Spain. The struggle for housing must be linked to the broader struggle for the living conditions of the proletariat

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Spain. The struggle for housing must be linked to the broader struggle for the living conditions of the proletariat

Throughout Europe, the housing problem is becoming increasingly pressing; it is becoming a central issue that sets the tone for the real difficulties faced by a growing segment of the population—primarily the working class—as they struggle to survive in capitalist society.

During the decades following the end of World War II, the housing shortage—caused, especially in cities, by the devastating war that had ravaged the region—combined with the influx of millions of dollars earmarked for reconstruction and for consolidating American economic over Europe and Asia, and the revival of European industry itself—which required millions of working-class workers for its factories—led to the expansion of cities, their absorption of former rural centers, and the construction of the immense “beehives” that even today house the working-class labor force for its exploitation. Housing was, at that time, such a profitable business that even the working class could entertain the illusion of “benefiting” from urban growth, as the traditional shortage of housing in cities seemed to disappear.

Urban expansion was aided by national urban development policies, through which various states addressed their bourgeoisie’s need to amass a labor force for their businesses. This gave rise to rent control systems, public-contract construction, and so on. In a world where the destruction caused by the war had made any industrial business profitable to an extent that would have been unimaginable just two decades earlier, real estate capital was not a particularly lucrative prospect for capitalists to pursue as eagerly as they did other sectors of production.

To a large extent, social democracy and Stalinism were able to base their policy of interclass collaboration—which relied on control over the proletariat and its subjugation to the political and economic demands of the bourgeoisie—on the spread of this relative well-being, which was grounded in affordable housing, which in many cases led to home ownership, at the cost of prolonged indebtedness to financial capital.

Beginning in 1974, the end of the economic boom marked the resumption of the traditional cycle of crisis-expansion-crisis and, with it, the worsening of many of the problems characteristic of capitalism, among them, above all, the high cost of living—the result of low wages, rising unemployment, and the aggressive policy of crushing any resistance the working class might mount (both inside and outside companies) against this process. Thus, low wages—especially among young workers, immigrants, and others —upon whom the burden of the economic crisis was placed—made access to housing extremely difficult. It was at this time that the financial structure we know today took shape: one that compensates for falling wages with very long-term mortgage loans and which, in fact, increases the cost of housing, thereby partially offsetting the decline in demand. Added to this were other factors, such as the sharp decline in population growth (as birth rates fell along with wages), which resulted in a decrease in the housing supply. All of this gave rise to the phenomenon known as the financialization of the real estate sector, which—as a result of a sharp imbalance between housing supply and demand stemming from the successive crises of overproduction that have occurred since 1975, and the subsequent growth of financial intermediaries operating in this sector—led to price increases at a rate consistently higher than that of wages, the conversion of part of the housing stock into an investment asset (so-called speculation), and, ultimately, the rising cost of housing to the point where it became a good that was difficult for the poorest sectors of the working class to access.

The protests of recent days have not only highlighted that the housing issue is a pressing problem that affects, as we say, all capitalist countries. They have also shown that the proletariat is not the only social class affected by this situation: the petty bourgeoisie, which sees how the concentration of capital—including real estate capital—displaces it, preventing its reproduction and lowering its social status, is also deeply harmed by a dynamic imposed by capitalist profit but which excludes it from that profit. But while for the proletariat the housing problem is part of the broader issue of its survival—including its physical survival—and that of its children, for the petty bourgeoisie it is a matter of losing ground to the big bourgeoisie. Whereas for the proletariat, the housing issue raises the need to fight against the bourgeoisie as a whole—which exploits its labor power and appropriates part of the wage it has earned in production when collecting rent or a mortgage— for the petty bourgeoisie, it is a matter of fighting against a segment of the bourgeoisie—that linked to finance capital, cynically called “rentiers”—with which it competes to appropriate social wealth, while at the same time fighting against the proletariat, the producer of this social wealth and whose exploitation it also depends on for its livelihood. That is why the petty bourgeoisie calls on the state to intervene in the rental market—that is, to control prices—while it wants nothing to do with the price of labor power, which is practically insufficient even to ensure its own subsistence.

The petty bourgeoisie puts forward its slogans demanding a share of control over the state in the form of laws against its bourgeois rivals, whose “right” to extract profit from their businesses it seeks to limit because this profit directly harms it. It demands that, just as big capital depends on the state to obtain its profits, this same state guarantee its social status. The petty bourgeoisie hates “rentier” capital because it appropriates—in the form of excessive housing charges—a portion of the profit it considers rightfully its own. These social classes—subordinate yet also exploiters of proletarian labor power—rely on the workers and demand their support for their demands because they need the workers’ strength to pose some kind of threat to the dominant bourgeois class; by dominating the proletariat to a certain extent, they gain significance in relation to it. The clearest example of this need the petty bourgeoisie has for proletarian strength has been seen in recent days in the demand for a general strike made by all the organizations representing these middle classes. The strike is the quintessential means of the proletarian class struggle; it is through the strike that the working class demonstrates its potential strength within bourgeois society… provided that it is directed toward specific goals and carried out using class-based methods. The general strike demanded by organizations such as the Socialist Movement, Revolutionary Left, or the Revolutionary Workers’ Current is the kind we have seen in recent decades: a one-day symbolic gesture aimed, at best, at exhausting the proletariat in a struggle devoid of meaning or objectives. One need only recall the strikes of the 2010–2012 period, all of which were true milestones in the demobilization of the proletariat. These are the strikes they seek—as bait to transform the impotence of the middle classes into something else at the expense of the proletariat.

For its part, the proletariat faces the housing problem just as it faces the problem of food prices or basic utilities: as a contradiction between the bourgeoisie’s high profits and the low price it receives—in the form of a wage—for selling its labor power. For the proletariat, there is only one issue, and that is its daily survival, which is directly linked to the wages it receives. Therefore, for the proletariat, there is only one way to address the housing issue: by linking it to a struggle to defend its living conditions, which can only be carried out through direct confrontation with the bourgeoisie.

This struggle must be waged, in the sphere of production, as a struggle for wages, to secure improvements for the lowest-paid sections of the proletariat, for wage increases to offset the general rise in prices, etc. And in the broader social sphere, it must be a struggle for organization in defense of their class interests, which involves direct and open confrontation with the bourgeoisie and the demand for an immediate resolution of the problems caused by homelessness.

This path—the class struggle on all fronts—is what is missing from the housing protests, as a result of the dominance that the petty-bourgeois classes exert over a proletariat that has long been accustomed to deferring to them and their democratic illusions.

Undoubtedly, the protests we are witnessing these days are a symptom of a social divide that is widening every day. This divide affects the working class just as much as the petty bourgeoisie, even though it is the latter that appears to be confronting it most forcefully. But undoubtedly, at the cost of extremely painful experiences, an independent proletarian class force must reemerge—one that will raise its own demands and put forward its own claims. That force will take its first step by breaking with the rest of the social classes, in which it will see nothing but an enemy.

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program