Abstract
This Afterword reviews the diversity of moral economies of housing under the current neoliberal regime. Based on the articles in this theme issue, it considers the ways people’s relationships to their housing have changed as the economy has shifted from a welfare state centered on industrial workers to a financialized economy more reliant on precarious occupations. In the process, the article suggests that struggles over homes and housing have framed the emergence of social movements, both from the left and from the right.
This Special Issue employs E.P. Thompson’s (1971) concept of a moral economy to examine demands and expectations of housing and homes. The introduction outlines two moments of housing which can be seen as paralleled among state socialist and welfare state societies and beyond, the first the post- Second World War trente glorieuses and the second, the changed social contract which began in the 1980s and has since been conceptualized as neoliberalism and financialization (Harvey, 2005; Kalb, 2014; Smith, 2011). Why, one might ask, are we reverting to a discussion of the moral economy now in a highly industrialized, financialized global economy? On the one hand, the articles describe the myriad ways in which housing and regulations about housing are embedded in contested relations of urban neighbourhoods and the state. In this sense, a moral economy is generated in people’s efforts to maintain the quality of life and social relations which are being eroded. On the other hand, we might ask whether the new importance of the moral economy is itself a product of the erosions of social life in relation to the destruction of the welfare state and the increasing interpenetration of financial capital.
As the introduction makes clear, Thompson was writing about a pre-industrial economy premised on the price of grain for bread. Since that time, globally, we have experienced multiple forms of social movements, union organizing, struggles for independence and efforts to create a welfare state as well as socialist and communist societies which would aim to guarantee housing, healthcare and nourishment. Political projects such as public housing have lost salience under the concerted assaults of capital represented by neoliberalism since the 1980s and the more dramatic assaults and increasing inequality which have characterized the austerity policies since the financial crisis of 2008. The moral economy of the 18th century represented in many ways the battles of the weak: expectations of a paternal hierarchy. Taking the moral economy as the defining perspective today marks the declining power of unions as well as the failures of socialism but possibly also signals the development of a new kind of horizontalist commons movement such as that represented since 2011 in the Squares movements in Spain, Greece and elsewhere and Occupy in the United States (Susser and Tonnelat 2013, Susser and Tonnelat 2016, 2017).
The articles document the expectations that characterize the years of the welfare and socialist states when the working class was able to successfully demand a certain standard of living, looking beyond shelter, to ideas of a sense of comfort, security, collective social practices and even aesthetic and moral expectations. These expectations of a past social contract created the basis for diverse moral economies of housing which people struggle to maintain in the neoliberal era. The papers explore how such expectations are disrupted by the destruction and undermining of housing security through financialization and other state and corporate interventions. Thus, historical patterns of relative security under state socialism and their loss in Kazakhstan (Alexander) correspond to shifts in the U.K. (Koch) and those in Denmark (Bruun). It is harder to fit the Landless Movement in Brazil (Flynn) into this context, not because they have not been subject to neoliberalism, but because the secure homes of an era of the welfare state were never available to them. However, in this case, without any previous experience of the rights of the welfare state, we see the emergence of a moral economy defined by austerity as those who were shackdwellers seek to discipline themselves to secure the recommendation to the state by fellow activists for a roof over their heads.
The papers develop an important extension of the social relations of housing, illuminating the interpenetration of the private with the public, which has implications not only for collective social practices but for the broader politics of the society. As Bruckermann’s article on China demonstrates, even rumours that lead people to unnecessarily abandon their housing can represent the anxiety of tenants as they fear that their very apartment blocks are the product of state shortchanging and were not built to withstand an earthquake. Alexander documents the shifting visions of a moral economy in Kazakhstan expressed among those who demanded housing within socialist and post-socialist state projects, variously in terms of guaranteed universal provision, nationalism, or different state priorities. The fragmented, sometimes rivalrous, ephemeral moral communities that are making claims upon the authorities for secure housing provision in Kazakhstan remind us that sometimes moral economies can lead to exclusionary movements rather than acting as an inclusive, progressive force. In some cases, in contemporary Europe, the exclusionary aspects of the moral economy of housing have led to the bolstering of right wing movements mobilized in opposition to immigrant access. In contrast, in Spain and elsewhere, efforts to change the conditions of housing have had major implications for state transformation in a progressive direction (Susser 2017).
The neoliberal era
As discussed above, a major shift toward the commodification of housing has taken place in the global economy of the past four decades. Initially, this was described in western capitalist countries as a process of gentrification associated with neoliberalism. Since the 2000s, as the commodification of housing has increased worldwide and massively in global cities, it can be understood more definitively as a product of the rapid financialization of capital. From the 1970s, the Friedrich Hayek/Milton Friedman discourse was developed globally, from Latin America to the United States and Europe to shift the ideological framework from the welfare state to privatization and individual financing (Robotham, 2010). Most of the articles in this issue demonstrate in some way the effects of that shift. Keynes' insight that the government must spend to maintain economic growth was not in fact abandoned by the proteges of Friedman. The ideological shift that occurred was that government spending must go to the corporate world and to subsidize private investment rather than fund the citizenship expectations of the welfare state (see for example in Brooklyn, New York, Susser, 2012).
