The Socialist Housing Union of the Basque Country is ready to work and fight for housing, adding the forces of all the Housing Unions created by the local Socialist Councils in recent years and welcoming a common political programme: Policy Proposal for the Struggle for Housing (read here the proposal in Basque and here in Spanish).

In April a joint protest was held in Bilbao (Bizkaia) by the Housing Unions of the Basque Socialist Councils to mark as an electoral farce the recently approved Housing Law in the Spanish State. It was then reported that the Socialist Councils took another step this year, and that the process of setting up the Socialist Housing Union of the Basque Country was already underway. The presentation of this national trade union took place on Saturday at the Ibarrekolanda Institute in Bilbao. A large group of partners have met to participate in an event in which all local work has been rounded up and published in recent months.

The sum of powers has two main functions

They pointed out that housing problems are worsening and that in this situation many initiatives have emerged in the last years in eleven places. They have warned that this heterogeneous struggle for housing has brought to the table the need to organize self-defense in housing and that "together with its development, insurmountable strategic and political constraints have been revealed".

They have emphasized the two main conclusions drawn from this trajectory: the need to "overcome the subordinate character of the institutions with which social movements usually count and order the struggle for housing outside the institutions of the bourgeoisie", and that "the mere defense of living conditions does not fuel a certain political program of social transformation", but "can end up strengthening the program of reform of any other". "We have to intervene in the housing issue, accumulating the forces articulated within an organization and a clear political program," they added.

The Socialist Councils of the Basque Country explain that “they have opted for coherence with these two teachings”, and in this sense have created this year the Socialist Housing Union of Euskal Herria. Through the union they want to respond to two major tasks: "articulate at the national level an organization that faces the capitalist offensive on housing" and "feed from this confrontation the process of political, cultural and organic expansion of communism".

The problem of housing in times of crisis

In this sense, they consider it essential to "know the housing problem and acquire the capacity to foresee what may come". They stress that the process of creating the Socialist Housing Union has been, precisely, a way of "sharing this analysis, setting the strategic bases and developing an updated political proposal".

The Housing Struggle Policy Proposal contains some of the main conclusions about the current situation, related, among others, to the crisis and the effects that capitalist society is experiencing, to the looting of workers' wages and their reflection on housing, to the attitude of the middle-class renter with respect to prolethality, with the way all this takes in Euskal Herria, with the polarization of consumption.

They have also analyzed the program that counteracts social democracy to the housing problem, based on two pillars: "the extension of private property through the redistribution of wealth" and "the defense of the State against the international interests of big financial capital". Thus, social democracy points out in the analysis contained in the Political Proposal that "strengthens the bourgeois state and disseminates practices and discourses against the proletariat".

Some conclusions that have been highlighted in this analysis of the situation are that the proletariat is being "expelled from the housing free market" and that, in times of crisis, "the room for action of parliamentary policy is decreasing". "The effective solution to the housing problem will not come from professional politicians," they said.

Socialist State, single guarantee

They claim, therefore, that "the same capitalist system" is what must be "abolished to definitively end the housing problem": "Moreover, the only way to abolish capitalism in positive terms is through a socialist system characterized by free and universal quality housing."

"The bourgeois state is economically and politically dependent on capital and therefore organizes resources on the basis of profit. However, a Socialist State would put these resources at the service of another rationality. Plan and centralize capabilities, tools, infrastructure and/or technologies in another way. So they would develop a better socialist housing system," they detailed in the presentation.

They consider that all this gives a "distant utopia" and that often "representing the end of the world is easier than imagining a non-bourgeois world": "Before we think that in order to end the housing problem we should lower the price a little, that housing should be free. And that happens because communism, as a political program, is disconnected at a cultural, organic and political level."

In this sense, they have explained that it is essential to "create political, cultural and economic conditions for the construction of the Socialist State", as well as "develop effective capacities to defend the living conditions of the proletariat" to "end a system that threatens these living conditions at all times". This is what they call the Socialist Self-Defense, which in the "struggle for housing" has been associated with three major functions: "the cultural struggle for the extension of the communist program, the defense and effective improvement of living conditions and the creation and stabilization of proletarian institutions capable of eradicating capitalist profit and integrating into a new social order".

Political proposal, point by point

They recall that the Housing Policy Proposal, based on the Socialist Housing Union of Euskal Herria, is therefore "an instrument of cultural war and a guide for political action". It gathers four main ideas: it claims free housing in the face of capitalist profit; it demands housing for all people; it claims quality housing and is committed to the expansion of political rights.

Also within these four bases, it marks a number of specific points related to each one of them, forming a political roadmap with 14 concrete clues:

1. Abolition of rent, mortgages and debt
2. The end of speculation and rentism
3. No to social misery
4. Expropriation of vulture funds and banks
5. Against the classicist segregation of capitalist urbanism and space
6. Suspension of all evictions
7. Elimination of racist, bureaucratic and economic filters
8. Safe housing; aggressor, landlord and without police
9. No to the loss of quality of housing or to the underdevelopment
10. End of supply cuts
11. For a system of self-development housing
12. Against the impunity of owners
13. Right to empty housing
14. No to repression against the fight for housing

This roadmap summarises the invariable principles for universal, free and quality housing, as underlined during the event. The proposal has sought to show "the potential of a political program based on the construction of the Socialist State" so that it gradually "gives new meaning" and it is seen that "the only way to overcome all everyday problems is the integral reorganization of this society".

They have also recalled that the future International Communist Party is "a necessary condition for ending bourgeois power and building socialist power", and that "all the steps that bring us closer to this objective, even if small, are due to the work of the militants". They consider that this "strong ethical commitment" has been "renewed over generations through different projects", but "always based on the objective of universal emancipation". "There are more and more militancies willing to make that ethical choice among us," they valued.