Friendship to the city! On intersectional solidarity in social housing

If we couch the word “proletariat” less in terms of organised factory workers than in terms of what groups in our society are dispossessed, without rights and vulnerable in everyday life, it is clear that this old term now covers a multifaceted community. It ranges from the precariat and a middle class in danger of social decline to the working poor (often women in badly paid reproductive labour), single parents, persons with migration experience, persons suffering discrimination due to racism, heterosexism or because of disabilities. (It ought to be added at this point that nobody should be made to move out of a municipal flat because they are not, for a time, part of the “poor”.) Instead of the classic, comprehensive socialist layering – “from Socialist International down to district organisation”, one might say –, we are today faced with a sort of “Intersectional”: different experiences of marginalisation overlap in one person, as do relations between groups affected by such experiences of marginalisation. Against the backdrop of these potentials for conflicts and alliances, the problem of the Gemeinde as a community is thrown into sharp relief, from the local-global level of the communal to the commons as self-administered shared property.

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