CREDIT: classnrace
By Oakland Basic Needs Electoral Committee (OBNEC)
The current war on residents of Oakland, CA, is serving as a test case for the consolidation of fascist power in cities all across the US. Its goal is to increase corporate profits by displacing more and more low-income and working-class residents, and crushing the political influence of those who remain.
It is bipartisan, including overtly MAGA elements as well as fascists inside the Democratic Party. It began with the billionaire-funded recalls in 2024 of the former Mayor and the progressive DA Pamela Price. Oakland residents fought back when they elected a supporter of workers’ rights, Mayor Barbara Lee, over the corporate-backed candidate, Loren Taylor.
Then in August, Oakland was openly threatened and targeted by President Trump during his press conference announcing the takeover of Washington, DC. “We’re not gonna allow a military occupation of the city,” responded Mayor Lee. “That’s what this president wants to do…This is part of his effort to dismantle democracy!” The Trump playbook is taken from the South, where red state legislatures have been stripping democracy step by step from Democratic-led cities like Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans, Houston, and Atlanta. The ruling class is increasingly turning to corporate dictatorship to control a population that capitalism cannot feed, house, educate, or provide health care to. Its aim is to get rid of the “nuisance” of electoral democracy and keep the resistance afraid and divided. White supremacy is their weapon of choice to divide and conqueror.
RESISTANCE, THEN TRANSFORMATION
The question in Oakland and other cities is: which way forward for the working class, especially the Black, immigrant, and other dispossessed workers? The people are not passive. The lie that Black elected officials are unable to control crime or deliver city services has been challenged by Oakland’s Care 4 Community (C4C) neighborhood organizing group ever since 2022. Oakland workers are organizing for real change. Groups from the homeless encampments are building visionary alternatives: self-governed shelters, housing cooperatives rooted in dignity, not charity, and community land trusts
Alameda County is entering a critical new phase in the fight against homelessness. The recent release of over $1.8 billion in Measure W funds for homelessness solutions marks a significant victory. But alongside this opportunity comes heightened danger: a renewed offensive by the ruling class to define the terms, limit the scope, and ultimately depoliticize this movement for housing justice. The history is that every luxury and market rate high rise project gets approved and built, while projects to permanently house our dispossessed, unhoused neighbors stay locked in red tape for years. Behind the talk of “solutions” and “services” lies the deeper conflict over power.
Alameda County is facing the same war on workers as other cities—the effort to keep power in monied hands, rather than in the hands of the people directly impacted. Who will sit on the Measure W oversight committee is up for grabs. Will it be grassroots organizations like The Black Solutions Lab, Care 4 Community Action, and Wood Street Commons, who want community-driven models, or will it be career bureaucrats and disconnected nonprofits more interested in maintaining funding than solving the crisis? This isn’t just about better services—it is about building power for the people and transforming systems. Workers are fighting for immediate implementation of Measure W including:
- System-wide reforms—move beyond service-level fixes toward structural change.
- A public list of vacant or underutilized buildings, to identify spaces that can house displaced individuals in the areas where encampments are located, to keep our unhoused neighbors in the community.
- Support community land trusts, co-ops, and sweat equity models to empower residents and resist commodification.
- Temporarily halt enforcement against vehicle dwellers, and provide designated safe areas for parking and living.
In Alameda County, extremely low-Income families of four earn less than $46,700 annually. The median rent for a family of four is $2,761. A family would have to earn $110,480 a year to pay rent equal to 30 percent of their income. While the minimum wage is $17.46, full time workers would have to make $53.12 to be able to afford median rent. This is an extremely heavy weight causing struggles for working families.
The housing crisis in Alameda County, like everywhere else, is about systems that fail working families and “legal” corporate crimes that destroy our community, such as conspiring to raise housing prices and organized eviction campaigns. The 30 percent affordability rule, used by HUD and housing advocates to define safe rent thresholds, is meaningless when wages lag so far behind market realities. Just as in New York’s Mamdani campaign, affordability is the issue that workers are rallying around.
CLASS UNITY
We are in a struggle over values and visions. On one side is corporate managerial approach that sees unhoused people as problems to be managed, and public funds as better spent on more “deserving” people. On the other side is a transformative vision that sees housing as a human right, and unhoused people as leaders in designing their own futures. Ruling class ideas are already seeping into the public discussions—like limiting shelter funding to facilities that meet narrow bed-count criteria, or increasing per-bed payments without questioning the structure of service delivery itself. These frameworks depoliticize the crisis and block innovative, community-led responses.
But ideas that serve the political class unity necessary to defeat fascism are also emerging. Groups supporting different aspects of working-class agendas are realizing that they have to emerge from their silos. Unity and mutual support advance all our interconnected issues: the fight for basic needs, the fight to reclaim public land for public good, the call for city-and county-wide shelter policy reform, and the demand for a grievance and compliance department that works for the people, not just the bureaucracy. ACCE is providing an example by blending the needs of tenants’ rights with immigration rights. Indivisible Hands Off and No Kings rallies are helping to defend democracy. That kind of understanding – that they are making war on all of us and we need to unite – that will lead to victory!