Following the implementation of Hayek’s ideas, housing became crucial as the one property or financial asset that everyday people could claim or to which they could aspire. With financialization, the ideas of common maintenance and shared responsibility for building blocks, or regulations for safety or to protect housing from flooding for a common good, dissipated as Johnson and Bruun discuss. Instead, as articles in this issue demonstrate, housing became a financial investment, subject to predatory lending and the vagaries of the economy.
With the advent of neoliberalism, cities began to base their municipal policies on the attraction of real estate investment rather than the social needs of the population (Susser, 2012). Rentals and social housing became insecure, and in many places social housing was sold to tenants. Public investment in the maintenance of social housing also decreased, which is a key factor in discussions here by Bruckermann, Koch and Alexander. In this new context, as residents were encouraged by the state, through incentives such as subsidized mortgages and tax breaks, to see their housing as an asset, as Bruun and Johnson’s articles on Denmark and Belgrade illustrate, they lost the protection of a housing commons – when a house or an apartment is recognized as a set of relationships upon which people create their families, support their kin and build their community – and became directly dependent upon the vagaries of the market. The particularities differ but this story has been duplicated internationally. For example, in Denmark, as people bought into traditional cooperatives, they had an expectation that they were making a much-practiced investment (Bruun). They were investing in a commodity, but they expected the mortgages to remain predictable. However, after 2008, the safety of such mortgages was no longer maintained, and homeowners in Denmark, Spain and elsewhere lost their life savings to the financial market.
As housing becomes an investment and not a home, the fundamental basis for community living is often reconfigured or destroyed. People are no longer concerned to keep schools for their children. Good schools are only significant as they affect the real estate market – and even children’s academic success becomes part of the calculus of property. In New York City, wealthy investors in the new real estate, if they live in the apartments at all, are not expecting to place children in state schools so there is no solidary practice with respect to public school improvement (Susser, 2012).
The loss of working class housing is also related to the control of public space and the carceral state – as people lose their neighbourhood security and roam out of place, they are liable to arrest and subject to police violence (Susser, 1996). As communities are displaced, the out-of-place youth have no protection and find themselves blamed for existing in the public sphere. Such an increase in violence among youth is documented in Johnson’s article about housing blocks in Belgrade.
A second related aspect discussed in several of the papers in this issue is the moral economy of blame. In the UK, as the quality of the housing decreased, the lack of insulation led neighbours to fight over the noise (Koch). However, these fights resulted finally in neighbours blaming one another and reporting one another to the authorities over noise infractions rather than in any way working together to demand better quality insulation throughout. Koch labels this the lawfare state. In a second example, among the Brazilian Landless People’s Movement, a form of aesthetic policing was practiced among the squatters themselves, in anticipation of the need to convince the state and the squatter leaders who negotiated with the state, that the people who were allowed to stay in the encampments were worthy occupants (Flynn). Again, it was not the lack of housing that came under attack among squatters but rather those who were not allocated space in the encampment were seen as somehow culpable in not conforming to unspoken regulations. In the US as in the UK, new regulations in parallel with the carceral state have been imposed on social housing – if anyone living in an apartment has been arrested, often youth in relation to marijuana, the whole family can be evicted.
The papers in this volume document the transformation of housing from the home to the commodity and the effects of this shift on the lives of the residents. They analyse the ways in which people create the ‘home’ and the sense of sharing and solidary community which such situations can instil. They also document the ways in which displacement and the increased commoditization of housing as in Belgrade and Denmark undermine the solidary efforts of residents and destroys not only their sense of ‘home’ but also the ways in which residents engage with the public sphere and work beyond the individual to make themselves heard in the public sphere. In fact, as many papers illuminate and the introduction points out, even the target of housing demands is fragmented, as the state is no longer regarded as responsible for social conditions. People trying to protect their homes no longer can identify whom they need to confront or where solutions can be found.
Different historical relations to housing not only provide the context for individualism and competition or collective practices and the establishment of a commons, but also interact with the development of social movements and the ideas of security and sharing that go beyond the housing itself. Since the 2008 fiscal crisis, social movements around housing have gained strength internationally, both in poorer countries exemplified by the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil (Flynn), and in response to the commodification of housing in higher income countries, outlined in several of the articles here. Such movements are shaped by the changing state in each historical moment and may become an exclusive, rightwing nationalist movement for a homeland (Kalb and Halmai, 2011). In Spain, grassroots movements to prevent eviction have become the platform for progressive political parties demonstrating the significance of ‘home’ and the state regulations of housing in the transformation of society. Interestingly, social movements in Barcelona have begun to target ‘vulture’ funds or, in fact, the very financialization that is leading to much of the global displacement. They have demanded legislative changes from the newly elected progressive municipal authorities to constrain such funds (Susser, 2017). The Spanish experience provides some hints of the possibility for a less individualized and possibly more effective confrontation with the ongoing displacements and accumulation by dispossession so well documented in these pages. In contrast, the lawfare state in the UK (Koch) and the individualization of life in Belgrade (Johnson) and Denmark (Bruun) illustrate the underlying pressures for a rightward trend which has certainly been evident in much of Europe and the United States.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.