Category: Economy

Shaun Morris

Nobody deserves to be homeless. A friend of mine is now facing homelessness just weeks before his final exams of university. I’m thankful not to be in his shoes, but it has made me think about how much power landlords have over their tenants’ lives.
My friend’s housing woes don’t begin with this eviction. He was kicked out of his previous home by an enterprising young landlord who wanted to convert his run-down suburban house into something he could flog on the market. Despite agreeing with the tenants to renew the lease, he changed his mind a few weeks later and told them to skedaddle.
This left my friend and his flatmates looking for a new place to live with only two months until the start of term. He feared he would have to move back to his family home and somehow commute over two hours to get to university. This was no real option, so he was forced to move into a place with a dodgy landlord.
The accommodation itself was an old townhouse that had been converted into a money maker. It was a single corridor with several rented rooms and a shared kitchen and bathroom. For this, the rent was not cheap but it wasn’t even near the university campus, a 45 minute cycle away. This is what students have to settle with when made desperate by the greed of landlords.
After nearly a year, the people living there were hit with a sudden demand to move out. As it turns out, the person they thought was their landlord was in actual fact a tenant. He was sub-letting the whole place to students without the knowledge of *his* landlord. He had even hung fake family photographs on the wall to support his story that it was a family home he had inherited! Once the real landlord had found out, he immediately demanded the place be emptied. With no lease and no rights, my friend and his flatmates are forced to squat there, fearing harassment or forcible eviction by the property owner.
For the second year in a row they find themselves desperately searching for a place to live, with final year exams looming. They’ve demanded that their rent be paid back to them, but there’s no way they can force the person who ripped them off to do this. All they can think to do is trash the place in revenge. My friend studies in Dublin, but his ordeal could have just as easily happened in Glasgow, Edinburgh or London (and I would bet it regularly does).
Rent is perhaps the clearest form of exploitation in capitalism. While people can incorrectly claim that profit is earned by the enterprise of the capitalist or interest (usury) is the cost of the risk a capitalist takes when lending money, landlords blatantly exploit the human need for shelter through their ownership of private property. What possible justification is there for this? Most landlords that students will have to deal with won’t even maintain their properties in a decent state, so what are we paying them for?
Young people have the poorest prospects for housing security than they have ever had. Home ownership is out of reach for a whole generation, throwing millions into the reserve army of renters that landlords can draw on to force rents up and conditions down when their tenants demand too much. With increasing casualization, exploitation and insecurity at work for young people, we are the worst hit victims of this crisis-ridden capitalist system.
Changing our fortunes requires a radical change in direction for our economy and society, demanding a break with capitalism and the exploitation it feeds off. We can abolish the current state of affairs if we struggle for the overthrow of the ruling class whose State defends the “rights” of private property over the needs of people. Our alternative is based on a democratic and socialist plan of production, where society’s resources are directed by need rather than profit, rent and usury.
That alternative begins with building a revolutionary labour movement that puts young people front and centre. It will be a movement armed with the broadest organisation of the working class and a revolutionary socialist programme. As Marxists we are at the forefront of preparing for this struggle.
Expropriate the landlords and capitalists! Homes and jobs for all!
Abolish rent, usury, profit and all exploitation! For world socialist revolution!Being a student in a time of capitalist crisis isn’t easy, and as many will know trying to make your loan stretch to the end of the month is a struggle. The days of generous grants seem a world away and it’s an endless juggle between money for food, rent, the electricity meter and having enough to buy a few pints at the end of the week. Of course, this isn’t just the reality for students but thousands of people across Scotland and Europe who have seen their standard of living plummet since the capitalist crisis of 2008 and the brutal austerity policies that have come as a result of it.
I was budgeting the other day when I realised just how much of my money goes on rent. For me two thirds of all the money I have coming in goes straight to my landlord and I am only left with one third for everything else. It struck me just how unfair this system is, where the law requires me to give the majority of the money I have to someone simply because they have a piece of paper saying they own the land and all that is built on it.
I do not live in a beautiful flat where the landlord works hard day-in, day-out to somehow earn these huge sums of money. In fact we had to argue with him for weeks just to get a fire alarm installed. There is damp and mould all over the place and the house was easily broken into because the building is so badly maintained. However the landlord continues to receive all this money for literally doing nothing. I’m not alone and I would argue that it’s a struggle for the vast majority of people in rented accommodation to get their landlord to do basic tasks and repairs.
Rent controls are obviously a start, however I believe we should go right to root of the problem; why should people be forced to pay rent at all? It isn’t right that landlords receive money from us just because they supposedly own the land or building. Why shouldn’t they work like everyone else? Under socialism we could have a system where these parasites are abolished and where society would collectively own the housing stock. No longer would we have to live with damp and unsafe houses, as these problems could be easily fixed if the money was in our own hands. Instead of profit being valued above all else, the aim of housing would be to create pleasant spaces for people to live, and everyone’s standard of living could be greatly improved.

The Keynesian Economic doctrine is one of the most dominant doctrines taught in schools and universities around the world as an example of how capitalism can work in a positive way. Many cite Keynesianism as the solution to the inherent ills of capitalism. The reformist parties such as The Labour Party cite it as a credible of way of making capitalism work by supposedly making capitalism state regulated to serve the interests of all. As Marxists we know this to be wrong, but why and how?

Government intervention under Capitalism

Empowering the workers

Keynes and Class

The fantasy of full employment

Suppressing real change

What do we want?