Take back the city: Building an interracial class coalition to fight for ‘Homes for All’

Abstract

This article draws on empirical data collected through in-depth interviews conducted with Irish and migrant activists from the Take Back the City housing coalition to incite the debate about the potential of interracial class coalitions and to point out the challenges of migrant activism in Ireland. Take Back the City was a movement from below, which through the praxis aimed to challenge common sense with good sense. It questioned the commodification of housing in Ireland by reframing the housing crisis as a result of political and economic decisions, as well as in its strategy of occupying empty buildings. Claiming Homes For All, activists noticed that this slogan was not all-encompassing and as such was insufficient to help recognise that it also referred to those who came to Ireland to study, work or seek asylum. As the hegemonic narrative understands the world through concepts such as the nation-state, borders and citizenship, it automatically excludes non-nationals as the people, the subject of rights within a nation-state. This article locates Take Back the City experience within the discussion on race and class dynamics addressed by anti-racist and anti-capitalist scholars and activists.

Keywords

Migrant activism anti-racism anti-capitalism social movement housing

Introduction

This article draws on empirical data collected through in-depth interviews conducted with Irish and migrant activists from the Take Back the City (TBTC) housing coalition to incite the debate about the potential of an interracial class coalition and to point out the challenges of migrant activism in Ireland. TBTC was a movement from below (Cox and Nilsen, 2014), which through the praxis aimed to challenge common sense with good sense (Gramsci, 2011). TBTC questioned the commodification of housing in Ireland and the contradiction between the land and buildings in the city (see O’Callaghan et al., 2014) and the growing numbers of those experiencing homelessness, on the housing list, living in overcrowded and substandard dwellings and facing evictions. Some of these evictions were opposed by groups within TBTC in the previous months – such as the emblematic Summerhill case, when more than a 100 migrants were evicted in less than a week. It was through groups organizing on the ground for housing that the need to address racism emerged. TBTC positioned itself as an alternative to top-down scapegoat narratives of the post-Celtic Tiger collapse, which according to O’Flynn et al. (2014) moved from a collective blaming to more specific groups such as public sector workers, the unemployed, single parents and immigrants. Ultimately, TBTC questioned private property rights in the framing of their demands as well as in their strategy of occupying empty buildings.

TBTC was formed by grassroots groups, which are distinct from NGOs and political parties (see glossary for more information about groups). For Arrossi et al. (1994), grassroots are membership-based organisations representing the particular interests of groups or localities in which members share in the risks, costs and benefits of social change efforts and the leadership is accountable to its members. Della Porta and Diani (2006) identify that not all social movement organisations are directly concerned with political power, but they are oriented to the needs of its constituency and/or to support cultural and symbolic changes or the practice of new lifestyles. It is relevant to emphasize that such cultural and symbolic changes and lifestyles are based on worldviews. Some activists organise themselves at the community level to achieve specific gains within the capitalist limits, while others aim to achieve specific gains to dismantle capitalism and to structure society under a distinct organizational basis – such groups are anti-capitalists.

Following a Marxist tradition, it is argued in this article that social movements cannot be understood in isolation (see Barker, 2013). Distinct movements are part of a totality, influenced by global, national and local events as well as by social, political, economic and cultural dynamics that are shaped by the class struggle – or the struggle between movements from above and from below (Cox and Nilsen, 2014). Therefore, this article suggests that TBTC should be categorized as a movement from below, which is part of a wider anti-capitalist movement. It specifically emerged as a response to the commodification of housing in Ireland and the rise of evictions and homelessness. However, it also connected people’s demands in Ireland with all those around the world struggling to have a home. Because housing deprivation is part of a global market-oriented rationality that privileges property rights over people’s needs, TBTC’s questioning of these property rights in Ireland locates it in the global anti-capitalist struggle – or within the movement of movements (Cox and Nilsen, 2014). For example, one event hosted by TBTC featured the guest speaker Thapelo Mohapi, General Secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo (the Durban Shack Dwellers’ Movement), a South African movement campaigning against evictions and for public housing. This solidarity action showed that the struggle for housing under capitalism is transnational and interracial. In this sense, anti-racism must also be part of the struggle against capitalism. As TBTC showed, questioning the commodification of housing was not just an Irish or a migrant issue. It was about placing human needs before the market’s interests.

This article is organised in five sections. It starts with a literature review on how race and class dynamics are understood by thinkers involved in anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements. Class is defined here as a category that relates ultimately to the positionality of people in the productive chain, not to one’s consumption habits or preferences. The second section focuses on migrant activism in Ireland and the third section covers the methodology. This article draws on qualitative research carried out with activists from TBTC in 2019. The researcher departs from a Marxist standpoint, the philosophy of the praxis in Gramsci’s words, to argue for the potentiality of an interracial class coalition in the Left. This research can be read as a militant investigation (Shukaitis et al., 2007), because the researcher is also part of the housing movement. The fourth section is devoted to the findings, where activists explain the emergence of TBTC, their reframing of the housing crisis, the structure of the coalition, the need to build an interracial class alliance and the challenges of migrant activism in Ireland. The article concludes with the fifth section outlining the defence of a universalist approach towards human liberation.

