Since the start of the pandemic-induced shutdowns, the housing terrain has exploded with organized political activity. Be it from state-mandated shutdowns, or from poor economic conditions, millions of workers have found themselves without their usual wages. Of course, many workers are also tenants, and landlords have not ceased demanding high rents despite the ongoing economic turbulence. This has produced a series of system-wide tensions around housing in general and with the tenant-landlord relation in particular. In other words, the crisis has thrown light onto previously obfuscated fault lines that run directly through the housing terrain. To understand this crisis, we have to also understand the way in which housing is integrated into the circuits of capitalist accumulation. This class focuses on housing in these two ways: first, as a site of struggle, and second as an element of the wider mechanics of capitalist accumulation.
Priority Reading & Viewing:
- Chapter from In Defense of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse
- Please read Chapter 1: “Against the Commodification of Housing”
- Summary: In this chapter, Marcuse and Madden go over the basic condition of housing under capitalism: commodification. Commodification, a concept borrowed from Marx’s capital, is a process distinctive to capitalist society. A commodity has a use value and an exchange value. Housing has an obvious use value—the fact that workers must reproduce themselves. However the exchange value of a home—which takes the form of rent for tenants and a mortgage loan for homeowners—is elevated in capitalist society. Production and distribution of housing are centered on exchange value rather than use values, and this chapter describes how this happens and why we must organize against it.
- Gentrification is a Feature, Not a Bug of Capitalist Urban Planning – Samuel Stein – Jacobin
- Summary: Urban planners, under capitalism, face extreme contradictions that force them to decide between the wants of real estate capitalists and manufacturing capitalists. In this system, gentrification is a necessary by-product that ends up displacing families from areas they have lived for years.
- Excerpt: No Job, No Rent: 10 Months of Organizing the Tenant Struggle – Stomp Out Slumlords, Metro DC DSA
- Please read Part 2: “The Course of the Struggle”
- Summary: While our other texts have viewed the housing problem from the perspective of capitalist social relations, this text switches focus and views the problem from the position of class struggle. Comrades at Metro DC seemed to have learned valuable lessons that can be helpful for our work here.
- This is Parkdale (Movie – 30 min)
- Very short, inspirational film that goes over a large rent strike launched by working class tenants in Toronto, CA. This is a good example of a struggle at the local level and demonstrates how tenants can fight against corporate landlords with high building concentrations in a local area.