— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Introduction

At least 929 people “without a home” died in France in 2025; the youngest was an eleven-day-old infant, found dead in Bron, on the outskirts of Lyon.¹ The day after this count was published, on the social network X, the former Housing minister Guillaume Kasbarian, author of a 2023 law that makes rental evictions easier², replied to those who call his law “odious”: “The Kasbarian law […] protects a fundamental right: private property. I STAND BY IT.”³

The most remarkable thing about this inhuman declaration is that it is legally accurate. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees property in its article 17; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 ranks it, in its article 2, among the “natural and imprescriptible rights of man”, and proclaims it, in its article 17, an “inviolable and sacred right”.⁴ Both, however, are careful not to define properly what property is — what it covers, how far it extends, what distinguishes the enjoyment of a good from the right to demand an income from it — and not to subordinate it to anything whatsoever, not even to the existence of others, as Robespierre demanded before the Convention on 24 April 1793.⁵ Thus, in law, the former minister is right. A landlord disposes of a good from which he may draw an income (and often, competition obliging, draw a maximal income); a mother cannot pay the rent; she is evicted — it would be illegal for her to stay, since her presence would violate the owner’s right to draw income from his good; her infant dies. The life of an infant is not worth much against an “inviolable and sacred right”: an unfortunate consequence, but the law is safe.

This book proposes to accept this no longer — and, among other consequences, to amend the Declaration of 1789, hence the French constitutional corpus, and the European texts that echo it⁶, by specifying that what is “inviolable and sacred” is the property of use: the property that guarantees to each the place of their existence — the housing they inhabit, the workshop where they work —, not the property that allows one to demand an income from the existence of others.

The oldest political problem

The proposal is outsized. To touch lucrative property, to guarantee the property of use, is properly revolutionary. On production and the working class, the literature is plethoric, from Marx to Friot, and we shall not return to it: this book is about housing, and more broadly about everything that derives from land. Yet landed property and its correlates — the lease, the farm rent — are so deeply anchored in society that conservative politicians make them a campaign argument, that reformers yield to them, and that many revolutionaries themselves hardly question them, or question them badly. Sarkozy wanted a “France of owners”⁷ and Hollande, on the left, capped rents⁸ — the one subsidising access to ownership, the other capping the rent, but neither of them calling the tribute itself into question. On the side of Sarkozy and Kasbarian, one invokes human rights and the necessity of property, set against the extreme and wholly undesirable communal dwellings. On the revolutionary side, one dreads arbitrary allocation regimes (those of Yugoslavia), mostly without seeing that allocation by money is an arbitrariness too, and one of extreme violence. The housing question thus appears politically paralysed: subsidies to home-ownership on one side, construction of social housing on the other, at best the fight for an enforceable right to housing — but nothing that questions the very notions.

That is why this book begins by showing that these notions, these institutions, are not eternal but dated; not natural but instituted; and what has been instituted can be instituted otherwise. To see this, one must widen the lens, and lead the news item back to the question it encloses. Behind the landlord, the mother and the judge, there is a question that every sedentary society, without exception, must settle: who has the right to be where? All human activity is situated — one needs a place to sleep, to work, to raise children, to be at home — and useful space is finite, not reproducible: no one manufactures an additional city centre or an additional fertile field. Something, then, must decide who occupies what. That something — custom, status, force, price, deliberation — is a regime of land allocation; and the choice of that regime is one of the fundamental political acts of a society, even though it never formulates it.

This question is one of the oldest political problems of sedentary societies. From the end of the fourth millennium BCE, at Uruk, the first great urban concentration in history, situated land becomes a disputed resource, and institutions arise to allocate it — the temple, then the palace, which assign the fields, distribute the rations, register the tenures; writing itself appears there, not to sing but to count, and its oldest tablets are accounts of land and rations. More than a millennium later, the Code of Hammurabi already regulates the lease and sharecropping — and a clause has even been restored in it sanctioning the landlord who evicts his tenant before term.⁹ Competition for land was therefore not born with capitalism, nor rent with the market. What capitalism did is something else, something it did everywhere: it seized a phenomenon of long history (the toll levied on access to land), subjected it wholly to price, made the title transferable and the levy maximisable, and thus carried it to its maximal intensity.

This long history calls for a precaution, valid at every stage of the journey: one single thing will be drawn from it, the contingency of the present regime. Allocation by price is the latest comer among allocation regimes, long marginal; it is a choice of organisation, not a law of nature. The desirability of earlier regimes will never be drawn from it — Uruk’s allocation was priestly and servile, that of the fief a hierarchy of dependencies; none of them is a model. That the allocation of land can be other, history proves; that it ought to be democratic is not proved by history but argued politically, and the last part of this book is devoted to it.

The thesis

The thesis holds in two propositions, one analytical, the other political.

The first: land does not produce, it conditions; rent is the toll levied on this conditioning. Land takes part in no process of production — neither the field that bears the wheat nor the plot that bears the building adds any value to what is done there: they are its condition. Whoever holds this condition holds a gate, and what he demands for opening it — farm rent, rent, price per square metre — remunerates no service: it is a tribute. Hence a dividing line that runs through society otherwise than the nomenclatures say: on one side the user, who must gain access to a place to satisfy a non-negotiable need — to house oneself, to work; on the other the rentier, who draws income from holding the place. The inhabitant and the worker are the two faces of the user this book treats; the peasant, who must gain access to the land to produce food, is its third, but we shall not treat him here.

