— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part Four — Allocating land otherwise · Chapter 14

14 Property of use: communalising the land, guaranteeing the home

The twentieth century proved, on four continents, that rent is not a necessity of human housing — an entire population can be housed outside the market, and durably. Yet almost none of these attempts brought together the three conditions the grid has drawn out. Moscow abolished rent but denied the home; Cuba and Libya saved the home but distributed full ownership, which freezes the stock and dies with the regime; Belgrade almost held on to property of use, but corrupted it at allocation; and everywhere, or almost, the stock ended up rotting, for want of an upkeep the token rent did not finance, or flowing back towards the market, which privatisation reopened. It remains to do what no one has done: to assemble the scattered pieces into a regime that holds the three criteria at once.

This chapter and the next set about it. The demonstration changed in nature at the threshold of this part: we are no longer establishing what is, we are arguing what ought to be. Nothing, then, will be proved here in the sense in which Part III proved an amount; we shall found — we shall show that a coherent regime, holding the three criteria, is conceivable in the detail of its institutions, and that it is closer than one might think to forms already tried. Rigour, here, is not that of the figure but that of consequence: each institution proposed must be deduced from a criterion, and withstand the objection that undid those that came before it.

The order is that of the two questions the inventory left open. First the law: under what form of ownership must land and housing be held for rent to be extinguished and the home guaranteed? That is the object of this chapter: property of use, and the two gestures that institute it — communalising the land as bare ownership, recognising use through habitation. Then the institution: who allocates vacant housing, by what criteria, under what control, and how is it to be maintained without rent? That is the object of chapter 15.

14.1 The commune as bare owner

The form of ownership that extinguishes rent is neither full private ownership (which institutes it) nor State ownership (which has everywhere reinstated it in the figure of the counter). Chapter 5 laid down the decisive divide: not between those who own and those who do not, but between property of use and lucrative property. It remains to give it an institutional body. That body is built by dissociating what full ownership had fused into a single title: the land and its use.

That the land be communalised as bare ownership means this. The commune holds, over all the land within its bounds, the bare ownership — the stripped title, in the sense in which civil law has always distinguished bare ownership from usufruct: to the bare owner the title without the enjoyment, to the usufructuary the use and the fruits.¹ But this communal bare ownership is not that of the civil law, and the difference is everything: it is sterilised. The ordinary bare owner waits for the usufruct to end in order to recover full ownership and its value; the commune, for its part, never recovers anything to sell, for the title it holds is by construction untransferable and unproductive of rent. It holds the land for one end only: to prevent anyone from holding it in order to levy the toll — the position of a guardian rather than a landlord, which makes the communal bare owner an owner that by construction forbids itself to be a rentier.

To the expected objection — why the commune, and not the State? — the inventory of chapter 12 answered in advance: wherever the State made itself sole owner — the Soviet Union, the Mozambican apie, the Ethiopian kebele —, it carried rent over in another form, no longer the rent payment but rationing — allocation by the counter, the queue, the propiska, the card. It was not the market that returned, it was status: the power to allocate, captured by those who held it. The commune is not immune to that failing (the next chapter sets against it a whole apparatus of safeguards), but it is the only scale at which allocation can again become the business of those concerned themselves, and not of an overarching administration. It is the scale at which the assembly has, in fact, allocated land outside the market: the Aztec capulli become ejido, the asamblea of Chiapas, the komin of Rojava — and, beyond recent history, the redistributive institution of the ancient city, but turned around: no longer the temple assigning from above, but the commune allocating from below.²

That this dissociation is no figment of the mind, contemporary capitalism itself administers the proof, on a small scale and for its own ends. In the United States, the community land trusts withdraw the land from the market: a trust holds the plot, the household owns the building and occupies it under a long lease, and resale is capped by a formula that returns the locational gain to the collectivity.³ France has transcribed the device into its law: the organisme de foncier solidaire keeps the plot, the household takes a bail réel solidaire on the building alone, at a capped resale price and under a means test.⁴ What the organisme de foncier solidaire does for a few thousand dwellings, keeping the land off the market while leaving use to the household, the commune would do for all land — and without the market residue those schemes still retain, since communal use, for its part, will be neither saleable nor priced. The dissociation of land and use is therefore no unprecedented utopia: it is a legal technique already in service, which must be carried from the exception to the rule, and purged of the rent it still tolerates.

14.2 The proof of residence as title: use recognised through habitation

Once the land is communalised, it remains to say who has its use; we argue here that the simplest answer is also the most just — use belongs to whoever already inhabits —, and this is the second gesture: it costs nothing, and it undoes at a stroke the trap in which every exit from the market has been caught. Let the proof of residence — that document everyone produces a hundred times in a lifetime, rent receipt, utility bill, attestation — become the title of property of use. The occupant is recognised as holder of the use by the very fact of inhabiting: habitation makes the title, as possession made medieval seisin, but without the lord above.