Race and class as part of the anti-capitalist struggle

This section covers how race and class dynamics have been addressed by anti-racist and anti-capitalist thinkers. The challenges of uniting the working class beyond the national border and the colour line have been a long-standing problem within the anti-capitalist left. When analysing the Polish liberation movement, Friedrich Engels (1882) highlighted the need of Poland to become a free nation but at the same time the urgency of opposing the Pan-Slavic nation myth, which he identified as a movement from above, a project of the Slavic aristocrat class, which would keep exploiting the Slavic people. Another question that received particular attention from Marx and Engels was the hostility and competition among British and Irish migrant workers in England. Marx (1975) argued that the liberation of Ireland was decisive to the emancipation of workers in both countries and English workers should support it. Decades later, in the US, W.E.B. Du Bois also observed how racism divided the working class in their common interest to free themselves. He used the term ‘psychological wage’ to explain the specific privilege that was given to White workers, which also were exploited and poor, but felt superior to their Black peers: ‘They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools’ explains Du Bois (1985: 700). Such distinctions draw a colour line between the working class. Michelle Alexander (2019) also identifies a psychological wage and argues that Black and White poor people should get together in a cross-racial front. However, Alexander would look at the inequality in US society through a racial justice frame, understanding such inequalities as the result of a castle system.

Departing from the perspective that racialisation processes are connected to the class struggle, this article rejects both right and left-wing discourses that disconnect race analysis from the class dynamics. It has recently been observed a growing ‘class first’ form of orthodoxy which reduces the working class to White nationals. Such patterns of discourse were revived during the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum – which according to Valluvan and Kalra (2019: 2394) drew on anti-immigration and cognate anxieties regarding race and ethnic difference to argue for Britain leaving the European Union.Not far from there, the Irish left-wing scholar Angela Nagle (2018) argued that the left defence for free immigration had turned well-intentioned activists into ‘useful idiots of big business’, which benefit from migration (a view that is shared by Slavoj Žižek). While the first narrative draws on nationalist sentiments, the second draws on the idea that migrant workers lower the national wages. It is telling of the first case, Hilary Pilkington’s (2016) ethnographic research with the English Defence League, a working-class organization that sees itself as warriors of the nation fighting cultural Islamic invasion (which is conceptualised as cultural racism by Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Pilkington’s findings enlighten the problem with nationalism, as well as the need to overcome imagined communities in order to bring people together under common class interest.

The problem of gender, ethnic and racial division within the working class is addressed in the ninth thesis of David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014). Harvey recognises the role of racialisation within the social division of labour. However, Harvey does not see contemporary anti-racist movements as anti-capitalist because to be anti-capitalist it must attack capital’s inner logic. He reminds the reader that racial divisions would not be indispensable to capital accumulation. In this sense, capital can survive without racism but not without labour exploitation, so it is necessary that movements against racism take into account the class dimension. It is imperative to bear in mind though that movements evolve through the praxis and it is the task of organisers in the left – and of social scientists – to look beyond the veil of appearance into the deeper nature of structures and practices.

In the book From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, the activist scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) locates racism within the context of economic exploitation and shows the complex chain of elements that the anti-racist struggle involves. If there is a conflict of interest among Black and Whites, there are also conflicts among the so-called Black community – a concept that Taylor (2016: 7) argues has been losing its strength since the end of segregation in the US. The Black elites can be anti-racist but not anti-capitalists, due to their defence of neoliberalism and serving as examples to reinforce the ideas of meritocracy and colourblindness. Class distinction – and interests – among racialised people has also been addressed by James Forman Jr (2017) and Asad Haider (2018). Haider (2018: 19) reminds us that it is not about replacing a White cop with a Black cop, it is about people’s liberation. After all, racialised people are not unified, it is important to highlight that racialised people are not unified by essential characteristics. Migrant workers and Blacks became united as People of Colour under the circumstance of precarity, which draws from economic relations and are enforced and reinforced by the state and the cultural apparatus. Such circumstances can be challenged through the praxis by social movements though.

In order to challenge these circumstances, it is necessary to understand the precarity of racialised working-class people. The working-class grievances are not restricted to the workplace and not all workers are impacted to the same degree. White and racialised groups also struggle on multiple fronts, such as housing, ableism, health, education, gender inequality, sexuality, domestic violence and police repression to quote just some from an extensive list. The case study described in this article acknowledges Irish and migrant people unified by the housing issue as the dispossessed. To say they were united does not mean that all were affected in the same way. Migrants did not have as much of a network as Irish people to rely on. Nor did all of them have a full-time working visa or a visa at all. Many lived in Ireland but could not bring their family over. The International Organization for Migration study carried out by Guadagno (2020: 5) shows that ‘migrants are overrepresented in low-income and discriminated minorities, and encounter unique sets of challenges linked with their lack of entitlement to health care, exclusion from welfare programmes, and fear of stigmatization and/or arrest and deportation’. McGinnity et al. (2018) identified that in 2016, around 23 per cent of non-Irish nationals were living below the income poverty line (drawn at 60 per cent of median household income) compared to under 16 per cent of Irish nationals. Consistent poverty rates were 13 per cent for non-Irish as a whole, compared to 8 per cent for Irish, surging to 29 per cent in specific cases of non-EU nationals. Even though migrant workers are often overqualified, a report from the Migrants Rights Centre Ireland (2015) exposed that they are the majority in low-paid job sectors of the Irish labour market. The incidence of minimum wage pay among migrants is over twice that of Irish employees according to a research released in 2017 by Maitre, McGuinness and Redmon. All of these issues make migrants more vulnerable to the rental market. Almost 80 per cent of Irish nationals own their home (with or without a mortgage) compared to 34 per cent of non-Irish nationals (McGinnity et al., 2018). Less than 1-in-14 Irish nationals rent their home on the private market (McGinnity et al., 2018). In the case of the non-Irish population, McGinnity et al. (2018) reveal that half of them are private renters. Due to migrants’ reliance on the rental sector, their precarious jobs and lower income, they are disproportionately affected by the surge on rents. A report from the Economic and Social Research Institute authored by Grotti et al. (2018: 4) shows that ‘the standardised average rent increased by 40 per cent from Quarter 1, 2011 to Quarter 3, 2017. Even higher rises are recorded in Dublin, where rents rose by 55 per cent over the same period’. More recent research released by the think tank Social Justice Ireland (2019: 4) highlights that ‘more than one in five tenants paying market rent in Ireland are paying over 40 per cent of their disposable income on housing, with almost one in 10 paying over 60 per cent and more than one in 20 paying 75 per cent’. The lack of a rent cap and other regulations also add people to the homelessness list, where migrants and ethnic minorities are overrepresented. The ethnic minority Travellers make up 1 per cent of the population and are 19 per cent of those facing homelessness (see Grotti et al., 2018). While non-Irish nationals are less than 12 per cent of the population, they made up 33 per cent of the homeless population in 2017 (Morrin and Hynes, 2018). In April 2018, the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) confirmed that 42 per cent of rough sleepers were migrants. According to the Minister of Housing, Planning and Local Government Eoghan Murphy (2018), these people were not entitled to housing support.

