— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part Four — Allocating land otherwise · Chapter 12

12 Abolishing rent: a century of experiments

The epigraph of this chapter could be a sentence from this book. It is by Muammar Gaddafi. The unease is deliberate: it is the very subject of the chapter. For the watchword this whole book labours to ground — housing to the inhabitant — did not wait to be grounded: the twentieth century tried it, massively, on three continents, by revolution, by the municipality, by self-management, by decree. Tens of millions of people were housed, for decades, outside the market. And these attempts failed — almost all of them, almost always, and often, as we shall see, at the same point: the home. One does not socialise a dwelling the way one socialises a factory.

Part III closed on a question that was no longer one of accounting but of politics: must it be so? The present part answers, and it will answer normatively — property of use, the institutions capable of carrying it, the paths of transition. But before grounding, one must inventory what the century attempted, not out of scholarly scruple but as a matter of method. If one proposes to take housing out of the market, one must look squarely at what happened every time it was done — precisely because the conclusion pleases us, rigour must come first.¹ The inventory that follows will therefore be neither martyrology nor indictment, but an examination of institutions, conducted for the prosecution and for the defence alike, on the documents.

12.1 Three questions and an arbiter

These attempts extend the typology of chapter 2. There we followed the regimes of land allocation (the redistribution of the temple city, the statutory dues of tenure, the market price) and promised to draw, here, the political consequence.² The twentieth century supplies the missing material: regimes of institutional allocation instituted against the price, on the scale of entire industrial societies. We shall question them all in the same way, with three questions and an arbiter.

First question: is rent abolished? The rentier, in the sense of chapter 5, is not the one who owns but the one who holds in order to levy — who holds a portion of space not to inhabit it but to collect the toll of those who need it. To abolish rent is to extinguish that position: that no one may any longer draw an income from another’s access to a place.

Second question: is the home respected? The introduction and chapter 5 set out what is irreducible about housing: it is not a good that can be shared like a machine or company shares; it is the inviolable site of an existence, a place of sovereignty, of memories and of future. The criterion can be broken down: no one must be able to assign a stranger inside your walls (non-sharing); no one must be able to revoke you from them by mere administrative decision (stability); what happens there concerns only those who live there (inviolability). A factory can be collectivised and a workshop pooled; a dwelling, by contrast, supports none of these sharings without ceasing to be a home.

Third question: who allocates, and how? This is the question the first two conceal, and we shall see that it governs everything. Once the price no longer allocates, something else allocates — a scale, a committee, a counter, a favour. Is that something public, contestable, controllable by those concerned? Or opaque, discretionary, appropriated by those who hold it?

The arbiter, finally: the fate of the housing stock. Upkeep or ruin, shortage or abundance, the grey market or its absence, and the way the regime ends — for all those we are about to examine have ended, save one. One last point of method, before opening the file: from these failures we shall not conclude that taking housing out of the market is impossible (the partial successes refute that), nor that it is desirable (that is argued in the following chapters, on other ground). We shall draw from them conditions: what any future attempt will have to assemble, on pain of repeating the same errors.

12.2 Moscow: rent abolished, the home denied

Everything begins with a scene Lenin himself writes, on the eve of October. A detachment of workers’ militia presents itself at a rich man’s door, inspects the apartment, finds five rooms for four occupants: “You will squeeze into two rooms, citizens, for this winter, and you will fit out two others so that two families now living in basements can be installed there.”³ The requisition is conceived as the exact inversion of the eviction — the bailiff and the squad change sides — and the law follows: the decree on land, from October 1917, abolishes property in the soil; the decree of 20 August 1918 “on the abolition of the right of private property in buildings in the cities” completes the edifice: urban land is abolished “without exception”, buildings above a value threshold are handed over to the local soviets, which alone hold the right to build — and the former owners “pay rent on the same terms as the other tenants”.⁴ In eight articles, the private urban landlord has legally ceased to exist, not to reappear until seventy years later.

