Good evening, everyone. Welcome again, and thanks to my comrades who just spoke. You put forward some really great work into research and into helping us understand why, in fact, the rent is so damn high.
I'm here to talk to you today about not necessarily why the rent is so high, but what do we do about it? What's the Marxist-Leninist position on how we should move forward from here? And posing that question in that way brings to mind one of Lenin's most popular works called What Is To Be Done, which in turn reminds me of something from that piece that I think is applicable here. I'm going to paraphrase this quote to simplify some historical context that could cause some confusion, so this isn't going to be an exact quote, but allow me to open by reading from Lenin for a moment.
“The spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed the depth of the newly awakening popular movement, and if we're to speak of the spontaneous element, then, of course, it's this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. These strikes might even be described as conscious to such an extent that they do mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period, but the spontaneity of them, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began, I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities.
But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle. They amounted to simply the resistance of the oppressed. And taken by themselves, they were simply trade union struggles, not yet socialist struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers, but the workers were not and could not be conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interest to the whole of the modern political and social system. I.e. theirs was not yet a socialist consciousness. We have said that there could not have been socialist consciousness among the workers: It would have to be brought to them from without.”
Now, what Lenin is saying here is that people generally understand their plight, but they often don’t know where or how to direct there ire. We put a flyer out saying, “why is the rent so damn high?” and there's a degree to which you already know the answer, on some level, to that simple question. Now, I don’t mean to discount my comrades' work who have laid out how we got here and what our current challenges are, or even the existence of this whole eduforum, because pursuing the particulars of the problem will help us find answers to the universal of the problem. So it's very necessary work to dive into the problems that we're facing and to present them in such a way that's digestible and approachable for everyone. But there's a degree to which, when we ask, “why is the rent so damn high?” you're interested in the answer because you suffer under the realities. What I'm here to talk about is our proposed solution for this problem. And I think at this point in our development as a class of workers who are only just now gaining our consciousness, just as the workers that Lenin describes, is not to specify policies such that we will implement when we gain power. Instead, I want to focus on the broader answer and the higher level of how we create the necessary material conditions that will allow us to then develop policies that address the particular issues that we're facing as individuals and as a nation.
In fact, in this specific moment so early in our development, I think it would be a genuine waste of time to try to pursue figuring out the details of policies that we would write and implement for the sheer fact of we will be like a dog that's caught a firetruck. We'll have these policies- but what are we going to do with them? Are we going to hand them off to our elected representatives who will then consult AIPAC, decide where it is on the priority list —spoiler alert, it's at the bottom— and then they never do anything with it? Are we going to waste our time in that manner? Or are we going to pursue the creation of material conditions that are different from what we have now —under which it would be a waste of time— so that when we apply our efforts to creating those policies, it is effective and actionable in the moment of creation? That, I think, is the true Marxist-Leninist answer for this question. Policies without Power are useless.
As materialists, we recognize that we can't force our ideas and superimpose them upon our reality. That would be an idealist position to have an idea and to believe that we could force it perfectly into existence. No- we don't do that. We work with our reality. We take our material conditions and recognize that it’s those conditions that form our ideas. But the ideas that we have that come from our material conditions are the antithesis of those conditions that created them and therefore cannot coexist with them- so as we seek to implement our desires, the old ways of existence, the current modes of existence, must necessarily expire. At which point, when we have formed new conditions that allow our desires to flourish in reality, we can then implement them- but only when the proper material conditions have arisen. Which is to say that there's work to be done before there's work to be done. So what does that solution look like? What does that new reality look like?
I want to talk about a very simple phrase. It's a phrase that can be very scary for some folks, and is truly, because of the connotations around it, is one of the more common reasons why people tend to be afraid of embracing socialism, Marxism-Leninism, and communism. That phrase is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now, before you stand up and walk out of here, allow me to dispel some of those fears and some of those myths that may have just risen up in your mind.
I'm gonna go back to basics for this one, and we're gonna hit the communist manifesto. Marx says that
“the history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle. Free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
He goes on to say that
“the modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epic, the epic of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature. It has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, the bourgeoisie and proletariat."
These irreconcilable class antagonisms that Marx is talking about are why we're tasked with this revolutionary project to begin with. The bourgeoisie are currently the ruling class in the dynamic, and as such, they created and seek to perpetuate the status quo. We're told that we as individual citizens govern ourselves through representative democracy, but this is a myth created by corporate oligarchs that acts as smoke and mirrors to perpetuate their own dominance as the owning class. At the end of the day, it's the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, that controls policy and budgets, and through these bureaucratic institutions and the threat of state-sanctioned violence, they dictate every aspect of our lives, from the media and entertainment we consume, to our access to food, health care, housing, education, and on and on. Every aspect of our lives is dictated by the bourgeoisie.