In the next section, it will be addressed how migrant grassroots groups have been responding to such reality in Ireland and the challenges they face.

Migrant activism in Ireland

The literature on migrant activism in Ireland has shown (Landy, 2014; Lentin, 2012) the obstacles and the difficulty migrants face to organise themselves, to avoid being tokenised by self-proclaimed Irish allies, co-opted and silenced by bureaucratic structures or targeted by the racist presuppositions that migrants lack the vocabulary of the Irish state. Migrant-led activism is not something new in Ireland (Lentin, 2012) but the study concerning migrant activism has been restricted to the policy-making field (see Cullen, 2009; De Lona and Lentin, 2012; De Tona and Moreo, 2012; Landy, 2014 2015; Lentin, 2012) and service provision (see Landy, 2014; Lentin, 2012). A hypothesis for the dominance of these areas in research might be the centrality of NGOs and the state in the social movement field since the 1990s through Social Partnership schemes, which were criticised by the left at the time (Cox and Curry, 2010). This was the decade in which neo-corporatist relationships established in the 1980s between the state, employers and trade unions were extended to the community and voluntary sector (Cox, 2016). O’Byrne (quoted in Mallon, 2017) argues that social partnerships provoked the de-politicisation of community activism ‘towards “managerialism,” direct service provision and top-down, professionalised approaches to the problems at hand, with an individualist, neo-liberal ideology’. Thus, from the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s – when neoliberal politics became more deeply embedded in Irish society – Hearne et al. (2018) argue that social partnership schemes dominated the social movement field. After the 2008 crisis, such partnerships were weakened due to austerity measures and, as a consequence, a cut to the community and voluntary sector’s budget. Such measures were followed by anti-austerity protests.

Much research is needed to investigate the experience of migrant grassroots groups following the 2008 crisis, but what can be said from the data collected in the interviews is that they were critical of the state and NGOs, and that by 2014 they were already involved in national campaigns. The same can be said about housing groups that emerged at that time. The housing groups that in 2015 got together to set up the Irish Housing Network (IHN) were structurally grassroots. While there are some important analyses about the housing movement (such as Hearne et al., 2018; Lima, 2019; Mallon, 2017), the involvement of migrants and other racialised people is overlooked. An example is the exclusion of asylum seekers’ fight against Direct Provision in the analysis of anti-austerity and housing movements. The Movement of Asylum Seekers (MASI) was set up in 2014 through the direct action of seizing the Direct Provision Centre of Kinsale, Co Cork, where the residents demanded and achieved better living conditions, such as the right to cook for themselves. Direct Provision is a neoliberal response to house people and thus is a housing issue as argued by Sassi et al. (2019). Yet, the agency of asylum seekers and migrants is missing in the literature.

In the interviews conducted with migrant activists from Anti-Racism Network (ARN) and Migrants and Ethnic Minority for Reproductive Justice (MERJ), it was reported that working together with Irish groups and allies has been a constant challenge but also a necessity to highlight their agency and promote more profound social changes in society. A founder member of ARN said in the interview conducted for this research that the protests against water charges were a wake-up call for migrants to start getting involved in campaigns carried out on the left side of the political spectrum. He mentioned that slogans such as ‘Water for Irish people’ were alienating for the migrants, who did not feel represented by the movement. Thus, building an anti-racist narrative within the social movement field in Ireland was a task taken by migrant and ethnic minority groups. In 2015, ARN joined the IHN and was part of the Home Sweet Home coalition, which in winter 2016 occupied Apollo House. In 2017, MERJ emerged from the struggle of being seen and listened to during the ‘Repeal of the 8th’ Campaign. Part of the Together for Yes Coalition, this grassroots initiative aimed to bring their particularity as migrants and ethnic minorities, such as their experience within the maternal services in Ireland, and the impossibility of ones’ travelling abroad if undocumented or living in Direct Provision (MERJ, 2018). In 2018, MERJ and ARN were part of the TBTC along with Brazilian Left Front (BLF), a Brazilian grassroots group that was created in 2016 to denounce the ongoing coup against President Dilma Rousseff and became involved with issues concerning Irish society in the following years due the new reality Brazilians experience in Ireland: they are now working-class migrants.

This growing involvement of foreign nations in the social movement field in Ireland was observed with optimism by Cox (2016: 23), who argued that migrants bring new perspectives that help move beyond cross-class, unreflected ethnic identification. TBTC was a concrete experience in this direction.

