— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part One — A theory of rent and space · Chapter 5

5 The user and the rentier

The preceding chapters characterised a mechanism and retraced its forms. Land does not produce, it conditions; whoever holds this conditioning collects a toll from whoever must produce or live, and this toll (rent) runs from arable land to built space without changing its nature, fertility there becoming location¹. But a mechanism does not yet make a politics, and for rent to become a political question (the thesis of this book is that it is the oldest of them all), those whom it sets against each other must be named: who pays the toll, who pockets it. That is the object of this chapter, and it is its point of highest exposure. For the classical answer of Marxism is already given: it names the proletarian and the bourgeois, defined by their position in the relation of production. Rent, however, is not born in production: it is born in access — and in the way this access has been captured by the bourgeoisie and by capital. It therefore demands its own pair of figures. This chapter grounds them: the user and the rentier.

To ground such a pair is to expose oneself immediately to an objection that we shall here take as our organising adversary, because it is the most serious one: by making access to space the principle of a class division, does one not dilute the Marxian criterion, which anchors class in the process of production and in exploitation? Does one not fabricate, under the colours of radicalism, a transversal and confused bloc (“those who pay a rent” against “those who collect one”) that blurs the fundamental antagonism of capital and labour? We shall not answer this objection by dodging it, but by following it step by step, according to the discipline inherited from Volume 40 of Lenin’s works: first concede what is right in it, then settle the matter on the chosen terrain.

5.1 The trinity formula and the neglected third party

The objection assumes that rigorous Marxism knows only two classes. Yet Marx himself, at the close of Capital, counts not two but three. The trinity formula of Book III associates three sources of income with three distinct figures: capital with profit, labour with wages, and land with ground rent.² The landed proprietor is not there one capitalist among others: his source of income is not the exploitation of labour power in production, but the holding of a monopoly over a condition of production. Marx formulates it in the very terms of our thesis: the land “functions as an agent in the production of a use value […] but it in no way intervenes in the formation of value”.³ The capitalist extracts surplus value; the landed proprietor levies a tribute — a word that Lenin would take up literally in his notebooks, for absolute rent, which “does not arise from the capitalist exploitation of the land, but from the private ownership of the land […] not from the quantity of production, but a tribute”.⁴

A serious objection nonetheless remains: the “land” of the trinity formula is first of all agricultural land, and Marx’s landed proprietor is the landed proprietor, not today’s real-estate owner. To transpose agricultural rent to built space without precaution would be a forced move. But the first step of this transposition is not ours: it is Marx’s. In chapter xlvi (“Rent of Building Land. Rent of Mines. Price of Land”), he explicitly extends the analysis to urban land, and there he notes precisely what will form the matter of this book. First, that for building land location becomes the preponderant determinant, where fertility governed agricultural rent: these rents “are characterised, in the first place, by the preponderant influence that situation exerts upon them”.⁵ Next, that this urban rent belongs to monopoly price and thrives on the most elementary need: “poverty is for house rent a richer source than the mines of Potosí ever were”.⁶ Marx finally draws from it a formula that our thesis merely prolongs: “one part of humanity pays a tribute to the other in order to be able to inhabit the earth”.⁷

This third party, however, the workerist reading of Marxism long left fallow: it made the wage relation alone the heart of the critique and dismissed rent as an archaism destined to dissolve into capital — when it is the opposite that has happened: far from fading away, the rent of built space has become general and today carries, in France, more than one hundred and sixty billion euros of annual levy, as Part III will measure. The user/rentier category therefore does not dilute the Marxian criterion: it takes up the term that Marx had opened in chapter xlvi, and raises it into the principle of a class division proper to space.

The point immediately calls for a clarification. We do not claim that the user/rentier division replaces that of capital and labour. We maintain that it is distinct from it (grounded in another mechanism, the toll on access to space, and not the extraction of surplus value at the point of production) and that it intersects it without being reducible to it. That this division has become, by its sheer mass, politically decisive is a wager on the empirical magnitude of a relation, which Part III verifies; it is not a substitution of concepts. To confuse them would be a baneful error: even diffuse or diluted, the division of capital and labour remains violently pertinent.

