The Housing Monster
Friendofzanetti
“We may call such a monster the ‘beast of property’. It now rules theworld, making mankind miserable, and gains in cruelty and voracitywith the progress of our so-called ‘civilization’. This monster wewill in the following characterize and recommend to extermination.”
Johann Most, cited in The Housing Monster (p.3)
Just as Marx set out to de-mystify the commodity form in the firstchapter in Capital Volume 1, The Housing Monster byprole.info sets out to de-fetishise housing as a commodity form bymeans of an illustrated book. That we have waited so long for such aclear and compelling introduction to this subject says much about theaporias of the productivist Left which has traditionally relegatedreproductive issues, including housing, behind workplaceissues1. The book’s arrival provides an opportunity todiscuss housing in a way that does not merely replicate the dullcompulsions of social democracy, which assumes that distributionalways follows behind production, and thereby implicitly accepts thecapitalist relation in the wage-labour form2. Of course,Marx’s writing is replete with monsters. The ideal workhouse for thecapitalist, he relates, is a “House of Terror”3, andvampires, werewolves and ‘the Furies of private interest’ populateCapital throughout. In the preface to the first edition, hedescribes how Perseus, slayer of monsters in Greek mythology, wore amagic cap so that monsters could not see him, yet in our times, “Wedraw the magic cap down over our own eyes and ears so as to deny thatthere are any monsters”4. This book is an attempt to liftthe cap from over our eyes again – the monsters must be slain!
By necessity there is something universal about our relation tohousing that makes it such a crucial subject. Excepting deepeninghomelessness and destitution5, we live in different typesof houses, but we all live in homes. Thus the opening ‘Foreword’, inthe form of a narrative vignette, tells an everyday tale ofalienation, tiredness and compulsion – commuting and working to pay aconstantly increasing rent. The book is notable for its attention tothe individual forms of stress and estrangement that the vast majorityof us experience on the capital-deficit side of property relations.However, these problems reflect a wider context of subsumption underthe tyranny of rent, and the relation between subjective observationsand wider objective social relations are what gives the book acritical pedagogical form. Like Marx, prole.info takes nothing forgranted in an elaboration of real, material social relations and acertain repetitive turn is concomitant with this approach. Given thenormalisation of extortionate property relations in the presentclimate, however, ‘don’t understand me too quickly!’ could serve asthe book’s coda. The review here thus intends to tease out some of themain arguments with particular reference to the UK context of thehousing crisis.
Part I. The Construction Site
Construction labour, the dirty end of the production of commodities,has all but disappeared from view behind hoardings promising ‘safeconstruction’, and nylon sheets advertising capitalist consumption onscaffolding (often fetishising the finished form of the buildingitself before it has even been built). Meanwhile hymns to ‘immaterial’and ‘affective’ labour’ on the Left sometimes obscure the fact thatworkers are still working and still producing surplus value. The firstsection, ‘The Construction Site’, sets out to rectify this incompleteview, itself embarked upon as a corrective6, by emphasisingthe labour relations of production in the construction phase. Thechapter opens with a quote by Isaak Illich Rubin, a Marxist valuetheorist, who, reclaiming Marx from vulgar political economy, notedthat capitalism was not a science of “the relation of things tothings”, but the relation of “people to people in the process ofproduction” (p.10). Like Marx, Rubin assumes that labour is the basicelement of human society, and he emphasises Marx’s theory of fetishismas the basis of Marx’s critique of the economic system, and his theoryof value7. This simple, yet often mystified, materialistanalysis forms the core of the book, challenging the arbitrary ‘value’of the home as commodity. That prole.info performs the difficult taskof deconstructing value-form theory in the popular form of ahighly-readable illustrated book – freely available to download8– is highly commendable. The book approaches the housing commodity ina clear, straightforward manner that both demystifies the ‘socialhieroglyphic’ of housing as a commodity, and suggests a form ofcritique that is widely applicable – though rarely applied with thesame lucidity as found here9. This is no doubt down to thedeployment of the graphic form, with a series of excellentillustrations complementing the economic use of text.
As The Situationist International used to say, capitalism isseparation perfected10, and for prole.info “the biggestobstacle” (p.27) to forming political groups which develop their owncollectivity is the division of labour. The construction site is theshared workplace of different types of workers with different types ofbosses, and with different work schedules. Specialised subcontracting,which separates activity even more, means that collectivesocialisation across these different roles is difficult (pp.23-28).These divisions are also overlaid with cultural differences such asclass, race and gender. Divide and rule, as ever, is both the methodand outcome of surplus value extraction. The pressure to build housesfor profit means that the work process is constantly beingintensified11. De-skilling means that employees need lesstraining, get paid less, and are easier to replace. A familiar tale ofalienation and erosion of autonomy then, but as prole.info usefullypoints out, rote tasks are less evident on the construction site thanelsewhere (in factory production, telesales, cashier work, etc).Limits to growth, due to the durability of existing buildings, andland costs, means that there is an incentive to build small andquickly, and the need to create at least the appearance of choice indesign for the consumer market means that production is rarelycompletely standardised over a large amount of units. This means thatworkers on construction sites have a certain degree of autonomy intheir work, which must be performed with a certain degree of skill(p.35).
