Not content with having made it illegal for homeless people to put a roof over their heads in empty residential properties, the same people who brought us last year’s ban on squatting are now trying to extend it to empty commercial properties too. Fired up with the same sort of prejudiced misinformation that formed the backdrop to the original campaign to criminalise squatters, Mike Weatherley has tabled an early day motion in parliament to this effect. It had gathered 24 signatures as Red Pepper went to press, including the Labour MPs Paul Flynn and Mary Glindon and the Liberal Democrats’ Mike Hancock.
While the sheer stupidity of some statements from supporters of the ban is almost comical (another from Weatherley on squatters: ‘these people are anti-capitalists and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it’), the consequences of the new law are no laughing matter. Campaigners such as SQUASH, (Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes) are still fighting to highlight the real issues at stake since section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act came into force last September.
The opening quote from Weatherley was made to the local paper The Argus, in response to claims that the law he had so keenly promoted had resulted in its first fatality. Daniel Gauntlett, a 35 year-old homeless man in Kent, froze to death in February after police warned him not to enter an empty bungalow, due for demolition, on the doorstep of which he later died.
So far, 33 people have been arrested under the new law, which makes it a crime to ‘trespass’ into a residential property with the intention of living there, punishable by up to six months in prison and a £5,000 fine. Ten were convicted, with three receiving custodial sentences, while research by squatting support networks such as Advisory Service for Squatters, SQUASH and the Squatters’ Legal Network has identified at least 108 people who have been displaced after being threatened with prosecution by police. Given that accurate figures are not readily available – many police forces are treating the offence as non-recordable – this is just the tip of what many groups working with homeless people believe could be a very big iceberg.
What is clear is that in contrast to the images of ‘home stealing’ squatters conjured up in the imaginations of the media and politicians – caricatures resting on prejudiced portrayals of eastern European migrants and ‘feral’ middle-class youth – the law has disproportionately affected homeless and vulnerable people. This is exactly what opponents of the law, including homeless charities such as Crisis, Shelter and the Simon Community, had predicted.
Of the three people jailed for squatting, all were genuinely homeless, vulnerable, and in one case struggling with substance abuse problems. As the SQUASH report The Case Against S144, recently presented in the House of Commons, summarised: ‘As expected, a law that was introduced to “protect home owners” is, ultimately, putting homeless people in jail simply for trying to avoid rough sleeping.’
The report is backed by lawyers, homeless charities, academics and MPs. The broader campaign includes MPs such as John McDonnell, who has tabled an early day motion to repeal S144. A chorus of 40 legal experts, most recently in a letter published in the Guardian, has reiterated the fact that previous laws already protected home owners and intended occupiers. There was no need to introduce additional criminal sanctions, and no justification for extending them further.
‘There is no evidence that the law is being used to protect home owners, which it was claimed the law was for. No one has been arrested for squatting someone else’s home; it’s been for squatting empty properties,’ says SQUASH campaigner Gianni Barlassina. ‘What we’ve been saying all along is that squatting is a homelessness issue, not a criminal issue. It should be treated for what it is.’

Few have been as influential in answering these questions as Marxist geographer David Harvey. He spoke to Ronan Burtenshaw and Aubrey Robinson about these problems earlier this summer.

You’re working on a new book at the moment, The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism. Why focus on its contradictions?

David Harvey: The analysis of capitalism suggests that there are significant and foundational contradictions. Periodically those contradictions get out of hand and they generate a crisis. We’ve just been through a crisis and I think it’s important to ask, what were the contradictions that led us into it? How can we analyse the crisis in terms of contradictions? One of Marx’s great sayings was that a crisis is always the result of the underlying contradictions. Therefore we have to deal with those themselves rather than their results.

One of the contradictions you focus on is that between the use and exchange value of a commodity. Why is this contradiction so fundamental to capitalism, and why do you use housing to illustrate it?

All commodities have to be understood as having a use value and exchange value. If I have a steak the use value is that I can eat it and the exchange value is how much I had to pay for it.

But housing is very interesting in this way because as a use value you can understand it as shelter, privacy, a world of affective relations with people, a big list of things you use a house for. But then there is the question of how you get the house. At one time houses were built by people themselves and there was no exchange value at all. Then from the 18th century onwards you got speculative house building – Georgian terraces which were built and sold later on. Then houses became exchange values for consumers in the form of saving. If I buy a house and I pay down the mortgage on it, I can end up owning the house. So I have an asset. I therefore become very concerned about the nature of the asset. This generates interesting politics – ‘not in my backyard’, ‘I don’t want people moving in next door who don’t look like me’. So you start to get segregation in housing markets because people want to protect the value of their savings.

