The Housing Question, ground rent theory, and differentiation vs. homogenization

Abstract

This essay takes Engels’ The Housing Question as a provocation to (1) apply ground rent theory to housing (something which Engels neglected to do) and (2) investigate Engels’ conflation of housing struggles with the concerns of a “backwards” peasantry. I show that applying Marx’s ground rent theory to housing illuminates aspects of the housing question heretofore unexamined—in particular, the significance of the relationship between landowner and capitalist in housing. I then show that Engels’ dismissal of housing struggles and land-based struggles more broadly is rooted in the specious belief that proletarianization homogenizes people. Engels’ spurious logic nonetheless sets in relief an important connection: I suggest that only through grasping what Cedric Robinson has called racialization or differentiation and what Sylvia Wynter has named nonhomogeneity can we recognize the theoretical and practical centrality of housing and other land-based struggles to revolution and abolition.

Class monopoly rent and the urban sustainability fix in Seattle's South Lake Union District

“…These conditions form the constituent components of all rent, whereby the proportions attributable to each condition, or category, equal the total rent paid. The four primary categories are differential rent I (DR1), differential rent II (DR2), monopoly rent (MR), and absolute rent (AR), each of which highlights specific struggles for profit/wages between landowner and capitalist/consumer tenants (Manning, 2021).…”

“…Much of this scholarship is focused on the increasing financialization of land in the context of neoliberalization (see Swyngedouw and Ward, 2021), and is significant in that it widens the applicability of rent theory by highlighting the "expansion and the subsequent embedding of rent relations across increasingly broad swathes of the economy and society" (Strauss, 2021: 3). Yet, this literature exhibits marginal engagement with Marx's categories and tends to conflate ground rent with "economic rent" (or interest) (Manning, 2021).…”

“…As such, "the capitalist appears to be absent," contributing to the relatively late and marginal application of rent theory to the urban context (Manning, 2021: 231). But, as Manning (2021) argues, this is merely an appearance, as the capitalist producer takes the form of the developer, builder, or property management firm that contracts with separate landowners. In this context, the contracts (from which the producer's profits are derived) represent the landowner's capitalist investment in the means of producing their properties (and the rents that flow from them).…”

“…Land rent theory has experienced a renaissance in recent years, revived by a series of extensive reviews (Haila, 2016;Manning, 2021;Park, 2014;Ward and Aalbers, 2016) that highlight the role of land, property, and the evolving dynamics of rent in the transformation of contemporary urban landscapes, from the impacts of the post-2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis (Wyly et al, 2012) to the proliferation of upscale redevelopment agendas (Anderson, 2014(Anderson, , 2019, the global housing affordability crisis (Beitel, 2016), and the increasing assetization of land in the context of advanced neoliberalization (see Swyngedouw and Ward, 2021). Land, property, and rent are increasingly understood as embodiments of complex socio-material relations, tensions, and conflicts.…”

“…Rooted in the agricultural context, interest in rent declined during the 20 th century due to the marginalist-turn in neoclassical economic theory (Fine, 1982;Keiper, et al, 1961;Patnaik, 2007) and the lingering tendency in Marxist political economy to treat land-based struggles (e.g. housing) as subordinate to those centered on the wage-relation (Manning, 2021). Interest was then revived in the 1970s and 1980s as urban scholars, influenced by Marx's incomplete writings on rent, sought to re-work the categories of rent to the urban context (Park, 2014;Ward and Aalbers, 2016).…”