Lessons Learned – Spring 2026
This is a report of our work so far building Tampa Autonomous Tenants Union (TATU). Here, we focus on our efforts understanding the essential structure and practice of the union, recounting lines we’ve taken struggling with Left groups which collaborated with TATU.
C-TCP is an organization constructing a communist party to guide the working class and its allies towards socialism. The conditions where people are forced to become tenants and subjected to the mercy of landlords is a common pattern in history, but this practice became perfected as capital achieved the freedom it has today. Now, petty landlords, such as those owning small apartment complexes or even individual rental units, compete with private equity and other large concentrations of capital gobbling up properties. Despite their apparent differences, both types of landlords have a common interest in profiting from tenants, which they keep helpless, miserable, and unorganized.
By themselves, the only strategy that tenants have to improve their living conditions is to set their sights on moving to better apartments. This dream of “greener pastures” has several problems: one, tenants often acknowledge that the rent at their current complex was the cheapest available to them at the time they moved in. Then, the landlord jacked up the rent, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of dollars over the course of a few years — with no repairs or improvements made. While rental prices fluctuate, rent for all units generally increases over time, as landlords are allowed to set rent based on neighboring property values, and so they are invested in the increase of rent in entire neighborhoods. Therefore the next apartment is probably not cheaper unless it is in a neighborhood with lower average rent, or out of town, and the “greener pastures” strategy becomes more fraught.
Secondly, the cost of moving itself is expensive. Landlords of all stripes, driven by both greed for profit and their disdainful mistrust of the ordinary tenant, charge exorbitant security deposits, sometimes three months’ rent. Since many people do not have this cash on hand, they must rely on recuperating their existing security deposit in full, which is never guaranteed; tenants have few protections, especially against landlords nickel-and-diming tenants with “repair” and “cleaning” fees for normal wear and tear.
There are places to rent which have fewer of the problems that tenants report. There are complexes where rent is more controlled, repairs may be done in a timely way, the staff is respectful, and the area is less policed or has fewer break-ins. But it is common knowledge that this state of affairs is reserved only for the tenants who can afford the premium rent or, in the case of applying to income-based, senior living, or charity-operated units, lucky winners of a lottery system which might involve years of waiting time.
This promise of a better place to live is rooted in a notion that the conditions a tenant is facing are unique to that particular complex, despite a lifelong wisdom saying otherwise: that the problems of renting are everywhere. Individual tenants believe their best chance at improving their living conditions is to roll the dice: will their next landlord be kinder? Will the new complex have black mold? Will their rent remain affordable?
As communists, we know that collective organizing is a better strategy. C-TCP recognizes that the tenant struggle is an important aspect of the working class struggle for freedom, and that communists should work with tenants directly to develop an intimate and grounded understanding of this struggle. C-TCP mandates that party cadre, be they tenants or homeowners, pay their due to this important area of struggle by helping tenants build a fighting union. But what do we communists bring to the struggle?
Tenant organizing has a long history in the American socialist movement, but is now continued by different federations of tenant unions with different ideological commitments, mostly shaped by large organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and anarchist networks. Each of these have different commitments and strategies, which we expand on in the “Party Leadership and Autonomism” section. A theme among different tenant federations is that the tenant organizations, as composed of working-class people, should be the ones to lead socialist-organizers towards either reform or revolution, and that they generally place less priority or even resist the presence of a democratic centralist organization in organizing.
We disagree fundamentally with any position that is critical of the party’s role in organizing; we believe that the party must be the central organ for directing organizing towards revolution. We envision the party growing, steering, and uniting tenant power into a shared working class struggle through a process called the mass line, the process of synthesizing the needs of the working class and their allies with the objectives of the Party. We do not pretend we have all the answers; we know that working people are the authorities on the problems they face. At the same time, we recognize that working class ideology is chaotic and unconcentrated, and the Party has the central role in concentrating the working class into something effective and empowered. The commitment to struggling with the working class to learn and guide the struggle is embodied in the mass line strategy.
