You may think society cannot operate with a law such as the one above making squatting legal. If so, I urge you to read this footnote¹ where I explain why society can work perfectly well in accordance with this law.

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But what is the “transitional demand”?

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Even if society could work this way one day, how, you may ask, could we ever transition from the way it is today to this entirely different egalitarian kind of society that isn’t even based on money? What series of transitional laws could ever be enacted that would take us step by step from where we are today to the entirely different egalitarian society? How could such laws ever be passed against the enormous opposition of those—such as big landlords—who want to keep the status quo?

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The answer to these questions requires thinking about how fundamental change has happened in the past.

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Consider the biggest fundamental change that ever occurred in the United States: going from a society in which slavery was 100% legal and was virtually the entire basis of the economy of the South (and indirectly for much of the North as well), to an economy in which slavery was 100% illegal.

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What were the series of transitional laws that changed the United States from being a society in which slavery was 100% legal to one in which slavery was 100% illegal? Can you think of even one such law? No, you cannot, because there were no such laws. One day slavery was 100% legal and the next day it was 100% illegal. One day the slaves were 100% slaves and the next day they were suddenly free—no longer slaves at all. The slaves did not gradually incrementally change from being slaves to being free. No transitioning laws were enacted whatsoever. (Sure, the end of slavery did not mean the end of class inequality. Former slaves and other poor people still were treated like dirt. But that is another story—the story about why we need to abolish class inequality!)

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Obviously the sudden end of slavery required the military defeat of the slave-owning class, accomplished by the Civil War. Fundamental changes in society require the forcible defeat of the class of people who use all the violence or credible threat of violence they can muster to oppose the change.

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And yes, the end of class inequality, which is what the law that makes squatting legal is all about, requires the forcible removal from power of the class of people who will use violence or its credible threat to prevent that fundamental change. Fortunately, the have-nots—egalitarians—can prevail in this contest of force, in the manner I discuss here.

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But, you may ask, what exactly happens the day after the defenders of class inequality are removed from power (like the slave-owners were)? Everything would have been based on money till that day. What happens the next day?

 

Good question!

 

To answer this question let’s see how an egalitarian economy (what I call a ‘sharing economy’ works at the nuts and bolts level, from the point of view of a ‘customer’ (perhaps a former landlord or perhaps a health care worker or a farmer or a person who works in a grocery store, etc.) walking into a store to obtain an item or a service or a home to live in or a college education, etc. (To read about how the sharing economy works at a more general level please read one or more of these articles: “Thinking about Revolution” and “What Replaces the ‘Free Market’ in a Sharing Economy?” and “What Is an Egalitarian Economy”​.)

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To start with, in any given local community the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, by mutual agreement from voluntary federation with local assemblies of other local communities, has joined a sharing economy and items/services from this sharing economy are what is available in the stores of the given local community.

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When the ‘customer’ tells the store worker what he/she would like to have for free, this is what happens.

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The store worker determines if the customer is a member in good standing of the sharing economy. If so, the customer can take for free what he/she wants if it is available. If it’s not available because it is a scarce item then the customer can enter the lottery and write what his/her need is for the item, which is equitably rationed according to need by a method determined by the Local Assembly of Egalitarians (the sovereign authority in the local community, now that the anti-egalitarians have been removed from power).

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If the customer is not a member in good standing of the sharing economy then the customer can only obtain the item or service by bartering for it with the store worker (who acts on behalf of the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, not as the owner of the item/service in question.) Whatever the store receives in barter becomes just another item/service available at the store. If the customer cannot reach a mutual barter agreement, then he/she is just out of luck. (This is one reason most people would prefer to be a member of the sharing economy, which is voluntary.)

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Here’s one way (of course there are other possible ways) that a local community might decide how to verify membership in good standing in the sharing economy.

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• The Local Assembly of Egalitarians creates membership (in the sharing economy) cards periodically, say monthly, with an expiration date.

• It distributes these cards to a designated worker in every economic enterprise (which includes schools whose students are considered to be working in the enterprise and organizations such as hospitals or anything else) that the Local Assembly of Egalitarians deems to be (as an economic enterprise) a member in good standing of the sharing economy (i.e., that the enterprise does something useful in a reasonable manner.)

