FEELING AT HOME

A Marxist interpretation of the housing crisis in Britain.

In these essays, Gotby, author (They Call It Love) and housing activist, indicts capitalism, the capitalist state, and white bourgeois ideology for their role in perpetuating and profiting from the lack of affordable and quality housing for poor and working-class people. Housing, she claims, is “at the core of…all the things that go into ensuring the relative wellbeing of people.” The wealthy excepted, well-being is degraded by a housing market that treats the home as a financial asset, the privatization of council housing, and a dominant ideology that locates safety, health, and care in bourgeois domesticity and homeownership—i.e., in the private, not the public, sphere. Yet she cautions against pining for a time when the welfare state was more robust. The welfare state was as much a bailout of capitalism’s neglect of the social reproduction of the proletariat as it was a help for people in need, while council housing never addressed the variety of living arrangements that people desire. Ideally, housing should be collective, and the caring functions associated with the family spread across institutional settings. Regarding the latter, Gotby points out that the family (contrary to bourgeois ideology) can be a “site of intense exploitation, violence, and alienation.” Throughout, she emphasizes people’s emotional attachment to housing and, in the final essay, how feelings contribute to the housing movement. Argumentative and impressionistic, the book combines Marxism and feminism to offer an aspirational perspective on how to think about housing and ways to overcome the current and prevent future crises. Gotby, though, does not call for revolution and an end to capitalism. Rather, her dream is housing that exists beyond capitalism’s reach, a goal even she recognizes as utopian.

A much-needed complement to the left’s focus on rentier capitalism.