Creating Utopia through Real Struggle: A Case Study of the Rialto Community Housing Campaign

The article examines the potential of a symbiotic strategy to transform capitalism in a more socialist direction through a case study of a community campaign to address substandard housing conditions resulting from neoliberal property-based regeneration policies and austerity. The case study contrasts the empowerment of disadvantaged groups with dominant partnership approaches to achieving social justice in Ireland. It concludes that while such human rights approaches offer the potential to achieve improvements in people's living conditions, their prospect for symbiotic transformation is limited, unless they link to wider social and political forces challenging structural inequalities, including class and gender.