The Peoples’ Council: a Case Study in Practical Movement Building

Analyzing the Successes & Failures of an Experiment in Radical, Working-Class Democracy

Most entries on this blog are works of more abstract theory. As the author, my usual approach is to step back and hope that my words can speak well enough for themselves. This case, however, is more of an analysis of a political project in which I was personally involved. So, I’ll step forward into the limelight and offer my subjective recollections.

Beginning in the late Summer of 2021, I had the opportunity to help launch and facilitate an experiment in mass political organizing and agitation in St. Petersburg, Florida. I’ve decided to reflect on my experiences building this project, because I believe that those experiences can be instructive in how — and how not — to build up the kind of mass, democratic mobilization that would be necessary to any successful struggle for popular change.

Here, I offer a post-mortem of the Peoples’ Council of St. Petersburg, and attempt to convey the idea and aims of our activity, as well as examine where it all went wrong. The intent here is not to disparage or accuse any one person or group of failure. Rather, the intent is to offer a learning opportunity for community organizers, and to help future projects avoid these same pitfalls.

The Context

We began the process in August 2021. At a meeting over drinks, a handful of like-minded local activists and I hammered out a loose vision of a kind of independent “peoples’ council.” This body would operate separate from formal channels of city government. It was not invested with any formal authority by elected officials or the city charter. Instead, the body’s legitimacy would come from the people, and eventually, from the overwhelming pressure we could wield through popular mobilization.

St. Petersburg was, and still is, a rapidly-gentrifying city. The average rent for an 872 sq. ft. is currently $1,969 per month, as of this writing. Four-fifths of all units within the city’s rental stock cost more than $1,500 per month, putting them outside the realm of affordability for many working class families.

Thousands have had to relocate to the periphery of the metro area. They’ve been pushed away by the city’s rapid gentrification, driven out of a city built only by their labor. No developers, investors, or speculators built St. Petersburg; the city has survived and thrived in spite of these profiteers.

This mass expulsion of working-class people is happening against a backdrop of a booming tourist industry which depends, more than ever, on those same people to staff the hotels, cook the food, mix the drinks, and park the cars. That’s not to mention all the thousands of other workers who drive the busses, clean the streets, make repairs, man the registers, stock the shelves, and perform all the other vital functions that keep a city of 300,000 people-within a metro area of more than 3 million-functioning.

This is an untenable and unsustainable problem which the city government seems to have no earnest interest in addressing. The city government has made populist overtures referencing the need for “affordable” housing. However, the actions of the city government suggest otherwise.

The current plan for redevelopment of the Tropicana Field site calls for the city to give hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to developers to privatize a massive expanse of land that is currently publicly owned. What will the working people of St. Petersburg receive in return? Just over 800 “affordable and workhouse units,” barely 100 of which will be genuinely affordable, and even then, affordable only for a matter of years.

Our government has failed us. Private equity and development has failed us. So, what better matter for the citizens themselves to solve?

The Council Model in Action

It took a while for everyone to really grasp the idea at first, but the form that the Peoples’ Council would eventually take was quite simple. I intend to give a more detailed analysis of the methods and theory of the Peoples’ Council at a later date; for now, I will provide a very basic rundown of the layout of the agenda.

The Peoples’ Council was set, at least at first, to be a recurring monthly meeting, open to all members of the community. For the initial meeting, a prompt would be predetermined. In subsequent meetings, though, the topic of discussion would be raised as a natural result of the resolution of that first meeting.

Meeting attendees-the “Councilmembers” of the Peoples’ Council-would then be invited to sit together in groups of five to ten people at each table. There would then be a brief keynote, delivered by one of the organizers, explaining the basic purpose for the meeting. The agenda would then turn to an open forum, during which members of the community were invited to speak on the topic and share their perspective and experiences.

The meeting would next turn to breakout groups. The newly-deputized Councilmembers at each table were asked to discuss the topic at hand. Then, after discussion, our Councilmembers would be asked to reconvene and share the ideas or impressions developed in each breakout group. Finally, Councilmembers would vote on two things: the question at hand, followed by an attempt at achieving a quorum regarding how to proceed for the following meeting.

All totaled, this experiment in radical democracy would take about two hours’ time, not accounting for setup and breakdown afterward.

Getting the Word Out to the Community

We paid to reserve a facility near downtown called the Sunshine Center. During regular hours, the center provided recreational, social and educational programming for area seniors. It was also centrally located, and was generally accessible via bus from most corners of the city. Importantly, it also provided a large room in which the council could convene, with additional space for overflow if needed.