5.2 Grounding class on need and on use

Where, then, does the user come from? A caution, first, about the terrain on which one looks for him. There exists a lived experience of space, and it is real: attachment to place, the memory of walls, the feeling of being — or, more exactly, of feeling — at home. The dwelling is the refuge of a sovereignty, the only place where one is fully in one’s own right; this book will return to it.⁸ This reality must be acknowledged, not dismissed as a sentiment. But it cannot ground the class: to rest the category upon it would be to dissolve an objective relation into an experience, and to surrender class to each person’s subjectivity. The relation is not read in lived experience, but in the position one occupies. And it is precisely there that lived experience regains its right, but inverted: for this experience of the home is what the class relation violates. The toll on access to space forces one to live and to work where one can, not where one wishes; it makes the refuge a conditional good, revocable, suspended on payment — so that the sovereignty of the inhabitant, without being denied in law, finds itself confiscated in fact. Lived experience is therefore not the foundation of the category — it is its stake, what rent damages and what use made unconditional would restore. The social production of space completes the proof: space is a natural given but humanity makes of it a collective product, and the location that makes rent is itself an externality fabricated by the presence and labour of all.⁹ What grounds the class is therefore not the lived experience of that space; it is the objective position one occupies in it — a position recognisable, among other things, by what it inflicts on lived experience.

This position is defined by two terms, and by them alone: need and use. The user is the one who must gain access to a determinate portion of space in order to satisfy a need he cannot negotiate — housing himself, working — and who does not hold the conditioning of that access. The need is non-negotiable in the strict sense: one cannot not be somewhere, for inhabiting, like producing, presupposes occupying a piece of ground — the body has extension, work has a place, and there exists no existence stateless of space. It is this physical necessity, and not a preference, that places the user in the situation of having to pay the toll. The rentier, symmetrically, is defined not by the experience he has of space (he may have none, may never have set foot there) but by the fact that he holds the conditioning of access and draws an income from it. Both are defined by a relation, exactly like the proletarian and the capitalist, and not by a lived experience: housing, in the full sense, is a social relation.

What makes this relation possible, on the scale at which we observe it, is a historical fact that Part I established and that must here be recalled as a condition: the transformation of land into a commodity. Polanyi named it with the right word — land is a “fictitious commodity”, on the same footing as labour and money.¹⁰ The force of the formula, for our purposes, is that it links in a single stroke the two fictitious commodities that are land and labour. The user is precisely the figure who undergoes this double fiction at the point of need: he must sell his labour — the first fictitious commodity — in order to buy the right to occupy a piece of ground — the second fictitious commodity. Housing, in particular, resists its own commodification: durable, fixed, costly, vital, it has been described as an “impossible commodity”, whose failures the state must ceaselessly correct for it to function as a commodity.¹¹ The user is not a consumer who arbitrates; he is the constrained subject of a commodity that ought not to be one.

5.3 The grip on the conatus: the unity of the inhabitant and the worker

It remains to justify the unity of the category. Why should the inhabitant and the worker be two modalities of a single figure, and not two unrelated situations? The answer is found not in economics but in anthropology: Lordon has shown how the wage relation enlists the employee’s conatus — because he must earn his living, the employee finds himself enlisted in the employer’s “master-desire”, his striving to persevere in his being captured and redirected towards the productive ends of another.¹²

It would be imprecise, and we shall guard against it, to transpose this schema as it stands to the relation of the user to the rentier. The tenant does not work for his landlord; he is not enlisted in a productive master-desire, and the rentier does not direct his activity. What the two relations have in common is not enlistment, but the point of grip: a non-negotiable need where the conatus is seized and compelled to yield up a part of itself. And on this terrain, the rentier’s grip is more elementary still than the capitalist’s. For one must be somewhere before being able to work — before even being able to sell one’s labour power. Access to space is the condition of all other activities; the toll that burdens it therefore applies upstream of production, at the root of perseverance in existence. The rentier does not capture the user’s desire: he taxes the condition without which the user can undertake nothing and the peasant can produce nothing.

