Publication HCDM Rent

What challenges does the political-economic determination of rent pose for Marxist theory? This article examines the political economy of housing rents in the light of the writings of Marx and Engels and the findings of Marxist scholarship since the 1970s.

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HCDM

Author

Bernd Belina,

Published

December 2024

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Housing for rent in Cartagena, Colombia.
Housing for rent in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo: pixabay

The Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) is a comprehensive Marxist lexicon which, upon completion, will span 15 volumes and over 1,500 entries. Of the nine volumes published so far in the original German, two volumes have been published in Chinese since 2017. In 2019, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung teamed up with the HCDM team to advance its "globalization" into English and Spanish, with the ultimate aim of recruiting a new generation of Marxist scholars from around the globe to the project and expanding its readership and reach. The below entry is one of a selection of these translations that are made available on our website.

For more information about the project and other translated entries, check out our HCDM dossier.

 

A: ’īǧār. – F: loyer. – G: Miete. – R: plata. – S: alquiler. – C: zūjīn 租金.

In the German-speaking countries, R is associated primarily with residential R. In capitalism, the fundamental need for housing can only be satisfied by the purchase or inheritance of residential properties or by means of R. Rental housing regularly creates social problems, especially for urban populations: from scarce supply, financial burdens on household income, and forced mobility to homelessness or rooflessness (which can also impact overindebted homeowners). This leads repeatedly to protests and political organisation.

R is subject to the laws of supply and demand, not just on the housing market, but on the real estate and the financial markets as well. The relation between renter and landlord is embedded in that between real estate owner and creditor, between the construction industry and the constructor, between capital and landed property as well as that between capital and labour, whereby the regulative state is constantly involved. The political-economic determination of R in its complex ramifications poses challenges to Marxist theory, which only a few authors have taken up. The following concentrates on the contributions of Marx and Engels on the political economy of residential R, as well as works conducted since the 1970s.

In bourgeois law, R refers to a payment of money that authorises the temporary use of an object owned by another party. The renting of the built environment – housing in particular – is central to the overall process of social reproduction. Other things can also be ‘rented’, such as machines or labour force, but here ‘R’ usually is not the common term (at least in German), but rather for example ‘leasing’ or ‘temporary labour’.

The development of the forces of production in the course of capitalist industrialisation of Europe in the 19th cent. required the housing of a rapidly growing mass of proletarians in cities, within a reachable distance from workplaces and under conditions that had to ensure the reproduction of labour. Liberal market mechanisms were unable to guarantee this, meaning that the social question appeared therefore primarily as the question of housing. Bourgeois reform efforts attempted, within the prevailing power relations, to adapt the physical and psychological reproduction of the working class to the increasing requirements of capitalist conditions of production. Meanwhile, the housing question increasingly became understood as an object of class struggles, and ultimately as a systemic question.

Depending on historical development, tendencies of living culture as well as governmental regulation in favour of either rental arrangements or the promotion of home ownership, the quantitative relationship between renters and homeowners varied strongly. Government support for the purchase of residential property through grants or loans reduced the number of renters. Whereas in many countries renting – accompanied by weak tenants’ rights – correlated with poverty, the situation was different in the German speaking countries. Here, as a result of the implementation of the political regulation of the housing question in the 20th cent., around half of the population live in rented dwellings.

1. Marx deals with R for housing only in passing. Thus he notes in Ms 44: “The enormous profit which the landlords of houses make out of poverty.” (MECW 3/258 [MEW 40/497]) While describing the living conditions of the British agricultural proletariat in CI he reports that landlords pocket “a large part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of the R of their houses” (C I, 831 [MEW 23/705]). Just as unsystematic, in the Manifesto, R payments are counted among the impositions added to the exploitation via wage labour: “No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, […] than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.” (MECW 6/491 [MEW 4/469]) Elsewhere he criticises the notion that interest-bearing capital represents the “basic form” of capital (C III, 744 [MEW 25/622]): “It is still more irrelevant and senseless to drag in the renting of houses, etc. for individual consumption. It is plain enough that the working class is swindled in this form too, and to an enormous extent; but it is equally exploited by the petty trader who supplies the workers with means of subsistence. This is a secondary exploitation, which proceeds alongside the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process itself.” (745 [623])

