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Our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Proposition on the Contemporary World Proletarian Revolution
Editor’s Note：
1、The housing question of the proletariat, like all other questions concerning the life and fate of the proletariat, is ultimately a question of power—a question of which class holds state power.As the capitalist economic crisis deepens, the petty bourgeoisie faces the prospect of falling into the ranks of the proletariat. In order to avoid suffering the brutal oppression and exploitation endured by proletarians, they often participate in and make use of the spontaneous resistance movements of the proletariat. However, their aim is not to liberate the proletariat. Thus, they either attribute the causes of their suffering to proletarians of a different skin color or birthplace, or advocate pursuing reforms without touching the fundamental capitalist social system.The proletarian vanguard must expose these opportunist views and firmly unite the proletariat. Any attempt to incite divisions within the proletariat must be resolutely subjected to proletarian dictatorship.
原文：无产阶级的住房问题，与其他有关无产阶级生活命运的一切问题一样，归根结底是权力问题，是政权掌握在哪个阶级手里的问题。随着资本主义经济危机的加深，小资产阶级面临着滑落到无产阶级的局面，为了不像无产者一样遭受残酷压迫剥削，他们常常会参加和利用无产阶级自发的反抗运动。但他们的目的并不是为了解放无产阶级，所以他们要么把苦难的原因说成是另一些肤色、出生不同的无产者，要么主张只进行改良，而不触及根本的资本主义社会制度。无产阶级先锋队要揭露这些机会主义观点，把无产阶级牢牢的团结起来，任何要挑起无产阶级内部分裂的意图都必须坚决进行专政。
2、 This text primarily exposes the housing crisis in the United States, the oppression of the proletariat by US imperialism regarding housing, and the resistance of the petty bourgeoisie. However, these are ultimately of no use to us. The true and only means to achieve a proletarian housing policy is revolution. Only through a proletarian revolution that establishes a socialist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat can the urban-rural contradictions and the housing crisis be completely resolved; any reforms made by the bourgeoisie are utterly futile. This requires us to rely on a political newspaper line to build a proletarian vanguard and organize the proletariat. Only then can we truly defeat the bourgeoisie and its dictatorship, and establish a socialist state that genuinely belongs to the proletariat. This fundamental revolutionary line is fully applicable whether in China, the United States, other imperialist nations, or semi-colonial countries.
此文主要揭露了美国的住房问题和美帝国主义对在住房问题上对无产阶级的压迫以及小资产阶级的反抗。但这些根本对于我们都是无用的，真正的，能够实现无产阶级的住房政策的手段就是革命，只有通过无产阶级革命建立无产阶级专政的社会主义国家，才能完全解决城乡矛盾和住房问题，资产阶级再怎么改革都是无济于事的。而这就要求我们依靠政治报路线建立起一支无产阶级的先锋队，并将无产阶级组织起来，才能够真正的战胜资产阶级及其专政，建立起真正属于无产阶级的社会主义国家，而条基本的革命路线，无论在中国、美国，还是其他帝国主义国际，以及一些半殖民地国家，都是完全适用的。
In the United States, the housing question is framed almost entirely from a petty-bourgeois perspective. Within the “cost of living” framework, the ideal of homeownership has become one of the main arguments of those who call themselves leftists—in truth, social-fascists such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Their golden age is the Eisenhower 1950s, when, the story goes, a man could buy a home on a single wage.
This nostalgia forgets that the maintenance of single-income families depended on the unpaid labor of women, and even liberal historians have pointed out that the family in the 1950s was a historical exception, not the norm.[1] The suburban home was also a white one. The single-wage home was built on the intense oppression of the national minorities. What is remembered as a golden age of the American worker was in fact the golden age of the American labour aristocracy.
We must understand the situation of housing in the USA clearly. The house is less a place to live than a means of accumulating financial assets. The wealth figures show that in 2022 the median American homeowner had a net worth of $396,200, and the median renter $10,400 [3].