The book makes clear that workers’ interests (to work less for moremoney) are diametrically opposed to the bosses’ (more profit for lessoutlay). This antagonism is the foundation for solidarity, and theinversionof socialised separation is posited as the formation of workers groupsamidst a range of different collective tactics including theft,skiving, mutual support, and playfulness (p.28, p.42). While theseobservations counter a typical Left narrative of woe and alienationfor workers – finding instead moments of craft pride, relativeautonomy and banter in a kind of workers ‘history-from-below’ – theysit contradictorily (as may be expected) with the hierarchies anddivisions so convincingly evinced as “the biggest obstacle” to mutualsolidarity elsewhere in the text. Prole.info acknowledges the extentof specialisation and separation in the work process, but continues todeploy the collective “we” (as a means of designating ‘the workers’)in a way that is sometimes problematic. Divisions within theworking class are most evident between skilled and ‘non-skilled’workers (apprentices, agency workers and casual or ‘illegal’labourers). Talking of “we” in this context tends to flatten out veryreal differences – in much the same way that the ‘we are the 99%’slogan of the Occupy movement, or Hardt and Negri’s concept of ‘themultitude’ does. Perhaps the problem is the assertion of this “we”anecdotally, without adequate evidence of the forms it takes inorganisation. Maybe this is deliberate: the book works very well as anabstract depiction around the relations of production and reproductionin housing, and ‘templates’ for radical activity were generallyscorned as ahistorical by Marx for instance. However, the deploymentof some kind of ‘workers’ enquiry’12 into the conditionsand experiences of construction site workers would have been useful,as a means to counter the sometimes god-like character of thenarration, and as a means to actively engage the workers as subjectsof research and action.
As Marx noted long ago, the development of the division of labour forthe enhanced extraction of surplus value takes, as its necessarycorollary, a “purely despotic” form through an enhanced regime ofsupervision13, and the book clearly expresses the everydaycontradictions between workers and management. While construction workis not regulated by an assembly line, the drive for profits ensuresthat the pace of work is constantly being monitored and sped up bybosses. Piece work, a form of performance related pay, is just one wayin which labour is enjoined to accelerate, at other times the methodsare more crude and disciplinary:
“The fewer breaks we take, the faster we work, the more work we getdone in a day, the more surplus value the company squeezes out of us.The faster we work, the more likely we are to have accidents or to getrepetitive injuries. The harder we work, the more work is likely toeat up our free time. When we get home from work we’ll be too tired todo anything but take a shower. The less time we spend talking to ourco-workers, the more boring the work is. We push in the exact oppositedirection as the company. We’re constantly trying to slow down thepace of work as much as possible” (p.40).
Time and work-discipline are not trans-historical as the historianE.P. Thompson noted. ‘Saint Monday’ (a day for avoiding work) was‘honoured’ by workers almost universally in the 18th,19th and 20th centuries, with Tuesdays sometimesthrown in too. Even in 1967 it was still apparently kept by “a fewcoopers in Burton-on-Trent”14. The drive to increase worktime and intensity is always being met with an opposing force thatseeks to reclaim lived time from work time. The Glasgow dock workers,for instance, mobilised a collective slow-down with the innovative ‘cacanny’ movement in 1889. Returning strikers (funds exhausted)replicated the slower and inefficient labour practices of importedscab labour as a means to re-assert the worth of their skilled labour.With profits affected, the ‘ca canny’ action got the wage increasethat the dockers had failed to get by striking. The strike-breakerscould neither work as fast or as safely as the long-term dockers andthus the balance of forces had shifted towards theirreturn15. This “balance of forces” is the territory that isconstantly disputed in prole.info’s account of the contradictionsbetween labour and bosses on the construction site. The book does notneglect the smaller details. Even though work is harder to come by,most people are still compelled to be there, and all the littlemethods – skiving, talking gibberish, singing, mimicry, pranks – bywhich the day is made less boring are evoked with a degree ofsolidarity and understanding that is often absent from sociologicalaccounts of labour practice. However, as John Holloway argues, thetransformation of the struggle against time at work to a struggleabout time at work has rarely been elucidated. The struggleover the length and intensity of the working day is crucial, but weshould not forget that this struggle is inseparable from theimposition of capitalist labour. When we represent ourselves asworkers we tacitly accept the capitalist wage labourrelation16.
