Jan 27, 2020
A simple demand, a world turned upside down — Moms4Housing in Oakland
The revolution comes from below. And at the bottom, the people scorned and kicked aside — invisible discarded, the wretched of the earth — are the unhoused in our society, an ever-growing group made up of the most oppressed. As our cities gentrify – for example, the Black population of Oakland has shrunk from 47% to 25% — the unhoused, those booted out of homes and no longer counted in the population totals, is 70% Black.
On November 18th, a group of Black mothers, Tolani King, Dominique Walker, Misty Cross and others, committed a radical act of civil disobedience — they moved themselves and their children into an empty house on Magnolia Street in West Oakland. The house was owned by a real estate corporation called Wedgewood which buys “distressed” properties (usually ones where Black owners have been forced out) at a discount, hundreds every month, and then flips them for inflated prices to richer buyers. Speculators getting rich off the pain of others. The property the mothers occupied had been empty for two years. And then the statistic that must give you pause: there are many times as many such empty houses as there are unhoused people in Oakland. Here lies the very core of capitalist logic: everything, not just shoes and cars but even health care, housing and education, even air and water, can be commodified (turned into something to buy and sell) in Oakland.
While many activists are debating about the Democratic Party candidates and working to get Trump out (a very worthy effort), the campaign of Moms 4 Housing, including dynamic and creative organizers such as Oakland’s Create Freedom Movements, are truly radical, in the sense of “going to the root” of the problem. This fundamental challenge to racist property rules has a long history in Oakland, from the Ten Point Platform of the Black Panther Party in the 60’s and 70’s to the housing struggles of the African People’s Socialist Party (Uhuru Movement) in the 80’s. In the latter campaign, many of us were arrested and beaten by police in the tent city for the homeless and during house takeovers. They even put a measure on the Oakland ballot, Community Control of Housing, which was defeated by a huge infusion of cash from real estate interests.
The real estate PR guys and trolls have, predictably, attacked the Moms. What has been surprising to some, however, is the number of liberal and progressive types in the Bay Area who have hesitated, pushed back, argued that Moms 4 Housing is just going too far; they say that it is a protest that upends everything and devalues the work that middle class people have done to buy their houses. Both Davey D and Liêu Vīnh Carina, local activists, have brilliantly responded on social media to these attacks.
Let me add my two cents — reflecting on those few who have complained about the Moms and on why this work is revolutionary. For starters, let’s think about the concept of hegemony, the idea that the ideological dominance of the ruling class dominates the thinking of everyone to some degree, even the oppressed. Common sense, taken-for-granted ideas — that anyone can get ahead if they work hard, that the rich have contributed to the general well-being, that the state is a fair arbiter between conflicting interests — are key to keeping capitalism in place. As Steve Biko pointed out, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The hegemony of capitalist ideology means that the masses of people accept the basic assumptions of the ruling class.
To begin to challenge this hegemony, to rescue our minds from the chains of the ruling class, we can begin by interrogating the idea of property, private property. Radicals, socialists, anarchists, and communists have challenged the idea that private property is sacred. This does not mean you can’t own your own clothes or car or even (in certain conditions) your home. But it does challenge the proposal that there is something God-given about private property. In fact, the rules of property have been constructed, and relatively recently, to benefit . . . guess who?
Think about it. Here are some moments in wealth accumulation and the creation of private property that have led to our current predicament. The Americas were of course held by Indigenous peoples. It’s crucial to recognize that these humans did not have a European capitalist idea of property. The diverse cultures on these continents saw nature as having its own rights and its own spirits. The very origins of the US are based on the theft of Indigenous land and the privatization of land as property. This theft is enshrined in law and seldom reported in history. Review such laws as the Indian Appropriations Act and the “Great Oklahoma Land Rush” of 1889, and again of 1893, in which white people were invited to gather at a starting line and gallop off at a signal to grab and occupy and claim ownership of whatever parcel they could.
