A Libertarian Socialist Program to Intervene in the Housing Movement

We deeply disagree with those organizations that believe a political program is merely a collection of maximalist aspirations due to their inability to establish real communication with broad sectors of the population. We also distance ourselves from those collectives that simply adopt reformist demands without attempting to contribute anything to the struggles of the working class.

A Revolutionary Organization must take the real demands of struggles and make contributions that support their development toward more combative goals, pointing to the capitalist system, advocating for self-organization processes, and defending the strategic autonomy of the class.

A Political Program of a Revolutionary Organization must be an ideological compass for its militants and a tactical tool for political struggle. Among the announced demands, there will be proposals aimed at revealing structural issues of this system, highlighting threats to the movement such as diversions and cooptations, promoting the consolidation of the most solid organizational forms, overcoming the sectorialization of demands, building class consciousness, and providing strategic vision.

Autonomy is not an abstract concept that can be separated from the construction of the working class and the struggle to defend its interests.

1 — Criticism of the productive model and the outsourcing of the economy and the subjugation of public institutions to speculators and exploiters. Reorganization of the productive system to serve the interests of the working class as a whole, ensuring its material autonomy and rational production with resources and ecological balance, avoiding unsustainable growth dynamics that prioritize the profits of a few over everything else.

2 — Regulation of the housing and rental market, prioritizing the right to decent housing over market interests.

• Linking housing prices to wages.

• Market control mechanisms by institutions of the working class.

• Creation of a social housing stock through uncompensated expropriation of large holders and speculators.

• Territorial reordering and urban planning with an ecological and class perspective. Transportation, accessibility, and mobility.

3 — Decriminalization of protest. Repeal of gag and repressive laws. Resolution and restoration of penalized individuals for fighting. End of police infiltrations.

4 — Immediate halt to evictions until relocation in social housing, considering rootedness, material, and cultural issues.

5 — Stop eviction processes and ban eviction companies. Destigmatization of squatting. Remove squatting as a criminal offense.

Against the securitarian discourse and social alarm generated by media controlled by large corporations aligned with the interests of capitalists and speculators, portraying squatters as lazy, delinquent, and violent. Propaganda campaigns deliberately conceal that many squatters are families without resources, vulnerable people, or collectives creating social spaces. Moreover, under the term “squatting,” the media lump together unrelated situations such as families unable to pay rent or mortgage and being evicted, tenants in arrears due to real estate abuse, or even people scammed by fraudulent contracts with no other housing options. This media narrative aims to justify state repression and reinforce the idea that private property of housing is an absolute and untouchable right, even above human life.

This social panic spread by the media is no coincidence; it is a capitalist propaganda strategy based on instilling fear to justify more repressive laws that cut workers’ rights in housing and reinforce the interests of large landlords and investment funds. Squatting, although not the solution to the working class’s problems, is a legitimate option in a system that prioritizes the profit of a few over the dignity of the majority. We must fight to remove squatting from the Penal Code. As argued, squatting, in most cases, is not a violent crime but a conflict related to property rights. Its inclusion in the Penal Code leads to disproportionate punishments, including prison sentences.

At the same time, it is imperative to fight against eviction companies presented by mainstream media as a legitimate solution to a social problem, which serves to whitewash the Far Right and Fascism. But we must not settle for denouncing the reactionaries. As clarified, these companies are made up of speculators and businessmen, and their ranks include politicians from major parties.

6 — Radical combat against reformism, both institutional and that of trade union and social movement bureaucracies.

The capitalist system and the bourgeois state at its service generate a whole set of tools to dissipate class conflict, diverting or reintegrating it. Reformist parties, negotiation unions, and various mediation bodies are promoted to perform this task.

But bureaucracy is not only a phenomenon imposed from above but also a structural product of the capitalist system and class division. They emerge as mediation mechanisms between the base and power structures, consolidating a “professionalized” layer that monopolizes representation and dilutes class autonomy. Bureaucracies develop interests tied to those of the ruling classes.

Bureaucracies act as containment apparatuses of class struggle: they channel discontent into limited reforms, demobilize direct action, divide and sectorialize struggles, and neutralize radicalism in favor of partial gains.