While acknowledging the need to find an exit from capitalism, the‘Blue Collar Blues’ chapter re-affirms the compulsion we face to dragour hides to work for sale: “We have to spend our time working forsomeone else to be able to exist on our time. We both need and hatework” (p.55). This basic antinomy – the need to accept waged work atone level, even if we may violently reject it in principle – creates asituation whereby we resign ourselves to our identification asworkers: ‘the working class’. From a Left point of view, one of themore interesting discussions in the book is over ‘working-class’identity. As prole.info notes, ‘working class’ in the context ofcapitalist relations can soon become a stereotype of itself, definedinternally as a sign of ‘authenticity’, and externally as asociological category defined by income and lifestyle choices that canbe marketed to and pandered to by politicians. But escaping from this‘role’ is not as easy as changing ‘lifestyle’ options, a notion whichprole.info describes as the “the ideology of the wage labourer whocan’t imagine any way out of wage labor” (p.57). It is notworking-class pride or a sense of identity that keeps workers working,but the class relationships within capitalism where we are reproducedas ‘workers’ (and non-workers) on a daily basis. Wage labour andsurplus value are the foundation of capitalist relations. Waving theflag for ‘the working-class’ sometimes obscures the need to escapefrom the wage labour relation in order to exit our designated roles(pp.50-59). The object of the everyday struggles prole.info depicts isclear: “We are not just the working class; we are the working classthat struggles to do away with work and class, and the society builtaround them”17.
Part II. The Neighbourhood
Part II of the book looks at capital flows in land and property andtheir impacts on labour, ownership, class and gender. Credit isessential to the flow of capital in construction, allowing investorsto keep their capital in constant circulation, and avoidingdevaluation through under-use. The loan capital of banks is based oninterest. Unlike value derived from exploiting labour, this capital isfictitious, based on future claims to wealth generated from the loansit distributes. Crucially, the credit is predicated on continualgrowth, but as repeated cyclical downturns and the ‘sub-prime’mortgage crisis has shown – with its defaults, ‘delinquencies’ andforeclosures – the miracle of continual growth always turns out to bea fallacy. Repayments are never guaranteed: “When the crash inevitablecomes, last year’s (or last week’s) confidence looks like stupidity.Prices that had built-in assumptions of a profitable future pop ordeflate like balloons” (p.65). Here, ‘fictitious capital’ disappearsor becomes ‘toxic’ (if it wasn’t already), businesses can’t sell theircommodities (houses in this case), and capital loses its liquidity(essential to its functioning), getting ‘stored up’ in unsold housesthat become subject to devaluation and decay.
For an analysis that emphasises labour processes,The Housing Monster could say more about the role ofoff-shoring in production. Graham Turner18, in his analysisof the roots of the housing bubble, argues that the credit bubble wasthe direct result of companies moving jobs abroad for cheaper labourand the maximisation of profits, leading to the reduction of consumerspending in the UK through unemployment and a more ‘competitive’ jobmarket. The rise in debt was the flipside to jobs being lost to theEast: property inflation was a “necessary stimulus” for economicgrowth in the West, with cheap interest rates and easy creditfostering “money illusion” and “property mania”; a short term, myopicbid for growth. Debt was the major factor in the housing bubble. Nowonder that the UK government publicly understated the importance ofthe housing market to the economy: the economy was supported by recordlevels of borrowing, and the spectres of chronic debt deflation andnegative equity haunt our debt-ridden homes. A recentShelter report19 suggests that almost seven millionpeople in the UK are relying on “unsustainable” credit withextortionate interest rates to help pay their housing costs, includingpayday loans, unauthorised overdrafts, other loans or credit cards.According to Credit Action20, the average household debt(including mortgages) in January 2012 was £55,988, and the averageamount owed per UK adult around 122% of average earnings. Every 15minutes a household is repossessed. Every 4 minutes someone is madebankrupt or insolvent. As Michael Hudson argues, mortgage loans, byfar the biggest form of debt, are increasingly a form of peonage; a“new road to serfdom”21.