This is what the petit-bourgeois demand for “affordability” is really about. For this class, the problem is not finding somewhere to live. Across much of the country housing is still cheap: in much of the Midwest, typical homes sell for around $200,000–275,000, against a national median above $400,000 [4]. What they want is a house that works as an investment, located as close as possible to the great imperialist financial centres where they ply their “trade”. Their demand for lower “cost of living” is packaged as a proletarian appeal, a matter of survival. But in reality, it is a demand made by the declining petty bourgeoisie and the working class in an attempt to preserve the privileges their parents enjoyed.
The proletariat’s housing crisis looks quite different. Engels described this distinction in 1872 in The Housing Question. He traced the scheme to make every worker the owner of his dwelling to the reactionary outlook of Proudhon [5]—a handicraft outlook, where one can own their little house with their little industry, and have a small, quiet life (if one can ignore the cries of the downtrodden masses, who make such a life possible in our modern age). To attach oneself to the politics of home ownership is therefore at best ignorance, and at worst opportunism. The real solution depends on abolishing capitalism, and ending the divide between town and country—though in the more immediate term, existing owners should be expropriated and the homeless and overcrowded workers quartered in their houses.
The class character of this politics is clearest in the struggle over urban space known as gentrification: a struggle waged by the petit-bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and above all against those of the oppressed nations. A 2019 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that between 2000 and 2013 gentrification displaced at least 135,000 Black and Hispanic residents from their neighbourhoods. Seven cities, among them New York, Washington and Los Angeles, accounted for nearly half of all gentrification; in Washington alone, 20,000 Black residents were pushed out [6]. Capital abandons a neighbourhood and lets it decay (ie. White Flight), then returns once the land is able to accrue value. The newcomers are the shock troops of that return. Engels named the method after Haussmann, who rebuilt Paris by clearing its workers’ districts. The slums are never abolished, he observed but rather simply reappear somewhere else, often in the next neighbourhood over [7].
The DSA was founded in 1982 through the merger of Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee with the New American Movement, as an anti-communist organisation, rejecting the Soviet model as authoritarian [8]. It carries on that dubious tradition today. When the House of Representatives passed a resolution this September condemning “socialism in all its forms” and naming the DSA directly, the reply in Jacobin complained that Congress had lumped democratic socialists together with authoritarian states [9].
The same magazine’s defence of the DSA on housing makes for a revealing statement [10]. Jacobin accepts that gentrification (largely wealthy white Americans moving into the neighbourhoods of the oppressed nations) contributed to the DSA’s success. It then twists this into a story in which the older establishment policymakers were the originators of gentrifying policy, and so, in their view, made the noose that hanged them as the tide of DSA support rose. In the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary, some of Zohran Mamdani’s (a DSA candidate) widest margins came in Ridgewood, Bushwick and East Williamsburg, the heart of the so-called “commie corridor” of young, college-educated renters, while voters earning under $50,000, especially in public housing, broke for his opponent [11].
This is theatre, a simple shifting-around of blame. The social-fascists point to the big bourgeoisie and declare them the enemy, demanding the oppressed masses line up behind them. In truth, they are organising to take power for their own class and to set comfortable policies for themselves, and the oppressed masses who make up the body of the proletariat are expelled from their homes and communities.
This manoeuvre has a long and sordid history in the United States. In the postwar decades white Americans fled the cities for the suburbs, a period of “White Flight”. They took their wealth with them, and with it the tax base and political attention, leaving the cities as hollowed-out haunts of the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat. Now the children and grandchildren of that movement are moving back, and displacing the same oppressed peoples a second time. Flight and return can both be justified by so-called “American socialism”, because it is not the politics of the proletariat, but the deceptive politics of the petit-bourgeoisie.
The same parochial, money-grubbing politics has now taken another form, one that may yet become a national movement: the revolt against property taxes. Florida’s Amendment 3, on the November 2026 ballot, would raise the homestead exemption on non-school property taxes to $250,000 by 2028; the legislature’s own analysts estimate that local governments would lose $4.6 billion in the first year, rising to $8.4 billion a year. In Ohio, a citizens’ campaign to abolish property taxes altogether fell short of signatures for 2026, but can carry them forward to 2027 [12].