Methodology

This section addresses the methodology. This article draws on qualitative research conducted between March and May 2019. Fourteen one-to-one semi-structured interviews were carried out with activists from eight groups within TBTC. They were: ARN, MERJ, BLF, Dublin Central Housing Action (DCHA), North Dublin Bay Housing Crisis Community (NDB), Dublin South-West Housing Action, A Lending Hand and Take Back Trinity (TBT). The selection of the sample followed two main criteria: (1) Distinct agenda and membership of the groups for a plural representation of TBTC membership and (2) the involvement of the groups in the decision-making process within the coalition. From the sample, eight were women and six were men; six were migrants, seven were settled Irish and one was a Traveller woman. From the migrant sample, three were People of Colour. In terms of age, the sample had 11 people over 30 years old; 2 of them were students; 4 of the respondents were parents and 1 was a single mother. Two of them were members of a political party. Twelve of those interviewed were working class, in the economic dimension of the concept, including the students that came from working-class families. All the interviewees were anonymised, and pseudonymous were adopted for safety reasons. The qualitative method was an appropriate instrument to obtain the data once many activists were making sense of distinct aspects of the occupation at the time we were talking. During the occupation, activists had to make immediate and vital decisions for the movement such as ‘Stay, leave or expand’ the occupations.

The author understands that there are ethical implications in this study but not in strict sociological terms. Considering that race, class, gender and other factors shape our identity and subjectivity, it is hard to not critically consider the recommendation of Durkheim in The Rules of Sociological Method (1982), where he suggests that all preconceptions must be eradicated from the research process. Before Durkheim, Marx (2007: 47) had alerted us that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’, and latter Gramsci (2011) discussed the role of intellectuals in the building of the hegemonic ideology and what he calls common sense. And, as Audre Lorde (2018) precisely formulated it, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Thus, having established that there is no neutrality in science, and that we all have a side (Becker, 1967), it is relevant to establish my positionality when carrying out this research. I had worked with DCHA, BLF and MERJ, so I was known by the groups and the interviewers. It opened a channel of communication but also made people aware of my political stances, which could have influenced interviewers’ answers to the questions. Writing this article more than a year after, it was observed though that many groups kept working together and the IHN promoted anti-racist trainings with MERJ and ARN to educated activists as an ongoing process of challenging racism within and outside the housing movement. As a militant researcher (Shukaitis et al., 2007), I am at the same time a subject and an object in this study such as the activists interviewed. As we act and reflect – as people/rational beings/activists – we all shape the movement and are shaped by it.

The epistemological departure point of this article is the concept of praxis in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (2007). Praxis appears as a category of mediation between the individual, it’s conscience and nature. It implies a combined movement that emerges from the concrete experience, is abstracted in the intellectual activity and comes back to the world. My defence of a Marxist epistemology is due to its broad framework and its engagement with social change (Bhaskar and Callinicos, 2003: 90). Marxism helps to make sense of social movement action because, as argued by Cox and Nilsen (2014: 6), ‘Marxism is, at its core, a theory of organised human practice, and thus an alternative theory of social movements’. It helps activists and scholars to rationalise – and to act upon – the issues concerning the movement. In this sense, this article offers elements to reflect on the challenges to overcome, through the practice, racial conflicts to organise an interracial class alliance among the oppressed.

Summerhill and housing forums

In the following sections, the researcher’s findings are presented. First, we must contextualise TBTC’s emergence. Before being known as TBTC, the coalition was called by the name of the street where the first occupation took place on 7th August 2018: Summerhill Occupation. It was three months after DCHA, a member of the IHN, supported the tenants evicted from the row of houses 33–39 on that street. In less than a week, around 120 people were evicted with no place to go. The vast majority were migrants from the Global South, almost all of them from Brazil. Many did not speak English and had a precarious visa status. Most of them had to move to friends’ rented accommodations, which were already overcrowded. Sleeping on sofas, mattresses, on the floor or sharing double beds for 300 euros each was their new reality. Three months after the eviction, the seven houses were still lying empty while the number of people in homelessness and on the housing list kept surging. TBTC emerged then as a follow-up response to the way tenants in Summerhill were treated by the landlord Pat O’Donnell and the Irish State, which the groups saw as complacent by not developing policies to regulate the rental market and not investing in social housing. In addition, the state also left undocumented migrants without protection to challenge the eviction due to exclusionary migration laws that follow the 2004 constitutional change, which Lentin and McVeigh (2006) argue had turned Ireland into a racist state by shifting jus soli rights to jus sanguinis.

Migrant and housing groups worked together in Summerhill to avoid the eviction, and due to the outcome, these groups decided to get together to reflect upon what could (and should) be done next. In summer 2018, two open forums were organised by grassroots groups in Dublin. The first forum, organised in an assembly based format, provided an overview of the current housing crisis followed by discussions on specific issues such as homelessness, public housing, evictions, high rents, substandard housing conditions, racism and student accommodation. The final discussion about what could be done about the crisis led to another forum aiming to discuss possible actions to tackle such issues. From these discussions, which brought up many problems that groups were facing on the ground in the past years, seven groups that had been working together around housing-related issues decided that it was time to carry out a direct action to call attention to the contradictions around the housing crisis. The groups that set up TBTC were: Blanchardstown Housing Action Committee (BHAC), North Dublin Bay Housing Crisis Committee (NDB), DCHA, Dublin Renters Union (DRU), Take Back Trinity (TBT), BLF and MERJ. After two months of actions, TBTC amassed 18 grassroots groups around the country.