In the case of tenant organizing, C-TCP members must work together with tenants to identify, raise, and resolve problems in the union. Such problems might include:
- Tenants involving the police against their neighbors.
- Tenants opting to use the electoral or legal systems to address their issues prior to forming a tenants association.
- In the past, we cautioned against this strategy, as it bypasses the opportunity for tenants to organize.
- Tenants discriminating against one another on the basis of race or gender.
Any tenant organization worth its salt would confront these problems. However, the mass line strategy forces the Party to treat the questions and problems that tenants raise as important to our theoretical understanding of class struggle, and therefore necessary for communists to formulate and advance a position on. This commitment to grappling with the political essence of the problems in mass organizing keeps us attuned to the concrete needs of the union and helps us avoid throwing around party dogma, which has no established ground in the real movement.
C-TCP builds working class power around specific sites of struggle that directly affect working class people through non-party mass organizations. Mass organizations at first consist of party members and fellow activists who are dedicated to laying the groundwork for each organization. However, they are not front organizations; each mass organization actively recruits non-party members into it as it matures.
Tampa Autonomous Tenants Union (TATU), our first mass organization, has started several ongoing organizing attempts in the Tampa metro area and has even begun recruiting tenants into the organization.
TATU’s immediate goal is to nurture the development of a tenants association (TA) in a complex, an organization led by the tenants, which can represent and fight for their interests. Tenants forming their own associations also play a dual role as beacon of possibility to other tenants that are justifiably skeptical of organizing in their own complexes.
Over the longer term, we want to carry our knowledge about tenant organizing into neighboring towns and cities and start tenant unions there. We aim to unite our unions into one tenant federation that is directed ideologically by C-TCP. For us, ideological direction means connecting tenant unionism back to the struggle against capitalism and avoiding strategic problems we consider solved. Examples of these are avoiding the urge to drift into electoral or legislative reform on the basis of “harm reduction,” and avoiding the tendency for socialists to act as a “crisis response team” or “service organization,” which in their own ways disenfranchise tenants of self-determination.
More importantly, the Party provides a coherent strategy in which federated unions cooperate with other mass organizing projects. We consider it a failure if a network of tenant organizations becomes uncoupled from the party, whose major purpose is to connect the struggle now with the revolutionary future.
As of writing, our tenant organizing efforts have not yet resulted in a TA. In spring 2025, we thought we were close but faced setbacks at each complex we were organizing at the time. However, through the years of organizing TATU, we have improved the quality of conversations with tenants and polished our development plan for training organizers.
It has not been easy for C-TCP to bring TATU to where it is now. TATU’s membership tends to wobble in a disheartening way, and there have been political differences in strategy that have preoccupied C-TCP’s TATU team in a lot of writing, reflecting, and debate. Over the past several years, we have honed our opinions on tenant organizing, which steer the union’s activity towards more direct and sustained engagement with tenants. We have converged on the idea that if we nail down the internal questions of the union — what is the union’s political identity, how to build people into organizers, how to form a tenants association — we will be prepared to recruit more openly, and not get tangled in debates over fundamentals.
Our Tenant Federation strategy enables us to expand beyond organizing in Tampa proper and form sibling unions in neighboring localities, and save time by applying hard-earned lessons early in union development. It’s important that we list the lessons we’ve learned for the benefit of these future unions. As part of a struggle to build TATU, we sometimes refer to a “DSA tendency” as a hodge-podge of political and organizational opinions from the DSA that we have opposed. The major themes of our conflicts are outlined in this document. Below we summarize the debates that led us to arrive at these fundamentals and the various positions we’ve taken in the union.
Method and Membership: What does a union do as a union?
Method of Agitation and Escalation
By union “method,” we mean the strategy for engaging, sustaining, and empowering tenants to organize and escalate the struggle in their complexes. C-TCP does not currently have an authoritative document on what the “method” is, but it’s characterized by shifting into a “problem-posing” manner of agitation, where we learn how to ask the right questions to rally tenants into collective organizing and encourage gathering with their neighbors. This manner of agitation is taught in any union organizing workshop, but C-TCP connects this concept to the “problem-posing” method in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
One lesson we’ve learned is that while rent is the essence of the tenant struggle and is usually increased to the maximum level tenants are willing to pay, it is not always easy to agitate around. The fact that rent must be paid is a fact of life for renters; it is the essence of the landlord-tenant relationship, and therefore a load-bearing concept in the renter ideology. Agitating around it can lead the renter to either balk at the suggestion anything could be done about it, or that the union is mistaken for an NGO or charity, the only organizations that seem to directly intervene in rent payment matters.
