In Jacobin

For well over a century, radicals have debated whether systemic change might come through reform or revolution. Strategists — particularly within the socialist tradition — have disagreed on whether gradual steps might incrementally bring about a new society, or whether a sharp break with the existing political and economic order is required.

During the New Left of the 1960s, Austrian-French theorist André Gorz attempted to move beyond this binary and present another option. Gorz proposed that through the use of “non-reformist reforms,” social movements could both make immediate gains and build strength for a wider struggle, eventually culminating in revolutionary change. A certain type of reform, in other words, could herald greater transformations to come.

Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.

The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.

The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.

In the United States, the federal government’s favored program for producing low-income rental housing has shifted from public housing to the LIHTC program. LIHTC provides tax breaks to for-profit investors who invest in lower-income housing. This means LIHTC essentially wastes our public dollars on enriching private Wall Street investors. The investors are earning more in tax breaks from the government than they actually pay into affordable housing. It would be more cost-effective for the government to directly fund the production of affordable housing instead of allowing this profit-skimming to occur.

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Nationally, 80 percent of LIHTC developers are for-profit entities. Moreover, many LIHTC landlords are increasingly profit-seeking corporations rather than mission-driven nonprofits. Corporate landlords also benefit from rent increases, evictions, neglect of maintenance, and deplorable conditions for tenants. Profit-seeking landlords are more likely to convert buildings to market rate once LIHTC’s temporary affordability restrictions expire.

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State and federal governments must reform LIHTC to require that any housing it produces is permanently and deeply affordable, with strong tenant protections. Moreover, rather than tax breaks for for-profit investors, our communities need massive direct public funding for the creation of affordable housing.

Food is no ordinary commodity. It’s both indispensable and a precious, scarce resource. Ultimately, we need to bring food production and distribution under public ownership and control to end this irrationality.

Achieving that end-goal won’t be simple. We can’t simply take over a system as complex as our food system in one fell swoop. Socializing supermarkets, by contrast, would be relatively simple. It’s the obvious place to start.

Most of the popular discourse around food places the burden of change on individual consumers. However lovely local farmers’ markets may be, convincing people to frequent them isn’t going to cut it, especially as wages decline and working hours crawl up. For their part, government regulations can end the worst excesses of the market, but the problems with our food system require more than just regulatory nudges.

Solving these problems will require rational economic planning. In fact, supermarkets already plan our food system. But they do it for the sake of profit maximization rather than the public good and long-term sustainability.

In the one hundred fifty days after October 7, Israel killed thirty-one thousand Palestinians, injured seventy-two thousand, displaced 1.7 million, and razed or damaged more than half of Gaza’s buildings. Joe Biden sent over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel during the same stretch. In a recent classified briefing, US officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than one hundred separate weapons sales to Israel in the one hundred fifty days after October 7, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. That works out to one new arms deal every thirty-six hours, on average.

These transfers are classified as sales, but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense. The vast majority are funded through State Department grants. Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public, and the only reason he did is because he had to. Section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the president to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value. The notification threshold depends on the type of matériel (for “significant military equipment” it’s $14 million; for other military articles and services, $50 million; for military construction services, $200 million), but also the recipient. For NATO countries and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel, the notification thresholds for these three categories are considerably higher ($25 million, $100 million, and $300 million, respectively).

While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret. The quantity of sales since October 7 is case in point. By spreading his military support for Israel across more than one hundred sales, Biden kept pretty much all of them “under threshold” per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny.

MMT had been making inroads before the pandemic in terms of the number of lawmakers who were starting to ask whether they had gotten some big things wrong over the years. I was in meetings in Washington, DC, in February of 2020 with very high-level members of both the House and the Senate. This was leading up to the November 2020 election. So I’m sitting there, and they’re talking about the Trump administration’s massive tax cuts, how they increase the deficit and the national debt, adding some $2 trillion to deficits with total disregard for the fiscal impacts.

This is what Republicans always do when they have power. They don’t care about debt and deficits. They focus like a laser on passing their agenda. So they got their huge tax cuts passed.

