Occupation!

Its reported that anarchists, followers of Makhno, have occupied the London residence of one of Putin's cronies, Oleg Deripaska.  Good.  But, why stop there?  Russian oligarchs are not the only billionaires to have large, often unoccupied mansions in London.  There are many more owned by European, US, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and British billionaires.  Given the crisis of homelessness in Britain, and in London, in particular, under the disastrous management of Sadiq Khan, its time all of them were occupied, and made available to the homeless people of the capital.

As I wrote several days ago, that is the clear message that the US/UK and its allies have given with their economic war against Russia and China, and their own confiscation of property.  They have given the green light, for all to follow suit, and to begin confiscating the property of the global 0.01%, and we should do so.  It would be a good way of implementing the fundamental socialist position that "The Main Enemy Is At Home".  After all, its not Putin and his army that is the main enemy facing London's homeless, it is Boris Johnson's central government, and Sadiq Khan's conservative social-democratic London government, which together have failed to meet the basic needs for shelter of the capital's less well-off.  It is the conservative social-democratic policies of fiscal austerity, combined with money printing to inflate asset prices, including property prices, at the same time as ensuring that not enough social housing is provided, that has made houses unaffordable, and unavailable.

Jeremy Corbyn at least, as Labour Leader proposed such action to help quickly remedy the problem of homelessness, but, of course, the same politicians today who back confiscation of Russian property, as part of NATO's economic war against Russia and China, opposed Corbyn then, and will run a mile from suggesting any such action today.  Indeed, why stop at just the mansions of the rich.

The large corporations are also the collective property of the associated producers within them, i.e. the workers and managers, yet they are denied control over those enterprises.  Instead, shareholders, who do not own those companies, but are merely creditors of them, lenders of money, like a bank, or like a landlord lends land and property, have been given that control illegitimately.  Even a consistently democratic bourgeois government would remedy that situation, and change company law to remove the voting rights of shareholders, and give control of the companies to their workers and managers.  Of course, no government, other than a Workers Government is going to do that.  So, as well as occupying the houses of the rich, workers should also begin to occupy all of the large companies too, and begin to operate them under Workers Control, creating Factory Committees, as means of exercising such democratic control.  Of course, they will have to do that in the face of the inevitable opposition to such action that will come from the likes of Starmer, and the pro-capitalist leaders of the Labour Party.

As I said, the other day, in reality, the rulers in Britain and the US will be very circumspect in their actions of confiscating the property of Russians, precisely because, they know that it sends the message that all property is up for grabs.  In the 19th century, the followers of revolutionary bourgeois ideologists, like David Ricardo, argued that land should be nationalised, so that all rents would go to the state defraying its costs, and so reducing taxes, enabling capital to accumulate faster.  They never pursued that rational policy further, because the bourgeoisie, by that time also landlords themselves, feared that it would send the message to workers that all property could be taken out of the hands of private owners.  Its no surprise, therefore, that the capitalist cops have already stepped in to evict the Makhnovites, and to protect the property rights of Putin's friend.