But the instrument of requisition (installing families in other people’s apartments) at once becomes an institution. The uplotnenie, the “densification”, assigns to the large bourgeois dwellings as many families as there are rooms; the so-called sanitary norm, set in 1919 at about 9 m² per person (calculated, Azarova reports, on the quantity of air needed for a night’s sleep), is not a floor-right but a trigger-ceiling: every “surplus” square metre makes the apartment liable to requisition.⁵ Thus is born the communal apartment, the kommunalka: one family per room, and the kitchen, the corridor, the sanitary facilities shared among households the administration has assigned to one another. Nothing here of a transitory housing crisis: the kommunalka is the central institution of Soviet urban daily life for half a century — up to 80 % of the population of Moscow before the turn of 1957, more than a third of that of Leningrad still in the mid-1980s, the estimates diverging sharply by city and date.⁶ The sociology of the kommunalka has a name for what it describes: a public privacy, where the intimate is lived under the assigned gaze of the neighbours. On the criterion of the home, then, the regime fails by construction: the sharing of the dwelling is not a makeshift but an instrument — the very space where one sleeps is held by the administration, which can lodge a third party in it.

If rent, for its part, is indeed extinguished, what replaces it is not the power of the user but that of the counter. The rent payment, abolished in 1921 (and with it the financing of upkeep: the decay of the stock begins there), restored under the NEP, thereafter remains symbolic, a few per cent of the wage: “housing as the State’s gift”.⁷ Allocation passes through two superimposed counters (the local soviet and the employer, each with its lists) and through a police lock: the propiska, the residence permit without which there is neither formal employment, nor housing, nor care — and which one does not obtain without housing.⁸ The waiting lists are counted in decades: in 1988 still, from 12 to 36 % of families, depending on the city, are registered on the lists.⁹ Nothing in this circuit is democratic: no election, no deliberation of those concerned, no appeal: a bureaucratic allocation under two keys, on police condition, with the attendant string-pulling.

It takes the regime forty years to acknowledge what its own point of departure denied. The resolution of 31 July 1957 “on the development of housing construction in the USSR” launches mass construction and promises to eliminate the shortage within ten to twelve years; the khrushchyovki rise from the ground by the million, and in the new stock 95 % of households at last move into a separate apartment, against 36 % in the old stock.¹⁰ The Programme of the CPSU of 1961 puts the promise in writing: “by the end of the second decade, every family, including young married couples, will have a comfortable apartment”; and: “in the course of the second decade, housing will gradually become free of charge for all citizens”.¹¹ This doctrinal admission weighs heavily: one apartment per family (that is, the home, the very criterion of this chapter) enters Soviet doctrine in 1957, forty years after October, as a goal to be reached and not as a principle one had started from. The promise of 1961 will not be kept: neither free housing nor the clearing of the shortage — the queues last until the end of the regime.

The end of the regime tells the rest: the Russian law of 4 July 1991 organises the near-free transfer of State housing to its occupants; within fifteen years, the bulk of the stock passes to the residents (about nine tenths in 2015).¹² Seventy years of the abolition of rent end in the greatest distribution of property titles in history, room by room in the kommunalki, out of which half a million inhabitants of Saint Petersburg had still not moved by around 2020.¹³ On the balance sheet of our grid, rent was indeed abolished — and that is a proof, we shall return to it — but the home was denied by construction for forty years, conceded thereafter, never guaranteed; allocation remained administrative and police-bound from end to end; and the stock was handed over, at the close, to the occupants of the moment, in full ownership — a photograph of the last waiting list.

12.3 Vienna: rent reduced to cost

Vienna, 1919-1934, offers a complete change of scenery: no revolution, no single party, no expropriation, but a social-democratic municipality, elected and re-elected, in a bourgeois State hostile to it. We include it in this inventory deliberately, for Vienna is the control case. It shows what the other attempts could have respected and did not respect; and it shows, from inside the regime of the price, a truth this book has established by theory.

