12 Tees for Arguing With Your Landlord
Rent went up again. Somebody on television explained that this is what happens when the market finds its level, and the market has been finding its level for about fifteen years now.
These twelve designs are for the argument. Each one comes with a fact that is more useful than a slogan, because the slogan is already on the shirt.
1. Housing is a Human Right
Vienna settled this a century ago. After 1918 the city started building housing as public infrastructure and never stopped, and today roughly sixty percent of Viennese live in municipal or subsidised homes. Karl-Marx-Hof, finished in 1930, is still the longest single residential building on earth, more than a kilometre of apartments running the length of four tram stops. None of it is utopian. It is a policy that has simply been running for a hundred years while everywhere else argued about whether it could work.
The Housing is a Human Right tee.
2. Tax the Rich
The top hat and monocle came from a real person's caricature and then got softened into a board-game mascot, which is the most efficient summary of how this argument goes. The design puts the mascot back where he started.
The Tax the Rich tee.
3. Capitalism is a Death Cult
A conveyor belt, a queue of identical figures, and a hole at the end of it. There is no fact to attach here because there is no historical distance. This one is just the org chart drawn honestly.
The Death Cult tee.
4. Wage Against the Machine
In December 2009 a couple named Jon and Tracy Morter ran a Facebook campaign asking Britain to buy a seventeen-year-old Rage Against the Machine single instead of that year's X Factor winner. "Killing in the Name" took Christmas number one, roughly 500,000 sales against 450,000, and the band gave its proceeds to Shelter, the housing charity. A song about refusing to do what you are told, bought half a million times in a week, because people were told to.
The Wage Against the Machine tee.
5. Mikhail Bakunin
He lost the institutional fight and won the longer one. At the 1872 Hague Congress Marx had him expelled from the First International, then moved the General Council to New York, and the organisation withered and formally dissolved four years later. Bakunin's warning, that a state seized in the name of workers would still be a state, took until the following century to be tested. There is a longer note on him.
The Mikhail Bakunin tee.
6. Marx My Words
He finished one volume. Das Kapital volume one appeared in 1867 and the rest was notebooks when he died in 1883, so Engels spent eleven years assembling volumes two and three out of a dead man's handwriting. Most of the century's most cited economic work is, structurally, an editing job.
The Marx My Words tee.
7. Emma Goldman
She never said the famous line about dancing. What she wrote was longer, better and less printable on a tote bag, and the paraphrase has outlived the original by a century. Deported from the United States in 1919, she reached the Soviet Union, looked at it closely, and published a book called My Disillusionment in Russia two years later, which cost her most of her allies. There is a longer note on the quote.
The Emma Goldman tee.
8. Rosa Luxemburg
She spent most of the First World War in prison for opposing it, and wrote the argument that made her name from inside. Her line about freedom always being the freedom of the one who thinks differently was aimed at her own side, not the other one, which is why it still gets quoted at people who would rather it did not.
The Rosa Luxemburg tee.
9. Antonio Gramsci
The prosecutor at his 1928 trial asked the court to stop his brain from functioning for twenty years. Gramsci then wrote thirty-three notebooks in prison, and after his death his sister-in-law got to the room before the police did and moved them abroad in a Soviet diplomatic pouch. The state got the twenty years and lost the argument anyway.
The Antonio Gramsci tee.
10. Frantz Fanon
Martinique-born, French-trained psychiatrist, and the man who wrote the clearest account of what colonisation does to the coloniser as well as the colonised. He worked in an Algerian hospital treating both torturers and their victims, which is the biographical detail that explains the books better than any summary of them.
The Frantz Fanon tee.
11. Nothing to Lose But Your Blockchains
The joke writes itself and then keeps writing itself annually. A raised fist, a broken chain of blocks, and one of the great closing lines of political writing repurposed for an asset class that promised liberation and delivered a fee structure.
The Nothing to Lose But Your Blockchains tee.
12. La Beauté est dans la Rue
Paris, May 1968. Art students at the École des Beaux-Arts took over the print workshop and turned out protest posters by the thousand, unsigned, uncredited, produced overnight and pasted up by morning. Beauty is in the street. It was a poster before it was a phrase, and it was free before it was famous.
The La Beauté est dans la Rue tee.
None of this wins the argument with your landlord. It does mean you are wearing a citation while you have it.
