(Originally published at The Media Co-op.)
Melanie Andita is an organizer based in the Vancouver area.
An immigrant from Indonesia, Andita’s political journey started when she was a student at Simon Fraser University (SFU). She initially got involved in campus-focused actions – things like challenging the inadequate public health measures being taken by the university during earlier phases of the COVID pandemic – and moved from there into work in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle through the SFU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
It was about four years ago that Andita shifted her energies into community organizing, with a focus on “grassroots issues that people have” in their everyday lives. She says, “My main organizing right now revolves around two things: housing justice and drug user organizing,” as part of the Vancouver Tenants Union and the Surrey Union of Drug Users, respectively.
The Media Co-op: What have you learned from movements that you’ve never been personally involved in? Why are those things important?
Melanie Andita: I think the tenants movement today is pretty, you know, up and coming – we don’t have a lot of local blueprints for what tenant organizing could look like. There’s a handful of tenant organizing activities within the past 100 years, a handful of rent strikes, but there’s no blueprint for them. So to structure our union, we’ve drawn in knowledge from a bunch of different popular movements on the international side. We work a lot with a lot of the Filipino revolutionary groups here – groups like Anakbayan. And they’ve led me to reading a book called ARAK, which is an activist study guide focusing on democratic centralism (i.e. democracy guided by centralized leadership, where people build power and unite under the goals of the organization). Obviously, that’s just one of the sources that we use to imagine what a tenant union can be structured on. Another one is Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising, which is a decentralized armed guerilla uprising against the Mexican government by largely Indigenous peasants. It’s an early 2000s book describing a lot of the structures that the Zapatistas used in order to maintain their revolution. And so we use bits and pieces of a bunch of these revolutionary groups and adapt them to our own use. Both of these books have contradicting but also very useful ideas for imagining what a revolutionary group could look like.
Another thing is, more recently, I’ve been really enamoured by the idea of popular education as a part of revolutionary movements. The big one here – and I’m sure this is not a surprise for a lot of folks – is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. It has helped a lot in training regular tenants who are dealing with day-to-day issues, and pushing their struggles into, like, the revolutionary side, into an ideological struggle. Which these struggles are, right? This is something that we’ve learned a lot from the teachers unions here that have started to base their work off of popular education. I think it’s the Burnaby Teachers’ Association that have started pushing for more popular education in the schools.
Another place that we look to for ideas is labour organizing. I think we can recognize that, at least here in Canada, a lot of labour organizing has been restricted by the systems that were put in place historically. Labour was radical, I think, 100 years ago, but now there are so many checks and balances to make sure that they can never do anything actually revolutionary. But particularly a book called No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power by Jane McAlevey was where we based a lot of our tenant organizing work from. Doing one-on-one organizing, talking to people – we adapted a lot of these labour union organizing strategies into tenant organizing.
So just off the top of my head, those are some of the different movements and groups that we’ve drawn from.
And obviously solidarity is a big part of the tenant union movement as well. We very often work together with, like, migrant justice groups. Because a lot of migrants are tenants, and a lot of migrants are the ones that landlords target the most, in their most exploitative ways. So we work together a lot with some of the migrant justice orgs here. In terms of activists, in that sense, I think Harsha Walia has done a lot in the city. She’s kind of a local legend. She also has written a couple of important books – Undoing Border Imperialism and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
TMC: A number of the resources you just mentioned learning from, especially in terms of ways to structure organizations and certainly Paulo Freire’s stuff around popular education, come out of struggles in the Global South. So what does it mean, what does it look like to adapt lessons from sources that are grounded in those struggles and apply them to what you’re doing in Vancouver?
MA: One of the core things is that, when we talk about these struggles in Vancouver, in Canada, we’re fighting while we’re inside the belly of the beast, organizing in the belly of the beast. A lot of the issues that the Global South faces are directly tied to Canadian imperialism. At the same time, the material benefits that elites get from that Canadian imperialism often don’t go down to tenants – to the people who are most exploited. Like I said earlier, we work a lot with the Filipino activist groups here, and part of what they’ve taught us is that the reason there are so many Filipino migrants here, there are so many migrants from the Global South coming here, is part of our imperialism, part of forced labour export. It’s so much cheaper for Canada to hire migrant workers, just using the incentive structures built over the course of the past few decades. A lot of migrant Filipinos, a lot of migrant South Asians, are pushed out of their home countries because they don’t have any real alternatives to thrive. They get pushed here, where they work very, very menial jobs. And again, they become exploited as tenants. Migrants are some of the most exploited tenants here. In fact, it is often part of Canadian imperialism that tenants are facing the struggles they are. I think there was a recent article talking about how a lot of migrants are forced into very tiny dwellings.
As an international student in my first year here, I didn’t have any references, so I lived in a house like that – you know, in half a living room. I had a fireplace in my bedroom, with a very flimsy wall between us. And this is the reality for a lot of migrants here.
Similarly, in my work is as a member of the Surrey Union of Drug Users, a lot of the drug users I work with are migrants. The group has a South Asian committee called Saanjh. A lot of those folks are people who, again, their labour is exported out here. They had to find some way to survive, so that they can send remittances back home. But for one reason or another, dealing with so many issues, so much oppression, so much pain here, they started taking substances to survive, to make it through. And now many of these people have lost all of their supports.