That is what unites the inhabitant and the worker. Not that they feel the same thing, nor that they serve the same master: their conatus is seized at the same bottleneck — the necessity of occupying a piece of ground in order to live and to produce — by the same type of holder. The wage earner, on this account, is burdened twice: once by capital, which enlists his labour in production; once by the rentier, who taxes the space where that labour and that life must, after all, take place. The user is the name of this second grip — the oldest and the most general, since it precedes all activity. And because it is a relation, not a lived experience, the rentier must be thought not as a psychological type but as a function: the pole that captures this grip, whatever the face, human or institutional, that occupies it — we shall return to this.

5.4 Property of use and lucrative property: Engels’s cut

The objection of dilution has a more precise weapon than generality: the cases that blur the border. Is a worker who owns his dwelling a rentier? Is a capitalist who rents his shop a user? Does a pensioner owning a rented studio flat tip over into the antagonistic class? If the category could not answer these cases, it would collapse; it answers them, provided it is grounded not on property, but on the use of property.

The decisive cut is not between those who own and those who do not. It is between property of use and lucrative property. Engels laid it down against Proudhon as early as 1872: the housing question is not resolved by making every worker the indebted owner of his hovel (a petty-bourgeois illusion) but by abolishing rent-bearing property.¹³ The distinction runs through the whole of the thought of emancipation through use, from Friot, who grounds on it the property of use of the means of labour, to Graeber, who opposes property (an abstract legal title) to possession (the effective use of a thing).¹⁴ The rentier is not the one who owns; he is the one who holds in order to levy — who withholds a portion of space not to inhabit it or work in it, but to collect the toll of those who need it.

The contentious cases then resolve themselves. The owner-occupier worker who inhabits his dwelling exercises a property of use: he is a user, and the fact of holding a title in no way ranks him among the rentiers — he has, on the contrary, withdrawn his dwelling from the toll. The capitalist who rents his shop pays, in that particular relation, a toll to his landlord; but his social position is not defined by that, for he passes this toll on downstream, in the price of commodities, to the final user — this is the mechanism that Part III will quantify and that makes the ultimate incidence of commercial rent fall on the consumer. The pensioner with the rented studio flat occupies, for that part of his patrimony, the function of rentier, be it on the smallest scale: the category does not need him to be a rentier through and through in order to recognise that he is one through that part. Class is read in positions, not in persons, and one and the same person can hold two positions; what counts politically is on which side his balance falls, and on which side falls the balance of the immense majority.

5.5 The objection from trajectory: class or stratum?

Then comes the finest version of the objection, the one that was put to Lenin himself. When Lenin decomposed the Russian peasantry into three classes, his critics — Shanin, Lewin after him — reproached him with freezing into classes what belonged in part to strata with internal mobility, that is, with hardening into structure what was trajectory.¹⁵ The objection transposes as it stands to our category: what is presented as two classes would be only an effect of the life cycle — one is a tenant when young and poor, an owner when mature and established; the user/rentier border would separate not two groups but two ages of one and the same individual.

This objection must be granted its share of truth. Yes, mobility exists¹⁶; yes, individual trajectories cross the line; yes, an instantaneous snapshot of occupancy statuses overstates the rigidity of the cleavage. The answer consists in showing that the trajectory itself is captured. For the tenant’s “ascent” towards ownership is, under the dominant regime of home-ownership, a false exit. The indebted owner has not escaped the toll: he has converted it into a flow of interest paid to the bank, whose productive counterpart is nil — purchase, under the regime of credit, transforms the need for housing into debt service, what has elsewhere been called enslavement through purchase.¹⁷ As long as he repays, the purchasing owner pays the toll in another form, to another creditor; he has left the position of paying user only in appearance. Only the fully deleveraged owner-occupier has truly left it, for housing — and that one goes on paying it at his workplace and in the price of everything he consumes. The life-cycle trajectory therefore does not dissolve the cleavage: it describes the successive forms under which one and the same subject pays one and the same toll.

