Why does the USA, the richest nation on earth, have homelessness? Why are people unable to find shelter? Capitalism, war, and greed are creating this problem over and over and it is worldwide.
Why is this problem so hard to solve? In capitalism, prisons are a profitable industry, but building housing for low income people is not. Building affordable housing, planning for disasters, healthcare for mental illness and addiction, job training—none of these are sustainable under capitalism. Politicians are not your friend. They represent the wealthy and voting them in or out will not fix the fundamental problem of capitalism, which is profit before people.
Capitalism in decay in the US is causing a crisis of mass homelessness. Capitalism in the USA seeks new profit streams from niche housing development which requires that homeless people be criminalized, thus justifying their removal. Homeless encampments create ‘eyesores’ which create police measures of banishment, arrest, and criminalization. Capitalist decay, with its inability to rule in the same old way, creates multiple forms of class oppression. Homelessness is one of them. Police power grows. The basis for revolutionary change emerges and deepens.
Alex S. Vitale, in his book The End of Policing, documents how police departments are part of the war on the working class through warring against the homeless:
“Whenever a homeless person was found to be committing any of a number of minor crimes…they were not arrested, but instead banned from a particular area, such as a park, a row of cheap motels, or even an entire neighborhood.”
Homelessness is also tied to gentrification and the efforts of local capitalists to ‘revitalize’ areas that are populated by street people and the poor without permanent housing, but which are now desirable because of apartment, condos, and loft construction.
One aspect of homelessness is how the unemployed population of the homeless are thrown off, so to speak, by the capitalists. There are other homeless people, however, who work but who cannot afford rent or who are denied housing by landlords, rental agencies, or private individuals. These are homeless people as well. Shelters and spaces created by cities are insufficient for any of homeless people. People sleep in cars or ‘couch surf,’ maybe purchase a recreational vehicle or a van and live in it. Both type of homelessness are created by the capitalists.
Communism will get rid of money and the economic system that says you have to have a job—sell your labor power—to get money to pay the rent and buy what you need to survive. We’ll work collectively to produce what we need and share what we produce based on need.
Under communism, we will fight to guarantee full housing for all, an end to homelessness, and housing development that serves the needs and situations facing all families, be it a single family, multiple families or the elderly. These are some of the beginning moves that will need to be made as the masses’ needs are met under communism and the capitalist system is buried by the new people’s communism.
We’ll take over the mansions of the rich and turn them into collective housing, like they did in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution of 1917. We’ll collectively plan and build together the kind of housing that will allow us to break down social isolation and the divisions of “race,” language, and gender that we will inherit from capitalism.
We need communism. We can solve all these problems with the will of the masses and without a money system. Anyone of us can become homeless. Anyone of us can become a communist and together we can change the world.