Here and in other instances, Marx discusses R first of all in connection with other capitalist conditions: with ground-rent (here above all with regard to agriculture), with the circulation of fixed capital – “[t]he value of these products also often circulates bit by bit and gradually: for example the value of houses circulates in R over a series of years” (C II, 553 [MEW 24/473]) –, or with interest-bearing capital: “Certain commodities, by the nature of their use-value, can be lent only as fixed capital, such as houses, boats, machines, etc.” (C III, 465 [MEW 25/356]). The political-economic elaboration of R for housing space and other parts of the built environment following Marx was provided by other writers.

2. Engels deals specifically with R in relation to (urban) housing in The Condition of the Working Class in England. The formation of the working class is accompanied by the emergence of big cities: “Population becomes centralised just as capital does” (MECW 4/325 [MEW 2/254]). “Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly observable here” (326 [255]). This concentration is accompanied by the emergence of miserable living conditions in rented housing. With regard to what was then the most industrialised city, he writes: “The couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses to win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich” (355 [285 et sq.]). He summarises the living situation: “[W]herever a nook or corner was free, a house has been run up; where a superfluous passage remained, it has been built up; the value of land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it rose, the more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference to the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the highest possible profit” (355 [286]).

In his articles on The Housing Question (1872/73), Engels criticises the equation of the relation between landlord and renter with that between capitalist and worker as ‘completely wrong’ (cf. MECW 23/320 [MEW 18/215]). Instead, “we are dealing here with a quite ordinary commodity transaction between two citizens, and this transaction proceeds according to the economic laws which govern the sale of commodities in general, and in particular the sale of the commodity ‘landed property’. The building and maintenance costs of the house or of the part of the house in question enter first into the calculation; the value of the land, determined by the more or less favourable situation of the house, comes next; the relation between supply and demand existing at the moment decides in the end.” (320 [216]) The R “must not only pay the interest on the building costs, but must also cover repairs and the average amount of bad debts and unpaid Rs as well as the occasional periods when the house is untenanted, and finally must pay off in annual instalments the building capital which has been invested in a house, which is perishable and which in time becomes uninhabitable and worthless” (321 [216]). Finally, rent consists in part of “the increased value of the land upon which the building is erected”, that is, of “ground rent” (ibid. [217]). In order to enter into this commodity trade, the tenant must appear “as a man with money”, that is to say, must dispose of money or the prospect of monetary income, in order “to be able to appear with the proceeds as the buyer of the use of a dwelling” (320 [216]).

In capitalism, according to Engels, the housing question “just as any other social question” is settled “by the gradual economic levelling of demand and supply, a settlement which reproduces the question itself again and again and therefore is no settlement” (330 [226]). One can observe in the cities “how the bourgeoisie settles the housing question in practice. The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place produces them in the next place also.” (368 [263]) As long as the capitalist mode of production persists, “it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the lot of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself.” (ibid.) We learn little about what is to be done regarding the housing question “in the meanwhile” (Merrifield 2002, 47), that is, how to explain the changes in renting and influence them in a progressive way.

3. Political Economy of (Housing) R – In the 1970s and 1980s, R was the topic of intensive Marxist discussion in connection with housing shortage, urban redevelopment, the “crisis of the city”, urban social movements, social-spatial segregation, and squatting, especially in capitalist countries such as the Federal Republic of Germany, where a large part of the population lives in rented dwellings. Many of the still pertinent Marxist analyses originate from this period, above all the studies by Helmut Brede et al. (1975 and 1976), which systematise cursory remarks on R as well as relevant determinations of commodity- and interest-bearing capital and ground-rent in the works of Marx and Engels, applying them to the current situation.

