Cea Weaver Quotes
For centuries we've treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good... [A model of shared equity] will mean that families, especially white families who are homeowners, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.
Additional remarks from the same discussion, she suggested plans to "impoverish the white middle class.”
This was the typical language of the 1940’s and 1950’s at the height of the Red Scare used by the FBI and others to smear their opponents and political enemies. Seldes had published an article very critical of the FBI and its investigations of labor unions and other liberal organizations. See George Seldes, 1940 quotation.
This was the basic document issued after the Russian Revolution establishing the basic legal and economic structure of the new Soviet State.
Even in this early era, women had their own property.
Spinoza was one of the most feared intellectuals in human history—feared, that is, by the established power structures. He is the only known person who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims—all were forbidden to read his works. He was the enemy of authority and advocated personal reason as the guide for men.
The Diggers were a religious-economic movement that even today would be considered very radical. They advocated the right of the poor to go onto public lands and farm them—thus the name “Diggers.” Beyond their opposition to the private ownership of land to the exclusion of the poor, Winstanley and the Diggers promulgated another very modern doctrine: That the poor should take the responsibility and have the right to determinine how the society should provide for the poor. A version of this became one of the Mottos of the Poverty Program of 1964. See {616966}.
This quotation illustrates a very interesting historical fact about white understanding of Native American concepts of property and ownership. Here is a Scottsman before the American Revolution who is writing about American Indians and their communal concept of property. The “purchases” of Indian land from individual Indians therefore has even more doubt cast on the propriety than if the whites were acting in good faith. Furguson had personally visited North America for a brief visit.
Cea Weaver is an American tenant organizer who serves as the director of the New York City Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants since 2026. She previously coordinated the statewide organization Housing Justice for All and was a central figure in the campaign that led to the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Weaver has advocated for rent strikes and regulations that prioritize housing for community use rather than profit. She was appointed to her current municipal role by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 1, 2026.