Our team of core organizers were excited, yet nervous in the days leading up to the first meeting. This was a model of organizing which none of us had ever attempted to bring to life before. While I’m sure precedents of this model exist in abundance, my comrades and I had no frame of reference for how this should — or even could — go. The best we could do was fall back on the time-tested methods of getting out the word.

We spent the weeks leading up to the meeting canvassing, dropping flyers, putting up posters, running ads on social media (with funding appropriated only from our own pockets), and of course, making hundreds of phone calls. We stood outside of corner stores on the city’s southside. We waved signs on the corner of intersections and distributed flyers to cars when the light turned red.

All this was done with the express goal of turning out as many attendees as possible. And, in the end, our efforts paid off.

The Inaugural Meeting

That first meeting of the Peoples’ Council attracted well over one hundred attendees. Some of these were the figures you’d typically expect to find at such a meeting; your seasoned core of local activists and community leaders, black clergy, a handful of local political wonks, and a few developers and landlords active in the area. But, the majority of the crowd was composed of ordinary, working-class people from the community.

The working people of St. Pete, composing a diverse range of racial and gender identities, occupying a variety of trades, and navigating personal housing situations that ranged from long-time, stable ownership to long-term homelessness, showed up. Not only did they show, however; they engaged in the process. Young and old, members of the community gathered around tables to discuss and debate the question at hand.

The question we posed to the body was as follows: Is there a housing state of emergency in St. Petersburg? This question was not meant to be rhetorical; in Florida, many of the most effective tools in the arsenals of local governments to immediately halt evictions and displacements-like rent control, for instance-are preempted by existing state law. However, there was still a legal pathway available; as per research from the Urban Institute, temporary rent control measures could be imposed in Florida if the city government identified a “housing emergency so grave as to constitute a serious menace to the general public.” This measure would need to be approved by a popular referendum, and be renewed annually. While burdensome, we agreed that the need was so pressing in the city, due to the unprecedented surge in the cost of rent within the last several years, that even the chance to try and curtail raises would be galvanizing to the working class.

Not surprisingly, the people turned around an answer that was overwhelmingly affirmative. Yes, the people said, there is a housing state of emergency in St. Petersburg.

It was a stirring and encouraging result for the first meeting of the Peoples’ Council. However, it presented an even more crucial question, which was to be addressed at the following month’s meeting: What do we do about it? How could the working class of St. Petersburg, none of whom held any individual political power, move our leaders to act on this question?

How Things Proceeded

With our next meeting, the Peoples’ Council relocated to the Manhattan Casino, a dance hall on the city’s near-southside. Not only was this a much larger venue, but the facility also had long ties to the city’s black community, dating back to its 1930s heyday, when the Casino hosted legendary acts like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. While the building had sat vacant for many years, its recent refurbishment was seen by many as the reestablishment of an important link to the history of the city’s black community; a community which, year by year, is put at greater risk by rising rents as gentrification creeps further and further south of Central Avenue.

We repeated the same fundamental outreach strategy that brought us success with the previous month’s meeting. While we again opted to run Facebook ads, the majority of our bandwidth was dedicated to the street-level approach of meeting people where they were at, and getting out the word to the people directly. Again, this effort paid dividends.

Our second meeting attracted an even larger crowd than our first. Many of those who attended our first meeting returned, while new faces joined us, eager for their voice to be heard. Between the meeting hall, as well as virtual attendees who dialed in via Zoom, the Manhattan Casino meeting attracted nearly 250 attendees.

The agenda followed the same basic flow as the previous month’s meeting; a keynote, followed by an open forum, breakout groups, reconvening, and finally, a vote. This time, though, we asked a more substantive question: given that the body had already agreed that we were in the midst of a housing crisis, what could we do to pressure the city to declare a housing emergency?

After discussion and debate, the people settled on a three-stage path of escalation. First, we would speak before our leaders at a meeting of the City Council. Next, we would organize a mass demonstration or march. Then, our third and final point of escalation: occupation. We were intent on forcing the city government to listen to us, and we were ready to go to the mattresses if need be.

To be Continued…

I have a lot more to say about the Peoples’ Council. More than just a recounting of events, I also want to delve into the theory of change that motivated us to build the Peoples’ Council, the more radical, long-term aims of the council…and of course, how it fell apart. However, this post has already gone on long enough. So, these further reflections will have to wait for a later date.

For now, I’ll sign off by saying that the Peoples’ Council of St. Pete was more than just an exercise in activism. It was a truly revolutionary experience in worker’s democracy. It was one of the most rewarding-and frustrating-projects in which I’ve ever been involved. I hope, once this post-mortem is complete, we’ll be able to identify the points of failure, and rebuild this organization, stronger and more ready to take on power than ever.

Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com.