The neo-feudalism of homeless confiscation
Another sign that we're probably closer to feudalism than socialism.
ProPublica has posted a heartbreaking piece on the disaster of homeless confiscation storage programs. When police break up homeless encampments — a practice that was often considered cruel and unusual punishment until a recent Supreme Court ruling — they typically confiscate any belongings the find. Lawsuits like this one filed by the ACLU have challenged the practice, and in response many cities have opened storage facilities where the belongings are ostensibly kept for retrieval by their owners. Most homeless people don’t even know of the program, of course, or how to go about retrieving their belongings, and when they do complete the process they still find that much of what was taken is missing.
The most striking thing about this story is just the depth of tragedy visited upon these victims, who lose everything from medicine to crucial personal documents to irreplacable sentimental artifacts. Another thing that I can’t stop thinking about, however, is how blatantly this whole affair violates the most sacred right of capitalism: the right of private property. The ACLU’s lawsuit brings up the point directly:
Under the Four Amendment to the United States Constitution, Plaintiffs have the right to be secure in their persons against unreasonable seizures…During these raids, Defendants unreasonably seize and destroy property regardless of its condition, its apparent value, and/or whether or not it has been voluntarily abandoned.
From a liberal perspective, this may seem like just another violation of the rights of the poor. From a Marxist perspective, however, this is truly significant because capitalism, as an economic regime, is defined by private property rights that are universal. The universality of this right is ideologically crucial because that’s what makes it so inviolable: its universality expresses its inviolability, and it is precisely because the rights of property can never be abridged under any circumstances that the rich are able to lean upon them so heavily. After all, if exceptions can be made in the case of the poor, why can’t they be made in the case of the rich too? We confiscate the property of the homeless in the name of some greater good to society; can’t that logic be extended to the ungodly wealth of the rich?
It is true that capitalism foundationally entails the theft of the profits of labor from workers. But what gives capitalism its unique character is that it does so without violating private property rights. It does this through the systematic leverage ownership of the means of production creates for the ruling class in tandem with the worker’s need to sell his labor to survive; the worker does so “voluntarily”, though actually under the duress of the capitalist system. And this system depends, in the final analysis, on private property rights that are enforced as universal.
There is a name for an economic system in which formal property rights are only extended to some of the population while denied to others — but it isn’t capitalism. It’s feudalism. And in the wholesale denial of private property rights to the poor, what we are seeing is the foundation of a class that falls neither under the category of bourgeoisie or proletariat: something that is much closer to the status of medieval serf or pre-bellum slave. This is not a formal status in our society like it was in others, but it’s easy to see how it creates special kinds of impairments to class mobility:
Stephenie, whose belongings were taken in Portland, said the experience was crushing.
“It keeps you in what we call a ‘homeless rut,’ where we can’t focus on anything else except being homeless,” she said. “We can’t focus on getting out of it and moving forward.”
When they are deprived of their private property rights in a notionally capitalist system, the poor are left at the mercy of those classes which have them.
This is the sort of problem that makes me suspect we are still much closer to a feudal economy than to anything resembling socialism. When the rights of private property are universally upheld, then one can expect the contradictions of capitalism to start causing serious internal problems for the system. But it’s hard to imagine abolishing private property when we haven’t even implemented it for everyone.
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