What are the essential tasks of communists today? Ober weighs in.
A Necessary Correction
Comrade Fox Luces’ well-intentioned letter “Abolish it how?” makes a number of serious errors that require correction lest they lead themselves or others astray. These corrections are made in good faith, recognising the appeal of alternative forms of organisation and individualised consciousness-raising which have held great sway among the Western left in the post-war period.
The author’s central answer on what to do about the state is to abolish it. To be frank, this is nothing more than idealism. This impatience with the natural course of historical development, while understandable, immediately marks the comrade’s letter as anarchistic rather than Marxist. It treats abolition as a strategic slogan rather than a long-term historical process tied to the withering away of the state after class abolition as described by Marx.
Indeed, the bourgeois state cannot simply be taken over. It must be smashed. But it cannot be abolished overnight so long as class antagonisms persist. A proletarian state must be constructed in its place to suppress the bourgeoisie and reorganise production.
Comrade Luces correctly identifies the need to engage with the concrete reality of our situation but then makes no substantial attempt to do so. Leaping ahead instead to a number of idealistic forms of charitable prefigurations – food programs, community gardens and the like – which do not fundamentally address the core contradictions at the heart of class struggle here in Australia.
How do we establish concrete reality? Under scientific socialism, there are two ways: through the ruthless study of history and the close and unromanticised examination of our current political circumstances. This is the basis of historical and dialectical materialism.
What do we learn from history? First, alternative forms of political or economic power which present a genuine threat to capitalism cannot be consolidated or sustained without the seizure of state power.
The comrade invokes the Black Panthers, an organisation sabotaged, murdered and brutally crushed by the state apparatus. It is important to understand that the Black Panthers were a Marxist-Leninist party. They appreciated better than any that social programs were not the same thing as socialism. Instead, they targeted their work at the very bleeding edge of class struggle in the black community in the form of armed resistance against the poverty and criminalisation imposed by the violent and racist police state.
The Panthers did not understand their breakfast programs as prefigurative alternatives to the state but as instruments for political education, means of contact with the masses, recruitment mechanisms and the basis for revolutionary organisation. It was this close interface with working people along with the Panthers’ materialist analysis of the key contradictions facing the black working class in the United States that made them a deadly threat to capitalism. These survival programs were not an end but a means subordinate to a revolutionary party line.
Spontaneous local initiatives may be valuable but without an overarching and centralised strategy they remain fragmentary, economistic and easily dispersed. How does this activity translate into challenging capitalist power? Without that bridge, such forms of prefiguration risk becoming permanent subcultures rather than an actual revolutionary transition.
As Marxists and dialectical materialists, the Panthers’ form of political praxis was specific and particular to their precise political circumstances. It was this dialectical connection between theory and praxis which developed their understanding of the actual concrete conditions and made them such an effective threat to the bourgeois state, not their breakfast program. But employing a similar methodology to our own concrete reality here in Australia in 2026 we discover things are not so simple as replicating the approach of others in different times and contexts.
So then, what of the second part of establishing our concrete reality: the close and unromantic examination of our current conditions? What do the current class and economic conditions in Australia tell us about how to deploy our finite time and resources most effectively?
The Housing Question in Australia
How do we begin to fight back against our domestic capitalist ruling class when classical sites of proletarian concentration and struggle, such as workplace organisations, are catastrophically weakened? If we are serious about conducting an examination of Australian capitalism, we must identify not the most morally outrageous injustice, but the contradictions which most decisively structures workers reproduction and class rule.1
In his pamphlet The Housing Question, Engels describes the endemic commodity relationship of housing as a downstream of capitalist relations of production. Without the abolition of the capitalist mode of production itself, any reformist victories in the sphere of housing alone will only result in wage reductions or stagnation, neutralising any gains. The ultimate aim must be the overthrow of capitalism.
But Engels was writing at a time where the housing supply lagged woefully behind developing capitalist production. With the subsequent financialisation and consolidation of Australian housing into fewer hands and the systemic failures of capitalist policy and production to supply sufficient affordable housing, we find ourselves on the other side of the housing wave at which Engels wrote, however with the prospective trend of worsening rather than improving access and affordability.
While Engels rejects the idea that commodity price struggles alone could overturn capitalism, this does not mean that he, along with Marx, did not recognise that such struggles could prove potentially pivotal under certain conditions. As Marx notes, “the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer”, highlighting the centrality of access to essential commodities in shaping social stability. Just as food shortages in Tsarist Russia or the price of grain in pre-revolutionary France were not the key contradiction in class relations in those countries, the housing question in modern Australia can be structurally secondary to the central contradiction at the heart of the capitalist mode of production but nevertheless politically explosive.2
The exponential growth of rental prices and the expansion of household debt to levels unheard of in Engels’ time, along with interest rates and stagflation in an age of repeated economic crises, all have implications for the Australian working class. These conditions are alien to 19th century Europe, where the proportion of housing costs as a share of income was actually lower than the extractive housing model of contemporary Australian capitalism.
