Most of us woke up to a day off work this Labor Day. Margaret Miller, 64, Simeon Bihesi, 28, Adrian Collins, 60, and one other elderly gentleman didn’t wake up at all. They were shot dead in their sleep around 5:30 AM on the Chicago Blue Line. All were lacking shelter, each sought refuge on the train. None were spared.
Life for unsheltered people is deliberately enforced hell. Private property rights criminalize their existence in virtually every space. Recent waves of anti-homeless statutes have criminalized homelessness across entire municipalities. When homelessness is criminalized everywhere, the only place left for unsheltered people to go is jail. The Supreme Court of the United States not only recognizes but approves of this state of affairs. This summer, the Court affirmed laws which criminalized sleeping in public spaces. Saddling the unsheltered with fines and criminal records will of course make it harder for an unhoused person to secure housing, but overt fascism can give no breathing room for these basic considerations. The pipeline from unemployment to jail is streamlined like never before.
What’s more, rampant criminalization gives license to those who would commit violence against unhoused people. Criminalization breeds dehumanization. In 2019, Randy Santos murdered four unsheltered people with a pipe as they slept in doorways and sidewalks in New York City. This is a process of dehumanization that comes directly from the bourgeois state. State governments encourage petit-bourgeois residents to see the unsheltered as something other, creatures to be feared, rather than people to be helped.
Unhoused people often shelter on public transportation. This is what Margaret, Simeon, Adrian, and the other elderly person were doing last Sunday night when they boarded Chicago’s Blue Line, one of only two lines that run 24 hours. They bothered no one as they slept peacefully on the dusty train seats. Surveillance footage shows a masked individual executing all four at point blank range shortly before 5:30 AM. They were shot as the train rolled into the Forest Park, Illinois terminal. Margaret was shot in the head and killed instantly. Simeon and the unnamed person died of multiple gunshots. Adrian, who was shot in the abdomen, was rushed to a hospital but did not survive. Police have charged Rhianni Davis, a 30 year old Chicago resident who previously worked as a security guard, with the murders. He was arrested the same morning on another train with a 9mm Glock 43. Investigators claim Davis is a forensic match to the six shell casings found at the scene. There is no established motive.
Capitalism requires the constant generation of a relative surplus population to sustain the law of supply and demand of labor. Homelessness is not a crisis in America, it is a permanent and obligatory byproduct of our economic system. The number of unsheltered spikes during economic recessions. Regularly occurring economic crises are another absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. These crises become more disastrous in tandem with economic development. Capitalist regimes have developed various welfare systems to hamper revolutionary attitudes in times of crisis. Welfare systems are funded with the spoils of imperialist loot taken from oppressed nations, such as the shiploads of oil and natural gas stolen from Iraq and Syria. America’s welfare system has always been a poor cousin to its Western peers, but it faces little pushback from both the labor movement and a collaborationist “communist” party. The recession of 1973-1975 was not treated with the welfare band-aid. Instead, federal housing budgets were slashed, social service agencies were gutted, and the pace of deindustrialization picked up. This led to what is sometimes labeled the modern era of homelessness. Since homelessness has always existed, will always exist, must always exist under capitalism, the defining features of this modern era are increased visibility of the unhoused, abdication of the welfare state facade, and the barbaric labor discipline of anti-homeless laws.
Forest Park Deputy Police Chief Christopher Chin referred to Labor Day’s quadruple homicide as an “isolated incident.” There is nothing isolated about violence and dehumanization of unsheltered people. It all stems from “the bloody legislation against vagabondage” under which the unemployed are “whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labor.” Horrendous attacks like that which occurred last Monday will only increase in occurrence as the empire continues its clay-footed march into fascism. Margaret Miller, Simeon Bihesi, Adrian Collins, and the other gentleman did not deserve to die. It is up to the advanced workers to develop the organizations — with discipline and Marxist-Leninist education — that will defend the unhoused masses from fascist violence.
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