When reading Matt Wynn’s recent Southern Maryland News article on homelessness, the first reaction any thinking or feeling person should have is rage. The article contains infuriating accounts of insufficient resources, poor pay, scarce affordable housing, and inhumane treatment. 322 people are homeless in Southern Maryland. It is easy to say that these are 322 people the system has failed, but that would be inaccurate. The system was designed to do this.
Capitalism is the system where productive property is owned and controlled privately by owners for a profit, and the productive work of society is done by the mass of people with no choice but to sell their labor to property owners for a wage. There is not a single aspect of this system that was not mentioned as a cause for homelessness in this article, but we’re going to focus on three in particular.
First, we have unaffordable rent and a shortage of housing. We have people being priced out of their homes. This is part of capitalism’s for-profit housing system. Landlords depend on tenants’ inability to own a home. They are like ticket scalpers buying up properties, driving up prices so that homeownership is unaffordable, and then overcharging us for the homes they took off the market in the first place. This is a system more concerned with property values than people. When our housing is controlled this way, there’s no incentive to create affordable housing because it’s just not profitable. We only have a right to shelter if it profits somebody else. The second our access to housing is unprofitable, we lose it.
Second we have the fact that the State minimum wage is less than half of what a person needs to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Even with the recent increases, when you adjust for inflation, wages have stagnated since the Reagan administration while productivity has increased dramatically. The working class is producing more than ever – creating incredible growth with our labor – and seeing none of it. This is by design. All profit under capitalism comes from the extraction of surplus value: the worker makes less than the value they create, and the property owner keeps the difference. From minimum wage workers to engineers, the entire economic system is built on this relationship. Our labor can be exploited this way because the means of producing goods and services are privately owned by the wealthy.
Third, we have the dehumanizing treatment of homeless people and the conditions they are forced to live in. Poverty isn’t a choice. It’s a feature of a system that requires most of us to lose in order for a few people to win. Capitalism needs a permanent underclass to be a threat to the rest of us. There needs to be a group of people who are constantly in poverty to keep certain prices low. There needs to be a reserve army of unemployed people to keep wages low. There needs to be the threat of degrading, dehumanizing poverty keeping working people in line: “obey your boss, stay productive, generate value, or this could happen to you.”
322 homeless people in Southern Maryland represent 322 times a landlord or real-estate developer has profited from purposefully withholding housing. It represents 322 times a member of the working class has been exploited past their breaking point, and it represents 322 threats to the rest of us.
We have been convinced that this is just the way of things. We’re supposed to believe that these 322 homeless people are 322 isolated coincidences. Because otherwise we might realize that it doesn’t have to be like this.
We need more affordable housing in Southern Maryland, but it must be Social Housing. We need to develop housing through cooperatives, land trusts, tenant unions, and public funding. We need these developments to be planned democratically by stakeholders, not shareholders, and then run collectively by residents. We need to divorce housing from the system of profit entirely.
We need widespread union membership. We need industrial unions that represent workers as a class, instead of only certain professions. We need working people in all sectors to recognize all other working people as sharing their interests – from the line-cooks to the engineers – because they have the same relationship to the means of production. And we need those united workers to fight not just for concessions, but for the entirety of the wealth they create.
We need an end to the violence and degradation of poverty. An end to this arena where we are forced to compete with each other to survive artificial scarcity even though our society produces enough for everyone. This means extensive social safety nets, guaranteed food, guaranteed housing, guaranteed employment, a right to universal healthcare, and more.
This is not impossible. It only seems impossible because we’re playing by their rules. We can gain small concessions and reforms but they can always be taken away as long as the property owning class controls the rules of the game.
The serfs of feudalism, the vassals of slave states, and the hunters and gatherers of prehistory also believed that their system was just the natural way of things – until it wasn’t. Until the progress of history and the bravery of the masses flipped the game board and created new rules. We can do the same thing.
How we do that is a question for another article. But how you start is with solidarity and class consciousness. You start by recognizing that you are part of the same class as the 322 homeless people in Southern Maryland. You share the same interests. The system that hurts them hurts you. You start by recognizing what Jamie said at the end of the article:
“We are your reflection if you don’t get that check. We’re still human. …we just didn’t get our check last week. So think about it because you might not get yours next week, and I’ll be popping you a tent.”
When the majority of us learn to understand those words, we will be ready to flip the game board.
Southern Maryland DSA 