But while prole.info may neglect the links between financialisationand property, there is a thorough analysis of land ownership and therentier economy. As David Harvey explains, land is a uniquenon-fungible resource which cannot, as a rule, be produced or builtanew: there is a limited supply and it already hasowners22. This is what Mark Twain meant when he said, “Buyland, they’re not making it any more” (cited, p.68). Withoutcontributing to ‘development’ the landowner can profit off otherdevelopments such as a new train station or a large ‘regeneration’project, as with the multiple land-grabs via the London Olympics 2012and Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 201423. As prole.info putsit, landowners are in the position “to charge us a fee for the rightto live on earth” (p.72). For Michael Hudson, the important categoryis economic rent, “which is the profit one earns simply byowning something”; an “unearned increment”, which to the financier orcapitalist is, “earned in their sleep”24. But the ‘right torents’ in the rentier economy depends on the type and location of theland. Claims to future rents are predicated on the use of that land.Zoning laws are introduced to separate out land uses for effectiveplanning, but these are constantly under threat as developersmanipulate planning as an adjunct of economic development. Landspeculators are not concerned with the most useful use of land, butthe most profitable, and they actively intervene in the process ofdevelopment through a phalanx of opaque quasi-autonomous bodies thatsupposedly form the public interest in regeneration projects and urbanplanning in general (pp.68-73)25.
Changes in the urban landscape are not natural processes. The economicboom in the US after the World War II, for instance, was heavilystate-supported. The G.I. bill subsidised home ownership by giving outloans to veterans with no down payment necessary (p.91). This was, ineffect, a debt-financing strategy that helped derail public housing,prioritise private home ownership and individualism, and stimulate thecommodity-economy26. The economic boom sustained demand forhousing and allowed for the expansion of huge development firms.‘Levittown’, for instance, a symbol of post-war US suburbia, was thefiefdom of William Levitt, the ‘King of Suburbia’, who ran both adevelopment firm and a construction company, utilising standardisationand prefabrication methods which allowed him to build the first modelmass-produced suburb (p.75). This is the type of American landscapewhich Theodore Adorno might have meant when he said it was, “as ifno-one had ever passed their hands over the landscape’shair”27. Costs of machinery and labour were reducedmassively through Fordist production methods, enabling theconstruction of a homogenised landscape of tens of thousands of homes.‘Dumping’ money into urban infrastructural projects is one way inwhich capital attempts to resolve its frequent crises. David Harvey,has written of Robert Moses, the urban planner, who updatedHausmannisation for the post-WWII US context, by embarking on a hugeprocess of debt-financed suburbanisation as a means to resolve acapital surplus problem arising from the economic crisis of the1930’s28.
Land speculation is even more profitable than construction and thedevelopers’ main interest is in making sure the value of the landrises. Gentrification is one of the chief mechanisms for thisrevaluation. Transport links make an area attractive to affluentincomers and often serve to separate an area from poorerneighbourhoods nearby, while state subsidies make the area morealluring for developers. Increased investment creates a vicious spiralof higher rents, higher house prices and higher taxes, all of whichprice out poorer people in the neighbourhood, changing its characterand making it more acceptable for higher band tax payers. With hugeamounts of money to be made, state intervention and policing assistthe process – often violently. As prole.info notes: “Quick,speculative development is an obvious attack on us” (p.78). Urbantheorists like Neil Smith and Rachel Weber have pointed out the roleof disinvestment, defamation and stigmatisation in creating theconditions for wholesale makeovers of urban areas, and prole.infoinsists that the decay and development of neighbourhoods are, “bothautomatic market processes and the result of conscious action bydevelopers and city planners” (p.79). This is not a rational processfrom a social point of view, but it is from an economic one: whateveruse value we might want to make of urban space, exchange valuedominates as the privileged motor of social change under capitalistrelations.
The housing market and the labour market are inextricably interlinked:‘Levittown’ is only an extreme example of a ‘company town’; every townis really a company town (p.95)29. Without property we areforced to sell our labour power on the market to those who alreadyhave property and capital. We make just enough to reproduce ourselvesas workers for the next day, covering all our essential costs such ashousing, energy, transport costs and food. We need housing to survive,to reproduce ourselves, and the need to keep up rent and mortgagepayments keeps us going back to work every day – because landownershave the right to charge us money for a place to live (p.81). Thetendency of the labour market is to push down wages; the tendency ofthe property market is to push up the cost of housing. We get squeezedin between. Rent rises, de-regulation, overcrowding, fewer repairs,damp housing have been our lot, except when sustained pressure frombelow has resulted in gains. While the traditional Left has tended toemphasise struggles in production over wages as opposed toreproductive struggles over everyday living conditions, capitalistshave understood that higher house and rent prices lower the real valueof our wages. Inflation is just as effective a means to subdue theworker as strike-breaking, and Heinrich Zille, who as an illustratorportrayed the desperate overcrowding of the ‘tenement barracks’ inBerlin in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, is quoted judiciously here: “You can kill a man with anapartment just as easily as with an axe” (p.80). With little or nopublic or social housing available, the market for private letting andhome-buying has escalated out of control. The ludicrous house-buildingbooms in Spain and Ireland are exemplary cases. What is notable hereis that neither country has a tradition of public housing, meaningthat housing production has been completely dominated by a privatesector that acted like the boom would never end. Now that the crashhas come, whole ‘ghost estates’ lie empty (as of January 2012, 400,000properties lay vacant in the Republic of Ireland alone30),negative equity is rampant and construction workers are maderedundant, not because there is nothing to do, but because capitalcannot do it profitably.
