ZSP Statement on Popular Control of Public Housing

On March 9, ZSP sections in Warsaw and Wroclaw, along with tenants groups, will tell politicians and public administrators to get lost!

PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE!

DOWN WITH THE POLITICIANS AND BUREAUCRATS!

POPULAR CONTROL IMMEDIATELY!

Związek Syndykalistów Polski declares that the public housing authorities, in acting against the interest of tenants for the benefit of the corrupt bureaucratic apparatus, for the benefit of landlords and property speculators, are enemy entities which need to be abolished. The answer is not in replacing them with a new set of bureaucrats as the system of unchecked power is bound to always produce more or less the same results.

Tenants! It is time to take control of our own fates!

The problem we all face was well-illustrated in an example given at a recent public meeting in Praga Polnoc. One tenant explained how she and her neighbours, fed up with living in a house with a crumbling and disgusting entrance, proposed that they take some money out of their rent and fix the entrance themselves. The bureaucrats said no but did nothing to repair the problems. Thus the relation is that the administration takes money and does nothing. All tenants know that, if they could decide things, a lot more would be done to keep houses in good repair, instead of putting money into the pockets of useless bureaucrats or their friends and families who earn money off overcharging for different contracts.

Tenants, it is time to put an end to this system! It is time to put the people responsible for our everyday misery out of a job!

While thousands of us are living without heat, in crumbling flats which might collapse on us, with mold all over, crowded into slums, the administration wastes public money and turned public housing into ruins. Their only plan is a diabolic one of nearly eliminating public housing, privatizing it, evicting the elderly and poor, pushing them into the margins. They are destroying the lives of thousands of people! Are we going to stand by and let them do this, are we going to wait, as individuals until it is our turn to be thrown out before we cry out: enough! Our will we unite with our neighbours and take things into our own hands?

ZSP declares that it does not recognize the legitimacy of the bureaucrats to decide and calls for the creation of popular control of public housing. On March 9 we will confront the authorities and reach out again to the people with this message.

We also declare that we will help any person who needs housing to find an empty flat or building and call on people to squat these places. In upcoming weeks we will take action to realize such plans in a couple of flats and we will act decisively against any attempts to remove or harass those who have occupied these wasted spaces.

TENANTS UNITE IN STRUGGLE! HOUSING IS A RIGHT, NOT A COMMODITY!