A look at homelessness in relation to the State and Capitalism
Homeless in Capital
Old Mole Variety Hour, December 8, 2014
It would be hard for anyone living in Portland not to be aware of people who live on the streets; we see them everyday, with their belongings packed into shopping carts or bike trailers, collecting bags of returnable cans and bottles, huddled in doorways, or asking for spare change. On the cold and snowy East Coast, some fifty thousand people are now without a home in New York City. Homelessness in Washington DC is expected to rise 16 percent this winter. And in Massachusetts, it has spiked 40 percent since 2007. Right here in Portland, according to the Portland Housing Authority,
On any given night, about 4,000 people sleep on the streets or in shelters across Portland. Homeless people can be adults, young people, couples or families with children. They are living on the streets, either temporarily or for the long term, for a variety of reasons……: an untreated mental illness, a physical disability, domestic violence, the loss of a job, or a drug addiction. They may be experiencing a financial crisis and have been evicted from their home for the first time; they may cycle from homelessness to housing and back to homelessness again; or they may be chronically homeless, having lived on the streets for many months or years.
There are those who say to these people, “Get a job!”, to which the answer is, Just try to imagine what it would be like finding a job in the real world when you have no address or phone number to put on a resume, no place to shower or shave, no clean clothes, and only public transportation by which to get to far flung locations. Then imagine, if you should get a job, trying to find a place to live, with first and last months rent in advance, when you’re making less than $10 an hour.
Without a job or a place to live, getting enough to eat is a challenge. There are people who would like to feed people who are hungry, but more and more cities are making this illegal. You may have heard about
The mayor of the town thinks no one should get to eat without paying for it unless they get government approval, and many people claim that feeding the homeless only encourages homelessness.
According to Ari Paul, writing on the Jacobin Magazine website,
Paul points out that people on the left
There was a time when the state built housing with use value in mind – public housing for people who could not afford housing on the market.
But, as David Harvey explains,
And that’s from David Harvey’s excellent book, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.
So do what you can to support the homeless people you meet – and support organizations that defy the state’s restrictions on that support. But we need to also work towards taking the wealth of the world we have all worked to create away from those who have rigged the game to steer it all into their greedy hands.
I’m Clayton Morgareidge for the Old Mole Variety Hour.
Old Mole Variety Hour, December 8, 2014
It would be hard for anyone living in Portland not to be aware of people who live on the streets; we see them everyday, with their belongings packed into shopping carts or bike trailers, collecting bags of returnable cans and bottles, huddled in doorways, or asking for spare change. On the cold and snowy East Coast, some fifty thousand people are now without a home in New York City. Homelessness in Washington DC is expected to rise 16 percent this winter. And in Massachusetts, it has spiked 40 percent since 2007. Right here in Portland, according to the Portland Housing Authority,
On any given night, about 4,000 people sleep on the streets or in shelters across Portland. Homeless people can be adults, young people, couples or families with children. They are living on the streets, either temporarily or for the long term, for a variety of reasons……: an untreated mental illness, a physical disability, domestic violence, the loss of a job, or a drug addiction. They may be experiencing a financial crisis and have been evicted from their home for the first time; they may cycle from homelessness to housing and back to homelessness again; or they may be chronically homeless, having lived on the streets for many months or years.
Without a job or a place to live, getting enough to eat is a challenge. There are people who would like to feed people who are hungry, but more and more cities are making this illegal. You may have heard about
Arnold Abbott, age ninety, [who] has made international headlines for being arrested multiple times for organizing feedings of the homeless in public spaces in [Fort Lauderdale, Florida] his hometown, famous for its retirement community and spring break party-goers. …[1]
The mayor of the town thinks no one should get to eat without paying for it unless they get government approval, and many people claim that feeding the homeless only encourages homelessness.
According to Ari Paul, writing on the Jacobin Magazine website,
The situation in Florida …illustrates how immiseration is produced not by accidental market mechanisms, but by cold and precise state policy. Austerity is not a triumph of market values over so-called big government. It is a redirection of state resources away from services for people in need to forces working against them. Food stamps are cut, but federal grants to police departments keep flowing.
