Through an examination of shelter, care, and the right to communicate – all central to how the pandemic has been experienced – this chapter explores how the restructuring force of ownership has become a central institutional and political lever for reordering how our economies provide for (or more often do not) life’s fundamental needs. While this is not an exhaustive list of necessities, these three are both essential to dignity and participation in contemporary society as well as major cleavages during the pandemic, whether due to the paucity of their provision or profound injustices in their distribution, linked indelibly to their ownership structure. In response, drawing on socialist feminist traditions, we argue that to dismantle the inequalities this generates we must reimagine and re-socialise provision. That means breaking with the primacy of property and market-led distribution to instead meet universal needs through decommodified means.

  Residential Capitalism

  We begin with the most basic of necessities: shelter. A safe, secure, and comfortable home is foundational to one’s health and ability to thrive, yet in the US and UK, the housing market is arguably where the inequalities endemic to asset-dominated economies are most pronounced, and their implications most severe. In the US, house prices in May of 2021 were nearly 25 percent higher than the previous May, after a year of real estate market activity that rivalled levels last seen in the pre-crash mania of 2006.12 In the UK, house prices surged by 13.4 percent, the largest year-on-year rise in seventeen years.13 This extraordinary surge was an acceleration rather than a break with the norm. The stock value of British real estate rose almost a hundredfold from $60 billion in 1971 to an eye watering $6 trillion over the course of only four decades.14 Vast increases in aggregate housing wealth, of course, mask deep racial and class-based inequalities, the result of decades of racist housing policy (both explicit and implicit).15 This decades-long surge in wealth was actively facilitated by successive governments who, in response to systemic economic slowdown, incentivised a consumption-led growth model reliant on rising asset prices. The result: a worsening housing crisis where social housing is increasingly scarce, private rented accommodation unaffordable, and home ownership more and more out of reach for younger generations and low-income households. This existing crisis interacted with the unfolding pandemic to devastating effect, with housing insecurity and poor conditions found to have a significant relationship with negative health outcomes, from higher likelihood of infection and illness to increased mental illness. Consequently, in societies that privileged owners over renters, whether or not they owned their home profoundly shaped people’s experience of the pandemic.

  This was not by chance. The credit binge that has helped drive asset-price inflation (mortgage credit in the UK expanded from £280 million in April 2020 to its highest-ever rate of £11 billion by March 202116) was in part fostered by a combination of ultra-low interest rates and the Bank of England’s expanded quantitative easing programme. While homeowners enjoyed record rises in their wealth, the pandemic was a brutal economic shock for low earners, the young, and the self-employed, who disproportionately rent. Many fell through the cracks: around 700,000 renters in the UK were served with ‘no-fault’ eviction notices after the beginning of the pandemic17 while millions more renters and insecure homeowners across the world face the threat of losing their home. Moreover, as homeowners reaped an unearned wealth bonanza, private rents in Britain rose at the fastest rate on record in 2021, jumping by 9.9% outside London and even more in the capital.18 With private renters now spending on average a third of their household income on rent, the rental market is now arguably the greatest upward redistributive mechanism currently operating in Britain, transferring vast sums from working households to asset rich landlords.

  The growing chasm between the fortunes of renters and homeowners is the signature of the asset economy. In the world’s wealthy economies, class position and life chances are increasingly ‘defined less by occupational positions and more by relationships to assets, especially to housing as a wealth generating asset’.19 There is no denying that an individual’s relationship to the means and relations of production through work continues to be fundamental in class location, and a site of both domination and exploitation, but inequality between those who own housing wealth and those who do not has been cemented as a central divide. This in turn has created a politically complex and challenging landscape, with asset ownership an increasingly central determinant of political sentiments.

  In wealthier economies, the asset economy has entangled a growing proportion of people in its logic, offering a flawed bargain: don’t complain about wage stagnation in exchange for politically guaranteed asset-price inflation. From this flows a new form of inequality that mixes the logics of financialisation with the ‘feudal’ logics of inheritance to reshape the social class structure as a whole.20 Increasingly, the ability to get on the housing ladder hinges on whether an individual can access the ‘Bank of Mom and Dad’. Meanwhile, the centrality of assets introduces new temporalities and rhythms to capitalism based on the embrace of speculative logics and the focus on generating sufficient cash flow to service household and corporate debts.21 These credit-fuelled models of consumption have driven not only rising inequality but also financial instability. This is not to say, however, that rapidly rising prices mean the imminent or inevitable collapse of the upwardly spiralling housing market. So long as liquidity and leverage are abundant, with lenders willing to extend credit to households and central banks willing to backstop the financial system, the ratchet is likely to keep gearing higher, if bumpily, in the years ahead. Sustained by the political alliance of the ‘deflationary bloc’, residential capitalism has been hypercharged by Covid-19. Absent political intervention, it is here to stay.