In places where almost all residents have to go into debt to own a home and rental housing is limited to the poorest strata of the population, as in the USA, R has been, and is, discussed far less by Marxists. On the margins, this happens in connection with gentrification (Smith 1979 and 1987; Marcuse 1985), ghetto formation (Harvey 1974), and subsidised housing (Marcuse 1986). David Harvey (1974, 1982, and 2012) in particular developed theoretical definitions of the relation between the built environment and the financial sector as well as ground-rent, which have been further developed by many others (see Haila 1988; Swyngedouw 2012).

The immediate R relation, “the constellation of renters and property owners”, must “be interpreted as a fundamental relation of contradiction rooted in the unequal distribution of property titles and the decoupling of the exchange and use values of houses and apartments” (Holm 2011, 11). At the same time, it is not a class relation, as for example John Rex and Robert Moore (1967) claim with reference to a Weberian concept of class, but rather embedded in a complex manner in the class relations between productive and finance capital, labour and landed property. As a relationship of exploitation, it is “secondary” in the sense indicated by Marx (C III, 745 [MEW 25/623]). Correspondingly, Engels warned against understanding R as a “direct result of the exploitation of the worker as worker by the capitalist”: “The housing shortage from which the workers and part of the petty bourgeoisie suffer in our modern big cities is one of the innumerable smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-day capitalist mode of production.” (MECW 23/318 [MEW 18/214])

Residential R is the interest which the landlord receives for lending the apartment as a commodity. “To him, the apartment is commodity capital that he lends.” (Brede et al. 1975, 24) The housing space functions as interest-bearing capital. “Yet if capital is loaned out as money, land, a house, etc., it becomes a commodity as capital; or the commodity which is put into circulation is capital as capital.” (Marx, Grundrisse, MECW 29/109 [MEW 42/619]) Residential R distinguishes itself from other forms of interest-bearing capital by its special long-term nature and the spatial fixation of the investment, increasing the insecurity of repayment and the risk of R default (Harvey 1978, 122 et sqq.). Investment is only made in housing if the interest rates achievable there can compete with those in other spheres.

Residential R includes ground-rent and the value of the building. Since their costs are usually mainly financed through credit, there is a connection between residential R and the financial sector. Since the residential R paid by the workers is part of the costs of the reproduction of labour-power, there is also a connection with the wage.

3.1. Ground-rent – Ground-rent is “a certain sum of money that the landowner draws each year from leasing out a piece of the earth” (C III, 760 [MEW 25/636]). What Marx writes regarding agricultural use applies equally to urban land: “The price of land is nothing but the capitalized and thus anticipated rent.” (944) Its amount is therefore derived from the income to be generated in the future by leasing, letting, or use. Since these are only determined in the expectation of future developments, the “speculative aspect […] [is] inherent to capitalist ground-rent” (Brede et al. 1976, 88). In C II, Marx mentions this in passing with reference to statements by a London contractor: “The profit on the actual construction is extremely slight; the main source of profit comes from raising the ground rent, and from the clever selection and exploitation of the building land. Almost the whole of Belgravia, Tyburnia and the countless thousands of villas around London have been built in this way, by speculative anticipation of the demand for houses.” (C II, 312 [MEW 24/237]) He generalises this, also in passing, to the effect that “in cities that are experiencing rapid growth, particularly where building is carried on factory-style, as in London, it is ground-rent and not the houses themselves that forms the real basic object of speculative building” (C III, 909). The palpability of extra profits by means of land speculation – often first made possible through the complicity between landowners and politicians – make it a prominent subject in literature (e.g. Zola 1872; Zwerenz 1973) as well as in political agitation and conflicts (e.g. Büttner 1972; Schulz 1972).