Democrats fall for this story every time. When they get into power, they try to tighten the purse strings and say, “We’re going to be good stewards of ‘taxpayer money’ and try to avoid running deficits” and all that. Meanwhile, the Republicans never do that. They just use the deficit to pass their agenda.

Democrats had me come in and they said, “Listen, we think we’ve been misled about the risks of deficits. We don’t think that these things are the bogeyman that we’ve long been told, that it’s the road to ruin.” MMT had caused them to rethink these things.

South Africa is determined not only to be on the right side of history, but to change the course of it — and if the International Court of Justice was true to its name, it would give due consideration to South Africa’s case. It would find that the bombardment is wrong, the bombardment is illegal, and the bombardment represents the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. And it would rule that acts of genocide have been committed by the Israeli government.

In the meantime, the South African case asked for interim relief, which would require a rapid call for an immediate cease-fire. It is a call that should be made by any political representative anywhere in the world committed to the protection of civilian life. It is to the great shame of the British and American political systems that relatively few elected representatives in either country have supported this call for an end to the loss of human life.

There is no way forward other than a cease-fire observed by all sides, which would present the opportunity then to map out a just and peaceful future. This is a decision to be made by the Palestinian people, not by those of us who support them. Acts of solidarity cannot entail telling others what to do.

There is every reason to think that the home secretary wanted far-right thugs to attack the Palestine solidarity march. If some of the marchers defended themselves against attack, she could blame them for the violence and seek to ban future demonstrations. Unfortunately for Braverman, the people she was relying upon couldn’t be trusted to execute the plan.

A small group of ultranationalist thugs gathered at a war memorial in central London, well away from the demonstration’s planned route. Denied the opportunity to attack the marchers, they attacked the police instead.

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The clearest proof of what Braverman had been planning came in her own statement, which simply pretended that events had unfolded in the way she had been expecting: “Our brave police officers deserve the thanks of every decent citizen for their professionalism in the face of violence and aggression from protesters and counterprotesters in London today.” That was the only mention of the “counterprotesters” from Braverman, who went on to denounce the pro-cease-fire march as a celebration of terrorism:

"This can’t go on. Week by week, the streets of London are being polluted by hate, violence, and antisemitism. Members of the public are being mobbed and intimidated. Jewish people in particular feel threatened. Further action is necessary."

The final line of Braverman’s statement was a clear exhortation to the same thugs who had assaulted police officers and left them with broken bones to mobilize their forces again.

For the traveling public, the cost of rail is now almost 8 percent higher in real terms than it was in 1995, before privatization. This figure has dropped in the last two years only as inflation as risen. Until the cost-of-living crisis, when fare increases were decoupled from retail price index inflation, fares were consistently 15-20 percent higher in real terms than when the rail was publicly owned. There’s no decoupling this fact from rail privatization: the annual outflow of funds during the years of privatization could have enabled an average cut of 14 percent in fares — and if the railways were nationalized now, and the flow of funds into the private sector cut off, the money saved would fund a cut of 18 percent in fares.

Under privatization, the rail system has become a cash cow for the cloud of parasitic private interests that swarm around it — and all passengers have gained is an increasingly expensive, fractured railway, run by people fixated with cutting staff costs. It’s no surprise, then, that public opinion polls consistently show overwhelming public support for the renationalization of railways.

It’s very hard to see a strategy that leads to political change, if you accept a settler-colonial paradigm, in the metropole or in the colony — and more importantly in the metropole. If you look at the wars of independence in Ireland, Algeria, and Vietnam, or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, what was happening on the battlefield was part of a larger political strategy that also included the metropole.

For example, it meant convincing popular opinion in Britain and the US that Irish independence was a worthy and achievable aim — or at least in the case of England, that it was a war not worth fighting. The Irish Republican Army won, I think, in Manchester, Birmingham, London, New York, and Boston as much as it won in Cork. They were on the back foot in military terms by the middle of 1921. But the British decided that they couldn’t sustain the war any longer.

It was the same with Algeria, Vietnam, and South Africa. Without the battle of Algiers or the Tet Offensive or the struggle in the townships, those liberation movements would not have won. But without the demonstrations in the US, you wouldn’t have had the US government deciding that it couldn’t win the war in Vietnam.