  Home ownership is thus a disequalising dynamo of both exclusion and security. At once a driver of inequality and a critical source of wealth and reassurance for many millions, home ownership in Anglo-American societies is both complicated and politically disorienting. For many, there now exists an in-built preference towards rising real estate values not only with respect to their own home, but also through rapidly rising exposure via pensions to institutional landlords and real estate investment trusts. The political question of how we grapple with the housing crisis in the aftermath of Covid-19 is therefore a vital but complex challenge. One strategy would be to accept that the depth and scale of real estate financialisation is now irreversible, that the range of politically mobilised beneficiaries is too large, and so embrace the asset economy, seeking to further expand and universalise home ownership. However, a focus on simply extending private ownership risks distracting from the more fundamental goal at hand: ensuring everyone has a secure, safe, beautiful home regardless of whether they own housing wealth.

  The other route then – more attractive but more politically challenging – would attempt to radically increase social provision and non-market allocation of housing in an effort to rein in the economic and political significance of home ownership. In practice, given the material stake hundreds of millions have in the housing market, in the beginning at least, a dual approach will be required to navigate the complex and variegated politics of housing, and its generational, geographic and class cross-currents. Our twin challenge is to expand affordable home ownership for those who want it (albeit while seeking to stabilise prices) and guarantee security and affordability for renters. From challenging the credit-based drivers of asset-price inflation, to increasing public and cooperative housing available for social rent; from commoning land to community land trusts and public-common partnerships; from instituting rent control strategies and reclaiming privatised social housing stock, to reasserting democratic planning of space and built environment, there are a wide range of approaches that meet the needs of a coalition of renters and ordinary homeowners.

  The political need is urgent. The centrality of home ownership shapes our economies and our politics. Architects of the project that enshrined the primacy of property knew this well. Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of ‘Right to Buy’, arguably her most totemic single policy, was critical to transforming not only the UK’s housing tenure, but its politics. Enabling council house tenants to buy their house at a substantial discount, the policy helped consolidate a new political coalition for the right, centred on defending the interests of asset owners, regardless of the widely unequal patterns of ownership within this coalition. This was not some haphazard sale of public housing wealth; it was a targeted and successful effort to realign the interests of a new cohort of homeowners with wealthy asset owners instead of ordinary wage-earners, and with market-dominated over public provision. To understand its legacy, we need only look around us at the explosive spatial and economic inequalities that scar the UK’s towns and cities. Yet Thatcherism’s political insight – that changes in property relations targeted at clear social constituencies can anchor new political coalitions – remains fundamental. Unwinding its legacy will require grasping the centrality of ownership while building a future where a secure home is not dependent on entanglement within the asset economy.

  Clapping for Carers

  All crises generate their own rituals; Covid-19 was no different. Every Thursday evening at 8 PM throughout the first UK-wide lockdown, people gathered on their doorsteps to ‘clap for carers’. But despite the applause, little changed. Care work, the work of sustaining and reproducing life, is the foundation upon which all our societies operate. From unprotected social care workers to unanticipated childcare demands amid school closures, the pandemic underscored both our dependence on unpaid or low-paid care (4.5 million people in the UK became informal carers during the pandemic alone), as well as the continued undervaluation of this labour in our economies and societies. Moreover, the gendered and racialised divisions of labour within our societies – most carers are women, and many are migrants – exacerbate other inequities.22 However, while the crisis in care is rooted in capitalism’s broader devaluation of reproductive labour, this is not its only cause. The interlocking forces of fiscal austerity, marketisation, and financialisation have transformed how we organise and reward care work, enabled by the turn to private ownership and provision of this vital need.23

  Adult social care is emblematic of the ways in which private ownership models have hollowed out systems of non-household based care. Austerity reduced the resilience of the sector long in advance of the pandemic, but this weakness was anchored in structural shifts in ownership and control that, in several economies, have turned adult social care into a site of financialisation and rent extraction. In the UK for instance, in 1979, local government and the NHS provided two-thirds of residential and nursing home beds; by 2019, 84 percent of care home beds in England were in the private for-profit sector. This shift to a care sector dominated by for-profit providers has been in large part populated by private equity investors with a clear reason behind their appetite: consistent, publicly backed cash flows, real estate opportunities, and an ageing population make social care a compelling target for financial extraction.24

  Profitable though they may be, there is strong evidence that for-profit care homes deliver worse-quality care than voluntary and public sector providers.25 Care workers, meanwhile, face low wages and insecurity. In the UK, the average weekly pay for female care workers is just £385 a week, nearly £200 below the UK median. And the social costs of care work are borne not only by care workers and their families in a given country, but globally. As Fiona Williams, among others, has described, women in the Global South who migrate to become care workers are often forced to leave their own children or elderly parents behind, to be looked after by relatives or social networks, thus driving the formation of a ‘global care chain’.26

