Please read the whole thing (and if capitalists and conservatives were consistent, they’d be livid, too, at the idea homeless people’s property can be stolen and thrown away under the euphemism of “cleaning” - aren’t property rights sacred to them?), but here is the conclusion:
This is what we give up — always so much more than we think — in agreeing to scapegoat, to sacrifice the homeless everyone else gives up public space. An ordinance that says no camping or sleeping in public quickly becomes no loitering in public. Stories are already emerging in the wake of the Grants Pass ruling of random people being told that they cannot sit, cannot eat, cannot exist in public space. Often these people aren’t homeless, but how can they prove that? This ruling furthers the trend, one which is not new, of the privatization of public space and the need to be a consumer to exist out in the world. And this is just one way that abandoning the unhoused hurts us all. Equally significant is that in abandoning those who cannot afford housing we agree to frame shelter as something you must earn, rather than a basic need that we all must be granted in this world. That cannot stand.
What we need, now more than ever, is solidarity across all forms of division. We cannot allow the dehuamnization or that criminalization of homelessness, of poverty, of those struggling to get by in this system, both because it is unjust and because it hurts each and every one of us. Anything that targets struggling individuals instead of the system they struggle under reinforces the oppressive mechanisms of the system and takes us a step further from liberation, from freedom, and from the world we need.
I had a friend say (nearly 25 years ago) that homelessness is a necessity of capitalism. There will always be a portion of the population kept in that position so the rest of us wage slaves have something to motivate us to keep eating shit from our ruling class.
If we were shown a path to safety and security without sacrificing our bodies and minds to a paycheck, we just might rebel.
Preach. I rant about the same thing all the time.
Capitalism is decentralized tyranny. If a dictator said “if you refuse to work where I send you I will starve you to death on the streets” most Americans would recoil. But capitalism says “if you do not provide enough value for the upper class, they will not give you enough tokens to exchange for food and housing, and you will starve to death on the streets”. And we just shrug and say it’s the workers’ fault for not working hard enough - because “no one is forcing you” - there’s no specific individual we can blame for starving the unwanted population to death, it’s the insensate grinding of the gears of a machine, and don’t be silly, we can’t turn off the machine, what are you, traitor?
And even with the open dictator model, many Americans would say “that just makes sense, if you don’t work you don’t eat” and cheer the dictator for putting lazy useless people to work. Just look how many people support slave labor in private, for profit prisons, and how many people want unhoused people to be enslaved in those exact same prisons. Hell, at the height of the Qanon craze something like 20% of Americans believed that Donald Trump would enact martial law and put millions of liberals in concentration camps and wanted it to happen. We’re addicted to the taste of boot.