As part of the problem-posing method, we’ve learned to ask concrete questions about the state of the complex and the management, such as:
- Is maintenance timely with repairs?
- Does rent increase despite obvious disrepair in the complex?
- On the other hand, does the landlord pass on the cost of expensive improvements to tenants without consulting them?
- Is the property management rude and unprofessional?
We’ve also fomented fruitful conversations by asking tenants to reflect on their experience in their complex compared to the rent they pay; do they feel they are “getting what they pay for?” This line of inquiry leads tenants to see rent as a source of agitation, and become outraged that rent is disconnected from the quality of service.
Becoming comfortable with this method requires frequent practice, but in the next point we’ll discuss challenges getting membership to focus on developing this essential skill.
Membership
We struggled with the DSA tendency over defining membership. Frequently, people will join the union, participate for a little while, and settle as lurkers in a group chat. This decline in membership activity can be disheartening, and the DSA tendency responds with a desire to relax the conditions for membership to allow for such “paper members.”
This problem isn’t specific to TATU; it’s common among organizing projects without a strict membership policy. People who have dropped off from the union are generally activists who have prioritized other organizing commitments. Activists often believe that they should be involved in as many political projects as possible (ballot measures, food shares, etc.), thereby giving each the same weight. They do not see building tenant power as an important part of building working class power. C-TCP has fought against this tendency by challenging their commitment through implementing stricter membership policies. You can do more with less.
Our solution was to define the union membership around a specific commitment to organizing tenants: Members who show up regularly to canvass, attend meetings, and pay dues satisfy the basic requirements of membership.
While accommodating people on a case-by-case basis is wise, we have argued against slotting people into special roles or adding new structures in the union like “research committees” for union practice. Our policy is that:
- Membership should be clear-cut and that leaving (and rejoining) the union should be normalized.
- Membership should not specialize based on skills; every union member can learn the problem-posing method to have important conversations with tenants at every stage of struggle.
- Completing admin tasks or responding to messages in a group chat without “touching grass” (organizing tenants) is not satisfactory for membership.
In other words, we believe membership retention and growth comes from imbuing each member with a sense of ownership over the problem of the union. The term “ownership” means that tenants believe that the union is a tool for solving their problems.There is not an extensive history of organizing tenant unions in Florida, so for many tenants the tenants union is a new idea and likely to be confused with a government program or NGO. At the instant tenants see the union as a tool, they have to also see what the tool is used for as well as how to operate it. They begin to think more collectively, and recognize that the union’s existence opens new questions (“How can we keep this going?” “How can we grow it?”) and direct its efforts in some ways.
The best — perhaps only — way that members can become trained into the pressing questions of the union is by helping them to talk directly to tenants, learn about the specific dynamics of their tenant-landlord relationship, and work to engage them with their fellow renters. Then, the organizer starts to internalize these problems into concrete questions.
As an initial introduction to canvassing an apartment complex, we think that role-playing exercises are good ways of exposing members to the problems inherent in tenant organizing, namely practicing the skill of asking problem-posing questions.
“Do one, teach one”: What are the basics of a Committed Core?
Building a mass movement of tenants requires masses, which for our purposes here refers to many tenants and their allies in the renters’ struggle. However, the road to building a mass movement has many smaller stages which should be carefully developed.
In our experience, we have seen where developing too quickly or too recklessly distracts us from the movement-building process. In the past, we purposefully recruited members from DSA into the core membership as an effort to distribute the workload, which in turn took more energy from the C-TCP/TATU members tasked with onboarding them, managing the new members’ lack of capacity or willingness to participate in core union work, and then offboarding them. We would have done more to advance the union if we had just focused on the core method of the union.
