In a wave of hard-hearted attacks, cities across the U.S. are adopting laws that criminalize homeless people for sitting, lying down, sleeping, asking for spare change, and other survival activities. They are also criminalizing people for sharing food or otherwise helping their fellow victims of a collapsing economy. A 90 year-old man in Ft. Lauderdale, FL., was arrested three times for feeding hungry people in a public park, before a national outcry forced a change in the mean law.
Laws like these signal that the poorest among us have no rights anyone is bound to respect. Inhumane ‘sit/lie’ laws are spreading across the country. The police killing of an unarmed homeless man near his campsite above Albuquerque, New Mexico, set off large protests by people sick of police brutality and murders that are routine there.
Other random attacks and killings of homeless people are on the rise, as they are scapegoated by the rotten system that has failed them. Frail encampments made by people whose only crime is to seek shelter from the elements and gather in mutual protection are bulldozed, and possessions destroyed. Recently, the nation’s largest homeless encampment, in the city of San Jose in the heart of uber-wealthy Silicon Valley, was razed and its residents scattered to the cold wet streets. Other cities and towns across the country are doing the same.
The majority of Americans are said to now be just one paycheck away from homelessness. Many have already fallen to the streets, as capitalism self-destructs. The replacement of human labor by automation has thrown many out of work and into homelessness, with millions of others at risk. Many homeless people work, and many others have worked in the past and have useful skills. They are part of the working class, and have a common interest: the reorganization of society to guarantee that all can survive and thrive.
The denial of the right to housing is a go-die policy. The attacks by the armed enforcers of the ruling class against these thrown-out workers are symptoms of fascism, which will soon be directed against our entire class.
Right now in the U.S. there are six houses standing empty for every homeless person. The crisis of homelessness could be solved overnight. The only thing standing in the way is the private property relations of capitalism. That is, the owning of what we need to survive by the billionaire ruling class and available only to those who can pay.
Before human labor was replaced by computerized automation, most people could work to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads. Those days are over and won’t return. The working class, homeless and at-threat, must understand our common interests. We must gain political power to replace this failed system with one based on distribution according to need where the means of producing the socially necessary means of life are owned in common. The demand for an end to homelessness, and for housing as a right, is a call for revolution and social transformation.
