APL John Reed Division | Washington–

The evening of Dec. 28, members of the John Reed Division of the American Party of Labor ran one of our Service to the People programs in downtown Seattle, distributing free sandwiches, toiletries, drinks, and snacks to people of the local homeless community, including Halal and Kosher options.

As Marxist-Leninists, we understand that homelessness and extreme poverty are not problems which “just happen.” Rather, they emerge out of the frictions and contradictions within the social system of work, production, and distribution.

No one is “naturally” poor, no one is “predisposed” to homelessness – these conditions are entirely a result of the way production, labor, and distribution is organized. Your individual ability to get a job, shelter, or food is based on the whims and decisions of individual employers concerned entirely with increasing profit, and not with providing dignified work to all. From a birds-eye-view, an employer wants to pay their workers as little as possible; therefore, by refusing to provide you a job, they are trying to make you more desperate for work, and willing to work for less, under worse conditions. 

In order to hide the callous search after profit which underlies this “policy” of underemployment and low wages, the U.S. government, the employers themselves, and the educational and media landscapes all work together to preserve and intensify the cultural and social legacy of slavery, racism, genocide, and xenophobia: this makes underemployment for the sake of profit appear as if it were underemployment for the sake of racism. In other words, racism is one tool of capitalist society to “cover the tracks” of capitalist profit-seeking.

Members of the homeless population are working class – they are not separate, lesser, or removed from the class struggle. They, like all workers, deserve to live in dignity, with readily available and healthful food, water, and shelter. The system which casts workers out from our shelter, and which makes regaining shelter criminally difficult, is not just a governmental policy, or societal quirk – it is a fundamental feature of the capitalist mode of production.

As long as things are made to be sold, and not made to be used; as long as profit, and not human need, governs production; as long as political, social, and ideological power is held by those employers and bosses who profit off of misery, rather than by those who produce, the working class will never be free of homelessness. The fight for the rights of the homeless is a piece of a much larger fight against capitalism itself.

Categories: American Party of Labor, Workers Struggle