We believe that building a strong TU requires building up the union progressively, which for us has meant starting with the minimum number of people to achieve the current task of the union, and recruiting only by necessity, e.g., when the workload becomes burdensome for the current cadre. This strict limit on recruitment becomes relaxed over time as the core cadre grows and becomes more capable growing people.
Growth should only happen as quickly as union members can learn how to organize tenants and teach others how to do the same — “do one, teach one.”
This careful attention to growth intends to keep the quality of the cadre high, filled with people who collectively value consistently organizing tenants directly, reflecting on lessons from this activity, and revising their hypotheses. When your cadre feels that it has learned about how to agitate tenants into good-enough conversations, recruit people with the understanding that other more experienced people can develop those people. The “do one, teach one” principle means that the committed core offloads responsibility to less-developed organizers so they can also grapple with the problem of organizing people into the union. Judiciously toggling between activity and recruiting means selectively admitting people.
Admitting too many people at once is like pouring cold water into a pot you’re trying to boil.
More specifically, the problem with recruiting too much or too soon is admitting activists who are overcommitted to other projects and not committed to tenant organizing as we have defined it. In the past we have reacted by questioning TATU’s method rather than addressing the real problem of union “members” – i.e., those that have attended an onboarding meeting, joined a group chat, and not done much more beyond that – not pulling their weight. We need strong leadership in the union, leaders who delegate work downwards, with full, equal commitment from all union members.
A union with just four equally engaged members is, in our estimation, stronger than a union with four committed members and 10 members who do nothing but occasionally check the union group chat.
“Taskism”: Against Using Tasks to Keep People Engaged
We have so far argued that the method for agitating tenants requires frequent, consistent canvassing that follows a problem-posing line of inquiry. The frequency and consistency needed to both (1) keep the momentum going at any one complex as well as (2) make organizers comfortable with this method. However, while people have different needs and abilities, an ideological trend in activism selects for organizers which are more willing to avoid canvassing in favor of “doing admin work,” such as operating social media, researching tenant complexes, etc. This lower-effort activity is often the safe option for activists who are already distracted by a million other projects while still allowing themselves to claim they are part of the tenants’ struggle. Direly, this paper membership does not intellectually challenge communists to develop the hard skills of empathy, eliciting demands, and agitation, hurting them and the union.
This tendency to chase “tasks” and retreat when this isn’t possible makes the union’s active membership ebb and flow. When membership decreases, some find it sensible to propose changing union policy to keep the quantity of members up. This is a mistake.
C-TCP/TATU members have opposed a specific line offered by the DSA tendency in the union about member engagement. The DSA tendency has argued that the union has prioritized “technical” work over “cadre” work. As they have used it, “technical” refers to mastering the method of building a union and “cadre” being running social events and keeping membership engaged. They have argued that by putting “technical” stuff over “cadre,” we’ve burnt out members or neglected to engage members of different stripes.
C-TCP has argued against the assertion that there is a divide between “technical” and “cadre” at all, and against the claim that the union has prioritized technically nailing down one while ignoring the other.
Instead, C-TCP has argued that cadre develop through shared struggle and developing their method, which allows people — both tenants and activists — who were previously disenchanted or disenfranchised to understand that they can make a meaningful contribution to a movement they otherwise feel powerless within. We have consistently held the line that all members should regularly take on union tasks that keep them engaged, like leading a canvass, onboarding someone, or facilitating a roleplaying session. Otherwise, siloing tasks into certain “canvassing” or “onboarding” specialists shelters members from the risk of engaging with the real problem of developing themselves and others as organizers.
People have tended to drift away from active union membership because they are accustomed or committed to a different type of organizing work. To that end, there have been requests from members in the DSA tendency to add these types of admin tasks that can be assigned to newer members or those who are less inclined (or too busy to) canvass. These tasks are meant to be low-commitment, disorganized, and unconcentrated toward the union’s greater purpose. They simply attempt to keep the attention of someone who has already, if implicitly or ideologically, made the decision that they don’t want to commit to actually organizing tenants.
