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Chapter One
Why does ACTA, a tenant organization, find it so important to consider itself a “revolutionary socialist” organization?
The landlord-tenant relation only exists because it is a part of a larger system, the system of capitalism. Capitalism creates both the preconditions for the landlord-tenant relationship and the drive for it to grow and expand. The precondition which has led us to the present housing relations is the private as opposed to social ownership of the means of production, land, and resources. Until private property is replaced by social ownership, the increasing power of landlords to rule over tenants cannot be permanently destroyed and all reforms will be temporary half-measures.
The abolition of landlords and the self-abolition of tenants is our target, nothing less. If houses were the property of society collectively, there would be no landlords to demand rent and therefore no tenants forced to pay it. That is why we are a revolutionary organization first, tenant organization second.
Capitalism makes it possible for landlords to prioritize profit over the usefulness of housing because an economy based on private property provides owners with a legal and political dictatorship over their possessions. If these houses were owned socially, we would all have to determine the best way to use them. Under the system of capitalism, however, they are private property, which means that the state protects the right of a small minority to determine how these houses are used. As a result, property owners have the state-given “right” to “use” their property to make money, if they wish.
This right is rooted in common sense. We have the right to our possessions. Throughout history people have struggled to build political systems where the objects they use in everyday life cannot be taken away from them just because someone more powerful desires them. Capitalism is premised on this abstract right to property, but under capitalism, this historical need of humanity is transformed into its opposite as ownership of property is abstracted from use of property. Landlords who buy property with no intention of ever using it in any real sense are granted the absolute authority to rip it away from those who do use it, and in fact depend on it. As time goes on this perverse sense of “ownership” becomes an increasingly central part of the economic structure of society. Today, as a rule, owners purchase excess houses for the purpose of renting them out to tenants.
Capitalism not only sets the stage for an intensification of landlord dominance, it incentivises it. Under capitalism, productive activity is done with the goal of accumulation, rather than the goal of directly satisfying people’s needs. In other words, useful things are only created if they have exchange value. Only needs that are profitable are met.
Accumulation, as the accumulation of capital, has this contradiction embedded in it as well. By accumulation, we mean the increase of the mass of the means of production as private property in the hands of the owners. In other words, accumulation refers to the accumulation of capital itself: the means of production and their value. In plain talk, these things are the basis of an individual’s wealth and are referred to, in headlines for example, as one’s “net worth.” Accumulation of capital—in short, profit—is the general condition of the capitalist class and the objective of all individuals providing goods and services for sale in the market.
Producers aim to produce for the general needs of society, but there is no central coordinating body to determine this need. Instead, the general need of society is reported to the producers in the form of a quantitative valuation. As a result, no firm or enterprise surveys every possible consumer in order to determine the quantity of products needed to satisfy all needs. Instead, they base their appraisal of the general need on rates of return. In theory, a high rate of return should indicate a high need for a particular product. By maximizing their own profits, capitalist producers meet the general needs of society. In reality, profit is determined by its own set of complicated rules, rules distinct from any rational distribution of resources.[1]
This contradiction between usefulness and exchangeability is at the core of our economic system. It exists within the basic material elements of our society, the commodities we trade and use. On one hand, capitalist production is a process of collectively creating useful things in order to meet real needs, on the other hand this process is carried out by individual producers only under conditions ripe for capital accumulation.
These individual producers enter the market as competitors. Profitability is the general condition of capitalist production, but specific producers achieve specific rates of profit under conditions of competition with one another. Competition is felt most directly between producers in the same branch of industry, for example Samsung competes with Apple in the production of phones. It drives a progressively more cutthroat condition of survival and, in the process, skews the odds toward those firms which are larger in terms of their material forces of production and their corresponding scale of accumulated capital as money. This competition results in the triumph of some enterprises, and the collapse of others. The winners consume the losers as spoils of war and accumulation takes the form of acts of centralization in the direction of monopoly power. We can see in this process how the competition of many transforms into the domination of a few.[2]
interests of the landlord and the tenant are diametrically opposed to one another. We can generalize this contradiction as the basic condition of housing in the United States today: there is a controller who does not use (the capitalist landlord) vs. a user who does not control (the tenant).
The landlord and the tenant’s interests are diametrically opposed because their relationship is an economic one. Think about it this way: the tenant’s interests are in the usefulness of the house. If the heat breaks down in the winter and leaves him freezing, he does not have the legal or political right to fix the heat himself because he does not own the house as his private property. He has to ask the proper owner to do it, the landlord, who always treats these impositions like the burden of the cross. “And to think,” he says with a smug grin, “You people want to crucify me!”