Paul points out that people on the left
often shy away from charity on the grounds that it is a temporary reprieve from the suffering caused by structural inequality, a waste of time and energy that would be better suited organizing to make society more just and equal. Charity can also introduce relationships of subordination: rather than asserting their right to housing and food, the marginalized must accept help from above.
The austerity assault on charity is, however, a reminder that it can be a subversive act. It alleviates the suffering of those on the losing end of capitalism, cheating the [so-called] “natural order” of Social Darwinism. It can also strengthen the bonds between activists and those seeking justice. Charity, then, can be a channel toward organizing against the policies that ensure inequality. That’s why it’s so potentially dangerous.
In fact, this is what animated certain portions of Occupy Wall Street, especially during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. While some people viewed the relief work as [merely] piecemeal service providing, the ideology centered on the concept of providing help when the normal state channels fell short.
One of the aims, of course, was to create new types of solidarity, an opportunity for a mostly white movement to join in common cause with low-income communities of color. But another was more in line with the vision of radical socialist organizing — using charity to show the way in which the state’s priorities are warped in favor of the elite.
And that’s from Ari Paul’s piece at Jacobin Magazine called “Serve the People”. However, we must add another way in which the world is “warped in favor of the elite,” and that is the basic structure of capitalism itself, which turns every possibly useful bit of the world into a commodity, something with a price, a source of profit to privately owned capital. Housing is rarely built for the primary purpose of fulfilling the human need for a home, a place to live our lives. In a society of increasing inequality, this means that fewer and fewer people are able to pay the market value of housing as the cost of both owning and renting ratchet up to profit the developers and the banks who make money by loaning money first to the to builders and then to the buyers of houses. And then it turns out that when you own a house, you own a commodity whose market value becomes more important to you than its value as a place to live, with the result that banks are willing to loan you more and more money on it – until, of course the market crashes and you are left without a home you can afford and still owing more money to the bank than the house is now worth. This is the perverse logic of capital: it subverts the use values of things we need to live and improve our lives to exchange, or market, value, a token of wealth in a game that the wealthiest are always going to win.The austerity assault on charity is, however, a reminder that it can be a subversive act. It alleviates the suffering of those on the losing end of capitalism, cheating the [so-called] “natural order” of Social Darwinism. It can also strengthen the bonds between activists and those seeking justice. Charity, then, can be a channel toward organizing against the policies that ensure inequality. That’s why it’s so potentially dangerous.
In fact, this is what animated certain portions of Occupy Wall Street, especially during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. While some people viewed the relief work as [merely] piecemeal service providing, the ideology centered on the concept of providing help when the normal state channels fell short.
One of the aims, of course, was to create new types of solidarity, an opportunity for a mostly white movement to join in common cause with low-income communities of color. But another was more in line with the vision of radical socialist organizing — using charity to show the way in which the state’s priorities are warped in favor of the elite.
There was a time when the state built housing with use value in mind – public housing for people who could not afford housing on the market.
But, as David Harvey explains,
Since the 1970s, a ‘neoliberal consensus’ has emerged (or been imposed) in which the state withdraws from obligations for public provision [not only in housing, but in] health care, education, transportation and public utilities. It does so in the interests of opening up these arenas to private capital accumulation and exchange value considerations.…
The doctrine that the market always knows best supplies a rationale for privatizing and commodifying many categories of use value that were hitherto supplied free of charge by state….The world bank insists that this should be the global norm. But it is a system that works for the entrepreneurs, who by and large make hefty profits for the affluent, but it penalizes almost everyone else to the point of somewhere between 4 and 6 million foreclosures in the case of housing in the USA.…The political choice is between a commodified system that serves the rich well enough, and a system that focuses on the production and democratic provision of use values for all without any mediations of the market.
And that’s from David Harvey’s excellent book, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.
So do what you can to support the homeless people you meet – and support organizations that defy the state’s restrictions on that support. But we need to also work towards taking the wealth of the world we have all worked to create away from those who have rigged the game to steer it all into their greedy hands.
I’m Clayton Morgareidge for the Old Mole Variety Hour.