So when we talk about, “What is it like?”, lots of people impacted by the imperialism that Canada is complicit in around the world end up coming here. And so those are the people that we’re often organizing. And from there, these structures can be used as a baseline for how we imagine working-class solidarity could look here.
TMC: What are a couple of key ideas related to struggles that you are involved in, or to your approach to activism and organizing more generally, that you would like other people to know more about?
MA: Like I said, I think we base a lot of our organizing on the No Shortcuts book, which talks a lot about one-on-one organizing. We do a lot of basics like door knocking, talking to people, getting together in big building meetings where people get to know one another and build up their relationships. And from there, having a lot of one-on-one conversations, and getting tenants to understand that their power is in their solidarity and their numbers. Because there’s so much more power within a collective than there is individually against the landlord.
One of the texts that I think really describes how this could look is a recent book by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. It starts off talking about some common myths that a lot of tenants have when starting to get into the tenant movement. And then from there it shows a bunch of examples of organized tenants actually fighting back and winning, and how their structure could look like. In the same vein, but more locally, there’s this book Resisting Eviction: Domicide and the Financialization of Rental Housing by Andrew Crosby, which is about a group of tenants in the Herongate neighbourhood in Ottawa. It’s about a group of tenants resisting eviction and demoviction (i.e. eviction in order to demolish the building tenants live in), and this massive push of gentrification.
On the topic of popular education, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users published a book – a zine, really – called, We Are Somebody. It’s basically a guide to how to start a drug user movement. But it uses a lot of principles of popular education as the baseline. It’s about building a movement together, collectively, as a drug user movement.
Going back to tenants, there are a couple of other useful sources I’ve found. There’s a podcast based out of Toronto, Blueprints of Disruption, that interviews a lot of local organizers and a lot of tenant organizers. There are interviews with our friends, the Neighborhood Organizing Centre, or NOC, in Ottawa; the Tenants of Sandy Hill, also in Ottawa; and Climate Justice Toronto. I don’t remember if they have an interview of SLAM (the Syndicat des locataires autonomes de Montréal or Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union). We’ve tried our best to learn from other unions in the country, and the podcast really delves into it.
As well, the Autonomous Tenant Union Network, which is a network of tenant unions all across North America, publishes a newsletter. And a lot of their newsletter is articles written by tenant unions from all over the continent that get into, you know, their structure, their struggles, issues that they face.
TMC: One of the resources that you’ve mentioned a couple of times is Jane McAlevey’s book, No Shortcuts. Something that jumps out for me is that you’re recommending that as a tenant organizer, but this is a book about labour organizing. So talk a little bit about the connection between those two different kinds of organizing. What’s the relationship between workplace organizing and tenant organizing, and what can folks doing those kinds of work learn from each other?
MA: One of the slogans that we have in the Vancouver Tenants Union that we used to use a lot is, “A union at work, a union at home.” The idea is that, you know, we can talk about the importance of labour organizing, but for a lot of people, they don’t link that to issues that they’re facing in their apartments and issues that they’re facing with their landlord. In reality, there is a very similar power imbalance between a landlord and a tenant, and a boss and a worker. Both of these people in power can completely cut you off from things that you need to live. In the workplace, often you’re forced to work these awful jobs in order to get your bills paid, in order to feed your children. And so part of the threat of organizing in the workplace is that you might lose your source of income. And similarly, a lot of tenants are threatened with eviction when they try to resist their landlord in any way. And connecting to the drug user movement, losing your home can be so destabilizing for so many people, and that’s how a lot of people in the drug user movement are in the place that they are. So we have a lot of similarities in the power differences.
Obviously, it’s not a one to one comparison. But just like in No Shortcuts, one of the key bits that we’ve learned and we’ve used is the way that the book structures organizing. It breaks apart the weaknesses that a lot of the modern, North American labour movement has – the systemic limitations that they have in actually building any real power. And it also goes step by step talking about, you know, what kind of conversation should you have with workers to move past the structural limitations and push for actually larger power. And stuff like one-on-one conversations, building a structure, getting workers to talk to one another. And it talks about things like, how do we get our movement to not be appropriated by the state, not be appropriated by politicians? But we apply it to tenants – like, getting tenants to talk to their neighbours, and just building those relationships. I think this book is a really good primer for the labour movement, and is very applicable for us in the tenants’ movement. Obviously, we’ve, since then, moved around a lot, changed a lot of the structures, but we still use a lot of what this book recommends as a baseline.
TMC: Is there anything else that you would want to add on any of the things we’ve talked about, or anything else that you would suggest to readers who want to learn more about social movements and about being involved in grassroots struggles?
MA: I think all of these kind of readings are really, really important, and they’ve been a really massive, great part of my journey as an organizer. But honestly, the best way to actually get involved is to just join an organization, whether it be a tenant union, a migrant justice movement, a student movement – just whatever you have around you, whatever makes sense for you – and start off from there, build something out from there. I think, just like organizing without reading about radical history and ideas does nothing, you can’t just read – you need to actually go down and do the work.
The “Learning from Movements” series of interviews gives activists and organizers a chance to talk about how they’ve learned from, for, and about social movements, and to offer suggestions about how you can learn. Scott Neigh is a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton, Ontario. His latest book is Listen! Knowing the World and Fighting to Change It from Fernwood Publishing.