(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #246 - Urban Folder: Facing the housing crisis, abolish the real estate market (fr, it, pt)

 (en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #246 - Urban Folder:
Facing the housing crisis, abolish the real estate market (fr, it,
pt)[machine translation]

The question of land ownership is at the heart of the housing crisis, speculation on the 
real estate market and capitalist construction of urban space. It is time to develop, in 
this area, revolutionary orientations, founding a new law. ---- Over 100% increase since 
2000! Unfortunately - but we suspected - it is not about the wage curve, but the average 
price of real estate in France. Developed a tenant of a private park in five spends more 
than 40% of its income on housing[1]. Exacerbated in Paris and major provincial cities, 
the increase leaves doubtful, as the evolution of the real estate market seems 
disconnected from the real economy and household purchasing power. Why this dramatic 
inflation? ---- Construction costs have not increased in proportion, this surge has its 
origin in the parallel increase in the price of building land. But what are the reasons 
for this surge in property values, so impressive that many today speak of a speculative 
bubble?

Public authorities and private developers explain that prices are the result of the 
imbalance between supply and demand. However, this explanation is not enough to make 
intelligible such swelling. Besides, it is recognized that land and property, by their 
uniqueness, their intrinsic qualities and the socio-cultural and emotional values that 
take the body, are largely beyond the traditional mechanisms of market operation.

The stone, a sure bet for speculators

This bubble is in fact primarily a consequence of the global crisis of the capitalist 
system. In times of falling rate of profit, and unable to sufficiently increase the rate 
of exploitation of labor, investors look to safe havens. Like precious metals, the "stone" 
is. In other words, the land and property, mainly urban, used to absorb surplus capital 
finding no more profitable enough opportunities in the productive apparatus.

The urbanization process has a special place in the capital accumulation dynamics. The 
genesis of the first towns is explained by the existence of market goods which were more 
opportunities in self-sustaining rural communities.

The establishment of the land itself has been a central element in capitalist cosmogony. 
This particular social and legal report what the property is the rotten fruit of the 
settlement and development of agriculture and livestock in the Mesopotamian civilizations. 
Settlement and development of land ownership, collective or individual, which would also 
have had as a corollary the appearance of a warrior class inevitably hold sway over 
farmers through the monopolization of violence on the grounds of a role protection and 
security of economic activity[2]. Thus the seeds of a hierarchical society based on 
exploitation and domination, germinated in the other toxic slurry from land ownership.

In England in the sixteenth century, the primitive accumulation of capital was made 
possible by the enclosures, that is to say, the privatization of communal lands formerly 
subject to collective use. This land expropriation policy - which does not go smoothly 
smoothly, far from it[3] - leads to massive impoverishment of rural populations, forced to 
seek refuge in urban centers and strengthen the nascent mass industrial workers. This 
process is still at work, especially in many peripheral countries that are the subject of 
grabbing hundreds of millions of hectares of farmland by multinationals (see Alternative 
libertarian No. 216 of April 2012). Thus, through the privatization of the ground, that 
capitalism written "in letters of blood and fire" in the words of Marx, his indelible mark 
on the territory.

Sale of apartments for cutting

Brood of capitalism, the private ownership of land was the legal foundation of the modern 
urbanization. This process, which is now spreading across the globe is an essential 
condition for the survival of capitalism since the latter needs more than ever to absorb 
the surplus that continually generates. The expansion of cities - that challenges the 
traditional division urban / rural - enables this absorption[4]. Pension funds and other 
financial players are thus more likely to invest in real estate.

Sale of apartments for cutting in Paris or in other cities symbolizes this practice. This 
financialization of urban space is a consequence of the restructuring of capitalism that 
operates globally and induces a new international division of labor. The advanced 
capitalist countries reorganize their territories shots metropolization to insert their 
large cities in the global competition.

All this is not without social consequences. The capitalist urbanization, calibrated to 
the optimal profitability of land, is a new process of capital accumulation through 
dispossession and expulsion of the poorest populations in the city centers.

The phenomena of gentrification and urban renewal operations are the main vectors of this 
socio-spatial segregation. And these are not the promises of social housing and social 
diversity goals that will change anything. The urban setting has become a focal point of 
the class struggle, through confrontation for the occupation of space.

The land must be a common good

Revolutionary and anti-capitalist must not ignore this growing battle field. The land must 
be a common good beyond the logic of profit. The land issue was also, though in an 
agricultural context, a major concern of the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries and formed a valuable rallying cry (the "Zemlya i Volya" in Russian 
"Tierra y Libertad" Spanish anarchists and Mexican).

Nevermind valid but necessarily limited reformist demands (rent control and requisitioning 
of empty housing) and imagine what could be programmatic guidelines within a revolutionary 
process.

First, to avoid taking half of the population against the grain would avoid asking 
smallholders to collectivize their family home... We could instead separate the ownership 
of land in possession of the unit. This legal dichotomy prevails in some Nordic countries. 
In Stockholm, for example, the ownership is predominantly that of the concession. Most of 
the land owned by the City, they are granted to individuals with long-term leases. No 
exclusive right on its ground seat, housing thus would serve any commercial or speculative 
aspect to keep only use value. Eventually, following the voluntary departure of the 
occupants or their death (it should also obtain the removal of the right of inheritance), 
the house or apartment situated on the public land would fall into the community to 
integrate a purse common pot of socialized housing, run by and for the people of a 
territory; the relevant level to be defined according to the case (the street, the 
neighborhood, the town or even larger).

Expropriation without compensation

Of course, the temporary survival of private property concerns only the actual habitat 
occupied by its owners. All second homes or properties used for annuity or speculation 
should be expropriated without compensation.

Meanwhile, for new construction, we should socialize the existing construction companies 
and build self-build associations and self-management of housing. Past experiences have 
proven effective. From the 1940s to the early 1970s under the label Beaver or workers 
committees housing tens of thousands of houses were built with the cooperative system. 
They have gradually fallen into disuse with the introduction in the late 1950s, state 
programs of building large assemblies.

But this socialization dynamics should not stop there. A truly democratic habitat 
management should provide a basis for a more intense collective life, to resocialization 
neighborhoods through self-management of multiple urban services: transport, trade, 
cultural activities, etc. All this in the sense of individual and collective emancipation, 
far away from the capitalist paradigm that extends along the poisonous tentacles of the state.

Julien (AL Alsace)


[1] INSEE, March 2012, 
http://www.insee.fr/fr/ffc/horscollection/logement-sur-occupe/logement-sur-occupe.pdf

[2] Lewis Mumford, The City in History, Agone, 2011

[3] See Chapter XXVII of Book I of Capital by Karl Marx

[4] On this subject, see David Harvey, Geography of domination, Ordinary Prairies, 2008

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?La-question-fonciere-Face-a-la