That truth was laid down in chapter 4: the price of land is nothing but capitalised rent. Vienna demonstrates it at full scale, and by a savoury detour: the rent freeze, decreed by the Empire in 1917, is made permanent in December 1922 by a conservative federal law: the Christian Socials sacrifice the landlord to the export industry, which wants low wages without a fall in the workers’ standard of living.¹⁴ Now what happens when the rent can no longer rise? The expected rent vanishes, and with it the price: the value of land collapses, and the municipality buys (without any power of expropriation, at the market price) a quarter of Greater Vienna, at a seventh or a tenth of pre-war prices.¹⁵ The land was worth only the tribute one could exact from it: the tribute once suspended, the “capital” evaporates — and no demonstration teaches the nature of land value better than this one.

On this municipal land Vienna builds — and the way it finances is the other half of the lesson. The Wohnbausteuer of 1923, the tax earmarked for construction, is of a progressivity never seen since: from 2 to 37 % of the rent depending on the premises, in such a way that the 90 most expensive buildings in the city pay as much as the 350 000 cheapest premises; the top half per cent pays more than two fifths of the proceeds.¹⁶ And above all: the city builds à fonds perdu (the expression is in French in the Viennese documents), that is, it writes the invested capital off as a dead loss, refuses to borrow, backs no debt onto the rent.¹⁷ The consequence follows of itself: the rent of the Gemeindebauten contains no capital to repay, no interest to service, no ground rent to remit. It breaks down into four parts (upkeep, management, taxes, reserve for future repairs) and nothing else. The result holds in two figures: before 1914, rent absorbed about 25 % of a Viennese worker’s wage; in the municipal buildings of 1926, from 3.5 to 4 %, charges and tax included.¹⁸ Abolishing the landlord therefore means, for the user, a tribute divided by six without a single wall having changed in quality. This is also what distinguishes the Gemeindebau from French-style social housing, whose rent amortises the debt contracted to build it: Vienna had extinguished the debt at the source.

On the home, Vienna takes the exact opposite course to Moscow. The programme — some 64 000 to 65 000 dwellings in fifteen years, one Viennese in ten rehoused, the Karl-Marx-Hof and its 1 382 dwellings as its standard — rests on an unequivocal typology: individual and self-contained dwellings, small (38 and 48 m² in 1923, enlarged from 1927 onwards after international criticism had judged them cramped), but with water and toilet inside the dwelling; and the collective — central laundries, baths, kindergartens, libraries, dispensaries — installed at the foot of the buildings, that is, at the threshold of the dwelling, never within it.¹⁹ The historian of the programme, Eve Blau, says in one sentence what this changed for the working-class tenants, and her sentence ticks off one by one the criteria of this chapter: they now had “a home they could afford, that they did not have to share with strangers, and in which they could expect to remain for a long time. The new proletarian dwelling was no longer merely a place to sleep, but a place to live.”²⁰

Allocation, finally (the third question), receives in Vienna the only roughly honourable answer of the century: a scale. The Punktesystem of 1922 ranks applicants by points against published criteria — overcrowding, insalubrity, notice to quit, invalidity, pregnancy, subtenancy —, sorts the files into classes of urgency, organises appeals.²¹ The scale is not democracy (those concerned do not deliberate), but it is its minimal condition: a public rule, enforceable, contestable. We shall measure further on all that separates this transparent counter from the Yugoslav enterprise lists and the Libyan committees.

There remain the limits, and the end. The structural limit: the Viennese inhabitant remains a tenant — protected, solvent, but without an enforceable title of use; his security rests only on the political force that grants it, and nothing guarantees it the day that force falls — and that force fell on 13 February 1934: at one o’clock in the morning, the artillery of the Austrofascist government opens fire on the Karl-Marx-Hof; Viennese social democracy is crushed in three days of civil war.²² What the artillery crushed was neither the economics of the model (in balance, debt-free) nor the stock itself, but the power that carried it: Red Vienna as a project of municipal socialism, a social-democratic island in a State that shelled it. The regime perished in three days; the institution, for its part, has come through everything — Austrofascism, Nazism, the war — and Vienna still houses a quarter of its inhabitants today in some 220 000 municipal dwellings, six in ten counting the subsidised stock.²³ This is why Vienna is, of all the attempts in this chapter, the only one that lasts: the political experiment was killed, but the stock and the at-cost rent it instituted have outlived it. The irony completes the lesson, and hardens it: that stock the inhabitant always held as a tenant, never as the holder of an enforceable right; if it lasted, it is not because a title guaranteed it, it is because the successive powers did not choose to undo it. The durability of the institution and the fragility of the inhabitant therefore do not contradict each other: together they say what Vienna lacked — not housing, but the title that would have made it impregnable.