When we speak of the housing question in Australia today, we are not referring to a marginal social grievance but to one of the central pillars of Australian capitalism. Housing services alone – actual and imputed rent – account for nearly one-fifth of nominal GDP and a quarter of Australia’s total employment.3 This makes housing the largest single service category in the national accounts, larger than many individual industry sectors. When residential construction, real estate services and mortgage intermediation are included, the broader property sector plausibly touches a whole third of total economic activity in the country.4 This excludes still capital gains on land and housing, which, though not counted in GDP, periodically amounts to wealth revaluations on a scale comparable with annual economic growth itself.
In contemporary Australia, housing is not only a site of consumption but a core mechanism of accumulation, credit expansion and labour discipline. Any serious analysis of class power that treats housing as peripheral fails to grasp the current structure of the Australian economy. The absolute need for exponential economic growth creates a central and widening crisis that capitalism cannot address without severely damaging its own economic base; an insoluble contradiction which represents an historic opportunity for any revolutionary movement.
To be clear, I do not propose supplanting the key class contradiction between labour and capital with the housing question but rather to supplement it. The housing crisis is a consequence of the failures of capitalist production, not its root. Housing struggle does not replace workplace struggle and surplus value extraction still remains principally rooted in production. However, Australian workplace fragmentation has placed limits on traditional forms of struggle. Casualised and dispersed, union density is low and union leadership has been largely integrated into state arbitration mechanisms. Classical workplace concentrations, which underpinned earlier models of mass struggle, have been deliberately and strategically weakened.
Housing, by contrast, is firmly demarcated and geographically rooted. It concentrates people in place. It produces shared material conditions within buildings, streets and suburbs. It creates immediate and visible antagonisms between tenants and landlords, debtors and banks, communities and developers. It is far more difficult to casualise or offshore the need for shelter. In contemporary Australia, housing is the most accessible contradiction through which we can reconstitute broader class struggle.
In previous industrial phases, labour discipline was enforced primarily at the point of production. Today, it is enforced as much through the household balance sheet as on the factory floor. Financialised housing and the rising cost of living has shifted key mechanisms of class control and wealth extraction from the public workplace to the private sphere of reproduction. It has become a mechanism through which labour is disciplined, stratified and politically neutralised. Housing mediates wage reproduction directly. Rent inflation and mortgage debt absorbs wage gains. In other words, housing is where the wage relation is most concretely experienced. Workers feel exploitation at the point of production abstractly, but at the point of housing concretely.
This does not mean production ceases to matter. It means the architecture of labour control has evolved to become more sophisticated from the time of Marx and Engels, in ways they themselves would recognise as the inevitable result of accumulation and consolidation by the capitalist class.
While the housing question offers a potentially promising territory for class re-composition, it also creates significant dangers. Right-wing forces are explicitly using resentment around housing and immigration as recruitment tools, framing migrants as responsible for systemic economic problems, diverting anger away from banks, landlords, developers and tax policy toward racialised scapegoats. This is not accidental but the classic strategy of dividing the working class by substituting national and racial antagonism for class antagonism. This is a material expression of how reactionary politics exploits real grievances to protect capitalist accumulation. Where the Australian left fails to provide an explanation, reaction will supply the myth.
But the housing struggle must escalate beyond appeals for regulatory reform. It must make visible the fact that property rights are enforced by state power. When police defend evictions, when governments subsidise investors, when planning regimes protect speculation and corrupt developers, the class character of the state becomes concrete rather than theoretical. The task is not to confine ourselves to policy tinkering but to use the housing struggle as a tool and school of class struggle. Tenant organising, rent strikes, coordinated eviction resistance and confrontation with speculative development are not an end in themselves but mechanisms for rebuilding collective confidence with clearly defined and attainable conditions of success, exposing the unity of banks, developers and the state, demonstrating in practice that collective action can yield tangible results while training a cadre capable of linking rent extraction to wage suppression, mortgage debt to labour discipline and property inflation to financialisation of the economy.
From this firm terrain, workplace organisation can be revitalised and extended. The aim is not to replace labour politics with tenant politics, but to use the most accessible contradiction of our moment to regenerate broader class consciousness, organisations and antagonisms with the dual peripheral benefit of freeing workers from fear of financial retribution when engaging in workplace struggle and neutralising false and destructive narratives propagated by the far right.
We cannot simply leap to mass action when the material basis for such action has been eroded. But neither can we retreat into charitable prefigurations detached from power. Housing offers us a bridge: a contradiction rooted in accumulation, visible in everyday life, and capable of escalating the masses into direct confrontation with finance capital and the state.
If we are to begin somewhere, let it be where capital is most nakedly exposed, where millions already feel the pressure, where popular support is most likely and where collective action can transform unaddressed grievance into organisation.
Partyism versus Actionism: A False Dichotomy
Australian housing costs are among the highest in the developed world. According to research conducted in July 2025, 50% of Australian renters live in homes in need of repairs, one in ten needing urgent repairs. Almost a third of rental homes have pests such as cockroaches and ants. One in four have leaks or flooding and one in five have issues with hot water and bathroom mould. Most damning of all, 70% of tenants report fearing asking for repairs will lead to harsh reprisals like rent increases, eviction and blacklisting.
