ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, I have explored the historically specific forms of housing provision under capitalism, tracing how these are in the grip of two forms of capital accumulation with opposing dynamics: rent extraction and capitalist production. Rent extraction involves cornering an asset in conditions of limited or no competition with the aim of hiking up prices as much as possible. Capitalist production, by contrast, involves extracting surplus value through the competitive production of a commodity, by raising productivity to lower costs, thus undercutting rival suppliers. Though rent extraction is a phenomenon far older than capitalism, it obviously persists under it. Capitalist production, however, is the historically specific ‘essence’ of capitalist societies: it is what sets the pace for the whole structure, subordinating alternative forms of surplus extraction to its tempo. To say this in no way implies that rent extraction is merely a pre-capitalist hangover, nor that capitalist production will ever be able to do away with rentierism entirely. Capitalism can never rid itself of rent extraction because they both share the same institutional foundation: private property. Private property rights are what empowers capitalists to revolutionise production while simultaneously enabling rentiers to hoard scarce assets. Progressive reforms can restrict private property rights to curtail rentierism, but they can never do away with it entirely without simultaneously threatening the basis of capitalist production.
