Morning Comrades.
The other day a dear comrade and I were musing over a few bottles of wine about one of the central tenants of our philosophies, housing, something that they are entirely more versed in than I am - both from a practical and theoretical point of view and a thought crept up on me that continuously bugs me out, especially as I am getting older and that is housing. Or rather, the utter shit show that is housing here in the West and how frightening our collective future is looking. As if we didn’t need any more reasons to overthrow their shit show but this one is exceptionally high up on my list of, walls, let’s say it like that.
Housing, or shelter, alongside care and food are the central pillars to any healthy collection of humans and we all need it. For as long as I can fathom, however, those three pillars of peace have been commodified to force us into servitude and if liberation is the goal, those three pillars have to be addressed, desperately and without compromise.
The very real point we arrived at was that sooner or later, with even the remote possibility of shelter being available to the vast majority of us something is going to give. 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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