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I know we have spoken about housing on here before - more from the perspective of it being a human right and frankly it is a topic that is not going to go away until the revolution, but specifically, I came across this tweet the other day that made me take a deep dive into the reality of renting in the US and that left me wondering why the whole place isn’t on fire.
I am absolutely aware how vastly different the experience of renting is here compared the US, and even the UK for a matter of fact but throughout the NATO West, I believe there to be a unifying reality that, as all of them, is entirely man-made, unacceptable, downright degrading, stressful and puts far too many people at risk: it is nigh on impossible to get an apartment, especially if you are on your own and on average each one of us will have to spend at least 50% of their pay for rent. Granted, this applies to cities more so than the countryside but cities are where the jobs, life, comrades are at and that’s that.
The fact remains that this situation is entirely man-made and predominantly down to the fact that housing - and I won’t even get into the discussion of owning property here - is a profit based, investment even based industry that is increasingly run and manipulated by large investment firms such as BlackRock and the concept of housing as an investment is a large piece of the capitalist pipe-dream of freedom. This needs to change, drastically and immediately.
Again, I have no intention of discussing this, as so many other subjects, within the bounds of the existing bourgeois system of legality, but rather from the viewpoint of what is right, what is doable and why. As an important disclaimer: there is an entire field of Marxist work that deals with this subject specifically, both from a materialist and an additional feminist perspective both of which I am a novice at. I am extremely fortunate that I have dedicated people in my life that have studied this in-depth and who have sparked my interest in this field. If I only touch on certain subjects it is down to brevity and my superficial work on these subjects. Considering, however, how absolutely vital housing, a home, is for everyone this topic should be at the forefront of our interests and actions. Housing is a Human Right and damn what those pesky capitalists want - so let’s get into it, with the help of people such as Engels, Harvey, Madden, Marcuse and Frazer.
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