PHOTO/SANDY PERRY
First they came for the homeless. When the Nazis began their campaigns of extermination, they first launched a propaganda war against those they were targeting. Today, the laws against the poorest of the poor, those in the streets, and the way they are being treated and spoken of as little better than vermin, has ominous echoes of this.
The police, who flip through his meager possessions while his life bleeds out of him, shoots down an unarmed homeless man camping in the hills above Albuquerque. In the beautiful city named after St Francis, San Francisco, it is now against the law to sit or lie on a public sidewalk from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.—after that the ‘lodging’ law kicks in. Sleep deprivation is torture. Tickets for these and other crimes of poverty turn into warrants. A jail cell becomes the only form of housing available.
Many cities are criminalizing sharing food in public. Laws are passed against begging or panhandling. People who have nowhere to sleep but the streets are rousted in the night, or sprayed with power hoses and toxic chemicals, their bedding soaked. Homeless encampments where people attempt to find a little bit of shelter, community and mutual protection are razed and their residents scattered. Bedding, blankets, medicines, personal items and IDs are taken and lost in these sweeps. Untold thousands die each year from the diseases caused by this hard life. Young people travel from town to town in bands of mutual protection, inventing new ways of community in the breakup of the old, which offers them no future.
People whose only crime is that they are victims of a crumbling economic system are criminalized for everything they need to do to survive. Every year more men, women and children are thrown into the streets— glaring evidence that the capitalist system is broken, and those in power unfit to rule.
With computerized labor-replacing technology eliminating millions of jobs, formerly secure workers lose their homes and everything they own. With their labor no longer needed, and thus the value of their labor driven to zero, under the rule of private property they have zero rights. Everything they need to do to survive is criminalized. This Go Die policy is designed to clear public spaces of these reminders of the system’s failures. Mass homelessness in the U.S. is the system of private property’s Achilles heel. The rulers have no solution.
How insane that anyone should be homeless, hungry and destitute amid the greatest abundance the world has ever imagined! The demands of the homeless and all those fighting for survival are revolutionary, because they can only be met by an economic system organized around providing for all, ‘to each according to need.’ We organize ourselves to build this new society.