The story goes on and on — and the accumulation of white wealth was accomplished through theft and special grants. In the years of labor unrest after the Russian revolution, President Herbert Hoover promoted white home ownership through the Commerce Department because, as realtors argued, “socialism and communism do not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly embedded in the soil of America through homeownership.” And in the years after World War II, the massive GI Bill grants allowed millions of white (only white) veterans to purchase their first homes and begin to accumulate intergenerational wealth. The list goes on. Redlining. Predatory lending. The massive theft of Black wealth after the sub-prime collapse of 2008. It’s a fixed game.
But the idea of owning property as an aspiration for working people has taken hold as the common sense, the taken-for-granted way things are. And, just as Hoover predicted, the acquisition of a house has become accepted as the ticket out of insecurity, the way to guarantee that a working-class family can obtain safety without resorting to revolution. This has created a stake in capitalism and imperialism not only for the most privileged but even for oppressed classes, who can at least aspire to one day get that house. Sadly, some who have just managed to squeeze into a house have attacked the Moms housing takeover, imagining that someone else’s solution will hurt them. This is like people who scramble up onto the lifeboat and then pull in the ladder.
But the story of property is not only one of dispossession and cruelty. There are many cases where people have taken back public resources. Nations have nationalized oil, created public transportation and health systems, and made education free. Popular repossession of stolen resources is often achieved through mass action using force (and by force, I mean non-violent aggressive force as well.). Certainly, in feudal societies (whether in China, Europe or elsewhere), when people were faced with famine while big landowners stored up grain in huge warehouses, peasants broke into warehouses. And who would deny them? Would you really be able to say, “Yes, you are starving but after all the law says the grain belongs to Mr. Overfed?” No way. The rich locked up the grain and riots ensued.
The housing crisis today is much like those famines. Formerly housed people are being thrown out of the normal housing options, as tents spring up at every freeway entrance and park in US cities. The powers-that-be are locking up that grain warehouse during the famine. Since they insist that the hoarding of housing stock is a God-given right, an unassailable truth of common sense, they come up with ridiculous fixes. Remember, now, that there are many more empty houses in Oakland than there are homeless people, houses held empty waiting for prices to rise. The solutions the government and real estate interests come up with are: 1) to build more and more housing, mostly elite housing for those higher up on the income scale. This is Econ 101 logic, simple supply and demand, which ignores the supply that is held off the market by speculators; or, 2) move the unsightly campers into hovels, FEMA trailers (the governor recently showed up in Oakland to deposit 15 such trailers right after the Moms were arrested), or crowded “shelters.” The goal is to hide the embarrassing evidence of capitalism’s cruelty without disturbing “property rights.”
But property rights have to be challenged when they lead to the greatest wealth disparity in US history. As Pendarvis Harshaw points out, sometimes there is an emergency, sometimes you have to run the red light. Most every advance in human rights and justice has involved a challenge to sacred traditions and property rights. Enslaved Africans were previously held as property; unionized labor was a movement to wrest more of the property amassed by owners into the hands of workers; even basic safety regulations, for automobiles and drugs for instance, encroached on the absolute right of corporations to dispose of their property as they saw fit.
As with all truly revolutionary demands, the campaign of the Moms 4 Housing is one of simple democratic rights, human rights. Oakland’s Black Panther Party suffered vicious military assault for proposing the simple democratic demand for Community Control of the Police. There is no reason that the fundamental requirements for life, water, air, health care, education, food, and housing should be commodified and hoarded for profit.
The city and the house-flipping corporation Wedgewood have reached a temporary solution to defuse the current crisis — negotiating for the Oakland Community Land Trust to obtain the property on Magnolia Street for the Moms (but Moms4Housing is demanding that Wedgewood sell the house for what they paid for it, not at a jacked-up price). But this temporary truce and possible concession by the gentrifiers only reflects the weakness of their position. After all, the movement, in true guerrilla style, has the advantage of mobility — the ability to seize any of the 4,366 vacant individual houses in the city. The challenge faced by the rich speculators is how to hold on to all these properties, to police and alarm and fence and defend each one. The Moms 4 Housing movement is not just about getting one dwelling for an unhoused family. It is a powerful and viable organizing campaign against homelessness in the country and it is destined to catch on and spread like fire.
