FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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SEATTLE, WA July 12--Affordable housing is shaping up to be the major issue in the Seattle City Council races. The issue reverberates throughout the country and around the world. The answer lies not in affordability, but rather free collective housing that only communism can provide.
Billions have no housing or barely livable shelter. Capitalists force millions to live in neighborhoods of sub-standard housing, lacking basic services, surrounding every major city. It’s the same story from the Brazilian favelas to the South African irregular townships.
Rather than fix the problem, capitalism compounds it. Detroit plows thousands homes--mostly of African Americans--into the ground. City officials hit remaining homeowners with thousand-dollar water bills.
When the bosses can profit from the gentrification of these neighborhoods, the masses from  Harlem in New York to The Born in Barcelona find their communities destroyed and their families thrown into the street.
Neighborhoods with sub-standard housing not only breed disease and distress, but also mass uprisings. For example, poverty-stricken banlieues (suburbs) that surround the rich Paris core periodically revolt.
Most rebels there are African immigrants. These super-oppressed workers are not just capitalism’s victims. They are the potential leaders of the revolutionary communist movement--now and in the future.
The working class will have to mobilize millions to build the housing we need after the revolution. Who better to bring the commitment and understanding necessary to lead that mobilization than those who suffered in the shantytowns? Their leadership will be invaluable.
Seattle’s Sham Solutions Sustain Segregation
The Seattle mayor’s advisory committee, election rallies and public meetings will all present bogus solutions to the housing problem. Each will promise to combat racist and class segregation. None will!
The committee’s draft report was leaked last Thursday. It notes that “Seattle single-family zoning has roots in racial and class exclusion.”
The committee’s solution is to do away with single-family zones. They want to give developers free rein. The same developers that made a fortune segregating the city are now to be given free rein to correct the problem. Talk about letting the fox loose in the hen house!
The left calls for rent control and to increase linkage fees. Developers pay these fees when they build fancy condos and office towers. All this has been tried in other cities and failed.
They failed because the aim was affordable housing. Affordable housing still links shelter to your ability to pay. Racist and class segregation is inevitable when housing is linked to money. Profits and decent housing for the masses are incompatible.

Communism Can Succeed
Communist revolution will change all that. The ICWP will put into action a mass crash program to build proper housing immediately after workers seize state power.  Profits will no longer dictate how much and what kind of housing is built. This will be a huge job but millions of helping hands will make short work of it.
Of course in the short term we will have at our disposal the mansions of the wealthy and their luxury condos, resorts and hotels. We could even use otherwise useless office buildings (currently dedicated to processing money).
But mainly we will tear down sub-standard housing and put up new buildings. And we will build communal housing.
This mass campaign cannot succeed unless we mobilize masses to integrate communities. The party’s job will be to lead millions out of the old segregated areas.
For hundreds of years we’ve tried the capitalist solution. It’s never worked and it can not work. The answer lies in mobilizing the masses for communism.

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