And there it is. There rises up that scary word: dictatorship. You see, the thing is, we already live under a dictatorship. A dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But one, they tell you it's a democracy, and they let us play along. Two, they create culture wars to distract from class wars, and they refresh the faces of our oppressors every few election cycles. And three, ultimately, we're used to it. We're acclimated to our oppression and blind to the plank that's in our eye. A dictatorship isn't just when one totalitarian strongman has full authority over a country. The idea of a totalitarian government itself was created by bourgeois scholars who sought to blur the clear differences between governments of Stalin and Hitler. Terrified by the power of the USSR and its rapid rise from a backwards country to a world power that genuinely raised the standard of living for its citizens, bourgeois historians and political scientists have lied and twisted the legacy of its governance and the governance of other socialist projects by conflating them with the rightful boogeyman of Hitler so they can delegitimize any aspect of their success, all while conspiring behind closed doors to continue in some degree or another the fascist and Nazi project from Selma to Cape Town to Gaza.
Any conceptualization that portrays the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dark and oppressive force is pure bourgeois projection. Again, we already live under a dictatorship, that of the bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat is best understood as the system of government when the proletariat smashes the bourgeois state through revolution and establishes itself as the dominant ruling class. The bourgeois then cease to pull the strings from behind the curtain and the proletariat, that is the People, establishes a government that is —once and for all— of the people, by the people, and for the people. The People then dictate who has control over and access to resources. The People dictate what we as a society invest in, research, and explore, and how we develop our cities, our towns, and our lives.
This is where it becomes vitally important for a socialist party to establish and direct the initial phases of a new government in such a way as to be entrenched with the people, understand their needs, and be dedicated to their service. We cannot lead from above, as our bourgeois oppressors do now, but from within. We understand the People’s needs because we are the people. A socialist government, the proletarian dictatorship, is no longer motivated by the private interests of corporate oligarchs but guided by the needs and interests of its People, the People who intimately know the suffering of their conditions but who may not yet see the way forward through liberation to peace.
Now, if what I'm describing sounds strangely like a democracy and not your conception of a dictatorship, well that's because basically it is. Not the democracy that we live under now- because that's the oligarch’s lie of democracy where they give us these facades of control and participation trophies, but in reality, as I said, they're pulling the strings behind the curtain, but a true democracy where the party that's in control is entrenched with the needs of the people and not the needs of the corporations. And that's it.
So how do we solve this housing crisis? How do we move away from landlords leeching off of our existence, off of the work that we do, and stealing the value that we create? When what little value we do get to take home, they appropriate up to 30 percent or more?!
How do we do away with that system? I'm here to tell you- writing letters to your representative, having meetings with your senators is not going to do it.
As a personal anecdote, I have in fact sat in a meeting with Congressman Maxwell Frost as well as the regional representative for the Small Business Association with a handful of other business owners. We all were meeting regarding our financial hardships; increasing rents and other bills, credit cards, bank loans, government loans etc…but it was primarily a conversation centered around our rental situation. Every time we described our problem and even maybe put forth a potential solution, we had the SBA guy saying, well, that's not my department. You really need to talk to Maxwell and his team because you're talking about a policy change that would benefit you and your situation. But then we turned to Frost for the same answer or with the same question and he would say, well, really, that's not my department- You would really do better getting help from the SBA because what you're looking for is financial solutions, not policies, right?
And so both of these people that are arms of the bourgeois state that are under the pretense of being there to work for our benefit because we are the business owners that are, again, supposedly the ones that ought to benefit from this capitalist institution. We're getting slapped around playing pinball between two people who say they want to help us but that they can't. It's the other person's responsibility. Always giving empathetic platitudes, but passing the responsibility to someone else or back on to us.
We can plead with our representatives. We can shout until we are blue in the face. We can protest peacefully until the police crack our bones. But that will not do it. The only way for us to implement the policies that would benefit every person in this room and every person in this country and every person on this globe is to destroy the system as it stands and to replace it with one that benefits the working people.
Like I said, there is work to be done before there is work to be done. We will address the housing crisis, but at the moment, our material conditions are not ripe to do so. Any efforts that we put forward will be wasted on a bourgeois system. So in the meantime, we push to move our conditions towards those which would be conducive for addressing this particular issue and every issue.
And that is ultimately our project here at REAL, the Revolutionary Education and Action League. Our aim is to bring about a conscious group of people here in Central Florida that are working to fundamentally change the relations of production and the material conditions that we live under in America, to make way for revolution and a Socialist future for the benefit of the People and not of the rich.
I'd encourage you to get involved in whatever capacity you can, whether that's membership where we put the REAL work in, or volunteering or showing up to events and protests. Keep coming out. Keep engaging in our system and tell your friends. Up next, my Comrade Hamer is about to talk, among other things, about what we do, why we do it, how we’re working to prepare ourselves and our movement towards the conditions that will support REAL change. And together, as we grow to a critical mass of a movement that will effectively challenge the systems that we live under, then and only then will we have the opportunity to affect the change we want to see in the world. Revolution is the only solution. Thank you.