Good public housing is anathema according to the capitalist imperativeof growth – “Accumulate, Accumulate! That is Moses and theprophets!”31 The disinvestment and defamation of publichousing has been no accident: public housing, without the interventionof strong left-wing movement32, is meant to be shit –private property depends on it (p.93). The landlord is a capitalist.Exchange-value will always trump use-value in the class relationshipbetween the landlord and the renter. As Thatcher understood, promotinga ‘property owning-democracy’ (an aspirational working class) throughthe ‘right-to-buy’ scheme in council housing was an important link indeveloping class cleavages and divisions and tying a new group ofatomised consumer citizens more thoroughly into capitalist relations.Home-ownership is tied up with respectability, individualism andhierarchy. By owning a house, we largely relate to it asexchange-value rather than use-value, becoming our own landlords(p.92), and scanning the housing market ourselves for (now vastlydiminished) profitable opportunities. But how much respectability isthere in owning your own home when, as Michael Hudson argues, in theodd logic of the real estate bubble, debt has come to equal wealth? Inthe UK the bait on ‘the new road to serfdom’ was low interest rates,access to subsidised public housing (a one-off fire sale) and easycredit. While some got in on the property ladder and made money, thetrap for most is a lifetime of work to pay off debt on an assetrapidly dwindling in value33.
As prole.info argues, the terrain of reproduction (housing, health,social services, transport, leisure) is as significant as the terrainof the workplace in challenging capitalist relations. This argumentwas hammered home by the Italian autonomous feminist movement in theearly 1970s through key figures such as Selma James, Maria Dalla Costaand Leopaldi Fortunati, but these different terrains suggest differentproblems of organisation. The workplace has traditionally been builton co-operation. As Marx noted, this created the possibility of “a newproductive power, which is intrinsically a collective one”34– although this tremendous potential power has more often beenharnessed for the production of surplus value within an elaboratedivision of labour. In housing, especially when the working-class hasbeen weak, the tendency is towards separation and privacy, creating anin-built set of divisions and hierarchies to overcome (p.84). While atwork, on the bosses’ time, it may be possible to squeeze something outof ‘their time’, at home after work, we’re on ‘our own time’, facingtiredness and other threats to our already diminished leisure time. Onthe other hand, prole.info argues, neighbourhood struggles overhousing or community services help break down the atomisation ofcommunities and create the potential for new modes of face-to-facecommunication over direct needs (p.85). As the urban theorist HenriLefebvre has argued, when it comes to alienation, there really is nosubstitute for participation.35
Part III. Pushing, Pulling, Breaking
“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the waythey are.”
Bertold Brecht, cited in The Housing Monster (p.108)
As prole.info notes, it is not always possible to tell when real gainsor losses have been made, a ‘defeat’ can be demoralising, but it canalso lead to reorganisation and regrouping. For what may be considereda radical ultra-left perspective, in terms of a fundamental critiqueof capital, prole.info is careful not to succumb to the hoary olddichotomy of reform versus revolution. In the balance of forces thatmakes up the capitalist relation, unified militant action can extractreal concessions, yet ‘victory’ can easily be mediated by top-downunion bureaucracies whose unity is decidedly self-interested. Thismuch we know. The push for reforms is partly about achieving gains butmust also be about developing strength from the bottom-up, andrevealing the contradictions and the shifting terrain ofinterconnected forms of capitalist social relationships. The demandfor ‘more public housing!’ – a necessity given the acute shortage ofavailable public housing – is only one aspect of the struggle: whatabout the location of these houses; their insulation; their interiorspatial arrangement; connections to the city, town, countryside;transport and amenities? The question is qualitative as well asquantitative.
Yet beyond the problems of the ‘numbers game’ played by previousadministrations who have sought to control unrest in times of crisisthrough the provision of mass public housing, there is clearly a needfor a more universal provision of affordable public housing. Theprivatisation of housing epitomises the separation and atomisation ofindividuals inherent to the capitalist system, and various earlyexperiments in collective living incorporated, in some cases,integrated collective kitchens, gardens, laundries, sport facilities,libraries, day care, schools, etc. These experiments collectivisedhousework and freed up women to participate in other activities – forthis they were routinely demonised and denounced as ungodly anddangerously socialist (p.117-118). This reaction may point tocollectivised living as a model for living outside capital relation –the threat of good example – but self-management of housing does notfree it from capitalist relations, even if it might mitigate some ofthe worst aspects of those relations for small groups ofpeople36. As prole.info points out, where collective livinghas really taken off en masse is when governments have beenpressurised by strong movements with a commitment to public housing.Marx made clear the problem of co-ops and mutual forms of organisationthat concerned themselves more with the distribution of resourcesrather than their mode of production37, and this questioncannot be elided in the housing problem: “Detached from a militantworkers movement, collective housing easily becomes a marginalizedcommodity” (p.118).
