Racism, Covid-19 and Capitalism’s Shelter Crisis: Communism Is in the House!
You can’t “shelter at home” without a home. That’s millions of our working-class family around the world—at least.
You can’t “shelter at home” safely if you are among the 1.8 billion in grossly inadequate housing. In urban slums or rural misery from India to China to Brazil to the USA. From Cape Town to Madrid to Jakarta. Even in the world’s richest cities.
Wealthy but crowded Manhattan, New York City, has 73,000 people per square mile. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has almost ten times as many.
Some 800,000 US dwellings lack running water. The World Health Organization estimated last year that 3 billion people worldwide lack basic hand washing facilities. Covid-19 ravages their communities while privatized water companies profit.
Religions may declare that “the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society.” But capitalism doesn’t let us live that way. It can’t. Its money system – wages, markets and maximum profits – won’t let it.
Only communism can recognize and activate everyone’s abilities. Only communism will provide for each according to need.
Private Property Is Theft – And Murder
Individuals or small companies own three-quarters of US rental units. Like most home “owners,” they are in hock to the real owner, a bank. These banks are overflowing with profits siphoned from workers’ sweat and blood.
You won’t be able to “shelter at home” if you are evicted for non-payment of rent or dispossessed when you miss a mortgage payment. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought this wolf to the door of tens of millions in the United States alone.
That’s why tenant organizations called for a May 1 rent strike. Some US cities and states are freezing evictions. But the bills will still come due. Laws protecting private property are far stronger than any protection for the most vulnerable members of our working-class family.
And then the numbers of people who are unhoused, or doubled-up with relatives, will soar. So will deaths from Covid-19, stress and other causes.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Rent strikes show the potential of solidarity and mass action. But we need to abolish private property. That will take a mass mobilization for communist revolution. We’ll expropriate empty dwellings and mansions and put them to good use. We’ll collectively plan, build and occupy forms of housing (old and new) that meet our needs.
Slum dwellers everywhere are very resourceful – and often collective – in housing themselves. Communism will liberate their creativity and power!
More Red Flag readers must join the International Communist Workers’ Party to make that happen. Current members must help newer comrades build collectives among their co-workers, friends, family and neighbors.
Housing Is a Class Issue – So Is Racism
Within the working class, housing reflects racism. Look at the lowest-income fifth of the US population or the highest-income fifth or any group in between. Always, a much smaller percentage of black households than white households own homes. No matter what their gender, marital status, age, location, or level of schooling.
Banks turn down black and latinx people’s mortgage applications at dramatically higher rates than white people’s applications – even with the same credit ratings.
Voucher programs are supposed to help the most vulnerable. But in New Orleans, where 99% of voucher recipients are African American, four out of five landlords refuse to accept vouchers.
Before Covid-19, half of all US households lived paycheck to paycheck—including 80% of workers. Half of all black and latinx households had less than $1500 in the bank—if they had a bank account. Not even one month’s reserve! Half of white households with savings accounts had less than $9700. If they scrimped, that might last a few months.
After World War II, US imperialism promoted home ownership as the “American Dream.” This was a response to the massive strike wave of 1946-47. It went hand-in-hand with anticommunism.
“Redlining” and racial “covenants” kept neighborhoods “white only” – including post-war suburbs like Levittown. US housing policy was to segregate public housing complexes.
White vets (but not black ones) got no-down-payment VA loans. The message to white workers– amidst a growing international anti-racist movement – was that their economic security depended on racial segregation. Black workers got the message that white workers couldn’t be trusted.
The US ruling class has profited hugely from this divide-and-conquer strategy. Correspondingly, workers’ standard of living has declined steadily for 50 years.
Workers pay with their lives. The men in the wealthiest 1% live, on average, 15 years longer than the poorest 1%. For women, the difference is 10 years.
All workers will advance by fighting to unite our class to destroy this deadly system. Communists build this revolutionary unity now in order to build a world without the private property, wages and exploitation that form the material basis of racism. The Covid-19 pandemic makes this more urgent than ever.
“When the capitalists place workers in such a position that they inevitably meet a premature and unnatural death, when they deprive thousands of the necessities of life, place them under conditions in which they cannot live–know that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permit these conditions to remain, their deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offense is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.” F. Engels, 1845, Condition of the Working Class in England.
Brazil: We Refuse to Pay—Rent, Water, Lights, Gas
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