The monopoly on land enables the landowner “to appropriate a part of the socially created surplus value” (Brede et al. 1976, 62). Ground-rents for dwellings should be characterised as monopoly R, as a “price determined simply by the desire and ability of the buyer to pay” (C III, 910 [MEW 25/783]). The latter varies considerably between regions, cities, and neighbourhoods, according to the ratio between the supply of housing and solvent demand in relation to the respective types of dwelling in certain locations, as well as the political regulation of the land market (see, for Frankfurt am Main: Schipper 2013; for Montevideo and Vienna: Jäger 2003). In the case of commercial use, we are dealing directly with a deduction from surplus value or profit. In the case of public use, R is covered from taxes or other state revenues. In the case of housing or other use determined purely from the viewpoint of use-value, we are dealing with wages or other sources of money from which the costs of reproduction of the renter are paid. In this regard, Johannes Jäger (2003, 241) proposes distinguishing between monopoly R 1 as a deduction from surplus value, and monopoly R 2, which is paid from wages.

The way in which land is used is determined by the competition between solvent usage interests. It is regularly the case that a R obtained through commercial use, especially offices and retail, is higher than that from residential use. The competition for the use of land results in structures of (urban) spatial use that are determined primarily by the aspect of valorisation. Landowners who do not necessarily aim at maximising R (although this is increasingly the case), such as churches, municipalities, public or cooperative housing associations, or even private landlords who – for whatever reason – do not act primarily based on an orientation toward valorisation, have a relativising effect. The ensemble of state regulations with property rights, land taxation, tenancy law, planning specifications, subsidy measures, and settlement policies, also has a relativising effect. In countries like the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and Austria, state measures – down to the municipal level – to regulate R levels and to distinctively regulate the housing supply for reasons of political legitimacy as well as to ensure material social reproduction, amount to significant modifications of the capitalist housing market.

Neil Smith (1979, 543) introduces the concept of “[p]otential ground rent”, in order to designate the ground-rent obtainable from the most solvent demand possible, whose difference from realised ground-rent constitutes the cause for gentrification. For if this “R gap” (Smith 1987) allows investments in a particular area to appear attractive, capital will flow there and the ground-rent – and therefore the R – will increase. The accompanying displacement of the established residential population into less expensive neighbourhoods (Marcuse 1985; Holm 2010a) is a means of maximising ground-rent and the achievable R; it drives out tenants who are not able to pay as much and regularly alters the socio-spatial structure of the city.

Following classical political economy, Marx emphasises with regard to ground-rent as a source of revenue “the palpable and complete passivity displayed by the owner, whose activity consists simply in exploiting advances in social development (particularly in the case of mines), towards which he does not contribute and in which he risks nothing, unlike the industrial capitalist” (C III, 908 [MEW 25/781]). Not contradicting this, but relativising the “passivity” and the often imputed character as a “remnant” of feudalism, Harvey emphasises “the co-ordinating functions that [the ground-rent] performs in allocating land to uses and shaping geographical organization in ways reflective of competition and amenable to accumulation” (1982, 333). Land prices that are achieved by means of speculation – as regards the highest possible future R – exert pressure on the actual implementation of the most solvent usages. Thus ground-rent ‘coordinates’ the structure of (urban) usages of space; capitalism thereby develops, above all in the richer countries, mechanisms to modify the structure of usages generated by each individual capitalist in the sense of political legitimation, the implementation of development models, or retrofitting for warfare. Harvey also argues, going beyond Marx: “When trade in land is reduced to a special branch of the circulation of interest-bearing capital, then, I shall argue, landownership has achieved its true capitalistic form” (347). Because the price of land depends on the future income that can be generated from it, it is the case that “the land is treated as a pure financial asset” (ibid.) and the trade in land is de facto similar to that with other profit expectations (see Haila 1988; Harvey 2012).

In the context of ghetto formation in the USA, Harvey discusses a deviation from the principle of the coordination of the use of space purely through competition for ground-rent. Under special circumstances, speculators can achieve a “class-monopoly R” – a special form of monopoly R – when they “possess mechanisms for expressing their collective class interest” (1974, 243) and when they “are willing to release” “‘resource units’ – the land and the relatively permanent improvements incorporated in it – […] only if they receive a positive return above some arbitrary level” (241). Precisely this is the reason for the above average income of ‘slumlords’.

