In ancient Rome the haruspex were a group of persons trained to comb through the entrails of scarified animals to read the omens and fortunes concealed there. In our society, economists perform much the same role. They comb through the spreadsheets and graphs and give us their explanations: here is the demand shock, there is the price signal, and so on. Much like the haruspex, the economists disagree about what they see in the entrails – are we in a boom or a bubble? Are interest rates too high or too low? Are we overproducing or underproducing? Pouring over the entrails, some sound more convincing than others, but nobody truly knows. And although we all have the ability to look back, unlike the haruspex, the economists do not even claim to be able to see the future. An honest economist will tell you they are, at best, guessing. What does this really tell us?
Meanwhile, in our own lives, the price of everything goes up unceasingly. The grocery bill has doubled. Long gone is the dollar menu. The cost of a lousy meal from a drive-through now feels exorbitant. Clothes feel cheaper between our fingers but their price tags reflect the opposite. Our paychecks remain meager but our rent seems to spiral ever upward. To search for housing in this environment is an exercise in frustration.
On this last point, a certain group steps into the situation. Poking through some proverbial intestines, they conclude solving the problem is simple: there is not enough housing to go around. It’s basic supply and demand, they argue, pointing at a line-graph, if we just built more, then surely the cost of housing will go down.
It is here then that we find the concept of “measures” useful. Capitalist measures are those which remain constrained by the fundamental laws of capitalism. For us, it is pure absurdity to believe we can use capitalism to “solve” the problems capitalism itself creates. Under capitalism, nearly everything assumes the form of a commodity. The existence of commodities as such is certainly not original to capitalism, but one aspect that makes capitalism historically specific is commodities produced under capitalism are not produced for their use, but rather for their exchange.
What then, is a commodity? At its most base level, a commodity is anything that has both a use-value in that it fulfills some human want or need and an exchange-value in that it can be exchanged in some proportion for other commodities. Let us take for instance an apple: if we pick an apple from a tree and eat it, the apple has fulfilled our want or need of hunger. But we did not exchange the apple for something else. It therefore has not assumed the form of a commodity. Now then, lets imagine we picked an apple and then traded the apple to our friend for an orange. Both the apple and orange have not only use-value, but also exchange-value in that as a commodity they could be exchanged for some other commodity. There is nothing intrinsic to the apple or the orange that makes them commodities, rather they assume a specific form under specific conditions.
To go a step further, for the apple and orange to assume the form of a commodity, they required human intervention. Although the apple and orange were produced by nature – by sunshine, rain, etc. – they must have been picked by human hands, by “work,” and then brought into relation by human minds. Between them, the minds met and agreed that apples in some amount were worth the same as oranges in some other amount.
In the example of housing, under capitalism housing assumes the form of a commodity. Just like the apple, housing has use-value in that it fulfills some human want or need – keeping us protected from the elements, a safe place to store our belongings, and so. And just like the apple, there is nothing intrinsic to the housing which makes it a commodity. However, under capitalism housing (and apples) are not produced for their use, but instead are produced for exchange.
To exchange for housing in the form of a commodity, you must have some other commodity to exchange for it. In our society, this role is filled by the universal equivalent commodity: money. It is plain to see that nearly everything in our society is exchanged through the medium of money. It is thus tempting to conclude our society is run or controlled by money. But such a conception is wrong. Our society is dictated by capital.
A capitalist starts with money, but then throws their money into the market. When they pull it back, they hope the original money has grown. If it has, the capitalist has made capital. This is what we mean when we say capital is money in motion. If the capitalist throws their money into the market and upon pulling it back, receives less money in return, they have suffered a loss. They have not only not made capital, they now have less money than when they started. On a long enough timeline, this is fatal to the capitalist. The capitalist is merely the personification of an economic category – if the capitalist loses too much money, they will cease to be a capitalist at all. It is thus in the capitalist’s interest (indeed, it is perhaps their sole interest) to make their money grow into capital by any means possible.
Under capitalism, a “home-builder’s” role is not to build homes, it is to make capital. Whether they make capital by home-building or sausage-making makes no difference. Whether the home-builder builds ten homes or a hundred or a thousand, their ultimate goal is not to “provide housing” but to realize a profitable return on their investment. Operating under the abstract forces of competition, if a home-builder believes they cannot realize a profit when throwing their original money into the market, they will simply not do so.
“The housing question” is then not simply a question regarding the sheer amount of housing, but rather the form which housing assumes. As we have stated (and everyone can feel), the only way to gain “access” to housing is to exchange housing for money. And for the vast majority of us, the only way to gain “access” to money itself is by selling our capacity to work. To have housing we must wake up every day and drag ourselves to work; we must sell the hours of our lives to the very same capitalists which “provide” us housing. (And as an aside, we should all recognize “the home-builder” does not even build homes, they pay someone else to do the work for them and then pocket the profits left-over.)
