Abolish the Landlords
The Politics of the Permanent Housing Crisis
by Geoff Guy, Rampant, Jan. 19
https://rampantmag.com/2021/01/19/abolish-the-landlords/
. . .
...Whether the eviction crisis comes to pass or not, we are experiencing a
collective drama staged at a scale that lays bare the basic class relations
deciding who has a right to live in safety. This gives us an opportunity to
throttle capital not one landlord or one vote at a time, but on the terrain
of mass politics—to delegitimize and denaturalize the state violence which
underwrites every dollar of landlord profit.
The tenant, mutual aid, and protest organizations that have grown during
the pandemic will provide a vital bulwark against the forces gathering to
push us into barbarism, but we need not accept a one-sidedly defensive
orientation. A mobilized and class-conscious tenant movement can put
forward more radical and permanent demands and visions of the type
intimated in calls to cancel rent and for housing occupations. Maybe we
organize beyond winning concessions from landlords or reforms within the
state, and demand the collective ownership and self-management of large
landlords like Pangea. A staggering number of landlords in poor and
working-class neighborhoods only survive due to federal subsidies delivered
through Section 8 and Low Income Housing Tax Credits, disguised as
subsidies to the tenant. Maybe our movement stops the use of tax money to
subsidize landlord profits and uses that money to convert their holdings
into publicly owned and tenant-managed housing. Maybe we defund a global
military apparatus and build new social housing.
We must define the farthest reaches of our politics by the most advanced
demands of the working class, not by the stunted calculus of the capitalist
state. Our ability to articulate demands like these as real political
forces when we return to the normal permanent crisis will depend on what we
organize this year.
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