This was a small contribution I gave as part of a larger talk on Why you should be a Communist.
Now we all know that there is a housing crisis in this country, I won't patronise you by detailing the unaffordability crisis of housing that we all face. But very quickly, as the headlines, Houses in UK at their most unaffordable since 1876. It feels impossible to save for a deposit, impossible to get on the ladder, and house prices just seem to keep rising, almost beyond belief. But I do want to emphasise one hidden part of the housing crisis, which is that more than 1300 homeless people are estimated to have died in the UK in 2022 (no official data kept), equating to an average of one death every 6 1/2 hours. This is in the 6th largest economy in the world, it is shameful. Now if being a communist was measured in the dislike of the UK housing market, then it almost everyone under the age of 40 would've joined our ranks by now. What made me a Communist was the understanding that high house prices and high rents are not some accident, they are not some unintended consequence of policy. They are integral to capitalist logic, and have been perpetrated by every political party What I enjoy, really is that as communists, as Marxist, we look to truly analyse and understand problems like this and prove that the problem is caused by capitalism and indeed can never be fixed by capitalism.
So why do house prices keep on rising? As communists we can use the writings of Marx to say that House prices are derived firstly from the the amount of Labour time needed to build the house, but then also the amount of value you can extract from that house, which we would understand as rent. So, and I'm simplifying a lot here, we can broadly say that house prices are derived from rents. Now traditionally we'd apply the laws of market competition to the rental sector, which should actually drive rents down. However given the unique nature of land, it's often impossible for tenants to shop-around for appropriate shelter, as it is impossible to produce more local land with homes on it in order to undercut other landlords. The upper limit on rent is therefore determined not by competition, but by the maximum amount tenants are willing to pay to live in a particular area. Marx recognised that property rents tend to behave like a monopoly, especially in cities.
Over the last 40 years, the property owning class have basically been guaranteed a steady source of passive income and asset growth compensated for the decline of society that we are all too familiar with. The insecure jobs market, and wage stagnation, the slow dismantling of pensions, social care and adequate welfare provision under austerity. To truly, really solve the housing crisis, they would need to lower house prices, and rents for people like us to be able to afford them, this would screw over the very voters that get any political party into power. So any government is stuck basically, the same will be true for Reform, the same will be true for the Greens. No capitalist political party can tackle the issue head on.
So if we look to the USSR, we can immediately see that as soon as the Bolsheviks assumed power, they prohibited the private ownership of land and ordered it to be redistributed, and carried on the existing policy of rent control. In 1918 the Right to Immovable Private Property was abolished, whereby the houses of the former elite, both bourgeoisie and aristocracy housing, were effectively converted into communal housing. Imagine if we turned all the royal residences, into housing for those that needed it! We could seize the buy-to-let properties of landlords too, as well as all the multi-million pound properties that lay empty all year round!
For many reasons, housing was not prioritised under Stalinism, so we have to look to the late 1950s until the housing question was really being solved. Now we can talk about the quality of housing under the soviet union, and the smaller amounts of space they were entitled to as we are used to in the West. But you have to remember that this was housing being built quickly, at scale, that had sewage systems, running water, central heating, for what was a population of peasants as we understand them and so the leap in living standards in just one generation is immense and speaks to the power of productive forces when they are employed in socially beneficial ways. The USSR were regularly building upwards of 2 million homes per year. In the UK, when left to the all-mighty, efficient private sector, we only built 220,00 homes last year.
I could talk about this stuff for an hour, and I think we all could frankly because housing is such an integral part of our lives which affects so many aspects of our existence. The experience of renting, the day-to-day reality can be bleak. It's having to email your landlord to ask can I have a pet? Can I hang a picture?, the boilers broken again. The relationship between tenant and Landlord is inherently infantilising, degrading and dehumanising. And it's that human aspect that I want to end on, it's the recognition that access to housing is so much more than just shelter or being surrounded by four walls. Having a place you can really call your own gives you stability, it gives you safety, gives you peace, gives you autonomy, gives you a chance to express yourself? Above all It gives you dignity.
And the insulting part of all this is that there was a point where young people like us could buy a home fairly easily. In Capitalism's maybe 300 year history there was a sliver in time after the second world war where homeownership was accessible for the working classes. But that reality back then has become only a dream for us. That reality has been taken from us. It's been stolen from you by the capitalist class in order for them to get richer and richer while you get poorer and poorer. The landlord grows richer in his sleep as he, like a parasite, sucks wages out of the economy for his own benefit. I look forward to the day when the landlord is an ancient concept, when no one has to worry about the end of their tenancy or how they're going to pay rent this month. I look forward to when housing is allocated for all, when housing is treated as the human right that it should be, and that can only be achieved under socialism and eventual communism, and that is why I am a communist and why you maybe should be too.