#alab All Landlords Are Bastards 🧵

The landlord system is feudalism, it is one of the ugliest facets of capitalism and WE DON'T NEED IT. We as a species, as societies, as communities can do so much better.

Just think of how much money is wasted on paying landlords for literally nothing. They're gatekeepers, they don't do anything at all useful. Yet most people pay half their income on rent. That's not even counting the embodied rent costs of everything else we buy and pay for. How affordable would food, transportation and services be if no one paid landlords?

And the amount of energy it sucks and the emotional toll and psychic damage it does is so enormous. Almost everyone feels helpless and stuck in situations of exploitation or outright abuse but can't escape because they have to earn money to pay rent, or can't break up with their rapist because they can't find/afford a place of their own.

None of this is normal. None of this is sustainable. We won't accept any of it any longer.

#capitalism #AntiCapitalism #anarchy #communism #anarchism #landlords #landlordsAreCausingInflation #landlord_is_not_a_job #NeoFeudalism #RapeCulture

Housing insecurity is a huge bugbear for middle class people, one I am still in the process of wrangling. We are brought up in such a way that the threat of housing insecurity becomes a thought terminating cliché, it is unthinkable, it is THE WORST, it feels like death. To the point that most middle class people can't even consider the notion of paying rent a bit late.

This fear is blown so much out of proportion. It's what gives landlords so much power, because most people are so deeply cowed, even if they don't think capitalism and its ways of dominating land and housing and people is right. They still go along with it, when mass organised rent strikes could be such easy and effective actions. Why obey landlords at all?

#classism #HousingInsecurity #housing #class #landlord_is_not_a_job #landlord #alab #HousingCrisis

EDIT: We found someone! 🥳

After getting kicked out (eviction proceedings have started), the main thing holding my family and me back from finding a place to live is our lack of a landlord's reference, due to our current landlord being a verbally abusive harrasser who likes to exploit POC (me getting angry at that is what started all this and got us kicked out) and the one before that being a literal nazi we had to flee from.

Potential new landlords ask for references and contact details and won't rent to me without that! They already don't like that I'm a foreigner without a Finnish identification number, though luckily I'm an EU citizen. (We don't mention Dion bc he's undocumented.)

Can someone give us a fake reference and pretend to be our landlord for a minute? We'd need:
- a phone number they could call where you'd tell them I was a good renter IF they even call
- a name and address to give the prospective new landlord (this can be fake/made up)
- e-mail optional
- it doesn't matter where you live, our current landlord also doesn't live here in Finland
- I can't think of any possible way to get in trouble for this. It's not like we're asking for a guarantor! (although we're not saying no if someone wants to offer that! 😅)

Please help! We're both survivors of chronic abuse and have NO irl friends or family we can ask for help, at all. We just want a safe place to live so we can continue our antifa stuff, like making music, art, games and writing books in Dion's case and supporting abuse survivors, writing and making zines about trauma and mental health awareness and how to stand up to fascists and abusers in my case.

We also dream of opening up our home to others who need it in the future. We know what it's like to struggle for basic survival in a hostile world and we know how to support others through that, we just need the chance to do so!

#alab #AntiFa #AntiFascism #AntiCapitalism #AntifaAction