While the workers’ movement, mediated by the trades unions, hastraditionally relegated reproduction in favour of production issues,it is no surprise that lifestyle experiments in collective living arestill explored, even if they are ever more subject to the constraintsof the market38. However, prole.info cites the US practiceof Union ‘hiring halls’ as one reform, whereby employment is mediatedthough the unions rather than a direct capital-labour relation,meaning that: “The amount of crap we have to take from asshole bossesis greatly reduced” (p.122). This would seem to compare favourablywith the casual employment agencies that operate in the UK context,yet the hiring halls also perform the function of “labor brokerages” –mediating agents who tend to accede to membership concerns, reifycraft separation, and control militant and disruptive workers with thethreat of exclusion from work (p.123). Gilles Deleuze asserted that‘recognition’ is the lowest form of philosophy, and the need forlegitimation that the unions crave – both from the workers and thebosses – puts them in a position of compromise whose negotiatingposition can be summarised as the guarantee of a workforce that’sready to work (p.124). For instance, Ken Loach’s ‘Days of Hope’(1975), written by Jim Allen, shows precisely how the UK Labour Partyand the Trade Union Council (TUC) were willing to sacrifice workers tothe pyramids of accumulation in the General Strike of 1926, in orderto maintain legitimacy at parliamentary level (to the scorn of eventhe Conservatives)39. Unions have failed to escapecommodification themselves, and routinely take part in managingcapitalist relations, and undermining rank and file struggle. Asprole.info argues, at a time of intense struggle, the need to gobeyond the control of the union quickly makes itself felt (p.125).
State mediation and support is a normative function of the ‘freemarket’: a wealth of subsidies, guarantees, zoning laws and exemptionsprop up the housing market (p.127). The state has only had an interestin controlling rents when they rose to a level that required anunacceptably amplified demand on wages, but these concessions weretypically nominal, partial and inadequate. What is required to lowerrents, as has been proven time and time again, is a major “threat frombelow”, and prole.info discusses the rent strikes of New York andGlasgow in the 1910s and early 1920s that led to rent control andtenant protection in the first example, and, eventually, thebeginnings of government funded public housing on a large scale in thesecond example (p.127-128). While this legislation was passed toprevent the further development of tenants’ movements, theymust be seen as a real gain from below. Rent control on a large scalelimits profitability in the housing commodity and leads todisinvestment by private capital, forcing state intervention as ameans to stave off a housing shortage crisis (ibid).
Yet, as a measure forced on the ruling class, state housing has oftenbeen constructed as an inferior complement to private housing – withnotable exceptions at points of organisational strength – serving toremind a precarious class of where they might end up. The decimationand ghettoisation of the UK’s public housing stock over the past 30years is apposite. To compete with private housing, historically theregenerally needed to be a serious crisis, and a very strongworking-class movement (p.129). Moreover, access to cheap land tobuild on is essential; a need that has been increasingly undermined byland speculation and continual rounds of primitive accumulation andenclosure. The re-appropriation of public wealth – a wealth generatedby labour after all – in the form of subsidies for housing is a realmaterial gain, but is considered expensive by government and thereforealways prone to cuts. This is why there is a need for constantagitation by independent tenants and residents groups to both protectprevious gains and demand more gains in the present. Of course, statehousing is only a concession wrung from the capitalist system. Housingremains a commodity, but the most brutal aspects are in this wayattenuated, and more people, at least, can reclaim more lived time(p.130).
While the kind of Keynesian economic solution that has traditionallysecured public housing may seem tempting, in a historical digressionprole.info warns against an over-identification with this solution tothe housing problem. In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, thecentral plan guaranteed a continuous source of demand for housingwithin Soviet state productivism. Large governmental capital outlayand prefabricated mass production techniques brought the cost ofhousing down massively with workers often paying less than 5% of theirincome towards it (p.135). Workers received a large part of theirwages in a socialised form through free healthcare, education,transport and housing, but this didn’t preclude the wage-labourrelation, which was subject to the same Taylorist/Fordist principlesthat dominated the US-American production system40.Experiments in collective living took place within this context ofproductivist ideology and capitalist development: “Social life wasbeing radically reorganized but the changes were more the result ofbuilding modern capitalist society than of dismantling it” (p.p137).Keynesianism, as Negri has reminded us, was a solution toworking-class antagonism within the capitalistrelation41. In the Soviet case, as elsewhere, as long asthe value form was left intact social gains would be under attackthrough competition and the restless need of capital to expand andflow: thus the needs of the workers were increasingly squeezed out bythe “needs of the economy” (p.138).
