions rather than to the facts I cited to support
them. I suggest that readers go back and compare the reply with
my original
article: they will find that the central facts I cited there
are not challenged in the reply, but simply passed over in discreet
silence.
Where inaccuracies and distortions do appear, however, is in the
reply from the "Tenants’s Voice". I will leave most of
these for later refutation by the Bain majority; here I just want
to take up a few items that specifically misrepresent key aspects
of what I said.
The reply states I advocate that tenants "form a disciplined
corporate entity capable of dealing with government bureaucracies
which provide the necessary capital" and ... "that tenants
become their own landlord". "If you can’t beat them, join
them, right Ulli?" they say. In fact, however, the quotation
they cite has been blatantly taken out of context. It actually appears,
as anyone can verify by checking the original article, as part of
a discussion of the potential problems of co-ops, and is
specifically made as a criticism. In the passage in question I state,
among other things, that the Bain experience "does not necessarily
mean that it is best to pursue the co-op route", that in a
co-op "residents’ control is greatly restricted by the fact
that urban land continues to be controlled by the forces of the
capitalist market", and that "one of the main drawbacks
of the process of becoming a co-operative as it took place at Bain
was the way it channelled the energies of a significant number of
active and politically aware residents into legal and bureaucratic
activities". To tear part of one sentence out of that discussion,
deliberately misrepresent it, use it to make it appear that I am
an apologist for the very things I am drawing attention to and criticizing
and use this as a pretext for launching into a long diatribe against
my supposed views — views I have specifically rejected in the
very passage the quote has been taken from — well, I think
this kind of tactic speaks for itself.
Elsewhere, they attribute to me the view that "tenants were
at fault for being intested in ’putting more money in their pockets’
", that "we should not care about money", and that
"it is OK ... for workers in the factory to want more money,
while here in the community, money becomes a ’vulgar’ thing".
Nowhere did I say or imply anything of the sort. What I did say
was:
(a) that "residents were of course interested in paying as
little rent as possible ... And they thought a co-op would be the
best way of achieving that goal.";
(b) that the Wages for Housework stance was "a short-sighted
position even in its own terms, since most co-ops do have a better
track record on rents";
(c) that if necessary residents were willing to make some short-term
financial sacrifices in the expectation of benefitting financially
in the long run, and that this was a valid decision, and;
(d) that the Wages for Housework position is a "vulgar form
of economic determinism" because it is based on the premise
that people will only respond, and can only be organized
around, issues that have to do with putting more money in their
pockets.
It is this last point that is the key to the elitism of Wages for
Housework. They think they have discovered the key to the class
struggle, and insist on fitting everything onto their Procrustean
bed. (The Trotskyists have essentially the same approach with their
fetishization of correct "transitional demands" and "correct
slogans".) Let us be clear: there is no dispute at all about
the importance and validity of economic demands, whether in the
workplace or in the community. What is under dispute is Wages
for Housework’s insistence that money is the only thing around which
it is permissible to organize, their arrogant belief that working
class people cannot be interested in anything except money, and
their demonstrated determination to actually sabotage working-class
struggles that refuse to stick to the narrow goals Wages for Housework
has predetermined for them. In this respect, Wages for Housework
appears as a degenerated version of Leninism. Where Lenin proclaimed
that the working class could by its own efforts attain only a narrow
economic consciousness, and added the corollary that it was the
role of bourgeois intellectuals to bring socialist consciousnss
to it from the outside, Wages for Housework accepts the original
proposition but adds a new corollary: the theory that it is the
role of middle-class radicals (born-again under the all-encompassing
rubric of "housewife", which conveniently erases all class
distinctions) to make sure that the working class does not
transcend the supposed economistic limits of its consciousness.
Where this thinking leads became rather clear at Bain: Those residents
who share the objective of forming a co-op — the vast majority
— are characterized as the enemy, even though they are far
more representative of women, the poor, and the working class (the
group Wages for Housework claims to represent) than the rent freeze
group.
The rent freeze group is played up because it is said to be led
by women who are taking on "management" or "the co-op".
(The terms are used interchangeably, and it is stated, quite falsely,
that "the Co-op managers would become the proud owners of Bain
Ave.") Never mind that the co-op consists of all residents,
who all share ownership equally and that major decisions are made
at face-to-face meeting anyone can attend: the residents, we are
assured, are manipulated by the executive. Who is on the executive?
Twelve people, nine of them women, three of them single mothers
on social assistance. They pay the same rents as everybody else.
Never mind, they are not representative. How did they get on the
executive? Well, they were elected, but elections are just bourgeois
democracy: Trudeau was elected, and he isn’t representative. But
wasn’t the decision not to hold a rent freeze made at a well-attended
meeting, after a great deal of leafletting, convassing, and face-to-face
discussion, by a 120 to 16 vote? Yes, but the leafleting by the
pro-co-op people was "intimidation", so the vote wasn’t
valid. (The leafleting by the rent freeze group, in contract, was
education.) But wasn’t the anti-co-op group massively defeated again
in a referendum where 87 per cent of residents voted by secret ballot?
Ah yes, but that’s voting, and that’s bourgeois democracy, and that
doesn’t count, remember? The government shoud intervene to impose
the will of the minority on the majority. (But isn’t the government
itself the main example of bourgeois democracy? Never mind, let’s
not go off on tangents...) Besides, the people who favour the co-op
want (collective) ownership of their homes, so they can’t really
be working class or poor, since we all know homeowners are bourgeois.
Everybody knows only tenants are really working class, and even
then only if they agree with Wages for Housework...
Thinking like this can’t be argued against. But then maybe it doesn’t
have to be.
Published in Volume 2, Number 2 of The
Red Menace, Spring 1978.
(CX5155)
See also: Bain
Co-op Meets Wages for Housework
See also: Bain Co-op
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