We’ve started calling this ideology “taskism,” the organizational strategy that people should become (re-)engaged through small tasks. People indeed become stronger participants by progressively completing more difficult activities, a principle which applies to both union cadre and in collective organizing. However, the notion that the union should adapt itself to maintain the attention of a nominally radical membership through tasks punts the real task of challenging the ideological assumptions that prevent people from committing to unglamorous modes of organizing (i.e., canvassing). Practically, the union’s early stage has no room for trying to court paper members back into a union that fits their tight schedules.
We can draw a similarity to “routinism,” a term coined by Mao in his “Twenty Manifestations of Bureaucracy”:
3. They are very busy from morning until evening, they labour the whole year long; they do not examine people and they do not investigate matters; they do not study policies; they do not rely upon the masses; they do not prepare their statements; they do not plan their work. This is brainless, misdirected bureaucracy. In other words, it is routinism.
In other words, “routinism” is a practice of conducting things thoughtlessly and habitually, without forethought, investigation, or planning. “Taskism” is an attitude for engaging cadre by creating tasks with no clear connection to the long-term strategy of the union, in effect replacing challenges to the cadre’s general intellect with menial activity. A routine may be intellectually stimulating, but it treats itself as a fixed method or as an instrument which is used by the cadre, and doesn’t adapt to the challenges provided by the problems faced by real people in real situations. So routinism does not necessarily create taskism, they are related by their thoughtlessness.
Collaboration with other groups
We have used examples of C-TCP members, through TATU, working with different groups, namely DSA, to build the union. However, through its history, TATU has had the opportunity to work with other local activist groups.
C-TCP advises that collaboration with other organizations should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but the current state of the movement is such that working with different political organizations is generally unproductive for the tenants’ struggle. It tends to shift the focus away from tenants to keeping dead-end projects alive.
C-TCP does not support organizing for electoral measures: Electoralism is a wash; generally, organizations combine forces to support from voters and public officials around certain ballot measures. Most recently, DSA and PSL collaborating to gather signatures for ballot measures is another instance of collaboration across ideological lines to struggle for electoral wins.
C-TCP sees this as counterproductive; tenants should recognize themselves as such, not as a voting block. This shifts tenant consciousness away from legal or electoral revindication and toward recognizing each other as the common means for victory.
C-TCP opposes inter-organizational collaboration when it operates as “coalitionism”: Inter-organizational collaboration often does not critically look at why there are different organizations at all — to advance different political goals and employ different methods. This reproduces a bad habit for organizations to seek out support from one another whenever a project has immediate returns, such as protest demonstrations or electoral projects.
TATU has tried to collaborate with other organizations who have reached out to it. Specifically, TATU had the opportunity to help St. Pete Tenants Union (SPTU) with their tenant organizing. On a phone call, we told them that there seems to be a split between “helping people in a crisis” and “pursuing legal or electoral routes”: one member was frustrated that they only respond to tenants reactively, or in periods of crisis; the other member felt that researching legal infractions from landlords and new ballot initiatives was spinning their wheels. We advised them to try out our suggestions for proactive, direct organizing with tenants and come back to us with questions.
This relationship never took off, as TATU was not united on C-TCP’s goal for a more directed learning collaboration with SPTU. The opposing DSA tendency in TATU wanted SPTU as “mentees” to seek training on their own terms, which at the time was through reading what they wanted to read. While it’s possible to use reading groups to move discussion towards adopting TATU’s strategy, C-TCP argued that organizations tend to commit to a certain practice because of their political ideology, and that we should be direct and firm with other organizations that are struggling with union organizing. If we do not criticize the politics underlying an organization’s practice, we waste our time.
TATU does not allow “organizations joining as members:” C-TCP has argued that members join the union as individual tenants or activists, rather than organizations wholesale.
Specifically, Socialist Youth Tampa (SYT), in a drive to engage their predominantly student membership in more left-wing organizing around Tampa, encouraged its members to join TATU. This influx of members is usually welcome, but it came with certain drawbacks: students have different obligations which prevented them from committing to tenant organizing, and asked that TATU change its meeting schedule to fit the needs of SYT.
