The situation around housing in Australia is dire. Years of deregulated financial
excess, attacks on welfare and public housing along with attacks on wages andlobbying by real estate groups have placed the working class into housingprecarity. For many workers it is now almost impossible to find affordable andsecure rentals with many having to spend half of their income on rent alone. Thisdownward decline in the state of housing continues within the context ofcapitalist property relations that view housing as a commodity to be bought andsold on the market rather than a basic right of all people. Thus the struggle forhousing is not just a struggle for a place to live but a struggle to ultimatelyredefine the property relations that define our society.In Australia today we have some of the most unaffordable housing in the world interms of renting and buying with our cities routinely placed on the world's mostexpensive cities lists. It is not surprising then that over 100,000 people arehomeless with many more a lease ending away from desperate circumstances. How wegot here is a story - like most stories about social issues - of the state andcapitalism working in their natural way to plunder and maximise their power overtheir subjects. It is a story of loss and theft that has been experienced by theworking class since the dawn of capitalism.We Do Not Need Landlords"Landlords' right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men,love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the naturalproduce of the earth." - Adam SmithYou may have heard the refrain "landlords are leeches" or phrases of the likewhen people are criticising landlords, Though these phrases may seem vulgar theypoint to an essential truth about the nature of property and the tenant-landlordrelationship: landlords are unnecessary. Owning something requires no work.Landlords hoard (read steal) property, a "right" that is defended by the statethrough its monopoly on violence. If you take up residence in an empty home orrefuse to pay rent you will be punished for your crime of sanity. By hoardinghousing, landlords engineer an artificial scarcity which leaves us no alternativebut to rent from them.At the start of capitalism the state helped landlords drive peasants off theirlands in Europe in a process of primitive accumulation. In Australia land wasstolen en masse from the First Nations and handed to business owners, landlordsand settlers.It is important to note too that if there were no landlords there would still behousing. Landlords do not provide housing. They do not labour laying bricks orpouring cement - in fact they do not labour at all. Many landlording schemes areadvertised as a way to "make money in your sleep", as the landlord is neither thetradesman who builds the house or the handyperson who maintains it. Landlordscould be done away with and housing could still be built. A revolutionary societycould build housing for all.This parasitic relationship constitutes a second theft from the worker. Firsttheir labour is stolen at work and then what's left of the value of their labouris further sucked away to help finance a house for the hoarding thieves who stole it.How Did We Get HereThough housing under capitalism has always had this exploitative relationship,things have taken a turn for the worse in recent decades. In the late 1970'sonwards with the rise of neoliberalism in Australia factories began to beoff-shored and the importance of manufacturing in the economy declined. Thiscaused a break in manufacturing as a major driver of the capitalist machine inAustrala and instead other industries, particularly finance and real estate, wereto play a greater role. Also around this time was the beginning of attacks on thewelfare system in Australia with policies like full employment ending, publichousing being wound down and welfare becoming more precarious.This had a number of effects on the housing market - many of which are beyond thescope of this article - one of those being the availability of cheap creditthrough financial de-regulation. Instead of this improving access to housing itmade it worse as those who had more money could now borrow way more than theycould before making it much easier to purchase multiple properties. In additionto this increases in credit meant that the money supply increased (as bankscreate money when they give out loans they do not give out existing currency)which meant that demand increased, driving up the cost of housing in a viciouscycle. In effect the banks and government had essentially created a situation inwhich housing was to be mercilessly hoarded by the winners-take-all mentality ofthe market. They had intentionally created a situation where the price of housingwas no longer dictated by wage growth but one in which increasing inequality insociety meant - even more than it did before - greater gains for banks and landlords.Another factor that contributed to the housing crisis was the migration to citiesfrom regional areas due to the destruction of regional communities through theloss of manufacturing jobs and the greater extractive effects of the increasingmonopolisation of capitalism at the time. This caused ballooning populations incities like Sydney and Melbourne, making a bad