Click on Jordan ''Hello. I want to talk about this pamphlet on the housing question by Engles It's online if you want to read it. It pretty much describes you know what is a housing crisis? What is a housing shortage? And how do various groups of society solve it? Like from the ruling class to like utopian socialists uand how can you actually solve it? At the moment, we're hearing like pretty much every single politician being like, "I'm going to solve the housing crisis." And then literally none of them doing anything to do that. They proposed various things like cutting immigration, built to rent, like first home buyer schemes, and like we know all of this is just going to be useless. But uh yeah, 150 years ago, like in 1872, uh some old guy wrote about it and it's still true.
Engles writes,’ that a housing shortage uh is a necessary product of capitalism. He says that the housing shortage is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order. That it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages. That is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind. It's a world in which violent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time onto the streets unemployed in which workers are crowded together in masses in the big towns at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under the prevailing conditions. He also says, and I think this is really interesting in the next sentence, that the capitalist has not only the right, but by reason of competition to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can. In such a society, the housing shortage is no accident. It is a necessary institution.
Jordan van de Lamb: What Engles is saying is that a housing crisis or a housing shortage is not like a bug within capitalism, like an imperfect version of capitalism or whatever. This is capitalism working exactly as it's intended and it was designed to do. He also says, and keep in mind this is in 1872……'