• The person who receives the membership cards then gives one to each person who works in the economic enterprise (all such people are members in good standing of the sharing economy unless the Local Assembly of Egalitarians says otherwise regarding a specific individual, for example if the person is hogging stuff or doing something in violation of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire.”

• The Local Assembly of Egalitarians would also distribute membership cards to people who do not work in any economic enterprise but whom it believes should be members of the sharing economy, such as people above the retirement age and people who for some reason (mental or physical) cannot do any useful work. (Children, because they are children, do not need a membership card and can have for free what they need or reasonably desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.)

• These membership cards would, like money currency today, be hard to counterfeit (not impossible, but paper currency worked fine for hundreds of years just by being difficult to counterfeit) and of course illegal to counterfeit.

• To make the cards useless for anybody who stole one, the policy could be for the rightful person to sign the card when he/she first receives it. Then when the owner of the card wants to prove to the person working at a store that he/she is the true owner all he/she needs to do is demonstrate that he/she can write an essentially identical signature on a piece of paper. This is how traveller’s checks worked before the days of internationally acceptable credit cards.​

This is not complicated!

A local assembly of egalitarians could get this system up and running pretty fast. However long it took, it would be totally worth whatever the initial inconvenience might be to switch to an egalitarian economy. People who work reasonably according to ability (including those whose reasonable amount of work is zero) would soon have good homes to live in, and good health care, and all sorts of other good things that the rich deny us today, all based on people working reasonably according to ability to make it a good world for each other.​

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By the way, people would be able to own their own home and other private property, as I have written about here.

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But, but, but, but ….How could making squatting legal this way ever work! How could it create the new housing that is needed? How would the landlords get the rental income they need to maintain the housing properly? How would small landlords (owner occupied buildings) get the rental money they need to pay the mortgage? How would developers get paid for the cost of building new homes, and why would they even want to? This is CRAZY!

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OK. OK. Hold your horses and all will be revealed.

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Yes, of course, in a CAPITALIST society such as ours today, a society based on money and buying and selling things and producing things for profit to be sold to those who can afford to pay for them, then YES, making squatting legal would be CRAZY.

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But the egalitarian solution I am proposing is NOT to have a capitalist society, but rather an egalitarian one that is NOT based on money, NOT based on buying and selling things, NOT based on producing things for a profit, NOT providing things only to people who can afford to buy them. This is the kind of society in which those who contribute reasonably according to ability (which includes children and retired people and those going to school and those who for some reason cannot contribute anything, but does NOT include freeloaders who can but refuse to contribute reasonably according to ability) can have—for free!—the housing that they need or reasonably desire.

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In an egalitarian society (read what this is here) EVERYBODY is covered by the economic principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” (What is “reasonable” is decided by the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, as described here.) This egalitarian economy is not based on money at all.

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What this means is that everybody who does important economic work, such as building new homes, maintaining existing homes, and doing all the other things our lives rely on, is “paid” by getting, in exchange for their doing this work, membership in good standing in the sharing economy, described here. This membership in good standing is very valuable; it entitles a person to take for free what they need or reasonably desire. To obtain it is a motive people have for doing all the various kinds of work that needs to be done, including building new homes and maintaining existing ones.

In an egalitarian society with genuine democracy (again, described here), the Local Assembly of Egalitarians decides if new housing needs to be built, and if so, it tells the appropriate people that they will be members in good standing of the sharing economy if they build this new housing. Ditto for maintaining existing housing. And ditto for doing all of the other kinds of work that the egalitarians in the local community want done.

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True, nobody gets RICHER than most other people in an egalitarian society. Landlords who are motivated to get RICH will not like having an egalitarian society in which there are NO RICH AND NO POOR. In fact, there will be no landlords in the sense of people who gain wealth for no reason other than claiming to own a building and having the right to make the people who live in it pay them money. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and the Boston Globe’s John Henry will hate it if we have an egalitarian society.

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But the millions of Americans who want affordable housing would LOVE it. Here are photos of some of them—more than 500 of my zip-code neighbors, each holding a sign that reads “We the People want affordable housing for ALL. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” Online click on a photo and zoom in to read the sign more easily.