Vol. 72/No. 2      January 14, 2008

The primary form of exploitation that workers face is on the job—the appropriation by the capitalists of the surplus value we produce. As wages are reduced, rents, debts, and other secondary forms of exploitation cut more harshly. But the battle with the boss over wages, working conditions, and social benefits remains the central arena of the class struggle.

The collapse of the giant bubble of debt speculation causing millions to face foreclosure on their homes is the latest product of a deepening crisis of the entire capitalist system. For three decades workers have borne the brunt of an offensive by the bosses. The unions keep weakening. Employers have slashed wages, pension and health benefits, and increased speedup. Inflation is taking a further bite out of wages.

To fight this socialists support struggles to organize unions and to use union power. We champion the demand for a sliding scale of wages to combat inflation and a sliding scale of hours to confront unemployment. We call for a massive public works program to put millions to work at union scale building schools, housing, and hospitals. We point to the need for the unions to break with the capitalist parties and forge a labor party. We explain that capitalist rule must be replaced with a workers and farmers government.

From this starting point, socialists join in struggles against all the horrors and abuses of the capitalist system. We extend labor solidarity to rent strikes, battles against evictions, and other struggles that break out on housing. But we don’t appeal to workers as “homeowners.” Rather, we explain their exploitation as workers and the centrality of their battle against the employer class.

Attempting to come up with a list of immediate demands around the housing crisis today takes us away from this objective, tending to elevate this question above the capitalist system that is responsible for it.

Middle-class reformers have historically taken a different approach to the housing question, seeking a way to solve it under capitalism. Frederick Engels took up their arguments in his pamphlet The Housing Question, where he demonstrated that reformers’ “solutions”—usually proposing a way every worker can have his or her own house— invariably led to bolstering the very profit system that caused the housing crisis. Home ownership, Engels explained, is one of the main ways the employers tie workers to the capitalist system, entangling them in debt that conservatizes them and making them less mobile, less able to combat the bosses.

Answering critics who demanded he offer “practical” solutions on housing, Engels replied, “[I]t never entered my head to try to settle the so-called housing question any more than to occupy myself with the details of the still more important food question. I am satisfied if I can prove that the production of our modern society is sufficient to provide all its members with enough to eat, and that there are houses enough in existence to provide the working masses for the time being with roomy and healthy living accommodation. To speculate on how a future society might organize distribution of food and dwellings leads directly to utopia.”

That is why the Socialist Workers Party candidates are inviting their supporters to campaign along the course presented in the coverage in this week’s Militant.
 
 
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