12.4 Belgrade: property of use missed

Self-managed Yugoslavia produced the institution of the century closest to what this book will call property of use — and ruined it through allocation. It is the most instructive case in the inventory, because the failure there bears neither on the individual home nor on the extinction of rent, but on the third question, the one always said to be technical: who allocates.

The framework first. After the requisitions of the immediate post-war years (when the State, as in Moscow but on a smaller scale, assigned families into the “surplus floor area” of private dwellings), the federal law of 26 December 1958 nationalises rental buildings and constructible urban land: no one may any longer hold beyond a “housing maximum” — two large dwellings, or three small ones.²⁴ The nationalised stock belongs neither to the State nor to anyone: it is social property, a legal category peculiar to the system, of which the European Court of Human Rights will later give the driest definition: “according to the official doctrine, property in social ownership had no owner, the role of the public authorities in its regard being limited to management”.²⁵

On this ownerless stock, the law of 1959 institutes the stanarsko pravo — the “tenant’s right”, which the Court translates as “specially protected tenancy” and which we shall set out in detail, for never has anything come closer to property of use. The holder and the members of his household have the permanent, lifelong and unhindered use of the dwelling, against a nominal charge covering upkeep and amortisation; termination is possible only by court judgment, on exhaustively enumerated grounds; on the death or departure of the holder, the right passes as of right to the members of the household — “from generation to generation”, says the Court; the dwelling can even be exchanged for another, with the provider’s agreement; it cannot, on the other hand, be sold, mortgaged or sublet for profit.²⁶ Use guaranteed for life, transmissible to the household, insusceptible of rent: a Serbian housing sociologist could write that in terms of use, inheritance and even exchange there was “practically no difference” between the holders of the right and private owners.²⁷

The institution being in place, there remain its financing and its allocation, and it is here that everything tips over. The system is financed by a compulsory contribution on wages: 10 % from 1955, about 4 % of net earnings after the 1965 reform, paid into the housing funds and then managed by the self-managed enterprises themselves.²⁸ All wage-earners contribute. But allocation belongs to the housing commissions of each enterprise, on “house” scales nominally approved by the workers’ council — and these scales, which have been preserved, openly invert need: a university degree is worth 40 points; living at less than 5 m² per person is worth 30; and the “executives’ apartments”, the kadrovski stanovi, are distributed by decision of the director, “almost without any procedure”, insusceptible of appeal.²⁹

The results are measured, and they are unambiguous. At federal level, 80 % of people in positions of political leadership are housed in the social stock — against 20 to 22 % of workers.³⁰ In Split, in the 1970s, the most qualified categories (one tenth of wage-earners) receive thirteen times more apartments than the labourers, seven times more credit, and more than a third of the fund.³¹ The verdict of the Yugoslav sociologists themselves: equality in housing, “inscribed at the very heart of socialist ideology […], turned into a contradiction: instead of creating more equality, it gave rise to new and even more glaring inequalities”.³²

Meanwhile, those excluded from the system house themselves — and pay twice. By the mid-1960s, more than half the buildings erected in Yugoslav cities are built by private individuals for their own needs; in 1981, about 70 % of the national stock is private; in the big cities, nearly half of the self-building is without a permit, and the typical illegal builder is not the speculator one imagines: he is an industrial worker come from the countryside, with no land in the village for seven out of ten of them.³³ Yugoslav sociology fixed the class meaning of the phenomenon in one sentence: illegal construction is “the self-initiative of a second-class citizen to solve his housing problem with his personal resources, because society has not given him an apartment […] even though, with his own resources, he has financed the dwellings that society has given to its first-class citizens”.³⁴

