Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism Read Online Free PDF Page A

on a reciprocal basis – you help me now with my roof and I will help you next week with your foundations) and acquired many of the raw materials (timber, adobe etc.) from all around them. The only monetary transactions would have been those concerned with the acquisition of axes, saws, nails, hammers, knives, harnesses for the horses and suchlike. Systems of housing production of this sort can still be found in the informal settlements constituting the so-called slums of many cities in developing countries. This is how the favelas of Brazil get built. The promotion of ‘self-help housing’ by the World Bank from the 1970s onwards formally identified this system of housing provision as appropriate for low-income populations in many parts of the world. The exchange values involved are relatively limited.
    Houses can also be ‘built to order’. Someone has land and pays architects, contractors and builders to construct a house according to a given design. The exchange value is fixed by the cost of raw materials, the wages of labour and payment for the services required to build the house. The exchange value does not dominate. But it can limit the possibilities of creating use values (there is not enough money to build a garage or a whole wing of the aristocratic mansion does not get built because the funding runs out). In advanced capitalist societies many people add to the existing use values of a house in this way (building an extension or a deck, for example).
    In much of the advanced capitalist world, however, housing is built speculatively as a commodity to be sold on the market to whoever can afford it and whoever needs it. Housing provision of this sort has long been evident in capitalist societies. This is the way in which the famous Georgian terraces of Bath, Bristol, London and the like were built at the end of the eighteenth century. Later on, such speculative building practices were harnessed to erect the tenement blocks of New York City, the terraced housing for the working classes in industrial cities such as Philadelphia, Lille and Leeds, and the tract housing of the typical American suburb. The exchange value is fixed by the basic costs of the house’s production (labour and raw materials), but in this case there are two other costs added in: first, the profit mark-up of the speculative builder, who lays out the initial necessary capital and pays the interest on any loans involved, and, second, the cost of acquiring, renting or leasing the land from property owners. The exchange value is set by the actual costs of production plus profit, interest on loans and capitalised rent (land price). The aim of the producers is to procure exchange values not use values. The creation of use values for others is a means to that end. The speculative quality of the activity means, however, that it is
potential
exchange value that matters. The builders of the housing actually stand to lose as well as to gain. Obviously, they try to orchestrate things, particularly housing purchases, to ensure that this does not happen. But there is always a risk. Exchange value moves into the driver’s seat of housing provision.
    Seeing the need for adequate use values going unmet, a variety of social forces, ranging from employers anxious to keep their labour force domesticated and to hand (like Cadbury) to radical and utopian believers (like Robert Owen, the Fourierists and George Peabody) and the local and national state, have from time to time launched a variety of housing programmes with public, philanthropic or paternalistic funding to provide for the needs of the lower classes at a minimum cost. If it is widely accepted that everyone has a right to ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment’ (as stated in the preamble to the US Housing Act of 1949), then, obviously, use value considerations are brought back to the forefront of struggles over housing provision. This political stance very much affected housing policies in