Building an interracial coalition

TBTC was set up as a short-term coalition that served as a platform to carry out a series of direct actions in the summer of 2018. The broader goal of the coalition was to spark a larger housing movement, build community, share the narratives of those affected by the crisis and name those responsible for the crisis. TBTC was about escalating the resistance and building a cross-community/interracial based movement. Anthony from DCHA explained that

TBTC came a little bit more [than the occupations before] from the fact that there were evictions in May 2018 (…). At the time there was already good work being done around letting agencies or anti-evictions, but it was seen that there was a need to escalate in some way against this kind of vacancy, property hoarding by investors and connect with groups of tenants who maybe were not working together.

One of the concerns raised by the groups that had worked together in Summerhill was to tackle racism within the communities. Many claimed that the neighbours were resistant at first to taking the tenants’ side due to their nationality. Anthony from DCHA said that he observed a shift in the perception during that week about who was a troublemaker in the community, which he believed could have gone in a different direction if there were far-right groups in the area – John from Dublin South-West Housing Action said the same. Anthony recalled that the landlord hired people locally to evict the migrants, which could have ended in racial conflicts in the area:

It is like stoking racial tensions, there could be a massive physical confrontation, and the Irish people would see it locally as migrants beating up their young lads. So it could have gone that direction very quickly and this extra kind of tension is there.

To deal with these racial tensions, DCHA and other IHN and migrant groups did door knocking, stalls and social events in the area and contacted community groups and tenants they had worked with before to explain what was happening. The common ground which made the communication – and the solidarity – possible was that migrants and Irish people were both facing terrible dwelling conditions, struggling to pay the rent or in social housing buildings with no maintenance and/or leisure areas, and both were confronting the ballooning housing lists and homelessness figures. From this commonality, groups got together months later under the TBTC umbrella. TBTC was a choir with many voices and accents that verbalized distinct oppressions due to race, gender and sexual orientation that became unified by the category of class and their positionality as the disposed of and exploited by landlords in the housing market in Ireland.

Framing the struggle

While Leo Varadkar claimed Fine Gael stands for a ‘managed migration’ and the mainstream media made space for articles such as David Quinn’s ‘Huge scale of immigration is making our housing crisis worse’ (2017), housing and migrant activists got together to build a counter-narrative. From activists' previous experiences and the recent housing forums in summer 2018, the narrative of the housing crisis was drafted: while many people were exposed to high rents, overcrowding, terrible dwelling conditions and evictions, the properties and the land were still being offered on the market as an investment that would bring positive returns to the private capital. Dublin has ranked third out of 31 European cities for real estate investment and development according to the 2018 PwC/ULI Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe report. It is telling that, in the middle of a housing crisis, Dublin scored positively in rental growth prospects in this study, which evidences the capital interest in the rental sector and the capital’s view of housing as a commodity. As part of the collective identity of a social movement, TBTC framed their enemy by establishing who benefitted from the crisis. The answer was: the private capital (including companies such as Airbnb, whose office building the coalition occupied for a day), banks and landlords, which were named. According to Liam, a member of DCHA that had participated in other occupations such as the Bolt Hostel in 2015 and Apollo House in 2016, TBTC shifted the narrative from blaming the government to blaming the capitalist class. It was a more accurate framing of the crisis, he argued, which also differentiated the movement’s narrative from the institutional Left. According to Liam:

the left and its political parties say: look, the reason that there are so many people homeless or living in emergency accommodation is because Leo Varadkar or Simon Coveney or Eoghan Murphy or whatever, when actually Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, political parties, are kinda facilitating the profit of private landlords and property developers, banks and vulture funds as well. So the reason the housing crisis is happening is not because of governments, but because it is built into the structure of capital.

Such an approach is a distinct characteristic of TBTC. While Apollo House was grounded in human rights to provide a roof for the homeless and the target was the state agency Nama (Caoimhe, NDB), in TBTC the central issue was who had control of the stock market. Many activists from TBTC argued that to focus on the facilitators of capital accumulation (the state) instead of the capitalist class does not challenge the structures that feed the housing crisis. Liam explained that reframing the crisis by focusing on the landlords and naming them was a way of avoiding saying ‘the capital in general (…) that is this giant abstract thing that we cannot fight’. Fiona from DCHA said that naming the target produced tangible results. As five activists pointed out in the interviews, this tactic exposed landlords that refused to accept responsibility for the crisis, which was a specific victory of the movement.

For migrants within TBTC, it was important not only to re-frame the crisis but also to build a movement that would be inclusive of minorities. Rita, a member of ARN, said that working together is fundamental to build an anti-racist narrative:

As migrants we always felt that it is important to be part of a group that is dealing with housing to not have statements like ‘look at our own first’ dominating this kind of space because housing in Ireland is such a problematic issue, it is many times used as a platform by racist individuals and racist groups to highlight that there are not enough houses for the Irish so let's concentrate on that, and why should we care about migrants?

For Alice, member of MERJ and Single Parents Acting for the Rights of Kids (SPARK), also part of TBTC, once migrants and asylum seekers were being blamed for the housing crisis, TBTC offered a more realistic approach:

I think it was the first time that it was framed, that it was exposed. It was framed in a sense that it is the slum landlords that were making a profit out of more vulnerable people, and we cannot leave them behind (…) It was that sense (…) that wasn't one type of person who was facing evictions or being houseless or kicked out of the housing market. We were all, at this point.

Alice defended that TBTC put the responsibility back on the shoulders of the actual culprits for the crisis, aiming to make evident the contradictions of liberalism:

TBTC had claimed, you have 35.000 properties [in Dublin] closed down, so CPO them, open it, stop blaming the migrants, stop blaming the other, stop blaming lone parents that they are depending on the state, they are depending on the state because they have no choice. (…) [it] is very hypocritical that it is neoliberal politics telling you that this [migration] is wrong when they are the ones pushing globalization and free movement. The hypocrisy is getting bigger and bigger.