The banner they carry is, again, about the “cost of living” and making houses easier to buy. But property taxes are among the few taxes on wealth in the American system, and they pay for many public services. The typical homeowner earns twice as much as the typical renter, yet they still clutch onto their petty wealth and sneer at the plight of the masses. California’s Proposition 13 of 1978, the model for this whole movement, froze tax bills for existing owners and made the state less affordable for everyone who came after [13]. The homeowner who fights to withhold their private wealth from the public is simply accumulating capital for their private self—though, of course, I am not saying that we should be advocating for the bourgeois state’s ability to collect taxes. Rather, this is an example of the petit-bourgeoisie struggling with the haute bourgeoisie, and we must reject both sides.
What, then, should be demanded? Engels answered in The Housing Question, in a passage Lenin later singled out in The State and Revolution:
“But one thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real ‘housing shortage’, provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally only occur through the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by the present-day state.” [14]
The premise still holds. The 2020 Census counted 13.7 million vacant homes in the United States [15], against the 771,480 people counted as homeless in 2024. That is to say: the housing exists. It is the property-relation rather than the quantity of houses that prevents adequate housing for the masses. The proletarian housing question is thus not how to make houses cheaper to buy. It is about who owns them, and it can be answered only once the proletariat holds power. So, what should be done? Certainly, we should not go down the route of tenant unions, NGOs, and “community organization”. These are fundamentally liberal organisational forms. Any communist who works within them is practising entryism, and will be summarily expelled when they step out of line. No, a communist must work with a communist political form, that is, the Party-form, and seek the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie by proletarian power. The social question must first be resolved before the housing question. In the short-term, expropriation of property will work to alleviate housing pains. In the long-term, under an economic plan, homelessness will be abolished as it was in previous communist countries, and housing will be unchained from the law of value, built for the needs of the masses, and in line with the greater political line to end the division between country and town, and the overall struggle to end bourgeois right once and for all.
1 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
3 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm; summarised in National Association of Home Builders, “What Are the Differences Between Home Owner and Renter Wealth?”, March 2024, https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/03/differences-in-home-owner-rental-wealth.
4 Fortune, “7 of the 10 most affordable housing markets for Gen Z are in the Midwest”, https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-midwest-housing-markets-affordable/.
5 Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872), Part One, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/.
6 Jason Richardson, Bruce Mitchell and Juan Franco, Shifting Neighborhoods: Gentrification and Cultural Displacement in American Cities (National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2019), https://ncrc.org/gentrification-/.
7 Engels, The Housing Question, Part Two, section III.
8 Atlanta DSA, “History of DSA”, https://atldsa.org/about/history-of-dsa/.
9 Ben Burgis, “With Anti-DSA Bill, Congress Is Red-Baiting Like It’s 1955”, Jacobin, 3 September 2026, https://jacobin.com/2026/09/socialism-congress-resolution-democracy-authoritarianism.
10 Michael Thomas Carter, “Establishment Dems Are Pushing Gentrification, Not Socialists”, Jacobin, 17 January 2026, archived at https://archive.is/20260301045035/https://jacobin.com/2026/01/housing-gentrification-democrats-jeffries-mamdani.
11 Michael Lange, “The Zohran Coalition”, 27 June 2025, https://www.michaellange.nyc/p/the-zohran-coalition; see also “In the Heart of the ‘Commie Corridor’”, The Indypendent, August 2025, https://indypendent.org/2025/08/in-the-heart-of-the-commie-corridor/.
12 Ballotpedia, “Ohio Eliminate and Prohibit Taxes on Real Property Initiative (2026)”, https://ballotpedia.org/Ohio_Eliminate_and_Prohibit_Taxes_on_Real_Property_Initiative_(2026).
13 Annie Lowrey, "The Property Tax Revolution”, The Atlantic, 2026.
14 Engels, The Housing Question (1872), Part One (German edition of 1887, p. 22), as quoted in V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917), chapter 4, section 1, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch04.htm.
15 U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Characteristics: 2020 (2020 Census Brief), https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/census-briefs/c2020br-09.pdf.