The Yugoslav end is the crudest of all: from 1991 onwards, the republics sell the social dwellings to their holders — 10 to 15 % of market value in Croatia, 10 to 20 % in Serbia, where hyperinflation pulverises even those prices: “from a few hundred to a few thousand deutschmarks” per apartment.³⁵ Three categories of losers are left by the wayside: those who contributed all their lives without ever being housed — they receive nothing, not even an acknowledgement of debt; the holders of a right over restituted private dwellings, turned into precarious “protected tenants” — whose rent regime will in the end be condemned by the ECtHR… in favour of the landlord; and the displaced of the war, stripped of their right by the six-month absence rule — hundreds of thousands of people who lost everything, the home included.³⁶ Privatisation will thus have photographed the injustice of the allocation, before making it hereditary.

What should we retain? That Yugoslavia proved that a lifelong security of use, transmissible to the household, insusceptible of rent, can be institutionalised — the stanarsko pravo existed, millions of people had it, and in that sense the next chapter will owe it something. And that it proved, in the same movement, that this institution is corrupted at the root if allocation belongs to the employer: generalised tied housing doubles wage dependence with a residential dependence (the user held twice over, by the job and by the roof), and “self-management”, which was here, in Samary’s words, “a sort of power in the negative, like a right of veto”, never reached the only decision that mattered.³⁷ Allocation thus revealed itself as the true seat of class power: in Belgrade, the diploma and the card stood in for the property qualification. It is not the market that came back — it is the statutory regime of chapter 2, the fief in enterprise points.

12.5 Tripoli and Havana: the watchword without democracy

There remain the two regimes that realised the watchword to the letter — the house to the one who lives in it — and that show, better than all the others, why the letter is not enough.

Libya first, since this chapter opened on its text. The second part of the Green Book poses housing as a need: “Housing is a necessity for man and his family. It must belong to no one but him. A man is not free when he lives in a rented house. […] The individual’s house being one of his fundamental needs, no one may build for the purpose of letting.”³⁸ Law no. 4 of May 1978 translates it into practice: every citizen has the right to one house, and this property is declared “sacred”; all the surplus of multiple owners passes to the State, which redistributes it — the sitting tenant has priority over the dwelling he occupies, and the new owner pays the assessed value over twenty years. Application was immediate and from below: tenants “simply stopped paying their rent to the former owners”.³⁹ In one sense, this is the most literal expropriation of the rentier of the century: the private landlord disappears overnight, and the inhabitant becomes the holder of his own walls.

But let us look at the three questions. Rent is abolished, but by freezing the market, not by instituting use: the law manufactures full small owners, then prohibits letting, which is to say that it freezes the stock in the distribution of one day in 1978. The home is respected for the occupant (no forced sharing, no kommunalka), but protected by the fait accompli more than by law: as early as October 1978, the regime’s own Minister of Justice denounces the forcible occupations of vacant dwellings. It is this Libya that The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf fixed for millions of readers: the house that cannot be locked, and that another family occupies, as of right, in the time it takes to go for a walk.⁴⁰ Allocation falls to municipal committees on listed criteria — and, in practice, to what the report of the regime’s own supervisory authority records in 1986: properties allocated several times over, multiple allottees, beneficiaries without title, all “on the basis of favouritism and personal connections”.⁴¹ The fate of the stock, finally, settles the rest: in surplus until 1981, the Libyan stock goes into deficit from 1982 (four years after the law), and the shortfall peaks at 71 099 dwellings in 1992, private investment having deserted a sector in which letting had become illegal.⁴² And when the regime falls, the “sacred property” of 1978 reveals itself for what it was: a revocable assignment. From 56 000 to 75 000 properties are in dispute; the restitution conflicts “helped ignite the post-revolutionary fighting”⁴³: given by the favour of a regime, the house died with it, and in the war.

