In early November, as BC’s southern interior got cold enough to be life threatening, a group of community service organizations operating shelters sent a joint letter to municipal officials, Interior Health, and BC Housing essentially withdrawing their services. The letter calls BC’s response to the homelessness crisis “an exercise in futility, at best” and went on to complain: “Operators are running shelters in rundown buildings, in overcrowded rooms and in temporary structures in part because some municipalities in the region have lacked the political will or courage to build permanent, purpose-built shelters and additional supportive housing.” In addition, the letter notes that Interior Health dumps impoverished discharged patients, some who can’t even walk, on a shelter system which has neither the expertise nor funding to deal with them.
So far, BC Housing and the municipalities have responded with various versions of empty phrases of doing the best they and Interior Health has, as usual, clammed up completely. The practical effect has been pretty much zero … except there are fewer shelter operators. As various well-paid, media-relation types from these levels of government oozed their sympathy and concern … without, of course, promising to do anything, the weather got colder, and people kept suffering.
Oddly enough, no one on either side pushed the idea of letting the “free market” handle the crisis. There was a time when it was claimed that the ”free market” was going to solve all our problems. Once we got rid of taxes on corporations and the rich and ditched a pile of regulations restraining the rapaciousness of businesses, we’d usher in an age of limitless prosperity and plenty. That was the promise of neoliberal economics.
Well, the rich have certainly gotten richer, but the rest of us face an increasingly uncertain future in a deteriorating climate and tanking living standards. The homeless who, along with the victims of toxic drugs, are the bleeding stigmata of the failure of capitalism face, at best, empty “thoughts and prayers” drivel and, usually loathing, harassment and a brusque “move along there” from the cops. Obviously, there are a lot of people with drug and/or mental health issues among the homeless. A good many of those with drug problems got hooked as a result of workplace injury. Make no mistake, if you don’t have mental health problems when becoming homeless, you probably will very soon.
A hard, realistic look at the policies of capitalist governments to the homeless crisis shows convincingly that futility is precisely the point. Under capitalism, we’re only really valuable if we’re “productive” members of society, i.e., willing and able to produce wealth for capitalism. If we’re injured, or ill, or old, we suddenly become just a commodity that no longer works at making money. Crappy shelters, harassment and vilification, private care homes filled with COVID dead, they are all evidence of the real intent of our capitalist elites and their government flunkies: toss all this used up human refuse on the garbage heap.
We need a better way … we need a Socialist Alternative.