Although ground-rent is responsible for a part of residential R and especially for large differences between Rs depending upon the city and location in the city, Brede et al. (1976, 64) warn against an “overestimation of the land question”. Quantitatively, the share of ground-rent in R is relatively small; qualitatively, it can only be understood in its dependence upon the general development of the socially created surplus value.

3.2 Building Value – The production of the built environment, of factory buildings, streets, sewer systems, office towers, airports, and apartment buildings is commodity production. The value of buildings expresses the socially necessary labour time needed for their production. Due to the “possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price” (C I, 197 [MEW 23/117]) their prices fluctuate around their values according to supply and demand (see Smith 1979, 542). Value and price of buildings increase when further value-creating labour is put into them, such as in the case of renovation, building maintenance, etc.; it is reduced by wear and tear. In the case of buildings that are used for the production of surplus value, this value is transferred “bit by bit” (C II, 553 [MEW 24/473]) in the form of fixed capital to the value of the commodities produced. In the case of residential buildings, the use value is simply used up, which decreases the price.

Since the price of buildings also depends upon supply and demand, money owners lose interest in the housing market as a sphere of investment in case of an oversupply of housing. Then, the creation of an artificial housing shortage by means of ‘dismantling’, vulgo demolition, is a means of increasing the R that can be obtained. In this sense it is true that “[t]he capitalist housing market functions only under the condition of scarcity, of lack of housing.” (Frieling 2012, 23)

The commodity ‘built environment’ is expensive relative to other commodities, which is decisive for the level of R, especially in the case of new construction. When this phenomenon was still discussed by Marxists, the reason given for this was the “relatively low organic composition of construction capital, especially the low share of fixed capital” whilst the “growth in productivity” was “below average” (Brede et al. 1975, 27 et sq.). The construction branch had “not yet consummated the transition from the handicraft to the manufacturing mode of production” (Projektgruppe Branchenanalyse 1972, 103; similarly for Great Britain: Ball 1978). Despite the boost in industrialisation since then (prefabricated construction) with corresponding organisational forms of capital (construction corporations), built environment (and thus housing) continues to be a relatively expensive commodity. In the countries of state socialism, this was one area where attempts were made to tackle the housing question by making the new construction of housing cheaper by means of industrialisation and standardisation (see, for the GDR: Hannemann 1996, Chapter 3).

3.3 R and Finance Capital – Due to the high costs of production and the long-term return, the built environment in every form “could not be either produced or used without resort to the credit system” (Harvey 1982, 225). The interest payment in the form of R between renter and landlord is directly connected with that between the landlord and the lender of credit. At the same time, we are dealing with “two independent circuits of capital” (Brede et al. 1975, 33). Whereas renters pay interest in the form of R for the use of the built environment, landlords, as owners of the built environment, obtain credit on the basis of their future incomes from R. This marks the transition from interest-bearing capital to fictitious capital in the sense of a ‘capitalised’ expectation of profit. Landlords themselves carry out this transition when they consider not only their investment in land, but also in the built environment as a “pure financial asset” (Harvey 1982, 347).

A common basic form of credit financing is borrowing in the form of a mortgage, secured by the property as collateral. Due to a high level of borrowing with successive repayments spread over, for instance, 20, 30, or 50 years, investments in the built environment rarely achieve good returns in the early years. Only when the interest burden declines as a result of progressive repayment (frequently accompanied by a simultaneous increase in R) investments in housing generate huge profits (Brede et al. 1975, 34) and “rented housing [can] yield higher returns than other investments – but only in the long run” (Schwarz 1981, 247).

Additionally, there is a “variety of financial market-based investment opportunities in real estate” (Heeg 2013, 81), such as open- and closed-end real estate funds, real estate private equity funds, and real estate investment trusts. These are increasingly active globally and compare investment opportunities in the real estate sector worldwide with those in other spheres (see 2009). In the 2000s, the housing portfolios of the German public sector, which was willing to privatise, became a target (Holm 2010b). Due to the credit financing of the built environment, banks and other creditors are further actors who strive for use which is maximally profitable. They thus contribute decisively to processes of maximising ground-rent and therefore to upgrading, displacement, and gentrification.