To the capitalist, this situation in which they profit handsomely is freedom. The capitalist and their mouthpieces believe wholeheartedly in The Market the same way the haruspex believed in the entrails. To avoid re-inventing the wheel, we then quote extensively from Ellen Meiksins Wood, who has so plainly addressed this notion:
What, then, are market forces? Doesn’t force imply coercion? In capitalist ideology the market implies not compulsion but freedom. At the same time, this freedom is guaranteed by certain mechanisms that ensure a ‘rational economy’, where supply meets demand, putting on offer commodities and services that people will freely choose. These mechanisms are the impersonal ‘forces’ of the market, and if they are in any way coercive, it is simply in the sense that they compel economic actors to act ‘rationally’ so as to maximize choice and opportunity. This implies that capitalism, the ultimate ‘market society’, is the optimal condition of opportunity and choice. More goods and services are on offer, more people are more free to sell and profit from them, and more people are more free to choose among and buy them.
The distinctive and dominant characteristic of the capitalist market is not opportunity or choice but, on the contrary, compulsion. Material life and social reproduction in capitalism are universally mediated by the market, so that all individuals must in one way or another enter into market relations in order to gain access to the means of life. This unique system of market-dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market – its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labor-productivity – regulate not only all economic transactions but social relations in general.
It is true The Market provides us with choices. We “choose” our jobs, although the conditions under which we choose them are forced upon us, and the jobs we ultimately work are often a product of our socially-assigned race, gender, and/or class position. We “choose” to go to work every day, because if we chose otherwise we would not have access to the food, clothing, and housing necessary to live. And we “choose” to enter the mythical Market when we are selecting a place to live – competing with other unfortunate souls much like us. These choices are illusory. They are choices made under compulsion, under threat. Sure, you can refuse to work, but you will live on the street – where the concrete force of the state will subject you to the violence of the police. And, of course, in a grim bit of irony, the capitalist themself does not work – they simply purchase the work of others and sell the products at a profit.
It is these same abstract forces of compulsion and competition that apparently will give us “affordable housing.” Let us note from the outset, the notion of affordability is completely meaningless – what is affordable for one person is out-of-reach for another. And “affordable housing” still treats housing as a commodity. The only way to access “affordable housing” is by exchanging it for money, which means our “access” is predicated on our continual participation in work. To truly build “affordable housing,” the housing-builder will inevitably have to compete with other housing-builders. And to out-compete each other, this will require the use not only of cheaper materials but also cheaper labor. It is the proverbial race to the bottom. Anyone who has been into a “luxury apartment” built within the last ten years can tell you it was slapped together as fast as possible with the shoddiest materials available. And anyone who has worked on such a project can tell you they were directed to work faster, cheaper, and under conditions where safety is sacrificed for speed.
This is not to say affordable housing is not worth fighting for in certain narrow circumstances. Given the “choice” between paying one-half of our paycheck for housing or one-third, we would obviously choose the latter. But the capitalist character of such an arrangement remains the same. For us, the notion of affordable housing is not unlike the concept of the worker’s union. Given the choice, we would rather the average worker belong to a union because such membership generally comes with better pay, better benefits, decent health insurance, and so on. But the worker’s union is not a measure against work itself. In-fact, although the union may “bargain” with the boss, in the end both the boss and the union have a vested interest in the worker continuing to work.
We will not wholesale denounce all those who argue for affordable housing or worker’s unions in good-faith, as we believe they are in most cases simply misguided rather than nefarious, but at the same time we ask these same people to recognize what they are really advocating for: capitalist measures. Such measures which leave undisturbed the capital-wage relation and the landlord-tenant relation are not a struggle against capitalism, but are instead a struggle within capitalism itself.
Finally then we turn to the concept of communist measures. If capitalist measures leave capitalist social relations intact, we would posit any communist measure would take those same relations and tear them asunder. A capitalist measure imagines a kinder, gentler landlord, or a world wherein tenants are afforded greater “rights” by begging at the feet of the state. A communist measure is the process of building a world without wage-labor, landlords, tenants, or states. Likely to be communist are measures which build or maintain housing solely for its use rather than its profitable exchange. Likely to be communist are measures which house every person without exception. Likely to be communist are measures which build a world free from compulsion and competition in all its variable forms. We do not need to comb through the linegraphs and spreadsheets any more than we need to comb through the entrails. We already exist in a world of plenty, but we must unleash a world in which this plenty is freely available for everyone. In the words of Noche:
As communists we must also say what only we can say; that what we desire is not merely affordable housing but a world where access to housing is not an issue; that we desire not just a space(s) for art, but a world where our creativity is not confined to a separated, specialized sphere of our lives; that we desire not more well-paid jobs but a world without work; that what we desire is not community control of police but their wholesale abolition; that we do not desire a better seat at the table of Capital but to abolish Capital altogether.