The reach of this gesture is measured by what it avoids. Every exit from the market has stumbled on the same obstacle at the moment of converting the existing stock. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Cuba ended up transferring their dwellings to the occupants; but they transferred full ownership — transferable, mortgageable, lucrative —, and full ownership at once reopened the market that had been closed. To recognise use is not to privatise: it is exactly the opposite. The title of use is inalienable (it cannot be sold), unproductive of rent (it cannot be let out for income), but secure (no one can dislodge you from it). It takes from privatisation its single virtue, the occupant’s security, and strips it of its vice, the return to market. The reflux, which undid almost every reform in the inventory, becomes structurally impossible: there is nothing left to privatise, since the title cannot be sold.

From this, two cases that full ownership muddles settle themselves. Vacant housing and multiple ownership first: the title of use attaches to actual habitation, not to holding. Whoever does not inhabit a dwelling has no use of it; that dwelling therefore reverts to the commune, which will allocate it to whoever needs it. The second home, the building held for income, the studio bought to let: all of that ceases to have a holder, for want of a user, and joins the stock to be allocated. The rentier does not disappear by moral decree; he disappears because the very form of the title gives him no purchase — one has a title of use where one lives and where one works, never where one levies.

Transmission next: this is the precise point where Yugoslavia stumbled. The stanarsko pravo was passed on “from generation to generation”; and that hereditary transmission, by making the right of use a family asset, had imperceptibly re-patrimonialised it — returned it to the logic of the bequest, hence of having, which it was supposed to abolish. The title of use proposed here is not inherited like an estate: it follows the household and the need, not the blood. Those who live in the dwelling — the spouse, the children, the members of the household — continue its use as of right, for their home is precisely what the title protects; but no one receives as a bequest a dwelling he does not inhabit, to keep it empty or pass it on in his turn. On the departure or death of the last occupant, the dwelling does not fall into an estate: it reverts to the commune, which will reallocate it.⁵ The rule that emerges separates use from rent even in succession: the dwelling continues to those who shared its actual use, and never reverts to those who expected nothing from it but its value.

What holds for housing holds, mutatis mutandis, for the workplace. The workshop, the shop, the office are placed at the disposal of those who produce there; the pas-de-porte (that entry toll the outgoing tenant makes the incoming one pay for a location he did not make) and the extractive commercial lease disappear with the lucrative ownership of urban land: the worker, like the inhabitant, will henceforth hold his place from the use he makes of it, and not from a title that another turns into money.

14.3 Tested against the three criteria

It remains to test the proposed form against the three criteria. It holds them where the regimes of the inventory always let go of at least one.

Is rent abolished? It is, and at the root: there is no longer any transferable title to land, hence no longer any price of land; no longer any right to let, hence no longer any rent; the commune as bare owner levies nothing it could maximise, and the upkeep contribution that will replace the rent (chapter 15) covers only the cost, not a tribute. The toll of chapter 1 (the income drawn from the mere holding of the condition) no longer has any legal footing: land has been stripped of the quality of commodity, and the title of the faculty to extract.

Is the home respected? Better than in any of the cases examined. The title of use is inviolable: no one can assign a stranger within your walls, for the use is entire and personal — the exact opposite of uplotnenie and the kommunalka. It is stable: lifelong in fact, it can be revoked only by procedure and on limited grounds — which is what the Viennese tenant lacked, admirably housed but without an opposable title. It is non-divisible: the protected unit is the household in its dwelling, beyond seizure. Yugoslavia had almost attained this security with the stanarsko pravo; but it had spoiled it at the entry (allocation by the employer) and at the exit (hereditary transmission). We keep here the security of the stanarsko pravo, correcting its two vices: allocation will be democratic (chapter 15), transmission will follow the household and not the blood.

Who allocates? The form, by itself, does not answer: it says who is the holder (the occupant) and what becomes of the freed dwelling (it reverts to the commune), but not to whom the commune then allocates it, nor how. That is the third question, the one where all the regimes from above let status return, and it demands an institution of its own. The form prepares the answer without giving it: by making every vacant dwelling revert to the commune, it places the decision at the scale where deliberation is possible; by forbidding price and transferability, it removes in advance from allocation its two ordinary corrupters, money and the bequest. It remains to prevent the third (favour), and that is the object of the chapter to come.

Taking stock

The form is now laid down: the land, communalised as sterilised bare ownership, ceases to be a commodity; use, recognised through habitation and recorded in an inalienable title, ceases to be a rent. Between the two, rent no longer has anywhere to live: neither in the land, which is no longer sold, nor in the title, which is no longer let. And the home, for the first time, is held at all three ends at once — inviolable, stable, non-divisible —, without its security being able to flow back into a transferable privilege, since it cannot be sold.

This form is not without precedent: it generalises and purifies the dissociation that the community land trust and the bail réel solidaire already practise at the margin of the market, and it takes over from the stanarsko pravo its security of use while washing it of its two corruptions. What none of these models managed to do, and what nonetheless decides everything, is to allocate the freed dwelling without the reign of status being reborn beneath the abolished price. The form of ownership does not suffice: the institution of allocation is needed. It is that institution which remains to be founded.