Following Henri Lefebvre (1970/2003 and 1974/1991), Harvey has made observations concerning a “secondary circuit of capital” (see Belina 2010; Wiegand 2013, 136-56) by which he designates the totality of the processes “whereby capital circulates through fixed capital and consumption fund formation and use” (Harvey 1982, 236). In the credit-financed production of the built environment and the accompanying protracted return of the capital advanced, he sees a strategy by both individual capitals and states to avoid devaluation in periods of overaccumulation. “Cleary, property market booms and busts are inextricably intertwined with speculative financial flows, and these booms and busts have serious consequences for the macro-economy in general […]. […] [T]he greater the share of property markets in GDP, the more significant the connection between financing and investment in the built environment becomes as a potential source of macro crises.” (2012, 34) Big economic crises, according to Harvey, are regularly preceded by bursting real estate bubbles, especially when real estate markets constitute a large part of the economy (see 27-34).

3.4 R and Wages – The greatest part of R for housing is paid from wages. The higher the share of wages that has to be used to pay R, the greater the impositions for the worker. Furthermore: the higher the burden of R is, the greater the costs of the reproduction of labour-power and therefore the wage (Engels, MECW 23/345 et sq. [MEW 18/240 et sq.]; see Schwarz 1981, 253; Ball 1978, 87). The interest in a large income from R contradicts the interest not only of the wage recipient who pays R, but also that of the capitalist who purchases labour-power. Struggles over the level of R concentrate – depending upon the given balance of forces – on the one hand within the legal regulation of the market for land and/or R and on the other hand within state policies that intervene directly (e.g. by means of land taxation, public construction activity, or, as in the case of subsidised housing, rent subsidies) or indirectly (e.g. by means of spatial planning, lending, interest rate policy) in the market for land and/or rental markets. That policies to reduce R can be in the interest of both renting workers as well as productive capital is also demonstrated by the most remarkable attempt to solve the housing question “in the meanwhile” (Merrifield 2002, 47) under capitalist conditions: the Red Vienna of the interwar period. Alongside the progressive elements of this social democratic experiment – suitable housing for the petite-bourgeoisie and the workers, financed by taxing the rich – it was also the case that “the level of R was a state policy decision in order to keep the level of wages low”, “so that Austrian industry could remain competitive internationally” (Weihsmann 2002, 34 et sq.).

Capitalism produces periodic crises of housing supply. Particularly in countries with a high proportion of renting, these crises impact heterogeneous populations. Time and again – and with various methods such as R strikes, mass squatting, but also the construction of institutions of housing provision that are not oriented toward valorisation – the question of rental housing proves to be a cause for the repoliticisation of conflicts around social reproduction.

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Bernd Belina

Translated by Alexander Locascio

→ capital, city, city/countryside, commodity, communal economy, commune, credit, exploitation, fictitious capital, global city, ground-rent, house, housing question, interest [in finance and economics], landed property, lease, local government politics, market, metropole, monopoly, overaccumulation, ownership/property, price, primary valorisation, private/social, private property, privatisation, profit, red Vienna, scarcity, social policy, space, subcontracted/temporary labour, surplus value, trinity formula, urban development

→ Ausbeutung, Besitz/Eigentum, fiktives Kapital, Gemeinwirtschaft, globale Stadt, Grundeigentum, Grundrente, Haus, Inwertsetzung, Kapital, Kommunalpolitik, Kommune, Kredit, Leiharbeit, Mangel, Markt, Mehrwert, Metropole, Monopol, Pacht, Preis, privat/gesellschaftlich, Privateigentum, Privatisierung, Profit, Raum, Rotes Wien, Sozialpolitik, Stadt, Stadt/Land, Städtebau, trinitarische Formel, Überakkumulation, Ware, Wohnungsfrage, Zins