In the clash of rights, the force will decide
The commodification of housing is an undeniable reality. And behind there is a series of tragic evidences: evictions, inability to access decent housing, speculation, living drowned by renting… In short, the brutal imposition of the logic of private property. Faced with this, we often claim the “right to housing”. But don't homeowners have the right to do business with housing?
It is a subject with political and not terminological consequences. The right versus business dichotomy in housing is a mere mystification. Because housing is in turn a right (use value) and a business (exchange value). This means that we cannot claim a right as a natural characteristic, as an abstract ethics or morality. Because law is a social relationship, a relationship of strength and antagonism.
"There is a collision of conflicting rights: proprietary class (capital accumulation right) and expropriated class (housing right)"
David Harvey investigated the ambivalence of the concept of law, saying that its use and claim is contradictory: “The right of access to the city can be requested by the financiers and promoters, and it has full right to do so, but it can also be claimed by the homeless and papers. The definition of the right is therefore the object of the struggle, which must accompany the struggle for its exercise”.
Something similar happens with the right to housing. In capitalist society there is a collision between two contradictory and antagonistic rights: that of the proprietary class (right to capital accumulation) and that of the expropriated class (right to housing). And, as Marx said, "among the same rights, force decides."
In other words, we cannot raise the issue of rights only at the moral level. We must bring it to the plane of class organization and accumulation of forces. The ruling class is organized to exercise the right to housing as a business, reproducing the regime of goods and establishing the dictatorship of private property. The right to housing for the expropriated, therefore, will not come from institutions or bourgeois reforms. The right to housing will only be achieved by our ability to develop the organisation and the instruments of struggle.
There is no compatibility between conflicting rights. Therefore, class struggle will be the battlefield that will decide which of the two conceptions of the right to housing will prevail.
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