For the rest, this trajectory is not the free choice of a saver, but a socially produced demand. Bourdieu showed it for the market in single-family houses: the taste for ownership, far from being a given of human nature, is the product of a labour of the state and of the field of producers, which construct supply and demand in one and the same movement.¹⁸ The home buyer is less an agent freely arbitrating between renting and buying than the end point of an apparatus that steers him towards indebtedness and presents it to him as an emancipation. The category of the user therefore integrates the trajectory instead of suffering it: it posits that, under the regime of the price, there is no stable exit from the position of paying user, because the dominant form of purchasing “ownership” is itself a rent paid to finance.

5.6 The rentier: a function, not a fault

It remains to dispel a misunderstanding that lies in wait for every class category: confusing the position with the person, and believing one has said something about rent when one has pilloried the greed of some landlord. The rentier, however, is not a greedy man: he is a function (that of holding the access to a necessary space in order to collect its toll) and this function can be occupied indifferently by a multiple landlord, a pension fund, a listed property company, an insurance company, a public authority letting at market price, or the small saver whom the tax system has pushed towards bricks and mortar. The “good” landlord, moderate and scrupulous, is not the exception that would redeem the relation: he is its most accomplished exemplar, since he levies the tribute without anyone even thinking of reproaching him for it.

That is why structural critique is not an indulgence: it is more radical than moral indignation, not less.¹⁹ Where indignation demands better rentiers, analysis concludes that there is no good use of a function of extraction²⁰: it is therefore not the person that must be corrected, but the function that must be abolished. That this abolition is possible, and by what means, is the business of Part IV — the order of the desirable, distinct from the order of the established, which is demonstrated separately. But that the category points towards it, the present chapter suffices to establish: by aiming at a function and not at persons, it has shown that the problem lies not in the rentiers, but in the relation of rent that produces their position.

5.7 The peasant, third modality

The user has, in this book, two faces: the inhabitant and the worker, both seized at the point where space conditions a need. He has a third, which this book names without treating it: the peasant, who must gain access to the land in order to produce food — the most fundamental of needs. If he is not treated here, it is because the peasant, far from escaping the category, realises its most accomplished and most entangled form. His subsumption²¹ is not reducible to ground rent: it adds to it the technological dependence of the upstream, the financial stranglehold, capture by the downstream of processing and distribution, and being set in competition with territories under lower standards. This entanglement demands a treatment of its own. But the category is one, and the watchword says it whole, in the position of a thesis:

Housing to the inhabitant, the workshop to the worker, the land to the peasant.

Summary

We can now state what this chapter has claimed to ground, and what it has forbidden itself to claim. It has grounded a class category — the user against the rentier — on three objective supports: a non-negotiable need (to be somewhere in order to live and to produce), a relation of use (property of use opposed to lucrative property), and a grip on the conatus at the bottleneck of that need (which unites the inhabitant and the worker without appealing to their lived experience). On these three supports, the category withstands the objection of dilution: it does not blur the cleavage of capital and labour, it activates the third party that Marx’s trinity formula had named and that Marx himself had extended, in chapter xlvi, from agricultural land to building land; it does not dissolve into the life-cycle trajectory, for it shows that this trajectory is itself a captured form of payment of the toll; it does not sink into moral prosecution, for it aims at a function and not at persons.

It has forbidden itself, on the other hand, two things. To claim to replace the analysis of production: user/rentier is the class analysis of the relation of space, not a substitute for the analysis of the relation of production. And to draw the political conclusion from the concept alone: that this relation ought to be abolished, that the lucrative property of space ought to yield to the property of use, is not deducible from the category — it is demonstrated, normatively, in Part IV, and it is measured, empirically, in Part III. The conceptual keystone bears only what it can bear — not the solution, but the subject of the question —, and it is on it that all the rest of the book will rest.