Rita also saw the need to connect people beyond national boundaries:

it is important to communicate the message that we as migrants are many times the ones that are in a more vulnerable position and the ones who need more support (…) We shouldn't care just for our own. [It] is really horrible in a way that you discriminate people based on the way they look, their name or the way they dress or their religion, so I would be very much in favour of making Ireland a more inclusive society and (…) when you say our own it will mean everybody, because everybody is our own because we are all human beings.

From the data collected, it was observed that an anti-racist narrative was present in TBTC. On the other hand, activists identified challenges to communicate it to the broader society and to move beyond structural inequalities. The next section will explore how the internal structure of TBTC tried to deal with power imbalances within the movement as well the challenges of building a narrative where migrants were seen as active subjects outside the occupations.

A structural boundary: The invisibility and the hypervisibility of migrants

The structure of TBTC was horizontal, affected-led, anti-racist, non-sexist and non-homophobic. The division of the tasks was through working groups such as media, legal team, administration, outreach and security. No one could get more than two consecutive shifts inside the houses to avoid burnout. In the meetings, each group had the right to one vote – a 2⁄3 majority was necessary to approve issues such as ‘stay, leave or expand’ the occupations. Although theoretically, it seems fair, it was observed that the social position of people outside the occupations shaped their participation within the coalition. It was the case of single parents from SPARK, migrants and ethnic minorities but also full-time workers. People who could not stay inside the occupations could work in other teams, such as administration, mainly responsible for contacting people to do shifts, the media team, writing statements and posting on social media and also making food and bringing whatever was necessary to the occupation. Migrants interviewed did administrative, media and legal jobs, shifts before the injunctions and also participated in door knockings and stalls.

However, it was observed in this research that there are challenges and contradictions to migrant activism within the borders of the nation-state. On one hand, there is a will to be seen as a political force, and the invisibility provoked by a non-political recognition of migrants as citizens, the modern subject of the right (Nicholls, 2013). On the other hand, an intentional invisibility as Goldberg (1997: 191) defines as ‘a space of self-determination and a possible realm closed to colonial penetration’ – or in the current context, the Irish racist state. In this sense, it was a specific challenge to build a movement where migrants were seen as a central component of it. Three aspects of this challenge are discussed below.

The first was regarding building an inclusive and anti-racist narrative, where migrants were also protagonists. For many of the activists interviewed, the fact that TBTC started in Summerhill symbolised this goal. They recognised, though, that the broader society did not read this symbology. While in the Frederick Street occupation banners saying ‘A 10.000 welcomes to 10.000 homeless’ hung on the walls, reminding the failure of the ‘Ireland of 10000 welcomes’ to provide a real home to people, it did not resonate beyond the occupation walls. One of the questions the activists were asked was if they thought their slogan Homes For All was understood by broader society to include non-nationals. The activists were aware it was an issue that should be continuously challenged with political imagination and actions to expand people’s boundaries gradually. Eric, a member of TBT, said he understood the limitations of such language to be truly inclusive, especially when the Fianna Fail party was also claiming an Ireland for all. For Eric:

All is a floating signifier, it is filled with whatever meaning you read into it yourself so I think to answer that … I do not think that the housing movement has done a really great job of really emphasising that all should be truly universal, like. I think there is actually a quite worrying trend at the moment when Fianna Fail is saying this, it really shows you how empty it really is, this slogan. What I think the movement more broadly needs to do is to hammer down exactly what it means when it says it.

The activists interviewed understood that to hammer down what ‘all’ means would take more than a single action or public statements. Interracial fronts would need to be built, as well as increasing the involvement of migrants in community organising. Laura from MERJ evaluated that even though there were structures in place and people had good intentions, white supremacy still shaped people’s possibilities of being seen and heard:

We can do our best to legislate for inclusivity, we can do our best to put structures in place for inclusivity but, at the end of the day, we live in a white supremacist society, right? So, like, we can do all these things but they are kind token measures until we get at the root of white settled supremacy. (…) I think that we did sort, I don’t wanna say our best, but we were vocal, we were pushing and we were heard within the groups. I don’t know how much we were heard outside of the group, though.

The challenge of building an anti-racist narrative to resonate outside of the coalition exposes the complex chain of practices and ideas that, within the nation-state, defines the people and the others – who are the ‘all’. The Irish activists mentioned that migrants were missing as one of the faces of the movement, which did not help people to identify them as part of the housing movement. They said they should have pushed to have more migrants as spokespeople in the media team, for example. On the other hand, the migrants interviewed believed that the coalition did what it could. They admitted they were asked to be in the media, participate in TV programmes and make public statements in demonstrations, which very few did. However, the second issue addressed by migrants was the fact that they did not feel confident to speak out, perhaps understood through the connection of the racial and gender dimension, as around 80% of migrants involved in TBTC were female. As Laura from MERJ said:

We don’t have the confidence because of our, you know, different precarious situation, it is like, (…) we were demanding that has to have a migrant speaker and them it was like, ‘ok, you can have a migrant speaker’, and then we were all, ‘but I don’t wanna do it, I am not the best person to do it’ and then it ends up being the same migrant speaker over and over again.

Decentralising the narrative was a challenge in TBTC, which evidenced that the problems the coalition faced were not merely statutory and internal issues but they were also external to the coalition’s domain: they were structural. Such structural constraints included some people having more time to engage in decision making processes, citizenship rights, more confidence to speak out, as well as formal education, which was pointed out by groups such as MERJ and A Lending Hand.