Then about thirty years ago people began to use housing as a form of speculative gain. You could get a house and ‘flip’ it – you buy a house for £200,000, after a year you get £250,000 for it. You earned £50,000, so why not do it? The exchange value took over. And so you get this speculative boom. In 2000 after the collapse of global stock markets the surplus capital started to flow into housing. It’s an interesting kind of market. If I buy a house then housing prices go up, and you say ‘housing prices are going up, I should buy a house’, and then somebody else comes in. You get a housing bubble. People get pulled in and it explodes. Then all of a sudden a lot of people find they can’t have the use value of the housing anymore because the exchange value system has destroyed it.

Which raises the question, is it a good idea to allow use value in housing, which is crucial to people, be delivered by a crazy exchange value system? This is not only a problem with housing but with things like education and healthcare. In many of these we’ve released the exchange value dynamics in the theory that it’s going to provide the use value but frequently what it does is it screws up the use values and people don’t end up getting good healthcare, education or housing. This is why I think it’s very important to look at that distinction between use and exchange value.

Another contradiction you describe involves a process of switching over time between supply-side emphases on production and demand-side emphases on consumption in capitalism. Could you talk about how that manifested itself in the twentieth century and why it’s so important?

One of the big issues is keeping an adequate market demand, so that you can absorb whatever it is that capital is producing. The other is creating the conditions under which capital can produce profitably.

Those conditions of profitable production usually mean suppressing labour. To the degree that you engage in wage repression – paying lower and lower wages – the profit rate goes up. So, from the production side, you want to squeeze labour down as much as you possibly can. That gives you high profits. But then the question arises, who is going to buy the product? If labour is being squeezed, where is your market? If you squeeze labour too much you end up with a crisis because there’s not enough demand in the market to absorb the product.

It was broadly interpreted after a while that the problem in the crisis of the 1930s was lack of demand. There was therefore a shift to state-led investments in building new roads, the WPA [public works under the New Deal] and all that. They said ‘we will revitalise the economy by debt-financed demand’ and, in doing so, turned to Keynesian theory. So you came out of the 1930s with a very strong capacity for managing demand with a lot of state involvement in the economy. As a result of that you get very high growth rates, but the high growth rates are accompanied by an empowerment of the working-class with rising wages and stronger unions.

Strong unions and high wages mean the profit rate starts to come down. Capital is in crisis because it’s not repressing labour enough, and so you get the switch. In the 1970s they turned to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. That became dominant in economic theory and people began paying attention to the supply-side – particularly wages. You get wage repression, which begins in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan attacks the air traffic controllers, Margaret Thatcher goes after the miners, Pinochet kills people on the left. You get an attack on labour – which raises the profit rate. By the time you get to the 1980s the profit rate has jumped up because wages are being repressed and capital is doing well. But then there comes the problem of where are you going to sell the stuff.

In the 1990s that is really covered by the debt economy. You started to encourage people to borrow a lot – you started to create a credit card economy and a high mortgage-financed economy in housing. That covered the fact that there wasn’t real demand out there. But eventually that blows up in 2007-8.

Capital has this question, ‘do you work on the supply side or the demand side?’ My view of an anticapitalist world is that you should unify that. We should return to use value. What use values do people need and how to we organise production in such a way that it matches these?

It would seem that we are in a supply-side crisis, and yet austerity is an attempt to find a supply-side resolution. How do we square that?

You have to differentiate between the interests of capitalism as a whole and what is specifically in the interests of the capitalist class, or a section of it. During this crisis, by-and-large, the capitalist class have done very well. Some of them got burned but for the most part they have done extremely well. According to recent studies of the OECD countries social inequality has increased quite significantly since the onset of the crisis, which means that the benefits of the crisis have been flowing to the upper classes. In other words, they don’t want to get out of the crisis because they are doing very well out of it.

The population as a whole is suffering, capitalism as a whole is not healthy but the capitalist class – particularly an oligarchy within it – has been doing extremely well. There are many situations where individual capitalists operating in their own class interests can actually do things which are very damaging to the capitalist system as a whole. I think we are in that kind of situation right now.

You have said often recently that one of the things we should be doing on the left is engaging our postcapitalist imagination, starting to ask the question of what a postcapitalist world would look like. Why is that so important? And, in your view, what would a postcapitalist world look like?

It is important because it has been drummed into our heads for a considerable period of time that there is no alternative. One of the first things we have to do is to think about the alternative in order to move towards its creation.

The left has become so complicitous with neoliberalism that you can’t really tell its political parties from right-wing ones except on national or social issues. In political economy there is not much difference. We’ve got to find an alternative political economy to how capitalism works, and there are some principles. That’s why contradictions are interesting. You look at each one of them like, for instance, the use and exchange value contradiction and say – ‘the alternative world would be one where we deliver use values’. So we concentrate on use values and try to diminish the role of exchange values.