The second: this tribute is not a fatality, but the product of a particular allocation regime, historically dated and politically replaceable. In France, today, it amounts to some 162 billion euros a year — 126 for housing, 36 for economic activity, passed on into prices —, nearly 6 % of gross domestic product, on the order of 329 euros per month per tax household, almost twice the yield of the income tax: a sum comparable to the country’s foremost direct tax, levied outside any vote and without productive counterpart, on the sole fact of occupying a place.¹⁰ Against this regime, this book sets an alternative: the democratic allocation of land (of which, it will be argued, communism carried to its conclusion is the accomplished form), founded not on the collectivisation of existences but on the property of use: for a dwelling is not a shareable good like a machine or company shares; it is a home, the inviolable place of an existence. Without being the hearth dear to the Proudhonians and derided by Engels¹¹, besides being a functional place of shelter, comfort and hygiene, it is a place of sovereignty, a place of memories and a place of future. It is there that one knows one’s loves and that children grow up. It is therefore a quite particular type of property, which deserves to be treated specially. That is the journey the title announces: from tribute to communism — from the land tribute to the democratic allocation of land.

The method

The method comes first from Lenin and from scientific socialism. In the Notebooks on the agrarian question, statistics are not an ornament: they are the instrument of the demonstration and the weapon of the critique, because they are intersubjectively controllable¹² — one takes the data that bourgeois economics produces, and turns them against the categories that organise them.¹³ But Lenin is not enough. Contemporary built space — the city as social product, housing as a lived class relation, the state as guarantor of the proprietary order — requires the help of urban sociology and economic anthropology. Finally, and this is the book’s most constant rule, the empirical argument (what history and figures establish) is everywhere distinguished from the normative argument (what is desirable): the former is proved, the latter is defended, and we strive never to confuse the one with the other.

The architecture of the book

The journey goes from concept to measurement, and from measurement to project.

Part one (chapters 1 to 5) grounds the theory. It lays down the core — land does not produce, it conditions — before any recourse to Marx (chapter 1); unfolds the long-run typology of allocation regimes, from the temple of Uruk to the enclosures (chapter 2); rereads Marx not as a theorist of origins but as the analyst of the accomplished form of rent (chapter 3); transposes these laws from the land to built space, where fertility becomes location — a system of accessibilities produced by all, captured privately (chapter 4); and draws from them the subjects of the question, the user and the rentier (chapter 5).

Part two (chapters 6 to 8) is the most directly Leninist. National accounts can say of a house nothing but its price (they are a grown-up); by recording rent — actual or imputed — as the production of a “housing service”, they enter the tribute into gross domestic product as wealth created, and make it disappear as a levy. This machinery is dismantled piece by piece (chapters 6 and 7), before the theorists who give rent its letters of nobility are confronted with their own data (chapter 8).

Part three (chapters 9 to 11) measures. Residential rent (chapter 9), business rent (chapter 10), then the sum and the general law that emerges from it (chapter 11): about 162 billion euros a year, understated rather than overstated, obeying a single law — the capture of a monopoly income on access to a land that nobody produced and whose value is increased only by society as a whole.

Part four leaves measurement for the project: allocating land otherwise. It begins with the critical inventory of past attempts to take housing out of the market — and of their failures, which were often failures of the home: one does not collectivise a dwelling as one does a factory. It then grounds the reversal: the property of use, the institutions capable of carrying it, and the paths of the transition. There the demonstration explicitly changes nature: it no longer establishes what is, it argues what ought to be.

This order is the order of the demonstration; it is not a compulsory reading order. The parts stand well enough on their own to be read out of sequence: one may begin with the measurement (part III) or with the project (part IV), skip the critique of the nomenclatures if accounting repels, and return later to the foundations. Internal cross-references will always indicate where to find the missing link.

There is one question deliberately set aside in this book: the agrarian question.¹⁴ It treats the inhabitant and, to a lesser extent, the worker; it does not treat the peasant. Not that the latter escapes the question; on the contrary, he realises its most entangled form: to ground rent are added, for him, technological dependence on the upstream, financial strangulation, capture by the downstream of processing and distribution, and competition with lower-standard spaces; this entanglement would require an entire book, not a chapter. The question is of extreme importance (climate change, which makes land a resource more disputed with every passing year, will not cease to aggravate it), but it is beyond us; it will have to be treated by others.

At the end of the journey, the declaration with which this book opens will appear for what it is. The former minister was not stating an obvious truth; he was professing the faith of a particular allocation regime — the latest comer, the most intense, the only one that hands over entirely to price the decision of who has the right to be where. Between the landlord’s income and the inhabitant’s existence, this regime has chosen, and its law with it. That choice can be made again in the opposite direction, just as the class relation between capitalists and proletarians can be abolished: through the ballot box or not, but in every case through a revolutionary rupture, for the dominant never yield their power without resorting to violence. What deserves to be held inviolable and sacred is not the title that allows a toll to be demanded on the existence of others: it is the home — the very thing of which 929 people died deprived in 2025. The watchword that sums up this reversal, and that the whole book labours to ground, holds in one line:

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