Finding a working-class way out

The severity of the housing crisis over the past two decades has led to an existential shift among Australians. The prospect of an average Australian worker owning their own detached home in a suburb has become so remote that young people have simply given up on it. Gentrification has crept across the city, turning formerly working class areas into playgrounds for the upper middle class. New apartment complexes and housing projects are built rapidly and poorly, without proper amenities or social planning, by some of the slimiest property developers known to man, their development approvals (DAs) shunted through by dodgy local councillor friends. The rights of public housing tenants are diminishing, as actual public housing gets turned into rip-off “social housing” and waiting lists blow out to ludicrous levels.

On one level, the housing crisis is not new. Workers have always lived in substandard housing, paying too much for too little on the private market or have been forced to stay in long queues for public housing, which is usually of negligible quality anyway. What is new is the severity of the crisis, and the fact that it is now hitting all types of people in Australian society. No longer are housing pressures just focused on low-wage workers, Indigenous people, the unemployed, pensioners – they’re also hitting large parts of the middle class, from higher-earning workers to small business owners and relatively well-off professionals.

We want to point to something essential about reforms: they’re not dictated by the whims of individual politicians, but by the realities of administering capitalism that are imposed on them. Neither do the reforms by themselves necessarily amount to benefits for workers; if workers are to gain anything, it’s through fighting for ourselves – from below.

It’s this general feeling of discontent and the threat it poses to their electoral prospects that drives politicians to act. Parties across the spectrum make an effort to seem like they’re doing something: whether that’s Labor’s Housing Australian Future Fund (HAFF), the Coalition’s various saving and loan schemes, or the Greens’ public housing plans. At times, politicians attempt to use housing-related discontent to mobilise for directly pro-capitalist policies; note the way both Labor and Coalition politicians now rail against anti-development NIMBYs as the brick wall preventing the private sector from building houses for everyone.

When discussing government policies on housing, you can’t forget what the point of government is in the first place, and why they implement these policies. They don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of some charitable motive. The state is there to function as the “general capitalist”, advancing the rule of capitalism, whether through the carrot or the stick. This is the basic reason we’re sceptical of any politicians aiming to solve the housing crisis on our behalf – including “Mr. Renter” himself, Max Chandler-Mather.

On one level, politicians like Chandler-Mather can promise panaceas because they are so remote from power. The Greens are unlikely to form government any time soon, either on the state or federal level, and they know it – the best they can hope for is to play hardball from the crossbench. This explains why they can talk a big game but in the end capitulate, with a few crumbs thrown their way by Labor: first with the climate safeguard mechanism, then with the HAFF. Should the Greens ever reach a point where forming government became a possibility, then their policies would moderate substantially.

We don’t want to suggest that Australian governments are incapable of implementing reforms. They clearly are, and should the crisis intensify – and with it, competition for votes – more reforms may be implemented. However, we want to point to something essential about reforms: they’re not dictated by the whims of individual politicians, but by the realities of administering capitalism that are imposed on them. Neither do the reforms by themselves necessarily amount to benefits for workers; if workers are to gain anything, it’s through fighting for ourselves – from below.

The origins of the “golden age”

While promoting his party’s proposal for a massive public housing construction drive, Chandler-Mather has referred to the similar post-WWII building drive as precedent. This reference is intended to make his policy seem more credible and realistic, while also furthering the Greens’ appeal to disaffected Labor supporters – telling them that they are the rightful inheritors of the kind of social democracy that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) abandoned under Hawke and Keating.

However, this obscures the reality of the post-war building boom. While it’s certainly true that massive amounts of public housing was built by the government after WWII, Chandler-Mather’s reformism obscures the class conflict at the heart of post-war reconstruction. The story of the post-war reforms are not a story of governments acting kindly towards workers, but of large-scale plans for the expansion of Australian capitalism, and the determined effort of the working class to fight back.

The post-war housing programmes in particular were primarily motivated by two general, related factors: the terrifyingly bad quality of Australian housing stock, and the Australian economy’s need for millions more workers than it previously had. As the 1930s came to a close and the 1940s began, Australia’s cities were a shit-show. Melbourne is a good example: a detailed study led by the economist Wilfred Prest looked at the quality of Melbourne’s residences. Conducted between 1941 and 1943, it found that

…a quarter of the kitchens had no water supply and half lacked a hot-water service. Fewer than one in 10 had a refrigerator; about half used ice-chests and the remainder relied on daily purchases of perishables.

A closer analysis of the city’s industrialising Western Suburbs showed that 5% of dwellings were uninhabitable, with only a tiny minority of all houses having an internal toilet. This was in an area where the housing stock was not only newer than elsewhere, but far less crowded too: the majority of residences were detached single story houses.

A significant chunk of the cities consisted of slums and shanty-towns in dire condition. In 1937 Victoria’s Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board identified approximately six thousand residences of concern in the city centre. Of these, half needed repairs in order to be habitable, and the other half could not be repaired at all. According to the historian Stuart MacIntyre, “the great majority had no kitchen, a third no bathroom, and a quarter neither gas nor electricity […] they were disfigured by leaking roofs, unsound floors and defective drainage, poor ventilation, damp, and subject to rat and vermin infestation”.

