FTC Manning
FTC Manning is a geographer by way of philosophy and political economy, working on ground rent, theories of the state, and the political economy of land dispossession / the land dispossession at the heart of political economy. They are the Treasurer of the board of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and a participant in local organizing groups fighting for homes, resources, and mutual aid with housed and houseless neighbors and sex workers. Other research foci include ontologies of law, colonial land transfer, racialization in the longue-durée, psychoanalysis, quantum epistemology, and trauma-informed pedagogy. You can find their work at https://opencuny.org/ftcmanning/.
Collected Work
“Geographies of Ground Rent: Periodizing Ground Rent Theory, Spatializing Ground Rent Refusal”
This article presents an overview of ground rent theories from a historical and political vantage, analyzing chronological continuities and discontinuities, and hypothesizing about the historicopolitical motivations which spur certain approaches to ground rent. It begins with “Classical Marxist” approaches to ground rent theory in the decades after Marx’s death, followed by an analysis of ground rent theory from the 1970s to 2020s. The essay then argues that ground rent-based analyses yield a unique and essential interpretation of class relations, state–capital relations, and the complexity of embodied categories of capitalist social relations. It concludes by considering Demonic Ground/Rent in which the analysis of ground rent may lead us toward ascertaining how to most deeply and fundamentally challenge, refuse, abolish, the current state of things—if we allow ourselves to follow it there.
“A Defence of the Concept of the Landowning Class as the Third Class: Towards a Logic of Landownership”
Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the “three great classes” of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century—from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey—have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others who have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today.
“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.