Cuba, next — and this is the case that most directly concerns this book, for Havana realised, in October 1960, precisely the programme the introduction saw Proudhon formulate in 1851. The revolution had begun by freezing evictions and lowering rents by fiat by 30 to 50 % (March 1959); the Ley de Reforma Urbana of 14 October 1960 does the rest, in three articles we shall quote from the text itself. Article one: “Every family has a right to decent housing”; the State will provide for it in three stages — first the amortisation of the house each family lives in through what it currently pays as rent, over five to twenty years depending on the age of the building; then State-built dwellings granted in permanent usufruct against a charge capped at 10 % of family income; finally, free usufruct. Article 2: “The letting of urban buildings is proscribed”, as is any contract ceding the use of a building for payment. Article 25: the owners of slum housing are expropriated “without receiving any sum by way of price”.⁴⁴ The tenant becomes an owner by continuing to pay his rent, now an instalment of acquisition: this is, to the letter, the acquisitive rent of the General Idea of the Revolution — the Proudhonian solution that Mülberger defended and that Engels had demolished in 1872.⁴⁵

Now Cuba establishes what Libya already allowed one to glimpse: one can abolish the landlord and respect the home. No Cuban kommunalka: the unit the law protects is the family in its dwelling, unseizable, safe from eviction. More than 85 % of Cuban households owned their walls by the end of the 1990s, paying hardly anything but upkeep.⁴⁶ The failure lies elsewhere, and Engels had written it in advance: what is the title worth without the means of use? Sale is forbidden (it will remain so for fifty-one years, until decree-law 288 of November 2011), credit does not exist, materials are lacking; mobility survives only through the permuta, the barter of dwellings, which was “the way most households moved”; and the stock, which no one can either realise or maintain, rots where it stands: Old Havana suffers about two partial collapses every three days (71 876 houses in the capital were shored up as early as 1988), and the official deficit reaches 929 695 dwellings in 2018.⁴⁷ The Cuban “owner” holds a good he can neither transfer, nor pledge, nor repair. It is the exact inversion of property of use, which wants use guaranteed without the lucrative title — Cuba gave the title without the use, as Libya gave the house without the right.

The common balance sheet of the two cases holds in one proposition: the watchword realised without democracy protects the sitting occupants of the moment and excludes all who come after. Full ownership distributed freezes the stock in the distribution of day one; the State as sole allocator distributes by favour, without procedure or appeal; and young households (Libyan from 1982, Cuban for decades now) inherit the shortage the freeze manufactured. Rent may be dead and the home safe: so long as the third question (who allocates, and how?) remains unanswered, allocation remains an arbitrary power.

12.6 Land to those who work it: the land revolutions

The five regimes examined so far aimed at the urban landlord. But the tribute on access to land is older than the rental city, and its most widespread form is farm rent, not house rent. The twentieth century attacked it head-on, on four continents, in a wave of land revolutions whose watchword, from one end of the globe to the other, was the same — land to those who work it. The inventory would be unfaithful if it passed them over in silence; but we shall not take them up one by one as we did the urban cases. All abolish the great landowner and institute, in his place, a right of use; almost all entrust allocation to a State or party bureaucracy; and almost all are, sooner or later, undone — by law, by parcellisation, or by blood.

The archetype is Mexican. Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 (born of the revolution and of the peasant army of Zapata, who fought “so that the people should have lands, forests and water”) declares the soil “originally vested in the Nation” and mandates the State to expropriate the great estates and endow the communities with them. Under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), eighteen million hectares pass to some 812 000 peasants; by the end of the 1980s, more than three million households live in more than 28 000 ejidos, covering a third of the national territory and two thirds of the cultivated land.⁴⁸ The ejido is not private property: it is an inalienable communal use — the Agrarian Code of 1934 forbids its sale as well as its letting, strikes it with forfeiture if the plot remains unworked for two years, and withdraws it from mortgage —, allocated and where need be reallocated by the asamblea of the ejidatarios, on a structure traced back to the Aztec capulli.⁴⁹ The ejido will thus have realised, over a third of a large country and for three quarters of a century, a communal allocation of land withdrawn from the market.

It was nevertheless undone without a shot being fired: on 7 November 1991, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari proposes to remove the redistributive guarantees of article 27 and to authorise the ejidatarios to mortgage, let or sell their plot; both chambers approve. The 1992 reform “ends redistribution […] and paves the way for the mass transfer of rural land from the indigenous communities to the multinationals of agribusiness” — implemented through the PROCEDE programme and the passage to dominio pleno, full transferable ownership, in the wake of NAFTA.⁵⁰ The common is thus returned to the market by the way of law alone — counter-reform in its pure state, which, as we shall see, arms the rising of Chiapas on 1 January 1994.

