Organization through fronts
Reclaim Oneonta is a libertarian socialist organization. Our objective is the overthrow of capitalism and the state in a social revolution carried out by the exploited classes, with the modern working class at its center. This revolution is a product of the struggle between the capitalist class along with its state against the workers. The working class, in order to carry out its fight against exploitation, creates its own organizations of struggle to unify and strengthen its efforts. Through struggle, these organizations raise the capacities, drives, and consciousness of the working class. Beyond carrying out the day-to-day struggle with capitalism, these organizations are the “schools of socialism”, carrying the potential to build a new world in themselves.
Eventually, through expropriation and popular insurrection, the state and capitalism are destroyed by the combined force of the working class, who raise in their stead the organizations they fashioned in the war against class rule. This does not happen automatically. For this to occur, the minority of the working class which already understands the historic mission to abolish capitalism must be organized around a solid program for class struggle and social revolution and advocate for it within the organs of working-class power. That is the purpose of Reclaim Oneonta. This is the basis for the establishment of a socialist society.
The manner in which the exploitation of the working class occurs is fragmented. As a consequence, the working class is divided against itself, carrying out its day-to-day struggle against capitalist exploitation in different spheres of life. The final unification of the fragmented struggles of the working class will not occur until a revolutionary break with the status quo, brought about by the active struggle of the working class alongside a general crisis in the capitalist system. As a result of this fragmentation, revolutionaries themselves must simultaneously act as unifying force and divide their work into fronts to play a role in every expression of the class struggle.
The urban territorial front
The urban environment itself is a key site of class struggle. Who controls the land and infrastructure of the modern city? Who gets to profit from the collective labor that goes into making cities places worth living in? That is the capitalist class who owns the city, turning these environments into places for rent seeking and financial speculation, transforming the public into the private. In turn working class people struggle to resist being displaced and left destitute by capitalist investment and disinvestment.
One particularly acute expression of that struggle exists between landlords and tenants. The landlords, who own and control urban space, particularly homes, are constantly seeking to maximize the rent they can extract. This places them in tension with working class tenants, who have to engage in a continuous struggle for their own existence. Over the course of that struggle, tenants create their own organizations to consolidate their forces and apply their popular force against the wealth of their exploiters: the tenant union and the rent strike. Within the tenant union there lies a potential for the control of urban space through forms of grassroots working class democracy. Taking the administration of urban space from the hands of the government and private capitalists to the hands of the organizations of the working class is the basis for the socialization of the city itself. This is a possibility that will only present itself after the development of working-class conscious through the tenant struggle for housing.
This struggle is particularly stark in Oneonta, where landlords are the most prominent capitalists and tenants are unorganized. There is real need for tenants to organize against petty landlord tyranny, expressing itself in an ongoing drive to unilaterally transform Oneonta into a tourist trap for baseball families at the cost of working-class residents. This is something that can only be challenged through the methods of class struggle inherited from the long history of tenant movements. Reclaim Oneonta calls for the formation of a city-wide tenant union, bringing all of its renters into one compact organization with the strength to fight for the interests of tenants. Such an organization will not spring from will along, but from the concrete demands of tenants to defend their own interests.
reclaimfed.org 