October 10 is World Homeless Day! Continue to fight imperialist aggression and evictions!

October marks Habitant month. However much of the discourse surrounding shelter centers on supposed technocratic innovations of cities and public-private partnerships. These are the very concepts that imperialist powers use to pursue evictions globally.

The International League of People’s Struggles Commission 18 is a global network of anti-imperialist organizations and individuals struggling for the rights of the homeless and internally displaced.

Commission 18 calls for a continued resistance this month against imperialist backed aggression. To truly defend our homes and communities, we must band together in collective struggle against the reactionaries who try to tear down our dwellings through various means so that they may extract super-profits.

Globally, the New Urban Agenda signed in 2016, remains the popular framework for shelter-related policy making. This common understanding of the housing situation leaves out critical aspects of the reality for most displaced peoples, namely that widespread evictions are happening under the false banner of development.

Imperialist countries, through their excessive drive for export capital, look to take over communities and their spaces to erect commercial establishments. They use their puppet and subordinate governments to enact measures that allow the entry of foreign capital in urban development schemes. Not even the pandemic was enough to stop this trend. And now with most of the world returning to its normal operations, evictions in the name of capital have further intensified.

In recent times, we’ve seen moves by the government in Tanzania to evict poor communities to give way for wildlife tourism as part of the continuing influence of American and European imperialism. In Palestine, settlements face eviction operations by Israeli military forces in a bid to terrorize the residents. In the Philippines, aggressive infrastructure expansion continues to fuel violent demolitions nationwide.

The ILPS Commission 18 believes that the best way to mark Habitat month and the World Homeless Day is to demonstrate the massive resistance that the throngs of homeless and displaced can generate. The poor are powerful, especially in the face of imperialist paper tigers. The toiling masses demand safe and liveable communities where the rights to shelter, jobs, livelihood and a freedom from exploitation is upheld.

As the global superpowers find more and more creative ways to displace ordinary people, so too must the oppressed look to more militant and creative forms of struggle.

We join all alliances, organizations around the world in the call to resist imperialist-backed aggression in communities and salute all mass actions seeking to safeguard communities worldwide. ###