Palestinian man looks out on destroyed housing in Gaza
The Struggle for Housing Justice & Against Imperialism
What connects our struggle in apartment complexes to the struggle against imperialism across the world? Our fight against landlords is a fight against the rich who buy up properties either one-by-one or en masse to receive a “passive income.” The system that normalizes, enables, and encourages investing in property is capitalism – a system that must commodify every social need. It so happens that the workers whom capitalism exploits are the same people who are forced to rent or live precariously within it. Land grabs, forced removal, and evictions all require violence or the threat of it. The sheriff is tasked with enforcing the eviction, and as an agent of the state, gives us a prime example that the state’s job is to protect capital. This capitalist system wages war and mass-killing throughout the world, through foreign armies and military investments. For the capitalist both investing in a military contract that sells weapons to the Zionist entity with the intention of committing genocide and calling the sheriff to conduct an eviction are ways this system enables violence and dispossession abstractly, with the investor physically and mentally uninvolved. This system cannot continue to exist. In our struggle to dismantle housing injustice, landlords are the target and so is capitalism. By fighting landlords we’re ultimately in-combat with the people investing in our imperialist machine. A fight against one must be a fight against both.