But the landlord’s interests are not in the usefulness of the house, they are in the profitability of the house. Fixing the heat will cost him money and therefore it will work against his interests. The tenant's gain is necessarily the landlord’s loss, and vice versa.[3]
That is as simple as it can be stated and it should illustrate that, even in the case that a tenant has a “good landlord,” the landlord’s enthusiasm for maintaining the usefulness of the apartment will last only as long as the broader economic conditions of capitalist society leave him with enough of a financial cushion to do so profitably. But such conditions never last. Seemingly every decade a life-changing economic crisis paralyzes the world system. Not to mention those more localized, yearly crises that pop up in different corners of the globe, tearing life apart for everyone except the richest of the capitalists and the lucky ones in the middle class.[4]
For example, when the financial crisis of 2008 occurred and the Great Recession followed, millions of properties were foreclosed. “Mom and pop” landlords either couldn’t afford to pay their banks or sold their surplus properties in a desperate attempt to squeeze out whatever remaining cash they could in the panic. In either case, it meant tenants were evicted by the hundreds of thousands. The personality of the landlord is always irrelevant during hard times, and hard times will always come until the capitalist system is revolutionized and thrown away.
The landlord and tenant’s contradictory interests concerning housing are not independent of one another or arbitrary. The landlord’s money comes directly from the tenant, the former depends on the latter. In other words, while it is popularly understood in this order—the working class would have no place to live if housing providers didn’t exist—in reality, the situation proceeds in this order: landlords would have no money and no ability to make it from housing if a huge proportion of the masses were not dispossessed of the basic and necessary means of living.
The constant dispossession of the masses of their basic means of life and the concentration of those into the hands of an increasingly small and exclusive circle of capitalists is a precondition of landlordism and is the basis of the capitalist system. In fact, as a consequence of the 2008 crisis, houses that formerly belonged to millions of homeowners went on the market at low prices and were scooped up by the only people who still had any money to invest—small and big capitalist real estate speculators. At the same time, the existing rental housing stock now had to absorb mass tenantization—millions of homeowners converted into tenants in one sweep. The thrust of demand against the supply of rental stock could do nothing else but kickstart an increase in the price of rent,[5] which has carried through to the unbelievable levels we are facing today—all destined for the vaults of the rich!
The fundamental contradiction driving the landlord-tenant relationship, that contradiction between usefulness and profitability, is a contradiction that cannot be resolved without revolutionizing the system of private property. By replacing the system of private property with a system of social, collective ownership of the means of production we will put ourselves in the only viable position to orient production towards the satisfaction of the general needs of society, that is, socialism. This revolution has to be undertaken by the working class—the class to which tenants belong—against the capitalist class because the working class is the group that is in an economic relation with the capitalists that can be turned and leveraged against them. That’s why ACTA is a revolutionary organization of the working class that believes in socialism. Going forward, if the reader has questions about why ACTA believes this or that, it’s always worth revisiting this first point. We are revolutionary socialists.
- ↑ It is commonly argued by economists and political pundits that the market tends towards an “efficient” distribution of resources. This argument is always circular. Efficient distribution is only justified in relation to the actual tendencies of the market, in effect comparing the market to itself.
- ↑ Recall how at the beginning of the cell phone era, the list of competitors was extensive; Motorola, Nokia, LG, Blackberry, Samsung, Apple will be memorable to those of us in the United States. Only two of these now dominate half of the world market; while a handful of firms fight over the scraps. Forgotten are the hundreds of international companies who have tried to blast into the market only to disappear in a flash like shooting stars. In reality, their accomplishments were absorbed by their competitors and now form a part of their mass.
- ↑ In the long run, these repairs may maintain the sale price of the home. Some use this to argue that the interests of landlord and tenant coincide. This argument is easily dissolved by the reality of the situation, where landlords fight even the most important repairs tooth and nail. The truth of the matter is that the incremental maintenance of a building cuts into profits, and so most landlords put it off, hoping to sell the building just before the small issues grow into a massive necessary cost. The unlucky landlord who loses this game of hot potato almost never pays the repair costs incurred by the pillage of the building carried out by his progenitors. Instead, he appeals to the state for funding, diverting even more of the people’s money into landlord pockets. The fact that only a miniscule percentage of the dutifully paid rents over those decades of decay went towards the building itself is lost on all. The landlord gets subsidized and the tenants who actually use the homes pay the price.
- ↑ The list of economic crises in the capitalist system is too long to even make an appropriately evocative set of references to here because they are so frequent. However, to get a picture of the problem in broad strokes, search “list of economic crises” in Wikipedia.
- ↑ Disequilibrium between supply and demand is the inevitable scapegoat for the so-called housing crisis, but it has nothing to do with it—except in the way that salt has something to do with making the pain of a wound more acute.