The third issue pointed out by migrants was their hyper-visibility (see Moreo, 2012), which at first glance may seem contradictory. Migrants reported that part of their invisibility was also intentional. Their invisibility was caused not by the groups in TBTC silencing them but because of their objective precarity as migrants, which also make them hyper-visible to immigration officers, the garda and far-right groups. Migrant’s decisions were made considering the limited visa status they held in the country and the concern of becoming a target of these institutions and groups. It is not to say that migrants were not in the front line of TBTC nor that migrants cannot take part in contentious politics, as the case of the ‘sans-papiers’ illustrates. The point made is that citizenship and racialisation processes played a role in shaping migrants participation in TBTC. ARN, MERJ and BLF members had already received threats from members of the far-right and racist people on their social media in different campaigns and actions, which was not reported by housing groups at the time.

Notwithstanding, migrants’ work was central in pushing an anti-racist praxis. I recall being present in a TBTC door knocking and meeting with an Irish woman complaining about leaving surrounded by Brazilians. Being Brazilian myself, I replied to the comment in a Socratic manner – why? – to help her to make sense of what she was saying. She did not have what to say, and the Irish people in the group started talking about the vast amount of empty properties in Dublin, turning the focus from racism and making it about a common struggle. This kind of conversation was something that the migrants in the coalition were engaging with, and many Irish activists and volunteers that signed up for door knocking and stalls during TBTC were following.

Racialisation and class

In this last part of the research findings, it will be shown how race and class dynamics were understood by groups in TBTC. Even though anti-capitalist movements know, theoretically, that race and class are part of the same struggle, how race and class should be addressed by the movement is still taking shape through the praxis. The role of racialisation in the class struggle was an informal conversation among activists during the occupations, mostly based on one’s experience with racism and economic burdens, but also guided by Marxist and Anarchist ideology. In the interviews, activists were asked how they understood such issues. Not all the interviewers were concerned with this discussion though. Some said the conversation was becoming too theoretical, and housing and homeless community groups seemed more concerned with working together to build a strong coalition that would overcome racism through the practice.

On the other hand, dealing with racism within the movement was central for migrants in the coalition. For Paula from MERJ, what made a ‘united front’ possible in TBTC was people’s willingness to be inclusive of distinct oppressions, to what she reminded the Women’s Day Occupation to honor the Magdalene Laundries victims. For Laura, to say that TBTC’s saw the need to be anti-racist was not always reflected in its actions. In her words

they know [the Irish settled people] intellectually that there is a problem but I do not think they wanted to address it necessarily, or maybe they just didn't have the tools to address it. I think there is also a class divide in that when working-class groups were having to address it or ignore it depending on their position, or how they were working. A lot of Irish, more middle-class groups, were really reluctant to address it because they were afraid they would lose their working-class street creds.

Mark, a member of ARN, pointed out the need to unite race and class on the left. For him.

We can’t make class this supreme of everything else and deny other people. (…) that has been the weakness of some of our comrades on the left. Although I know that there is some literature on race and class amongst the left that they should have come to read and see why it is important. It is important to Black and White to unite, you know? As a class.

He also connects the way race is overlooked with the social division of labour:

Before the interview we were talking about jobs, that we are working in two jobs, three jobs, you know? Just to try to make … you know … everyone is doing that but if you check some sections of these jobs there are mainly people of colour or non-EU people doing those jobs. So you have to acknowledge that class is there but also other identity is also there.

Gabriel from BLF said that it is crucial to understand that there are distinct interests within the working class that are connected to racialisation processes, but also that there are distinct interests among the racialised, which lead to class antagonisms. To avoid falling into an eternal rhetorical dilemma of what would be more relevant, he said it would be ‘necessary to focus on capitalism as the one to be combated, people must work together in a united left front’. He also mentioned the challenges of a leftist group organizing among the so-called national community sign once national interests are not the same – to which he mentioned the election of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro as a result of the deeper polarization in Brazilian society. For Rita, as well, nationality and race in its own is not enough as unifier:

there are certain people that regardless of their nationality are kind of beyond their race. So I think, as a person, I would just say that I have more similarities with somebody in another country that is from the same class as me.

The Irish activists acknowledged in the interviews that racism is still overlooked in the left. For John from Dublin South-West Housing Action, who organises in Tallaght and has also been working with migrants facing evictions, the change in the mindset comes from communities working together and learning to trust each other. For DCHA activists, the struggle is the best place to learn to be anti-racist, to build community and stable and trustful relations. For Caoimhe from NDB, Sara from A Lending Hand and Eric from TBT, education is central to deconstructing false conceptions about migrants and asylum seekers. In synthesis, while racism was acknowledged within the coalition as a real problem, it still shaped migrants' possibility of being visible as a political force.

Conclusion

TBTC pointed out some challenges, the potential and urgency of an interracial class coalition to oppose the market rules and rebuild a narrative – and practice – of those dispossessed by property rights. If housing is not a right in the Irish constitution, the right of property is. If migrants have not the same rights as citizens, they have the same need as any human being living in 21st-century Ireland. TBTC questioned the capitalist logic organically, through an interracial class coalition working to reframe the housing crisis. TBTC framed the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy not in nationalist and elitist terms but anti-capitalist and anti-racist terms. TBTC re-framed the housing crisis as a crisis of capitalism, not people's failure, and rejected the top-down division to conquer tactics by bringing together immigrants and Irish citizens.