situation even worse ascompetition for rentals increased drastically. As an aside, it is alwaysinteresting that experts view this as an inevitably of how 'efficient' cities arerather than focusing on the devastating effects that neoliberalism has had onregional areas. When you ask most of these migrants they will tell you that theywould rather not be in a city .There are many other contributing factors as well, such as poor planning bycouncils, government housing grant schemes, the destruction of unions (wagestagnation), tax incentives and government schemes for landlords, among othercauses for this housing crisis.The result of all these factors is an asset based economy in which the everincreasing value of housing and other assets is a major source of economicactivity as opposed to other industries such as manufacturing. This has turnedour houses into poker chips to be used by the leeches in the upper crust of oursociety to suck further from the working class and deepen inequality, putting usfurther under the ruling classes' control.It is important to note in the Australian context that it is not justneoliberalism that has produced poor housing, but also colonialism. The NorthernTerritory is the state/territory with the largest Indigenous population and wherenearly 1 in 20 Indigenous people experience homelessness. This is not acoincidence. Many Indigenous communities, contrary to popular belief, have beenexcluded from the various infrastructure and welfare programs that other areashave benefitted from. In rural areas, for instance, many Indigenous people cannotaccess welfare unless they are on a permanent work for the dole program.Essentially, this turns indigenous communities into slave labour forces. And thedestitution shows. Many Indigenous people live as shown in the documentary"Utopia", often in asbestos shacks and without basic amenities like electricity.As regulations over loans and housing have been weakened, housing quality hasgotten worse too. For all that money we pay, capitalism gives us unsafe,unlivable garbage with more than 85% of apartment blocks being built since 2000having defects in them. In 2017 the Grenfell Tower Apartment block caught fireand killed 74 of the residents and injuring dozens more. In the lead up to thefire many residents tried to highlight the litany of fire safety issues but werethreatened with legal action by the apartment management. The management alsoinstalled a highly flammable cladding that was cheaper than the less flammablealternative. They, like all capitalists and state actors, used their control tomaximise their own wealth and power and to hell with the residents they werethrowing in harm's way.In addition to these shocking examples many can attest to the callous andunaccountable indifference of landlords and property managers. You can readendless negative reviews and horror stories online from toilets falling throughthe floor to creepy landlords who try to exploit there tenants for sex. Youprobably have stories like this yourself.The real icing on the cake of the capitalist housing market is that there aremore houses than people in Australia yet so many remain homeless. If markets wereso good at distributing housing why are there still homeless people despite therebeing no material barrier?Speaking of capitalism, some people will tell us that the real enemy is notcapitalism and like prime minister Scott Morrison foolishly argues, we should alljust buy a house. But make no mistake - this crisis is precisely caused bymarkets. This is capitalism manifest. The situation we have today has beenengineered and created by the relentless pressures that the capitalist systemplaces on society to bend it to its will. Whether it is the real estate lobbyspending millions to get favourable laws to maximise their revenues or statesthat direct funds away from social housing to maximise their military andpolitical power elsewhere, capitalism and the state work as they are designed toconcentrate power in the hands of a few and in terms of housing, this means weget unaffordable, unlivable housing that is utterly precarious.The SolutionThe solution is to create a housing system based on the many human needs andwants rather than on the desires of a minority of investors. This cannot happenso long as we live under economic tyranny in which decisions about our economyare privatised to boardrooms or abstracted to the state. The only way this couldemerge is through the democratisation of our economy and through the directparticipation of workers in decision making about their workplaces and society.How Do We Fight BackBut how do we fight back against the landlords and the bankers? Individualactions alone are not enough. Those who rule over housing are organised and somust we be. Only through organising and building our collective power as tenantsand workers can we fight back against this system. By building tenant unions suchas the South East Queensland Union of Renters and the Renters and Housing Union -Victoria we can fight back directly and work towards a world where wecollectively control housing.https://www.acmeanjin.org/articles/we-want-homes-not-investments_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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