Private Housing, the State and the Working Class

Abstract

Housing is obviously of central importance to the working class and any consideration of its living conditions and general welfare under capitalism. It is also of essential importance to ‘capital in general’, which requires a supply of labour power housed sufficiently close to the point of production and housed adequately enough to ensure reproduction. Working-class housing conditions have been one of the most crucial material factors pushing forward the class struggle, both at the level of wages struggle and in other arenas. Housing expenditure has always taken up a high proportion of working-class spending; over the post-war period, according to the Family Expenditure Survey, average personal expenditure on housing rose from 9 per cent of total consumer spending in 1953 to 14 per cent in 1973, and lower income groups spend proportionally more on their housing than higher income groups.¹ Wage demands are highly sensitive to working-class housing costs, and hence the cost of housing to the working class is relevant to the interests of capital in general. Since the late nineteenth century the state has gradually come to play a central role both in processing working-class housing pressures and in ensuring the interests of capital in general in this sphere. The role of the state has largely been confined to housing consumption rather than its production; in the shape of central and local government agencies it has assumed the role of an exchange intermediary and regulator in the process of consumption.