The housing trap: endless expenditures of time and money…

Housing and the capitalist system
(editorial)


The housing crisis confronting workers today is inextricably linked with the crisis of the capitalist system—nothing short of a revolutionary overturn of that system can open the door for working people to decent shelter over a lifetime.

The housing crisis, marked by residential foreclosures, soaring rents, and growing homelessness, has its roots in the late 1960s, when the average rate of profit made by the tiny minority that owns the banks, factories, mines, and mills began to decline. Facing sharp international competition for markets and unable to boost their profits by expanding industrial capacity and increasing production, the capitalists turned to trading in debt, including extending credit to low-paid workers in the form of credit cards, student loans, auto “financing,” subprime mortgages, and home equity loans.

The Democrats and Republicans, together with the Federal Reserve Bank, obligingly pushed through the measures needed to allow the rulers to blow up huge bubbles of debt, especially in the housing market.

The capitalists pushed more and more workers into buying houses. To the bankers it no longer mattered if the loans could be repaid. They were no longer “holding” that debt; they were slicing it up and repackaging it as a “financial product” to be sold to a new investor. And most capitalists could be certain their government would insure them against any losses.

The rulers had another motivation for creating more “homeowners” in the working class. As the book Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes points out, “Owning a house ties workers down with onerous mortgage payments and endless expenditures of time and money… . It subverts our habits of class solidarity by elevating relations and problems we share in common with ‘fellow owners,’ ‘fellow property-holding taxpayers,’ over those with fellow workers.”

In his booklet The Housing Question Frederick Engels wrote about how the bosses use home ownership to put a brake on workers engaging in struggle: “Give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil, and break their power of resistance” during “a big strike or a general industrial crisis.”

As much as the dream of home ownership is a scam to shackle the working class and make profits for the capitalists, so is President Barack Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program, which supposedly helps people avoid foreclosure. Most of those qualifying for a mortgage payment reduction get strung along by the banks for a few more months or a year, and still lose their homes.

Obama recently lectured working people that they should stop asking for government relief and adopt “a traditional, more common sense way of thinking about housing, which is, if you want a house, you got to save for a while.”

What’s common sense for the working class is that no human being should be forced to live on the streets or in shabby, cramped quarters. Housing—attractive, clean, and roomy—is a human right.

What’s needed is a halt to house and farm foreclosures, along with a massive federal public works program to create millions of jobs building quality housing, schools, hospitals, and roads. More than that there needs to be a fight for a revolutionary working class government that would nationalize the land and housing stock to provide housing for all.