Peru shows the other path of the ebb. On 24 June 1969, the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado promulgates one of the most radical agrarian reforms in Latin America: nine to ten million hectares expropriated, some 370 000 beneficiary families, the latifundio and Andean serfdom (the gamonalismo) abolished. “Peasant, the master will no longer feed on your poverty!”, Velasco proclaims, quoting Túpac Amaru.⁵¹ But the land is not returned to the peasants in their own right: it is vested in cooperatives (CAP, SAIS) imposed from above, often against the preference of those concerned; and in the 1980s, their own members dissolve them and share out the plots. By abolishing the great landowner by decree without the users deciding the form, the reform itself prepared the parcellisation that undid it.

Ethiopia goes further than all the others. The revolution of 1974 brings to power the Derg, which in 1975 nationalises the land by two proclamations. The first (no. 31, 4 March) declares all rural land public property, without compensation, abolishes tenancy and sharecropping at a stroke, caps tenure at ten hectares and entrusts it to peasant associations charged with redistributing it.⁵² The second (no. 47, 26 July) does for the city what none of the preceding cases had dared from the outset: it nationalises all urban land and all “surplus” rental dwellings (beyond the family residence), without compensation, with the explicit aim, says the text, of “getting rid of the right of landlords”; rents are halved, and the low-grade dwellings handed over to neighbourhood committees, the kebele.⁵³ This is the abolition of the urban landlord by the African revolutionary road, more complete still than in Tripoli. And it is the same destiny: the peasant associations and the kebele, at first organs of peers, soon receive “directives from above”, the Derg captures them; the kebele stock, whose derisory rent does not cover upkeep, decays (only a quarter in good condition in Addis in 1996); the countryside suffers forced collectivisation and villagisation: the landlord once suppressed, allocation has passed entirely to the Party.

Two African cases confirm it, briefly. In Thomas Sankara’s Burkina, the Agrarian and Land Reorganisation of 1984 makes all land the “exclusive property of the State”, annuls prior titles and declares it inalienable, leaving the inhabitants only a permit of use; the famous “year without rent” of 1985, often magnified, was real but slight (few town-dwellers were tenants), and the reform was undone under Compaoré.⁵⁴ In Frelimo’s Mozambique, the land becomes State property (it still is), and decree-law 5/76 nationalises the tenement buildings abandoned by the settlers: the State makes itself sole landlord (the apie), before the stock, dilapidated, is privatised from 1991 onwards — a pattern that neighbouring Angola reproduces almost feature for feature.⁵⁵

Indonesia, finally, gives the ebb its most brutal form. The Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 (the uupa) breaks with Dutch colonial law, refounds land law on custom (the adat), lays down that “all land rights have a social function” and that their holder is “bound to cultivate it himself” (prohibition of absenteeism), caps ownership and redistributes the surplus to the needy.⁵⁶ Application drags, sabotaged by the notables; the peasant front linked to the Communist Party (the bti) forces it through “unilateral actions”, occupying the great estates. The reversion comes afterwards, not from a counter-law but from blood: the anti-communist massacres of 1965-1966 — from five hundred thousand to one million dead, “the overwhelming majority being peasants who had joined the Party for its position on agrarian reform” — physically liquidate those who carried it.⁵⁷ Suharto does not repeal the law of 1960; he reverses its intention: “instead of more land for the small peasants, more land passes to the economic and political elite”, and the most populous land transformation in Asia ends defeated by terror.

