Funny how the environmental objectives of the “Save the Planet from the Flying Global Warming Monster” squad and that of Marxism line up so neatly.
Of course, you shouldn’t have personal autonomy or private property. It’s bad for the ‘planet’. And by the planet, we mean the red planet.
So it’s no surprise that The Nation, where the synergy of the red and the green meet, should roll out a story like this, “If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership.”
Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property.
To engage with these challenges, we need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies. We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes.
And embrace a discredited 19th-century ideology instead. And give up on dreams of independence and private property. Instead, we can all live in barracks or gulags.
Won’t that be fun?
Expansionist, individualist, and exclusionary patterns of housing became synonymous with freedom and self-sufficiency.
Not became. Are.
Private property as freedom and self-sufficiency isn’t New Deal brainwashing, as The Nation insists, it’s human nature.
Cheap energy is untenable in the face of climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned.
To the gulags, go!
That’s the meaning of every single sentence in every single leftist global warming policy proposal. Sometimes you don’t even need to read between the lines.
But don’t worry. When the revolution comes, the Nation nomenklatura will have mansions. Until they’re purged.
There are other options, in theory: Rental housing serves many cities around the world well
Yes. Not having a home you can actually call your own is great.
There is also the potential for new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing. In New York City, cooperative apartment buildings have long been a norm.
If you don’t want a backyard or personal space. If you want to hear every argument upstairs.
If we can reframe debates about the future of cities beyond rote acceptance of property ownership
And rote acceptance of individual freedoms that will have to be set aside for the duration of the emergency.
We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.
Go to the collective farms, the gulags, and to slavery. For the planet.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