The tension between the need to create immediate gains through theexisting system, while at the same time understanding thenecessity to move beyond inherently contradictory anddestructive capitalist relations, is carefully navigated in the book.By locating these wider contradictions within everyday socialrelations from the starting point of a seemingly simple object, thehome, ‘the housing problem’ is not just posed as a question forwell-meaning reformers, but as a central problematic in our everydayexistence.
Getting Rid Of Monsters?
By emphasising actual social relations between people, prole.info goessome way to undermining the “magic and necromancy” that surrounds theproduction of housing as a commodity42. Getting rid ofmonsters involves unmasking the social relations that produce them anddissolving pseudo-critiques of capital for more fundamental ones: “Allthe critiques of immoral businessmen or the attempts to set up ethicalbusinesses do not make value flow through the economy according toethical rules. Clichéd criticism of capitalism only works to makecriticism of capitalism into a cliché” (p.141). By explainingcapitalism only through its worst aspects we risk conjuring monsterseverywhere, creating a binary between our own actions and a fetishisedworld ‘out there’. The basic capitalist relationships reinforcemonstrous relationships: in a commodity economy, everything costsmoney; we have to buy what we need to subsist. In order to buy what weneed, without capital or property, all we have to sell is our abilityto work (p.144-145). We might make our own housing, but we do not makeit as we please; we do not make it under self-selected circumstances,but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted fromthe past. The solutions we seek are immanent to the capitalistrelations we want to exit:
“This is not about comparing the present to an imaginary classless,moneyless future and finding it lacking […] It’s about developingour everyday struggles to the point where we’re in a position to breakcapitalist social relationships once and for all. We need decisiveideas and elegant actions” (p.146)
The substance of these “decisive ideas and elegant actions” is notmade clear beyond the need for a critique of capitalist relationstout court, and an emphasis on reproductive relations longsubdued in Left discourse. But with the cap pulled from over the eyes,there is at least the possibility of addressing our real materialrelations. This was the core of Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everydaylife’, first elaborated in the 1940s; the ‘dead gestures’ of organisedreligion, and the Surrealist ‘theme of the marvellous’ were seen asmystifying ideas that demoted everyday life and served to obfuscateits potential greatness43. In the late 1960s, interrogatingnew modes of capitalist production, Lefebvre speculated thaturbanisation was beginning to supplant industrialisation in advancedcapitalist economies:
“…capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve)its internal contradictions for a century, and consequently, in thehundred years since the writing of Capital, it has succeeded inachieving ‘growth’. We cannot calculate at what price, but we do knowthe means: by occupying space, by producing a space.”44
Despite resistance to this thesis, his central idea that we have“passed from the production of things in space to the production ofspace itself”, seems less fanciful when considered in relation to theurban roots of the financial crisis, and the obvious links betweencapitalist accumulation and the production of urbanspace45. The housing bubble, as Graham Turner argues, wasthe direct result of capital’s accelerated flight to Eastern economiesin the 1970s for access to cheap labour. To retain consumption levelsin the so-called advanced capitalist economies – increasingly withoutjobs and with a yawning wage gap – it was necessary to create liquidwealth through debt (cheap credit). The housing bubble, in both the USand the UK, was the necessary component of the incessant drive toexpand profits through the exploitation of a global labourforce46. The huge capital surplus generated by the simpleexpedience of not paying the price of labour greatly assisted theexpansion of the credit system, which Marx had described inCapital, as “a new and terrible weapon in the battle ofcompetition”47. Enormous wealth differentials,financialisation on a vastly increased scale and the expansion of the‘rentier economy’ ran in parallel with these processes48.Important differences between countries and continents suggests theneed for caution regarding this thesis, but the link between propertybubbles, capitalist crisis and social reproduction suggests arequirement to focus on a politics of space as a key terrain ofanti-capitalist struggle. Cities have become more than ever “theultimate of exchange”49 since Lefebvre’s time, and the“beast of property” that Johann Most recommended for exterminationwon’t disappear by merely pulling the cap down over our eyes again.It’s about time, as Lefebvre advocated, that the urban realm, withhousing foregrounded as a universal category, became an explicit locusof political organising alongside the workplace.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and James, Selma,The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community:
2 Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program skewered this socialdemocratic fallacy decisively in 1875:www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
3 Marx, Karl, Capital Volume 1, Penguin Books, pp.388.
4 Marx, Karl, Preface, ibid, pp.91-92.
5 In England, homelessness applications are up 18% this year, InLondon 36%:
6 For a good critical overview of these discussions within theautonomous Marxist tradition, see:
7 Rubin, Issak Illich, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Aakarbooks, 2008
9 Prole.info is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. See forinstance, ‘Abolish Restaurants: A Workers Critique of the FoodIndustry’, Ibid. See also, Wu Ming, ‘Fetishism of Digital Commoditiesand Hidden Exploitation: The Cases of Amazon and Apple’:www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=1895
10 Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994.Available at Situationist International Online:www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/tsots00.html
11 Broadly speaking, Marx described this process of intensification asthe extraction of ‘absolute’ surplus value (extending and intensifyingthe hours of work) and ‘relative’ surplus value (increasingproductivity by mechanization and rationalization).