For Graeber, revolutionary movements depend on the ability to imagine the unthinkable (such as a society without a State or capitalism), something bureaucracy blocks by prioritizing “practicality,” stifling political creativity by reducing solutions to what is “possible” within the system.

But trade union bureaucracy is not the only bureaucratization phenomenon that develops in class conflicts; social movements also generate their own bureaucrats. These structures, less formal than those of unions or parties, favor the emergence as bureaucrats of the most “prepared” figures (usually from the most privileged sectors of the struggle).

In recent years, we have seen both the proliferation of media figures performing this bureaucratization and usurpation function of various movements and their integration into state structures, neo-reformist parties, NGOs, or media. These agents represent only themselves and justify their spokesperson status in the movements based on their qualifications, forming a full-fledged technobureaucracy. Like trade union bureaucracies, they develop interests incompatible with those of the working class as a whole, making them a calming agent of struggles.

Part of this activity has been carried out under the logic of sectorializing struggles and denying class conflict. This has meant prioritizing identity, sectoral, or partial demands without questioning economic exploitation, thus concealing capitalist structures.

The fight against bureaucracies:

• Promote direct action (without intermediaries), in broad spaces with the involvement of different currents and radical democracy; horizontal assemblies, revocable mandates, and democratic methods of selecting positions.

• The goal is to establish workers’ assemblies consolidated into class structures with revolutionary projects capable of overcoming the limits imposed by union and social movement bureaucracies and exposing their practices and positions.

• Publicly denounce bureaucratic practices, exposing their role and the organizations they belong to.

• Support anti-bureaucratic revolts within unions and movements with a factional perspective.

7 — Regulation of energy and utilities. De-commodification of basic energy supplies under control of workers’ institutions.

Access to basic supplies such as electricity, water, or heating should not be a privilege subject to market rules but a right for all people, in a system that commodifies basic needs. Lack of access and market liberalization of these services by the State serve to reinforce job precariousness and dependence on insufficient wages to cover even the most basic needs.

Therefore, it is necessary to guarantee universal access to supplies, prioritizing social welfare over private profit.

To achieve this, we propose:

• Supply control: Intervention of services. Expropriation of energy companies to be managed by workers’ institutions, ensuring democratization of supplies and acceptance of service and employment conditions.

• Regulated prices: Establish accessible rates based on equity and social justice. We propose a format with income-based tables allowing unified billing (electricity+water/gas+electricity+water). These tables should also consider certain incomes (like non-contributory pensions, minimum vital income, or other subsidies) that support what are currently called “social bonuses,” “thermal bonuses,” etc., which would be excluded from billing.

• Protection against supply cuts: Ban on disconnections due to non-payment, especially in households where income and other social factors are linked to the non-payment. Similarly, exception periods will be established during crises, and characteristics increasing vulnerability will be considered, such as people dependent on electricity for medical treatments.

• Democratic participation and control: Community management, through cooperatives or local entities, ensuring that decisions respond to population needs. For example, in the Madrid neighborhood of Orcasitas, 2,276 families have heating service for less than €40/month following this model. Community energy, with local energy generation projects, such as solar panels or rainwater collection systems, to reduce dependence on large companies.

8 — Decriminalization of migration and regularization of migrants. Creating second-class or irregular citizens produces conditions for the most brutal exploitation. In the social housing issue, this irregularity opens the door to even greater speculation, subjecting the most vulnerable to subhuman living conditions.

9 — Decent housing, reduction of overcrowding, housing health conditions, and access to public services. The right to life is the right to the city and to total management.

10 — Progress toward integral class unionism, capable of integrating the working class as a whole. One that takes the demands of workers along with retirees, students, and irregular-status individuals. That integrates all facets of working-class life into self-organization and struggle structures. Equipping itself with tools that enable qualitative and quantitative growth in the struggles for housing, defense and expansion of democratic rights, and defense of public services against speculation and privatization. We advocate for total unionism as comprehensive self-organization structures of the class and grassroots unionism as methodologies for its expansion against coordination and loosely federated struggle strategies or “unions” under vertical control.