10.05.2007

Not rabbit hutches, but houses fit for the revolutionary proletariat

When Margaret Hodge recently placed the blame for housing scarcity on migrants, she deliberately ignored the glaringly obvious, social solution: that of providing more houses. Jim Gilbert remembers Red Vienna and its houses fit for the revolutionary proletariat

Hodge, as readers will also remember, asserted just before last year's local elections that eight out of 10 white people in her east London constituency of Barking were threatening to vote for the British National Party. She has subsequently adjusted her politics to stress and pander to the xenophobia she sees as being rampant among her constituents. No wonder the BNP tried to deliver a bouquet to her constituency offices in tribute.

It was in The Observer of Sunday May 20 that Hodge wrote: "We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants. We should also look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions ..." Anything, in fact, that sets those in housing need to fight amongst themselves rather than challenging a society that is failing to provide this basic human requirement.

Although Hodge's reactionary vomit has been condemned by leading members of her own party, these individuals have themselves been part of a Labour government that is as responsible as any in recent decades for the housing crisis faced by millions. When Thatcher seized on the device of selling off council houses and flats, she did so in order to create a Tory 'vote bank' out of property-owning workers. But New Labour embraced her ideas so enthusiastically, continuing to sell off council housing stock, that the Tories were outflanked on this question. Both parties are in agreement; indeed, Gordon Brown is a fervent apostle of such privatisation.

At the end of last week, Liam Smith, Labour's deputy leader of Barking and Dagenham council, broke the Tory-Labour consensus. He damned Margaret Hodge's comments as "nonsense" and flatly denied that the needs of migrant families were being prioritised over others' entitlement. Smith perceptively responded to her ill-informed remarks: "It is not fair for her to play one group of people off against another. Margaret Hodge is missing the point. The problem is clear - there are not enough council houses to meet the demand. We have been extremely active here in Barking and Dagenham in lobbying the government to build more council houses and we need them to take action now. The simple truth is that if we built 7,500 more council homes in the borough this debate would disappear. It's not about any one group of people queue-jumping or taking priority - that is just a myth. It's about demand outstripping supply."

Liam Smith is spot on. Our focus must be on the way that capitalist society responds to what is clearly a crisis in the provision of housing. Anyone who has been on a council house waiting list in the London boroughs or in towns and cities around Britain can testify to the inordinate length of time, stretching into decades, that they have been expected to wait. Taking the Hodge/BNP approach is to blame some of the victims, those who desperately need accommodation; our approach is to tackle the provision of the accommodation itself.

Blaming those in need of housing is not confined to the BNP and Margaret Hodge, of course. In fact, bourgeois opinion, from the mainstream to the extreme right, is as one on the issue, despite the nuance that each politician attempts to give to this shared view. For example, Keith Vaz MP, Labour NEC representative for ethnic minorities, debated on Newsnight last week with BNP leader Nick Griffin; undoubtedly briefed by Labour's bureaucracy, Vaz kept repeating that there was not a government in Europe that was tougher on immigration than the British.

Clearly, then, limiting migration is shared ground between such Labour politicians as Vaz and the BNP. But the shared ground is much more extensive, since the call for regulation of migration reaches also into the political territory of George Galloway and Respect. It was Galloway who called for a "points system" to identify worthy migrants, remember (Morning Star February 12 2005).

What Respect, Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party itself stresses is defence of asylum-seekers and refugees, as opposed to migrants as a whole, together with those individual cases that generate often intense local opposition to deportation. Quite why the slogan 'Asylum-seekers welcome here' is raised is strange, since we all know that they are only welcome as residents of Harmondsworth, Colnbrook and Brize Norton. As it happens, this liberal pose is like nothing so much as the charity-mongers of the 19th century - only concerned with the deserving poor; the rest can go hang.

Much of the left has indeed fallen into line with bourgeois propaganda. Capital wants cheap labour, yet does not want to bear the cost of social housing that cheap labour in particular needs. Reducing the number of council houses and flats by selling them off has inevitably led to the present situation of scarcity: now the same ideologues want to reduce the number of people getting social housing, rather than bear the costs of the growing demand. But for us as working class politicians, the issue must be one of opposition to what capital sees as its priority: profit before people every time. This applies just as fully to the provision of housing as it does to any other aspect of life for the overwhelming, working class, majority.

Racism?

Bizarrely, the response to Hodge's venom by leading SWPer Lindsey German, Respect candidate for mayor of London, and George Galloway, posted on the Respect website the day after the Observer article was published, claims that Hodge "thinks that we should prioritise some residents with less housing need than those with greater, because of the colour of the family's skin ... And she seems to think that not being white automatically makes you a migrant." Nothing in Hodge's article expresses the sentiments on colour ascribed to her by German and Galloway, though her British chauvinism comes through quite clearly - for example, when she writes: "I would ... insist that fluency in English should become a condition of acquiring British citizenship."

Once again, the SWP/Respect conflates racism, chauvinism and xenophobia, and in the process fakes the basis of Hodge's argument to favour the SWP's dogma, that British capitalism is inevitably racist. A common misconception on the left, of course, but flying in the face of the official anti-racism that government and the state espouse.

But denying reality is what the SWP does on this question. As Ruth Brown wrote, "Immigration and racist immigration controls are both intrinsic parts of the capitalist system." ('Racism and immigration in Britain' International Socialism autumn 1995). Not true: "racist immigration controls" are certainly not intrinsic to capitalism. As a point of fact, Britain had no immigration controls at all until 1905, when the first Aliens Act was introduced to target Jewish migrants; and it is generally accepted that Britain was capitalist long before 1905.