We concluded that SYT’s attempt to join TATU was a “box-checking exercise.” SYT wanted to demonstrate that it could be involved in as many organizing projects as possible and promoted itself as being a part of TATU well before any one of its membership established a relationship with TATU. In one way this is another overcommitment problem we’ve observed among other more excited organizations, but in another way it was a disingenuous way to promote SYT as doing something productive following the failed encampments. In both ways, while individual members TATU worked with were upstanding, SYT as an organization didn’t demonstrate itself as having a genuine interest in organizing tenants.
Party Leadership, being “Autonomous,” and Autonomism
The Autonomous Tenant Union (ATU) concept is a popular answer to other tenant organizing projects in the U.S. which argue for building the union to become tenant-led, and independent from “business unions.” Anarchism and various strains of communism (Italian autonomism, left-communism, and neo-Kautskyism) are the major influences in the current theory on tenant-organizing, sometimes referred to as protagonism. Both support an essential separation between working class and socialist politics, where the working class spontaneously arrives at the correct ideas, and socialists play an instigative or supporting role.
TATU was developed with the consultation of DSA’s Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) project, which advocates for the ATU model. While C-TCP does not agree with the anarchist and umbrella of left-communist influence, TATU inherited its method from this tendency. Many of the debates with the DSA tendency described throughout have been a result of trying to understand autonomous tenant organizing as consistent with the idea that the party should establish communist leadership in its organizations.
Our current position on communist leadership is derived from the Mass Line. C-TCP aims to struggle through mass organizations with the working class in order to integrate the movement in the broader struggle against capital. Moreover, developing the tenant-driven autonomy of TATU means that the party’s consultation with working class people can be fully realized. This dance of “develop the tenants movement into one that stands on its own legs” and “the party must keep the tenants movement ensconced in a revolutionary strategy” is how C-TCP thinks of its strategy as coherent.
A fuller elaboration of C-TCP’s implementation of mass line strategy is forthcoming.
Conclusion
This summation covers several years of organizing experience in a union which emerged both from consultation with the DSA Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) and shared joint membership with DSA members. Over time, C-TCP whittled down several ideas broadly attributed to the DSA influence, advancing lines which together keep “cadre-building” activity in line with mass organizing. This entanglement with DSA happened naturally as C-TCP began shucking its commitment to “mutual aid” organizing and developed a tenant organizing approach explicitly through mass organizing, which included other local activists predominantly from DSA. Moreover, the fact that this separation from DSA was gradual was attributed to the commitments (and lack thereof) which predispositioned C-TCP to less principled engagements.
However, we believe that the lines advanced by the “DSA tendency” are probably common and are applicable to other organizing projects. The attention given to understanding these inter-Left differences does not mean that the union has not learned lessons from directly engaging with tenants, it means that these political differences meaningfully affect the course of a union and should be examined thoroughly. We have streamlined the union on a principled basis; we justify decisions and lines we’ve taken which have coincidentally removed opposing tendencies, not because they were “opposition,” but because their opposition prevented the union from praxis where these conflicts make sense and have meaning. Now, we have more quickly developed connections with tenants and can agitate others into the early stages of organization; we are happy to say that we are beginning to have meetings among tenants on their complex again.
TATU presents itself to tenants as a tool to be used against the specific problems they suffer as tenants, and so we endeavor to promote all membership to high-quality levels of engagement and involvement. But TATU is also interface between the party and masses for whom tenancy is only an aspect of their life-story, and where grievances can be generalized, socialist development encouraged, and communist leadership made both perceptible and testable.
We believe that the lessons summarized above have allowed the party to set both hard and soft lines which discourage reformist elements from cropping up in the union and maximize connection between the party, union, and renters. Ultimately, C-TCP should be able to answer the question, “Can the ATU method be reconciled with party leadership?” However, since we are trained theoretically in the ATU method, we’d like to “walk and talk” on this question. In a forthcoming report, we will focus on how we have attempted to synthesize this method, and whether it has improved the quality of our incipient organizing attempts.