  Too often, our policy response has been to approach adult social care as a ‘low productivity’ sector in which productivity must be raised if wages and outcomes are to improve.27 However, this approach – in addition to failing to grapple with the underlying devaluation of care work in society – suffers from an overly simplistic understanding of the relationship between productivity and wages, and neglects the distinctively human dimension of care.28 It also fails to recognise, as the social theorist Isaac Stanley and others have argued, the significance of care as a collective service that secures well-being and dignity for care recipients and care workers, rather than simply a source of income and a series of ‘bio-maintenance’ tasks.29

  Emblematic of this was the UK government’s proposed solution to the crisis of adult social care, which it put forward in the summer of 2021. This ‘solution’ underscored the themes we have reiterated: despite calls for a wealth tax to support an increase in spending on adult social care (much of which would ultimately flow to private equity investors) the government opted to increase National Insurance contributions, a move that would hit wage-earners and the low-paid hardest. At the same time, there was no effort to transform the extractive ownership structures which have done so much to drive the challenges facing the social care system, nor to improve the quality of work for care workers themselves. Thus, the fault-lines of ownership cut through and severely limited efforts at reform.

  Against the deliberate carelessness with which we currently treat both people and the planet, a truly caring world would nurture practices and institutions that recognise and value our essential interdependence and shared needs. As the Care Collective’s Care Manifesto recently stated: ‘We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.’30 From child-care to adult social care, from housework to our stewardship of the natural world, bringing this agenda to life requires undoing the gendered division of caring labour and centring care in all its dimensions. It requires recognising and then addressing how far our economies rely upon ‘the off-loading of the cost of care onto the shoulders of underpaid and unpaid realms of society’.31 Above all, we must recognise that care is not a private concern or responsibility, whether in the household or via for-profit providers, in either cases shouldered disproportionately by women, nor something to be managed according to the financial interests of absent corporate owners; rather it is a collective task. As Amia Srinivasan argues, ‘the work of social reproduction must be the work of society.’32

  Care, in all its forms, is neither a luxury nor a purely domestic concern, but a form of critical infrastructure and labour that requires transformative public investment and a reimagining of its distribution in society. Reversing the austerity programmes that have decimated care systems is a crucial first step. However, to secure an enduring shift to a new system of care, a transformation in ownership structures – essential as they are to shaping the organisation and imperatives of the care system – must be at the heart of this vision. Indeed, as researchers at the University of Manchester argued in the context of the heavily financialised UK care sector, simply putting more money into the existing system without removing the dominant interest of financial speculation and the drive to maximise returns will amount to little more than ‘pouring water into a leaky bucket’, siphoning this investment upward and outward to shareholders and private equity backers.33

  We can begin by replacing the extractive and privatised nature of contemporary care provision with a public-oriented system: a coordinated system of cooperative, municipal, and publicly provided childcare and adult social care that centres life-making over profit-making.34 Political economist of care Emma Dowling, for example, argues for a new era of ‘care municipalism’ that can end the race to the bottom in terms of conditions, ‘bringing social care (back) under the control of public bodies, where it can be planned and delivered directly, and democratising public ownership models in partnership with communities’.35 Taken together, this would begin to socialise the essential work of social reproduction. An ambitious politics of care is also fundamental to the possibility of cohering a durable progressive majority. Care work is at the heart of the new working class: multi-racial, feminised, working predominantly in the service sector. And, as so evident during the crisis, care workers – paid and unpaid – are central to the functioning of our societies. They are a strategic pressure point for change, albeit currently fragmented. Cohering this latent political force through a transformative politics of care – democratic, decommodified, degendered – is an essential task for securing durable change.36 By stressing the tension between the social nature of care and the privatised structures of property that push against our mutual interdependence, we can organise for a world founded on solidarity and mutuality.

  Social-ist Networks

  What we count as a necessity to meaningfully participate in society is never fixed. As the pandemic underscored, the right to communication, enabling the ability to work, learn, and play, increasingly hinges on access to high-quality, reliable internet. If, as the UN argues, we have a human right to communicate, today that means a human right to the internet. Despite this, for many, Covid-19 was marked by poor connection, expensive services, and uneven access to the means of communication. On the eve of the pandemic, only 2 percent of households in the northeast of England could access full fibre broadband, while in the US, 21.3 million people did not have access to the minimum speed broadband connection during the pandemic. And globally, of course, connection was very often far worse. A central reason for this slow and unequal deployment is the ownership structure of the entities tasked with delivering the digital infrastructures of the twenty-first century: the for-profit corporation.

 

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