The following text was used for a hand-out that we spread during the various May 1st events in Berlin. The German version of the text is to be found here.
The state of the world is more and more spiralling into conflict and these conflicts are mostly fuelled by the interests of the rich and powerful. More and more they try to mobilize the fear our safety and are fuelling nationalist sentiments. This all the while we as humanity face ever larger challenges and are on a personal level confronted with every rising costs for our daily groceries, rent and shortage in general of affordable housing.
Parliamentarians cannot and will not solve the housing crisis
Housing issues in Berlin are for many people a growing problem. Landlords and housing corporations are sucking up our wages – an ever growing % of our income flows directly into their pockets. Rent hikes in Berlin have been huge: the rent for a new apartment doubled over the last 10 years1 and the last couple of years they exploded even further with 21.2% in 2023 and 12.2 % in 2024.2 In 2019 there had been put a stop in rising rents in Berlin by law, this however was thwarted by the national government in 2021.3 After a large campaign and the hard work of ‚Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen‘ attempted fight back and attempted to organize a referendum to nationalize the larger housing corporations in the city. This referendum found way in 2021 and came out positive, was however side tracked by the subsequent city councils of the city under SPD and CDU. Now, a couple years later, the issues remain and the construction for ‚exclusive luxury apartments‘ continue. Politicians have not shown the will to go to the core of the issue.
We have not forgotten our demands because we live the daily consequences. Housing, like any basic need, should not be a for-profit sector but needs-oriented. We need inclusive and good housing. The only answer to this is to radically reform the housing sector. It needs to be socialized and this should start with an initiative to expropriate radically.
Work and wealth distribution
While most of us work, there are people making profits on the backs of our labour. The last decade the amount of people with lower incomes is growing4 while the ones benefitting from this got more and more wealthy.5 Globally this even looks more dramatically. With the globalization of capitalism, capitalists went all over the world in search of ‚cheap labor‘. In practice this means that large corporations looked for more impoverished and oppressed people that are more easy to exploit (of course with the help of laws and the local police forces at their backing).
The capitalists knife cut for them both ways: on the one hand they raise their profits by drastically cutting their costs on wages and environmental regulations, on the other hand they use the threat of moving way their production to pressure workers here to accept deteriorating labor conditions and lower wages. These facts show how the fate of workers on both sides of the border are tied to one another – we have a world to gain if we team up our struggles. The capitalist class understands this, and tries everything to divide and alienate us from each other while nationalist provide faulty answers and mobilizing people against our own class instead of the capitalists and the capitalist system.
War and the military industrial complex
While this wealth distribution from below upwards is taking place6 – the biggest robbery of our times – politicians however try to have us focussed on the fear of ‚the east‘ (Russia, China). NATO is forcing its state members to an already high 2% military budget and now under the leadership of Mark Rutte is now trying to push to double this to 4%. In Europe the Trump-administration is used as a shock doctrine to have us believe these investments are necessary to be able ‚to defend ourselves‘ and make us more independent from the USA.
While there is being said, that expropriation of the housing sector is too expensive7, the German government does find the money to invest billions of euro’s in the military and the military industry and maintain the status quo. A trend seen globally. The German government repeats its failures of the Corona-pandemic: money could have actually been used to solve many of the problems of our times but for which never existed the courage nor the will.
While in the ‚Cold‘ War of Eighties there was a competition of systems, at first sight this seems not be the case today. Al tough the war mongering between competing imperialisms is used to close our perspective for possible change and a stable future, the general deficiency of this system could make more visible the tension between the powers above and our interests from below. To take benefit of this however also means we should find ways to effectively combat rising authoritarian and nationalist dynamics and support a libertarian and socialist outlook.
A way out
We need to fight against the current developments and overcome our daily problems. We cannot do this alone. For this we need combative organisations: we need militant unions with radical workers democracy, we need to strengthen our ties in our houses and neighbourhoods, we need to combat the everyday oppression of women, queers and struggle against the every day racism so many face and which stands in the way of a united class. We need to strengthen our understanding of economic and the power dynamics both here and abroad so that we – as a society – ready ourselves for a radical break with this system for ourselves our our common interest.
For libertarian Communism: feminist, internationalist, revolutionary
- https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/kosten-in-berlin-verdoppelt-mieten-in-deutschen-grossstadten-seit-2014-massiv-gestiegen-12760355.html [↩]
- 2023 & 2024 IBB Housing Market Report, Investitionsbank Berlin. [↩]
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mietendeckel [↩]
- https://www.boeckler.de/de/boeckler-impuls-die-kluft-waechst-8557.htm [↩]
- Oxfam Inequality Report: https://www.oxfam.de/ueber-uns/publikationen/bericht-soziale-ungleichheit-2024 [↩]
- https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/oxfam-studie-bericht-davos-arm-reich-vermoegen-1.6332957 [↩]
- Following the logic that these companies should be compensated, which is a thing we reject as they already have profited enough over our backs the last decades. [↩]