There remains a case that carries at once the best diagnosis of the century and the worst method — and which we shall quote at length. As early as 1962, Julius Nyerere⁵⁸ states, in terms that could be those of the first chapter of this book, that “neither the worker nor the landlord produces land: land is God’s gift to man”, that “the African’s right to land was simply the right to use it”, and that the urban landowner — who “has no need to develop his plot: he can leave it to the fools ready to develop all the plots around it, thereby automatically raising the value of his own” — belongs “to the class of parasites”.⁵⁹ One finds in him, twenty years before this book, the land that does not produce but conditions, rent as the toll of location, the parasitism of the bare title. But the Tanzania of ujamaa shows what happens when the right diagnosis gives itself the wrong allocation. Villagisation, at first voluntary — “socialist communities cannot be established by compulsion”, Nyerere declared in 1967 — becomes in December 1973 compulsory and universal: army and militia, “one-way” meetings, and, to prevent the displaced from returning, houses burned. Up to eleven million people uprooted, for a resounding productive failure.⁶⁰ James Scott drew from it the lesson for the whole of “authoritarian high modernism”: collectivising land is not allocating it democratically, a captured peasantry is not a productive peasantry, and the collective imposed from above is only another figure of status.

12.7 The lesson of the experiments from above

What do these experiments prove, and what do they teach?

What they prove, first — for it is a proof, the only one this chapter claims. Chapter 2 had established the contingency of the regime of the price by long history; the twentieth century establishes it by direct experimentation. Entire societies housed their populations (or fed their peasants) outside the market, for decades on end: the USSR for seventy years, Yugoslavia for forty-five, Cuba for sixty, Vienna for a hundred and more; and, from the Mexican ejidos to Ethiopian land, revolutions wrested the soil from the great landowner on four continents. Nowhere did the private landlord prove necessary: his abolition never caused housing as such to collapse — what collapsed, every time, was something else: upkeep, the justice of allocation, the freedom of the inhabitant. Whoever maintains that private rent (and lucrative ownership) is the natural condition of human housing has against him a century of facts and 6000 years of history. Rent is not a technical necessity; it is a political choice.

What they teach, next. From Moscow: that the abolition of rent is worth nothing if it denies the home — the assigned sharing of the dwelling does not emancipate the inhabitant, it dissolves him; forty years of kommunalka ending in the admission of 1961 (“every family […] an apartment”) are the demonstration by the absurd of the criterion this book posed from the outset. From Vienna: that rent is reducible to cost — the Viennese breakdown into upkeep, management, taxes and reserve, with neither capital nor interest nor ground rent, is the exact prefiguration of what the rest of this part will call the upkeep contribution; that land value vanishes when rent is suspended — experimental confirmation of chapter 4; and that an allocation can be scaled, published, contestable. But also: that the inhabitant-tenant, however well housed, remains at the mercy of power; a title will be needed. From Belgrade: that lifelong and transmissible security of use can be institutionalised (the stanarsko pravo is, of all the legal figures of the century, the closest to property of use), and that everything is decided in the allocation: entrusted to the employer, it reconstituted an aristocracy of the diploma and the card, paid for by the contributions of the workers it excluded. From Tripoli and Havana: that the watchword “the house to the one who lives in it” requires property of use and not full ownership — distributed in full titles without a market, the house freezes the stock and dies with the regime; given without right or appeal, it is only a favour. From the land revolutions, finally: that property of use is realisable on four continents, but that to abolish the great landowner without democracy of allocation is to substitute for him the tribute of the apparatus — or to prepare the ebb that returns everything to the market (the dominio pleno of 1992, the piñata of 1990, the terror of 1965).

And the lesson of the lessons, the one that governs all that follows: the decisive question is not “market or State” (that screen-alternative on which the contradictors named in chapter 8 live), but: who allocates, by what procedure, under what control. Everywhere the price was abolished without allocation becoming democratic, status took its place: the party card in Moscow, the diploma and the post in Belgrade, the favour of the clan in Tripoli, the State counter in Havana, the agrarian bureaucracy in Lima as in Addis Ababa. It is the statutory regime of chapter 2 returning in new clothes — the property qualification in enterprise points, the fief in tied housing — while, through the cracks, the price itself reconstitutes itself as a grey market, and at five times the rate. The real alternative is therefore not between two terms but among three: the price, status, deliberation. The first two have given their proofs, and they are proofs for the prosecution. There remains the third — democratic allocation, founded on ascertained need and guaranteed use — which not one of these regimes from above attempted: all of them abolished rent for the people, none by it.