What is objectionable about the SWP's automatic use of the racist label is that it obscures the necessity of opposing all immigration controls. We are against  immigration controls because our class is fundamentally an international class and its liberation relies on global, not national, action. We therefore seek to win workers to understand that their loyalty should lie not with the national state, but rather with protecting and advancing the interests of their class brothers and sisters, no matter where they were born and bred.

Housing needs

Let us now turn to the crying need for housing. In fact, most of the left fails to address the question of social housing properly. If it deals with it all, its prescriptions are pretty dire.

It is certainly not enough to crow about the provision of what is essentially shoddy social housing, as Hannah Sell does in her dire Socialist Party pamphlet, Socialism in the 21st century (online version at www.socialistparty.org.uk/socialism21/). Outlining how Militant, the SP's precursor, played a leading role on Liverpool city council, fighting Tory government "cuts" from 1983 to 1987, comrade Sell writes: "Fourteen inner-city and two other housing estates, with a population of over 40,000, were completely transformed. Five thousand council houses were built, all with front and back gardens and their own private entrance, 4,400 council houses and flats and 4,115 private-sector homes were renovated." Of course, the finance for this was in part advanced to Liverpool by the Tory government as a bribe. The miners' Great Strike of 1984-85 had to be kept isolated "¦ and Thatcher was certainly successful in that strategy, no small thanks to Militant in Liverpool.

Equally to the point, have a look at those 5,000 council houses. Yes, they have little patches of green front and back and, yes, they have their own private entrances. Homes fit for wage-slaves. The bourgeois ideal of what workers should have.

But surely we need to set our sights far higher than glorified rabbit hutches. We need to demand the best. We need to dream. We must certainly re-establish collectivism. The 'property-owning democracy' -  ie, the renting of housing by way of mortgage companies - has had the effect over the last 20 or 30 years of peasantising the mentality of wide sections of the working class. People really imagine they are rich if their house is worth £250,000 on the market. But for the vast majority a house is a house: it is somewhere to live, a use-value and not a means of escaping the necessity of daily selling one's ability to labour.

Instead of social action to tackle the social problem of housing provision, people have been forced - because of the weakness of the organised working class, and because of the poverty of vision - to seek individual solutions. That can and must be changed. The working class movement must once again take up the demand for the provision of housing based on need.

The Macmillan Tories of the 1950s and early 1960s used to boast of the number of (ever more cramped) council housing units they had built. Then the debate on housing saw the agenda being led by the Labour Party and the 'official' CPGB.

However, we have no wish to return to some golden age of council house capitalism. We aspire to the best, we want housing for workers that facilitates rounded development and fulfils people's much expanded needs. We want places where even the bourgeoisie would aspire to live. Architects at the top of their profession should be tasked to produce genuinely social housing projects that are beautiful and inspiring and are a joy to live in.

This idea is not new: indeed it is something that was put into practice in a limited, but striking manner in the last century. An example of what we want can be seen in Red Vienna and the work of the architect and city planner Karl Ehn (1884-1957).

Under the left social democratic city administration, Ehn oversaw construction of the Karl Marx Hof, which still holds the distinction of being the world's longest single residential building (1,100m long). And its merits still elicit admiration: "... its powerful shapes, Piranesian on the exterior but much more gently articulated in the lovely garden courtyards, in fact historically culminate and bring to an enormous social climax the special Viennese tradition of Otto Wagner and his school ... how stirring the Austrian's triumphant deployment: in simple political fact daring hell and surviving" (V Scully Jr Modern architecture: the architecture of democracy p54).

Constructed between 1927 and 1930, Karl Marx Hof was known as Ringstraße des Proletariats (Ring Street of the Proletariat). Less than a fifth of its 156,000 square metres was built up; the rest was developed into play areas and gardens. Designed for a population of about 5,000, its amenities included laundries, baths, kindergartens, a library and doctors' surgeries. During the fascist takeover of Austria in early 1934, Heimwehr artillery bombarded the Karl Marx Hof complex; its occupants - who had a long-established workers' militia - valiantly resisted, including with machine guns, but in the end they were overcome.

In Germany, the Bauhaus movement had had a similar positive effect on architecture for social housing, though nowhere nearly to the same degree as in Vienna. Walter Gropius's project for social housing in the form of state homesteads on the Törten estate near Dessau in 1926 was carried out in collaboration with the Bauhaus, which was at the forefront of the design revolution at the time. Törten consisted of 300 units and was constructed from 1926 to 1928; five more blocks of 28 flats were completed in 1930. All in all, the Törten project represented an important summary of Bauhaus ideas on the subject of public housing.

Dessau and Vienna were two influential and important, though relatively isolated, examples of what could be achieved in social housing over 70 years ago. However, there is every reason to suppose that the working class of tomorrow will achieve far more brilliant highs when it comes to social housing. We as a class must aim to use the best architects, to produce the most ecologically friendly ways of living and to develop truly inspiring housing projects, with greenery, restaurants,  schools, medical services and a large variety of communal facilities including training areas for armed self-defence.

This must be an aspect of our programme. We in the CPGB shall certainly present such a vision in order to lift people's eyes from the current obsession with individual solutions, interest rates, house prices, second mortgages and the alienated living conditions of 21st century capitalism.