It was observed that, due to structural and institutional racism, migrants faced challenges to be seen as political subjects. It was a challenge to build an anti-racist narrative in TBTC, mainly because the hegemonic narrative understands the world through concepts such as nation-state, borders and citizenship, which automatically exclude non-nationals as the people within the nation-state. Thus, when activists claimed Homes For All, they noticed that the slogan was subjective, not all-encompassing and as such was insufficient to help recognise that it also referred to those who came to Ireland to study, work or seek asylum.

Thus, to give meaning to ‘all’, was not possible without confronting the principles of the capitalist mode of production with its racist states. In addition to the understanding of the need to re-frame narratives and meanings was the awareness of the necessity of rebuilding the world that produces and reproduces such meanings by changing it through concrete action. TBTC was then a space of possibilities. Through political imagination, concrete steps were taken to build a coalition that would be as close as possible to the model of society activists would like to live in. The structure of the movement was horizontal, and people regularly reported that the grassroots groups in the coalition had good intentions, listening and reflecting upon their actions to be inclusive of distinct agendas to tackle distinct oppressions within the movement and beyond. The challenges faced by racialised migrants within TBTC were not due to an innate impossibility of Whites and People of Colour organising and mobilising together, but due to structural and institutional constraints that go beyond the occupation’s site. Notwithstanding, migrant involvement in internal meetings, as well as stalls and door knockings, was central in pushing an anti-racist narrative and practice.

The presence of migrant groups in TBTC’s core showed that anti-racism is a left issue and that the Irish left can no longer avoid including migrants demands in their agenda. This view is also extended to the scholarship on social movements in Ireland, which can no longer ignore migrant involvement in national political affairs – as well as ethnic minorities’ activism. The traveller person interviewed in this article said she did not take part in the occupations due to her previous experience in Apollo House, where, according to her, travellers were denied agency. Regarding the racial studies fields, TBTC experiences offers empirical elements to address race relations as part of a totality, immersed in the class struggle. This article has defended the need to understand migrants’ struggle as part of a struggle of all those impacted by market rationality – the capital’s needs to accumulate – but also the need to consider migrants specificities as those more affected by state policies in Ireland due to lack of citizenship and basic rights. However, migrants’ issues are not just migrants’ issues or issues regarding the migrant community. The whole idea of a migrant community needs to be investigated in depth. If the idea of a Black community has been losing its strength after the end of segregation in the US as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) argues, the idea of a migrant community is also problematic to encompass the reality and aims of migrants from distinct nationalities, cultural backgrounds, political views and classes as pointed out by Gabriel from BLF. It can only be done in abstraction. The empirical material found in this research helps incite this debate, which is expected to be developed further by scholars from social movements and racial relations studies both in and outside of Ireland.

The argument made in this article is that looking at migrants’ grievances as grievances that emerge from the class struggle can help to build unity among all those who are exploited. Whites and racialised working-class people are unified materially, as the dispossessed and exploited, and in this sense, are united by the common interest in freeing themselves. To affirm it does not put an end to the problem because class conscientiousness is a process in construction, which is not linear. This process can be better understood through the Marxist categories of totality, alienation, ideology and class struggle. The decline of class consciousness and divisions among workers due to competition are long-standing concerns within the Marxist tradition. Therefore, once competition emerges from the relations of production, it is necessary to act upon such relations. Just then, Black, People of Colour and White workers’ liberation can be achieved. As Fanon (1994: 32) said, ‘racism is not the whole but the most visible, the most day-to-day and, not to mince matters, the crudest element of a given structure’. There are many other oppressions that emerge and reproduce themselves in this specific structure, but following Fanon (2008), the individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human condition. That is, the individual should move beyond fragments of itself, beyond race, and suppress class antagonisms to liberate itself. It can be done through the praxis.

Glossary¹

ARN is an independent political organisation run by ordinary people. ARN was set up in 2010 and since then have been involved on different campaigns including facilitating Asylum Seekers protest at the Dail in October 2010 on system of Direct Provision; campaign on No to Ethnic/Racial Profiling part of the now suspended ‘Immigration Residence and Protection Bill 2010’ the unjust piece of legislation which is meant to destabilise migrants families living in Ireland.

Anti-Water Charges was a national campaign to abolish domestic water charges in 2014. The government met with massive popular resistance to the installation of water metres in the communities. Demonstrations of tens of thousands of people took the street and the movement was victorious.

BLF was set up in 2016 to oppose the coup against former president Dilma Rousseff. In 2018, the group started getting involved in national campaigns in Ireland due to the precarious living situation of Brazilians.

DCHA was formed out of the Bolt Hostel occupation in the Summer of 2015. It has been involved in local housing and homeless support, organising and action, as well as working with other groups around the country as part of the IHN.

Migrants and Ethnic Minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ) is a group of migrants and ethnic minorities living in Ireland fighting for reproductive justice for all people.

NDB was established in 2014 by a group of affected parents that were and still are affected by the housing crisis. It is a community run, voluntary-based organisation that advocates on behalf of and supports people experiencing homelessness and housing issues.

SPARK is a diverse group of single parents living in Ireland who came together to protect their children from the policy changes introduced in Budget 2012.

TBT is a grassroots organisation of students organising and fighting for free education at Trinity College Dublin.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For feedback and comments on earlier incarnations of this manuscript, my thanks to Theresa O’ Keefe, Gavan Titley and Paola Rivetti.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

ORCID iD

Juliana Sassi

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Take back the city: Building an interracial class coalition to fight for ‘Homes for All’

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Race and class as part of the anti-capitalist struggle

Migrant activism in Ireland

Methodology

Summerhill and housing forums

Building an interracial coalition

Framing the struggle

A structural boundary: The invisibility and the hypervisibility of migrants

Racialisation and class

Conclusion

Glossary 1

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Note

ORCID iD

References

Glossary¹