To Meet Everyone’s Housing Needs: Communism Will Abolish Private Property
LOS ANGELES (USA), December 11 – “We expect a tsunami of evictions to arrive in January and February,” warned a housing activist. “There are no legal social safety nets.”
Some say “there will never be a communist revolution in the US because people are too comfortable.” The current housing crisis – and long lines for free groceries—should make them think again.
Before Covid-19, over 66,000 people in Los Angeles County were unhoused—13% more than 2019. Black people are 8% of the LA population but 40% of those without homes.
“Everyone is equal but not in capitalism,” commented a friend.
Now some 600,000 people in LA, and possibly 12 million households nationwide, face eviction. Children and older adults are especially at risk.
Most working-class people have social networks that can help them through a crisis. But now the staggering numbers of potentially homeless people make a qualitative difference. Friends and relatives who might have helped financially or with temporary shelter may face unemployment or eviction themselves.
Reforms can’t solve this profound and deepening crisis.
In 2017, LA voters approved a ten-year investment in reducing homelessness. Since then, annual housing placements have doubled. Most remain in their new homes. Responding to Covid-19, LA County housed another six thousand people in hotels, shelters and trailers. Yet the number of unhoused people continues to rise.
Now housing reformers are considering projects like Community Land Trusts and Social Housing where governments or non-profit corporations buy land and build affordable housing. They think about housing as part of community-building. They are seeking a solution that only communism can provide.
The root of the problem is capitalist private property.
“All land title in the Americas is based on land theft from indigenous societies who had no concept of private ownership of land,” another friend posted in a Zoom “chat” during a meeting about the housing crisis.
“Destroy all titles and mortgages,” responded a comrade. “People can stay where they are, if they have an appropriate place to live. Survey and list vacant properties and reallocate them based on need. Then start looking at underutilized housing. Yes, that would take a social revolution.”
It would require ending all private ownership of the means of production, not just land and housing.
Big corporate landlords own most California rental units. But most landlords are not corporations. Many are workers whose rental units are their retirement plan. They, like many homeowners, are at risk of foreclosure. After the 2008 housing crisis, one corporation alone (Blackstone) bought 50 thousand houses. Capitalism inevitably moves toward ever-greater concentration of wealth.
Capitalist State Power Guarantees Property Ownership
An emergency order from the US Centers for Disease Control officially halted most evictions from July through December. It’s been extended through January, but once it expires, all back rent will be due.
Meanwhile, the number of illegal evictions is skyrocketing. Landlords lock tenants out, cut utilities, threaten violence—and police let them. If landlords bother to post eviction notices, tenants have only five days to file complicated paperwork to appeal. Those who go to small-claims court without a lawyer always lose.
Many see direct-action groups like the Los Angeles Tenants Union as the best short-term hope.
But they are fighting the capitalist state, not just landlords. “Ownership” means that capitalist governments use official organized violence to support the “owner’s” ability to deny others the use of “their property.”
“Decisions about the wealth society produces are made by people far from the lives of those in need,” said another Chat participant. “They direct human and material resources into uses far from the necessities of life. Those far from the resource allocation decision-making cannot satisfy their needs under the present distribution.”
Communist Workers’ Power Will Guarantee Production for Need
Only communism can organize the masses to make the decisions about how to allocate resources to meet our needs.
The comrade in the online meeting was invited to give a closing reflection.
“For most of human history there was no private property,” she said. “This should be our vision for the future. Private property is a power relationship,” she continued. She mentioned the LA cops who broke into homes with a battering ram on Thanksgiving morning to evict people living there “illegally.” Those homes were actually owned by a government agency – still an example of capitalist power.
“Imagine a government that would use its power to guarantee meeting human needs,” the comrade urged. “That would eliminate all records of ‘ownership’ and ‘debt.’ That would allocate available housing and reimagine ways to build new housing that would change the ways we live.
“Instead of individual households fending for themselves, we would collectively take responsibility for all. No markets, no money – instead, cooperation and sharing. This demands revolutionary vision and practice. If not now, when?”
Housing for the Masses: A Global Capitalist Crisis
An estimated 150 million members of our international working-class family – including 100 million children — have no roof over their head each night. Two billion more make do with criminally inadequate shelter.
Some subsist in the impoverished and storm-ravaged countryside of Honduras and Nicaragua. More struggle to survive in the sprawling slums and townships of India, Brazil, South Africa and the Philippines. Many are trapped in refugee camps in Greece, Jordan, Kenya, Chad, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
And all the while, tens of millions of homes are vacant in the US and Europe alone. Exclusive real estate agencies list hundreds of thousands of luxury homes for sale every day. Many of the workers who built those homes, who clean and maintain then, live in squalor.
Shelter is one of the most basic of all human needs. In capitalism, we get only what we can pay for. In communism, we will produce and share what we need. What we need to build right now is the International Communist Workers’ Party that can lead the masses to win a world in which everyone is truly at home everywhere.
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