From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007) - On American Political Discourse

 

Markin comment:

 

In 2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.     

************

FOR A MORATORIUM ON HOME FORECLOSURES

 

COMMENTARY

 

NEW HOMEOWNERS NEED SOME RELIEF NOW

 

There has bee a recent spike in home foreclosures, particularly in New England, due to several factors, including predatory borrowing practices by banks and other lending institutions and housing price declines as a result of oversupply.  A call for a foreclosure moratorium would, however, seem unlikely as a cause for action and comment by a left-wing propagandist. Traditionally the left-wing position on home ownership was, as spelled out by Frederich Engels, Karl Marx’s close collaborator, don’t do it. The rationale behind that position, not an unreasonable political one, was that the struggle to make house payments in an uncertain capitalist economic environment sapped the political energies of the working class and therefore tended to make workers and their families more conservative. A later practical example of this was cited by American Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon in the early 1950’s during a faction fight involving a significant section of its trade union cadre when he noted that their revolutionary edge had been blunted by concerns over keeping their homes. From another political perspective, also from the 1950’s,  Robert Levitt the capitalist developer and builder of the hugely successful suburban tract houses of the period known as Levittowns noted that no one who owned his own home was likely to become a communist. Those points are all well and good but, as the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin pointed out, the task of socialists is to act as ‘tribunes of the people’. And damn, on this one it is the ‘people’ who are being squeezed out.

 

One of the great enduring myths of American capitalist society is that with a little bit of effort every person can own their own home. Moreover, that condition is one of the prerequisites for having ‘made it’ in America. The long and short of it is that many layers of society have in the past, are now, and will probably in the future desire to have their own homes. Using this notion as a wedge banking institutions has created a huge number of ways to ‘own’ a home as long a one was willing, knowingly or not, to pay extra for this privilege. Gone are the days when a family saved for a certain time to make a reasonable down payment and bought a house based on reasonable expectations of being able to pay off the mortgage, or upgrade, etc. So be it. Although I have not been privy to all the data concerning who is being foreclosed on, I have observed where the foreclosure auctions are taking place and it is not in the wealthy neighborhoods and towns in my area. The net seems to be dragging those first-time minority and working class buyers who with just the slightest downward shift in economic conditions are pushed to the wall. That, dear reader, is why this is an issue for socialists. While we definitely have our own ideas about how housing will be distributed under socialism-and it will not look like today’s absurdly inequitable distribution- these people need relief now. Is this a revolutionary demand? Hell, no. Is it a just demand? Hell, yes. STOP THE FORECLOSURES.