12 See, for instance, Emery, Ed, No Politics Without Enquiry,Available at:www.wildcat-www.de/en/material/cs18inqu.htm
13 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, Penguin Books, p.450
14 Thompson, E.P, ‘Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’,Past and Present, Number 38, pp.73-74. Available as PDF at:
15http://libcom.org/history/1889-glasgow-dockers-go-slow
16 Holloway, John, Crack Capitalism, Pluto Press, p.227. For agood summary version of the main themes in the book, see, Holloway,John, ‘Cracks and the Crisis of Abstract Labour’, Antipode:
17www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=Prole
18 Turner, Graham,The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the WorldwideEconomic Crisis, Pluto Press, 2008
19
20
21 Hudson, Michael, ‘The New Road to Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide tothe Coming Real Estate Collapse’:
22 For a detailed examination of how land monopoly has played out inGlasgow via Harvey, see:www.variant.org.uk/37_38texts/13RentTyranny.html
23
24 Hudson, Michael, ‘From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions ofFictitious Capital’:
25 Swyngedouw et al give an excellent account of these structuralprocesses, albeit with little attention to resistance, in Swyngedouet al, ‘Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large-Scale UrbanDevelopment Projects and the New Urban Policy’, in,Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America andWestern Europe, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p.201-209
26 See Gonzalez, Maya, ‘Notes on the New Housing Question: HomeOwnership, Credit and Reproduction in the US Post-war Economy’,Endnotes, # 2, April, 2010: Misery and the Value Form:http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/3
27 Adorno, Theodore, ‘Paysage’ in Minima Moralia, p.48
28 Harvey, David, The Enigma of Capital, Profile Books, p.169
29 See Stuart Hodkinson’s excellent critique of neoliberal urbanism inLeeds: ‘From Popular Capitalism to Third-Way Modernisation: the Caseof Leeds’, in Glynn, Sarah, ed,Where the Other Half Lives: Lower-income Housing in a NeoliberalWorld, Pluto Press, 2009
30
31 Marx, Karl, Capital, Chapter 24, ‘The Transformation ofSurplus Value into Capital’, Penguin, p.742
32 For examples of radical progressive public housing, see, Hatherley,Owen, Militant Modernism, Zero Books, 2009
33 Hudson, Michael, ‘The New Road to Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide tothe Coming Real Estate Collapse’:
34 Ibid., Chapter 13, ‘Co-operation’, p.443
35 Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, Verso,p.237
36 This problematic is raised in co-housing and mutual home-ownershipschemes. For a current model, see:www.lilac.coop/
37www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
38 Two social centres in Glasgow, for instance, have been closed downin recent years, in part because the rent was simply too much tocover.
39www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/467647/index.html
40 Guy Debord describes the Bolshevik Party as “a substitute rulingclass for the market economy”. Further, “when the bureaucracy attemptsto demonstrate its superiority on capitalism’s own ground, it isexposed as capitalism’s poor cousin”.The Society of the Spectacle, p.73, p.79
41 Negri,Antonio, Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State: 1929 as aFundamental Moment for a Periodisation of the Modern State:http://libcom.org/files/negri_keynes.pdf
42 For Marx, the commodity was “a very strange thing, abounding inmetaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. At once a materialobject (such as a table), and also a commodity, it “evolves out of itswooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were tobegin dancing of its own free will”, Marx, Karl, Capital Volume1, Penguin Books, p.165
43 Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, Verso,p.237
44 Lefebvre, Henri, The Survival of Capitalism, Motive series,Allison & Busby, 1976, p.21
45 See, for instance, ‘The Geography of it All’ chapter in,The Enigma of Capital, Profile Books, 2010, pp.140-183
46 Turner, Graham,The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the WorldwideEconomic Crisis, Pluto Press, 2008.
47 Marx, Karl, Capital, Chapter 24, ‘The General Law ofAccumulation’, Penguin, pp.777-778
48 Hudson, Michael, ‘From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions ofFictitious Capital’:
49 Lefebvre, Henri, The Urban Revolution, Minnesota Press,p.154