Originally published by the Community Labor Action Committee, Newark, DE
“I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”
Poverty and homelessness are social creations. But we are taught that they are the ailments of individuals.
They are part of the whole cloth of a society which needs reweaving. But we treat them as though they were the fault of single, inferior strands in the fabric.
A Few Are Owners
At last count, fourteen one-hundredths of one percent (.0014) of Americans owned one-quarter of the land, and one-half of one percent (.005%) owned one-quarter of the wealth. Only nuclear holocaust or another massive calamity would render any of these owners homeless. As long as there is a social fabric, their place in it is secure.
They possess, but they do not just possess things. They possess power over things and over their fellow human beings. Those who decide such things as the fate of their fellow human beings exercise possession of an entirely different magnitude.
The Many of Us
Even the homeless have such possessions as can be put in a cardboard box or garbage bag. And working people in general possess -cars, homes, and bank accounts- but cannot prevent their own layoff. As long as the rest of us, the workers, the non-owning class, do not come together to reweave the fabric of society, we are at risk. Those of us who are poor and homeless are the current expression of an old social problem: The non-owning classes are necessary in order to build society, but they only inhabit that society at the pleasure of those who call the shots.
This is what we have in common. Whether we work hard for a good living and have a home, whether we work hard for poor wages that do not enable us to even rent a space to live, whether we are living at the sufferance of others in a shelter or in an illegal “squat,” our lot will always be uncertain in a society that is owned by a few.
We are the people who become jobless, who are fired and laid off, the people who work but do not rise above poverty, the people who are evicted and “repossessed,” the people who become homeless, the people who work “temp” jobs and jobs without benefits, the people whose health care does not cover the medical costs, the people who fall back upon charity; and we do not possess the power to command.
No Lines Between Us
Those who are poor and homeless are usually blamed by others of us in the working class because of our fear of falling into just such dire straits ourselves. We desire to draw a firm line between “us” and “them,” but no such line will ever stay firm. We are all in this together, because we share a common fate in this society: we can become expendable without warning and through no fault of our own, any time that it suits someone in the owning classes.
Working people only succeed when they come together and struggle together. Drawing lines between us, on any grounds, only hurts us all. The owners draw lines in order to divide and conquer, by implying that one group or person is “better than” another, that a group or person “deserves” their problems, while another “deserves” their privileges.
As long as we allow ourselves to be divided, we can’t win. We also will never get around to asking questions like: what is a living wage? And: what would a society look like in which people work together for a better common life?
This Society Has No Future.
And we workers have no home in it, whether we have a home at the present moment or not. But we will always have a future, because we do the work of the world.
We must cast our lot with one another. We must reach across to one another in compassion and solidarity, to organize and lead each other forward, to reweave the whole cloth of society and make it a fabric of decency for every human being.
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