Or on the monetary question – we need money to circulate commodities, no question about it. But the problem with money is that it can be appropriated by private persons. It becomes a form of personal power and then a fetish desire. People mobilise their lives around searching for this money even when nobody knows that it is. So we’ve got to change the monetary system – either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles.

But in order to do that you’ve also got to overcome the private property-state dichotomy and come to a common property regime. And, at a certain point, you need to generate a basic income for people because if you have a form of money that is anti-saving then you need to guarantee people. You need to say, ‘you don’t need to save for a rainy day because you’ll always be getting this basic income no matter what’. You’ve got to give people security that way rather than private, personal savings.

By changing each one of these contradictory things you end up with a different kind of society, which is much more rational than the one we’ve got. What happens right now is that we produce things and then we try to persuade consumers to consume whatever we’ve produced, whether they really want it or need it. Whereas we should be finding out what people’s basic wants and desires are and then mobilising the production system to produce that. By eliminating the exchange value dynamic you can reorganise the whole system in a different kind of way. We can imagine the direction that a socialist alternative would move in as it breaks from this dominant form of capital accumulation, which runs everything today.

The full transcript of this interview will be available in the autumn edition of the Irish Left Review

Nadia Fall’s Home is an example of just how powerful verbatim theatre as a medium can be when it’s done right. Set in an East London homeless hostel for young people, the play draws on over thirty hours of interviews with residents and staff in the sector.

Ruth Sutcliffe’s set takes the audience through the foyer of the hostel, and the script has the characters directly address us, as interviewers. They jostle with each other to tell us their stories, and we feel like interlopers, albeit welcome ones.

Among the characters we hear from are an Eritrean Christian fleeing religious persecution, an ex-resident who feels compelled to return to the place, and a cockney whose racist rant is undermined by mention of his Turkish girlfriend. Jade (Grace Savage), a pregnant woman who communicates entirely through beat-boxing, contributes to the varied soundtrack that keeps the show’s momentum through its less dramatic moments.

Here are people in all their complexities, co-existing in the no-man’s land of temporary accommodation. Home manages to make important points – that there are no council houses, that working-class young people in London are regarded with disdain by many – without losing it’s sense of place and time. We know this is East London, the riots of 2011 and the Olympics of 2012 cast their shadow. Underlying the whole piece is the death of a former resident, Daniel, who was stabbed in Stratford’s Westfield shopping centre.

“I’ll probably have two houses,” says Bullet (Shakka), when asked to describe his dream home. Just for a moment, it doesn’t seem so fanciful, because we have been taken into the characters’ aspirations so convincingly. Certainly it’s less of a fantasy than the speech of the priest (Jonathan Coote) who presides over a memorial service to Daniel with an asinine prayer. I couldn’t help but think that he was a mirror for the National Theatre audience, the vast majority of whom looked and sounded far more like him than any other character.

Home deals with its subject matter without judgement, but not without sympathy. It is a surprisingly uplifting piece, which serves as an important contribution to the discussion about London’s ‘lost generation.’

Home runs until 7th September at the National Theatre Shed, box office 020 74523244.

Where the cuts bite

Bedroom tax
The bedroom tax, or the ‘under occupancy penalty’ as it is referred to by out-of-touch politicians, will see social housing tenants of working age with so-called spare bedrooms lose 14 per cent of their housing benefit for one room and 25 per cent for two or more. On average those affected will lose £14 a week in housing benefit. The bedroom tax greatly undermines the security and affordability of social housing.
This tax will affect the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation study found that 29 per cent of people renting social housing are living in poverty before paying housing costs. Of the 660,000 people affected by the tax, two-thirds of households include a person with disabilities.
Council tax
In April the government will abolish council tax benefit and shift responsibility for the new ‘council tax support’ regime, along with a 10 per cent cut in funding, to local authorities. Council tax benefit is claimed by 5.9 million families. However, under the new regime, many of the poorest households will be forced to pay the tax when previously they had been exempt, while others will see the amount they must pay increase.
A study by the Resolution Foundation has shown that those not in employment may face paying between £1.80 and £4.90 a week from their benefits. Even the architect of the poll tax, Patrick Jenkin, has warned the government against repeating the mistakes of the past. Speaking to the BBC, the Tory peer admitted: ‘The poll tax was introduced with the proposition that everyone should pay something… We got it wrong. The same factor will apply here.’
Benefits cap
Household welfare payments will be restricted to £500 per week (those receiving disability living allowance, working tax credit or war widow pensions will be exempt) from April 2013 for Bromley, Croydon, Enfield and Haringey, and autumn 2013 for the rest of the country. This will particularly affect those with three or more dependent children who are entitled to higher levels of benefits to reflect their additional needs.
As well as not taking into account family size, the cap also does not make allowances for where people live. Larger families in urban areas, particularly London, where rents are particularly high, will be hit hardest. Councils are already looking at relocating some families to cheaper areas.