“The Housing Question, Ground Rent Theory, and Differentiation vs. Homogenization”

This essay takes Engels’ The Housing Question as a provocation to (1) apply ground rent theory to housing (something which Engels neglected to do) and (2) investigate Engels’ conflation of housing struggles with the concerns of a “backwards” peasantry. The author shows that applying Marx’s ground rent theory to housing illuminates aspects of the housing question heretofore unexamined—in particular, the significance of the relationship between landowner and capitalist in housing. The essay then shows that Engels’s dismissal of housing struggles and land-based struggles more broadly is rooted in the specious belief that proletarianization homogenizes people. Engels’s spurious logic nonetheless sets in relief an important connection: that only through grasping what Cedric Robinson has called racialization or differentiation and what Sylvia Wynter has named nonhomogeneity can we recognize the theoretical and practical centrality of housing and other land-based struggles to revolution and abolition.