The issue of climate change plays a factor here too. Due to lax construction standards, the vast majority of Australian homes are insufficiently insulated for summer and winter, making them unfit for living. Only thirty-five percent of rentals are estimated to have air-conditioners, now becoming an increasing necessity for survival. Another study found that 70 percent of renters avoid heating or cooling their homes to save money.6
Despite these numerous problems rents have surged a staggering 47% in the past five years alone. Housing costs were, by far, the largest contributor to annual inflation, rising 6.8% in January 2026 alone according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Millions are estimated to be in rental stress or at risk of homelessness. Meanwhile, public spending on tax concessions for property investors outstrips expenditure on social housing and homelessness services. These negative effects are most keenly felt by women and Indigenous Australians. With no restraint in sight, this trend can only possibly continue to the point of crisis. This is a rich and largely untapped terrain for class struggle.
But it is certainly a simple matter to demand a revolutionary communist movement engage in praxis around housing. We must also recognise that the communist movement in Australia is small and fractured, making mounting substantive structural action on housing unviable. Initial action around this issue must, by mere practical necessity, be restricted to a small canvas.
Rather than prefiguring a party program around which communists might unite, an effective revolutionary communist movement must sharpen the credibility, appeal and correctness of its program through praxis. Communist organisations should seek to unite around vanguard initiatives in places where housing pressures and exploitations are high. Through engagement with and leadership of working class struggles, communists can develop broader proofs of concept on tactics of effective organisation and resistance, developing scalable programs informed by actual, rather than theoretical, interface with the working class. This is the symbiotic and dialectal relationship between the development of correct theory and effective practice. Without one you cannot have the other. This is fundamental to Marxism.
The weakness of small numbers can only be addressed through efficacy of action and high-quality cadre development. Abundant and transparent property data, made necessary by the extreme commodification of housing, makes the analysis and coordination of targeted strategies around housing more attainable for a limited cadre than the sphere of labour and capital where relations have been purposefully abstracted, fragmented and obscured. Such vanguard initiatives will be the transmission belts between a revolutionary party and the masses, energised by community solidarity and immediate worker self-interest, creating organic pathways for recruitment and proletarianisation of a communist organisation. We must identify and train motivated working-class revolutionaries who can recognise and describe the national and global flow of capital and the state as a repressive apparatus for banks, real estate capital and other ruling class interests.
While such campaigns will no doubt generate popular appeal, we must be careful to avoid populist simplifications. Housing does not always produce a clean proletariat versus bourgeoisie divide. Many workers are homeowners. Others are tied to property markets through superannuation. These layers occupy contradictory class positions. Struggle itself will determine which strata align openly with capital and which can be neutralised or won.
In a fragmented labour market, we must organise workers where they live to bring them back to where they work, ensuring the party line is always present: our goal isn’t merely clean and affordable housing, it is to pedagogically demonstrate through practice that such a goal is ultimately impossible under the repressive economic regime of Australian capitalism and that, therefore, this mode of production, not the state, must be immediately abolished.
This proposed shift in the focus of the finite energy and resources of Australian left will require difficult conversations around the current priorities and effectiveness of traditional forms of leftist praxis: namely, are the struggles of the Australian working class, the principal and most immediate concern of a serious and effectual Australian communist movement, being addressed through centralised, sporadic and frequently dissipated street protest movements without clear or obtainable demands or concrete victory conditions? In what sense is the desire to be seen responding to global injustice supplanting the actual need to engage in class struggle which tangibly challenges the loci of capitalist power and exploitation right here in Australia? A cold and objective assessment of the repeated defeats of the Australian left this century provides an unwelcome but necessary answer.
Let us be clear: there can be no more substantive act of solidarity with the global proletariat than direct confrontation with and the overthrow of the racist, warmongering Australian ruling class. That, as Australian communists, must be our true and firm aim, devoid of righteousness or sentimentality.
In the interest of brevity, too late perhaps, I leave this for comrades to debate within their respective organisations.
References
1. Engels, F. (1872) The Housing Question. London.
2. Marx, K. (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. London (Chapter 6).
3. Property Council of Australia (2024) Economic significance of the property industry to the Australian economy. July 2024.
4. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (latest year) Australian System of National Accounts (Cat. no. 5204.0). Canberra: ABS.
5. Martin, C., Hartley, C. and Pawson, H. (2025) Rights at risk: rising rents and repercussions: the experience of renting in Australia. Sydney: Australian Council of Social Service and UNSW Sydney. (https://shelter.org.au/rights-at-risk-rising-rents-and-repercussions/)
6. Energy Consumers Australia (2023) Consumer energy report card: understanding and measuring energy hardship in Australia. Sydney: Energy Consumers Australia. (https://energyconsumersaustralia.com.au/our-work/surveys/consumer-energy-report-card-understanding-measuring-energy-hardship-australia)
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