Oakland: tenants attack capitalist housing crisis

OAKLAND, CA, December 5—Motorcycle, bike and skateboard riders led a caravan of 125 Oakland tenants in cars today, stopping traffic and chanting “Fight, fight, fight – housing is a human right!”
This “Rally on Wheels” united multiple tenants’ unions into an Oakland-wide force calling for rent cancellation and guaranteed housing for the homeless.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members sold CHALLENGE and distributed leaflets calling for communist revolution to end the racist differentials in homelessness, hunger and disease. With four vacant homes for every homeless person in Oakland, 70 percent are Black while many more are immigrants.  
Our leaflet argued that homelessness is not due to “personal defects” of the homeless but rather a result of the systematic, racist injustice of capitalism.
Workers make homes, capitalism makes homelessness
The caravan started with a short rally with workers passing out signs in English and Spanish that said, “Tenants Against Capitalism,” and “Join Tenant Unions.” Among our PLP signs was “Workers Produce Homes, Capitalism Creates Homelessness.” Speakers said that capitalism was the source of the problems, that mass action and not the electoral process was the main way of making change, and that we need a “new society.” The 5 year-old daughter of one of the Moms 4 Housing occupiers led the crowd in rousing chants and many drivers honked in support.
The workers organized the rally very well, so well that the cops were nowhere in sight. The atmosphere was very positive, and we even enlisted a local radio station to broadcast the speeches to those of us quarantined in our cars.
We stopped for rallies at four apartment buildings organized on rent strike. Multiracial groups of tenants spoke emotionally and proudly about their struggles against their landlords and capitalism.
One stop was a gutted, burned out shell of a multi-family home destroyed by an electrical fire after many complaints from the tenants. The final stop was a call-out in front of the home of an abusive property manager.  Tenants posted a flyer with his picture and denouncing his actions all over the neighborhood. Due to tenant and worker struggles Oakland has better rent control than most cities and an eviction moratorium that extends to the end of the pandemic. But housing insecurity and capitalism are still a disaster for the working class.
Most importantly, many blamed capitalism as the source of housing insecurity and the shameless profiteering of corporate landlords during the pandemic.  
They also called for the end of the “commodification of housing” – the ability of private capitalists to buy, sell and rent for profit property that should be a basic human need.
PLP members are active in the tenant organizations that came out today and have consistently brought our communist politics through leaflets and CHALLENGE to these events. These personal relationships have led some young housing organizers to join a PLP study group.  
Our goal in these groups is to build revolutionary class-consciousness and PLP. This means understanding that capitalism is the problem, and that we must name it as the system that is attacking us all over the world. While we fight for immediate needs, we are also building the strength to take out the whole system. We see developing a Party that fights for communism as a crucial step in this process.
Communism means secure and accessible housing is available to allow our humanity to flower.  Collectively, we can build a world that meets the needs of the international working class. Fight for communism!