The Guardian 11 February, 2009

Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

NO to evictions!

I suppose the scene in the TV news editor's office must have gone something like this: "We need to jazz up this financial crisis news - it's getting stale. Get me some human interest stuff: send out a crew to film an eviction."

"Sure thing boss! I'll get right on it."

And with the co-operation of the NSW Sheriff's Department, last week television viewers were treated to the agonising spectacle of a distraught, hysterical woman standing on the lawn in front of her home alternately sobbing and screaming as she and her family were evicted from it by officers of the Court who had no responsibility for where the evicted family would sleep that night (assuming they could get any sleep after such an horrendous event).

Unlike the traditional picture of an eviction, in which the bailiffs put the unfortunate family's furniture on the street outside their house, in this one the court appeared to be seizing house and contents. A burly female sheriff advised the distraught woman that they were changing the locks and told her that if she wanted to come in and take away a few personal belongings she had better do it now while she could still get in the house.

With people being encouraged for so long to furnish their houses on credit, it is only to be expected that the kind of financial crisis that prevents a family from paying their mortgage would also prevent them from paying their hire-purchase or credit-card debt.

Credit cards are financed by banks, which are getting the money they use to pay for the goods practically for free or next to nothing, and charging the people using the cards around 20 percent or more in interest. It's usury, to use an old-fashioned term, although perhaps a legal form of loan-sharking would be a clearer description.

It's also parasitic and non-productive and most certainly immoral. But it's the capitalist way.

Having your home and your belongings seized and taken from you in this manner is like a massive mugging, one that you cannot even report to the police. The traumatising effects would be felt for years.

Capitalism, which is so keen to denounce socialist governments for "denials of human rights", never acknowledges that people have other rights which this kind of action tramples under foot.

It's legal under capitalism to throw people out of their homes for failing to meet their mortgage payments, to seize their furniture and belongings for failure to meet the payments on their credit card debt. The only concern of capitalism, and of the governments that do its bidding, is to see that the capitalists who "own" the money that was loaned are paid their pound of flesh.

But the wealth that money represents was not created by those capitalists, whatever they may say. It was created by the expenditure of the labour power of workers, not capitalists. Just because capitalism allows employers to appropriate a large chunk of the wealth the workers create does not mean that employers are actually entitled to that wealth.

The workers created it and the workers own it by right. Ever since 1917, workers in different parts of the world have been asserting their rights to take that wealth back. Eventually, they will have taken it all back. The right to shelter is a basic human right; housing, despite what L J Hooker would have you believe, is not a privilege for those who can afford it, but a right. To kick a family out of their home should be more than just a human interest story: it should be a crime.

In the Great Depression, the Communist youth organisation would battle the police to halt evictions, help families break back into their homes, try to carry furniture in the back door as fast as the bailiffs and police took it out the front door.

The Communist Party was a lot bigger then, but it was bigger partly because it took such an active part in just these struggles, because it stood with the people.

Capitalism's latest economic crisis is the worst for decades, and is likely to last for some time. Throwing money at banks and other capitalist corporations is no substitute for direct expenditure on developing the country's publicly-owned infrastructure: constructing schools, hospitals, highways, concert halls and public transport systems.

The massive program of public works that FDR launched in the US when he became President in 1932, in the midst of capitalism's greatest economic crisis, was also designed to stimulate the economy, to get cash flowing through it again. The method chosen was not to pour money into private companies (although they did pretty well) but instead to fund public enterprises and projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Think how much further the Rudd government's "stimulus package" would go if large parts of it were not being diverted to fund private corporate profits and executive bonuses.

Repossessions and evictions will only increase in the next twelve months, while the Rudd government continues trying to prop up inefficient, wasteful and very greedy capitalist corporations in the fond hope that they will in return "do the right thing" by the rest of us and help us weather the storm without too much damage.

Unfortunately, all they are concerned about protecting are their profits, not the people. The demand for a moratorium on evictions should be raised now, before the burden of salvaging excessive corporate debt impacts even further on the Australian people and this human tragedy that adversely affects only the poor (never the rich) gets worse.