Organizers are also recruiting lawyers willing to defend for no fee those who are arrested.

On March 12, as real estate investors waited to bid foreclosed properties at the Alameda County Courthouse, dozens of “home defenders” carried signs saying Stop Evictions Now! and Save Our Home. Among them were Fernanda Cardenas and her husband Armando Ramos, whose home in East Oakland was up for auction. In the face of the protest, the auction of their home was temporarily postponed.

In addition, in a growing number of cities across the country, activists are moving homeless families into empty foreclosed homes.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of action pushing the limits of property relations was the wave of “sitdown strikes” – factory occupations – of 1936-37. The sitdown had developed as a vehicle to exert rank-and-file labor power in the rubber plants in Akron. But when, in the midst of a union organizing campaign, General Motors started removing production equipment from its plants in Flint, auto workers began a massive occupation. They organized an orderly daily life, guarded the plant, and even spread the occupation to adjoining plants. Tens of thousands of workers mobilized outside to protect the plants from attack. After more than a month, GM agreed to recognize the union. Seeing what the sitdown could accomplish, 400,000 workers occupied their workplaces during 1937.

During the recession of 1974, workers seized the Rheingold breweries in New York City when management decided to close them down. The occupation led to political intervention which successfully kept the company, a local icon, in business.

At the end of 2008, 240 workers at the Republic Window and Door factory in Chicago were told they would lose their jobs in three days, without the advance notice legally required by the WARN act, and not even get the money they were owed. After intense discussions with their union, the United Electrical Workers (UE), they decided that at the end of their final work day they would not leave the plant. Their sitdown received instant media coverage and huge public support. The governor of Illinois came to the plant to show support. Even President-Elect Obama weighed in:

“When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right … what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” Obama said.

By the sixth day of the occupation, the company and its chief creditor, the Bank of America (which had just received a major federal subsidy), agreed to a $1.75 million settlement that provided workers pay owned under the WARN Act and the union contract. The plant has been purchased by the California-based Serious Materials, which has promised the union it will call back workers over the next few months.

Very often such actions challenge existing property rights – but often rights that have some degree of ambiguity. In the early days of the sitdown strikes, it wasn’t clear that the occupations were illegal since the companies were in violation of the newly passed Wagner Act. The same was true of the recent Republic Window and Door occupation in Chicago, where the employer was in violation of the WARN act. Due to the securitization and tranching of so much of capital over recent years, there is reason to think the entire American property system is somewhat up for grabs. So there should be a lot of opportunity to utilize such ambiguities, most obviously in housing, but also in the rest of the economy as well.

Today’s “Great Recession”

Each period of hard times is unique, both in the character of the economic downturn and in the changing character of national and global society. Today’s “great recession” is differentiated from previous downturns by globalization and the massive financialization of the U.S. Deindustrialization has transformed the majority of the American workforce from blue-collar to white-collar. Outsourcing has divided that workforce into “core” employees with job security and benefits and a “ring” of contingent workers with neither.

Unions have shrunk and the social safety net has been dismantled – less than half of those without work and who are actively seeking a new job were receiving unemployment compensation in early 2009. Meanwhile, new means of communication – think smart phones and web 2 – are making new ways of organizing possible. And behind it all, the crisis of human-induced climate change threatens to disrupt all social life and cause economic dislocation greater than the Great Depression and World War I and II combined.

The fundamental problem underlying today’s “great recession,” however, is the same as in past periods of hard times – Obama’s paradox that “there are millions of Americans trying to find work, even as, all around the country, there is so much work to be done.”
The pursuit of profit through the market does not lead to production of what people need. The solution can be summed up in the phrase “production for use.”

The range of unmet needs – nationally and globally – is enormous. All – education, health care, food security, infrastructure, childcare – can be spheres for putting people to work doing the work we need to have done.

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