Brooklyn Eviction Defense denounces the state-sanctioned eviction of the peoples’ market. And we demand an end to the harassment and policing of the Plaza and the communities that make it bloom every Sunday.
Plaza Tonatiuh is a site of community and principled resistance, a place where the values many on the left promote and give lip-service to–collectivism, collaboration, community, revolution–are actually practiced! Bourgeois authorities rightfully see the Plaza as a threat. This makes its defense and maintenence all the more important.
Our struggle to build tenant power and to end the evictions of tenants is the same struggle as that waged weekly by the people and organizers of Plaza Tonatiuh. Our enemies are your enemies. We fight for working-class control over how and where we live. The Plaza is an embodiment of this kind of community control and power. The Plaza is an example of the people of a neighborhood determining the organization of that neighborhood and of their lives.
The violent eviction of the people from the Plaza is not an isolated event, but part of the city’s ongoing revanchist project, led by real-estate-owned Eric Adams. This is a project to dispossess the working people of New York City at every turn. This revanchism includes but is not limited to the medical instiutionalizations of our houseless comrades, the defunding of our public libraries and the privatization of our public housing, the endless bloating of the NYPD budget, the unrepentant development and skyrocketing rents and the protection both of attacks on abortion providers and of transphobic attacks on drag queens!
The laboring people of New York City, the worker-tenants, produce this city and produce all of its value. And it is the laboring people–the vendors, the tenants, the workers–who reserve the right to determine how this city functions. As the revolutionary Walter Rodney wrote: “It is only the organization and resoluteness of the working class which protects it from the natural tendency of the capitalist to exploit to the most.”