Homes for Wage Slaves

Working class housing is a sore that has festered on the body of capitalism right from the beginning. Workers all over the world live in squalid and inferior conditions.

Following the lines of class division, every city and town has its contrasts. Spacious, comfortable houses for those who can afford them, and cramped and shoddy ones for those who cannot. Let’s take one example to show the poverty and insecurity that lies behind the so-called housing problem. When the L.C.C. announced recently that the sum of £3 million had been set aside for loans of up to £5,000 with no deposits, they were swamped with thousands of enquiries. This paltry sum might house something like a thousand working class families. On the other hand, one building, the new Hilton Hotel, cost £8 million; there were no workers enquiring for rooms at up to £40r per day.

While massive blocks of office buildings are appearing everywhere, people walk the streets of London looking for shelter or join those staying in rest centres. Such is the order of priorities under capitalism.

Labour-Liberal and Conservative governments in succession have promised to deal with the problem, but have left it much the same as when they first took office. Workers have been fed on such promises as “homes for heroes,” only to find they need to be heroes to live in some of the homes. Because of the low standards of working class dwellings, made necessary by the need to keep them within rents workers can afford, their new homes soon begin to look drab and to blend with the old eyesores around them. The best that capitalism’s parties can do is to try to outbid one another in promising to build more cheap and nasty dwellings for workers. But, even then, the rate at which old property deteriorates and needs to be pulled down, is higher than the rate of building.

When the Tories came back in 1951, there was a lot of talk about a “property owning democracy,” but housing, like the rest of wealth under capitalism, is produced for profit. Six years of Labour Government and nearly 30 years of Labour control on the L.C.C., have done nothing to solve the problem. In 1934, the housing problem and slum clearing was the major issue at County Hall. It still is today; as in all other fields, the reformists are ignorant of the true nature of the forces against which they pit their puny efforts. How many more years of capitalism run by the Labour Party must we endure before workers realise that reformism has no answer?

In an article in the old Sunday Pictorial last October there was a lot of factual information about the squalor and decay that millions of workers live in. We were told of a family of four living in an old car parked m a London street. We were given the contrast of London’s most luxurious penthouse at a rent of £12,500 a year, and of places in Earls Court for £9,500. There are plenty of flats at £60 a week, but few at 60s. The article goes on to enlighten us with the fact that in Manchester there are 68,000 slums and 13,677 people on the waiting list. In Leeds, where the Housing Minister is an M.P., there are 11,000 slums and 18,071 on the waiting list, while in Glasgow a thousand homes are closed each year by the city medical officer; 600 more are so rotten, they fall down unaided. There are 77,000 people on the Glasgow waiting list. This sort of article is fairly common in newspapers, but the press is just as helpless as the politicians when it comes to effective answers. This is what Mr. Michael Stewart, a Labour Party housing spokesman, wants, “Restore rent control; keep a check, or if necessary ban, new office building, and build more homes for rent—at least 300,000 a year.” Rent control did nothing to alleviate the present slum conditions and acted as a weight to keep wages down. Surely the Labour Party knows that office building is more profitable than building homes for workers who can only afford low rents. The Sunday Pictorial should know all about the benefits of new office buildings, the newspaper is printed in one of them. As for 300,000 houses a year, this is the exact figure the Tories promised in 1951. To carry on building places cheaply for workers only perpetuates the problem.

The housing problem is merely one symptom of a sickness that runs right through capitalism, the sickness of riches and poverty. None of the politicians who come vote-catching to the workers ever promise to build them mansions with expensive chandeliers and swimming pools. The life of yachts and sun-following is deemed to be unfit for the class that produces it all. When we arc told that 15 million people have no baths in their homes, swimming pools sound as though they belong to another world and in a way they do—the world of the capitalist.

When wars come along and workers are invited to fight for “their” country, they would do well to look at some of the places they live in and ask themselves what country they own. The Church of England, which always blesses workers in uniform, is one of Britain’s biggest landowners and has £69,000,000 invested in property, not to mention £132,000,000 in stocks and shares.

What can be said for a social system that cannot even provide adequate shelter for the overwhelming majority of its citizens? While capitalism remains, the squalor that it breeds will be with us. Frederick Engels nearly a hundred years ago pointed out that all oppressed classes in history have been poorly housed and that the solution is to abolish the present form of society.

Socialism will lay the foundation for the final removal of the housing problem. Although there will be an ugly aftermath left over from capitalism, when the means of production are held in common and the madness of profit-motivation swept away, we can then set about the task of gearing production to human needs, which means housing of the finest possible standard will be produced, in abundance, to be freely used and enjoyed.

H. B.