How Does Self-Interest Create Movement Unity?

I think there are two parts to this question: first, how we organize ourselves, and then, how our organization

create

s power. We really try to organize around

self

-

interest

and not ideology. I think in this country when you organize our ideology you end up with a room full of people who have the same ideology as you and we don't necessarily have enough people to win, for example when we go to trailer parks you know a lot of people in the trailer parks they raise their rents, their trailer parks are now owned by a corporate owner you see people of color moving into your neighborhood and you tend to blame that because we don't have the best public education system in this country and the People don't really have a way to explain politically what's happening to them, but they are outraged and so we try to connect directly with that outrage and then we bring them to a base of people who don't necessarily look like them and then we discover their personal

interest

s and we make them understand that they actually share the same

self

-interest.

These people have been told that they are actually segregated and they don't understand that self-interest is really key. I think in the South we have been trained to be selfless and we have been trained to give up our power over and over again and it is important to understand that we are not actually doing that for ourselves, that is the tactic of the ruling class , getting people to understand what their personal interest is and then getting them to act and having that personal interest get them. Declaring that publicly is a really key part and then the way we build power on top of that is to get them to behave as a collective.

There are two things we have that are real and that is our income and that is our job. I think the true potential. The idea of ​​the tenant

movement

is that if we can build a big enough base across this country, the day will come when we can call a national rent strike and tear down this entire system and then dictate the demands we really want. If you're interested in environmental justice, if you're interested in carceral justice, tenant organizing to me is really what's going to win and build power in this country to change the power dynamic that we currently have.