What is our program for WSBA?
[New York]: [West Side Block Association], [ca. 1966-67]. An unrecorded programmatic statement by radical organizers within New York's West Side Block Association (WSBA), advocating its transformation into a militant West Side Tenants Union organized along trade-union lines. Produced amid the ferment of student and community organizing on Manhattan's Upper West Side during the Vietnam era, the document attacks the WSBA's existing leadership for its reliance upon government anti-poverty funding, legal and bureaucratic remedies to housing problems, political accommodation with Reform Democrats, and insufficient commitment to direct action.
Opening with a six-point "program for WSBA," the authors call for a West Side Tenants Union empowered to bargain collectively with landlords; rent strikes, picketing, sit-ins and eviction defense; an independent political movement opposed to the Democratic Party and the two-party system; rejection of federal "anti-poverty" money; outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War; and the removal of alleged "Redbaiters" from the organization. The Mission District Tenants Union in San Francisco is cited as a model.
Of particular interest for the history of New Left community organizing, the statement explicitly conceives the proposed tenants union on the model of organized labor: individual buildings would function as "shops," with tenant stewards, collective bargaining, coordinated rent strikes, and solidarity actions between buildings. Housing agitation, however, is envisioned only as the beginning of a broader political movement addressing urban renewal, racism, police brutality, unemployment, poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War.
The document also records the ideological tensions between student radicals and neighborhood organizers characteristic of the period. Its authors criticize transient student activists and professionalized community organizers alike, arguing instead for long-term immersion in working-class neighborhood life and for the development of tenant leadership from within the community. Throughout, immediate housing grievances are interpreted through an increasingly revolutionary New Left vocabulary of class struggle, imperialism, direct action, and political consciousness. The final pages amount to an internal indictment of the existing WSBA leadership, which the authors accuse of bureaucratic maneuvering, political timidity, and dependence upon government funding, concluding unequivocally: "It must be replaced."
The proposed West Side Tenants Union was established in the late summer of 1967 by organizers associated with the West Village Committee for Independent Political Action, graduates of the Columbia School of Social Work, and members of the emerging New Left milieu. Its organizers included Robert Dillon, Edward Spannaus, and Tom Karp; the union subsequently intersected with debates inside the Progressive Labor Party and the developing tendency around economist Lyndon LaRouche, then known as Lyn Marcus. Archival holdings at NYU confirm the WSTU’s activity in 1967–68. Because the present document still treats the union as a proposal, it was almost certainly composed before its formal organization—probably between the Spectator report of November 1966 and the summer of 1967.
A substantial primary document recording the transition from neighborhood block organizing to a more ambitious tenant-union model, and an illuminating account of the complicated relationship among community residents, antipoverty agencies, Columbia activists, and competing currents of the New York New Left.
Corner-stapled 11” x 8 ½” sheets mimeographed from typescript on rectos only, 10 pp. Modest handling wear, else near fine. Not found by us in OCLC. Item #15172
Price: $250.00