The persistence of these slums troubled Australian reformers. Overcrowding, in the words of Federal Labor Senator Richard Keane, was a major contributor to “the falling birth-rate, the susceptibility to epidemics, the diminishing attraction of home life and of family life, the modern discontented outlook, the reported increasing tendency of children to ailments…”. The prominent housing reformers F. Osward Barnett and Walter Burt would put this in terms more directly relevant to the ruling class: the cost of subsidising public housing would be balanced out by savings on other government expenditures, like policing, education and sanitation.

The planners and the proletariat

The declining birth-rate was a particular concern to Australian capitalists, who banked on a massive growth in the population as a key part of a future economy. According to MacIntyre, by the early 1940s, there was a widespread consensus that the then-population of seven million was inadequate: “a figure of 20 million within 15 to 20 years was commonly used” as a necessary goal.

This population growth plan did not have direct financial motivations; they were also concerned with maintaining and expanding the nascent Australian empire. Planners, politicians and reformers were explicitly concerned with the spectre of the hordes of Asia, threatening to engulf the white race. “Australia cannot expect to hold indefinitely this large continent with the small population it now possesses”, said Chifley in 1943. “Populate or perish” was a widespread idea and the key to Australia’s development as a regional force. As the ostensibly left-wing Barnett stated, the “tragic lack of decent dwellings is rapidly leading us along the road to national race suicide”.

Australian capitalists were also scared of the moral effects of bad housing. Not only were slums seen as petri dishes for the growth of criminals, their very existence would drive disenchantment with the capitalist system itself. In 1944 Councils of Social Services NSW (COSSNSW) (the predecessor organisation to the New South Wales section of the Australian Council of Social Services, (ACOSS)) argued that “bad housing fosters the growth of anti-democratic opinion – the frame of mind of the ‘have not’”. The far-left, at that time largely embodied by the Communist Party of Australia, was active in the widespread working class organisations that grew from this disillusionment: unemployed workers’ councils, slum-dwellers’ committees, local trades councils and union branches.

As the Australian economy geared up for massive demographic changes, it was clear that this situation could not last. The gears began to turn during the war as the federal government created the Commonwealth Housing Commission to determine the extent of the housing crisis, and to plan for a way out of it. The private sector had been unable to produce any great number of new dwellings, thanks to the damage of the Great Depression and later the reconfiguration of the economy that was needed to fight World War II. A shortfall of three hundred thousand dwellings was identified – the private market was only providing around forty thousand new dwellings a year prior to 1939 – and in 1945 Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement was signed, arranging for the funding, construction and allocation of vast numbers of new houses.

Indeed, in order to set ourselves on the right path, we have to avoid separating the housing crisis from the general crisis of working class living standards. “Housing is too expensive” is ultimately another way of saying “wages are too low”. The housing crisis is another manifestation of one of the fundamental problems of capitalism – that workers cannot live decent lives on the wages they receive. 

Class war in the 40s and 50s

The lofty goals of the planners crashed with the reality of the post-war situation. In 1945 the federal government planned for half of residential construction to be public housing, but by 1947 the government was revising its estimate downward to a third, and as the decade ended it was demonstrated that only 17% of residential construction was public.

For an example of how the public housing schemes ended up serving capitalists, not workers, we can look to Victoria. There the state government, in assistance with the federal government, built a large amount of public housing with its purpose clear. According to MacIntyre, “substantial tracts of public housing” were built around the Shell Refinery, harvester works and Ford factory in Geelong; in the La Trobe Valley around coal mines and power plants; in the suburbs on Melbourne’s fringe where “large factories were replacing dairy farms, market gardens and orchards”. 

Looking at this case, we can also see that “public housing” is not synonymous with “good housing”. Roads in these developments were left unsealed, schools and hospitals were drastically overcrowded, and transport was poor; these problems would not be fixed until the 1950s.

Resistance to the sluggish social improvements in conditions post-war came quickly, and it was not government reformers that deserve credit for changing them. Neighbourhood committees and local protest groups sprung up to agitate for better conditions in terms of housing, and the most significant class resistance would come from the union movement, which took advantage of low unemployment to press home claims put to the side during the war. In 1945 there were around a thousand industrial disputes, with around two and a half million work days lost to strikes. Workers were fighting back en masse, and succeeding. They were securing serious wage increases, as well as decreases in hours.

In fact, most historians agree that federal and state Labor governments post-war spent an enormous amount of time trying to contain this strike wave; it was one of their primary tasks. Where possible, the government funnelled industrial disputes into courts of arbitration that dragged out cases for years. They leaned on the union officials to wind up industrial action, promising productivity-derived gains in exchange for restraint on wages. Neither were they scared of intervening with force: in 1948, a dispute on the Queensland railways was forcibly ended by the Labor government there, which criminalised support for the strike. In 1949, the federal government sent troops into New South Wales coalfields in order to serve as scabs, against an enormous strike of miners.

Taking post-war housing policy and isolating it from this context obscures the nature of governmental reforms, and also places undue emphasis on the role we should expect governments to play in improving working class living standards. This is an error of historical analysis, but one that is relevant to contemporary politics. When looking back to this period and figuring out how better wages and conditions can be achieved, it’s the strike wave of hundreds of thousands of workers that needs to be emphasised, not the actions of the government trying to cope with it.

What year is it?

It’s true that the government has the capacity to build public housing en masse – but will it, in 2024 or beyond? Looking at the post-war public housing programme, it becomes clear that it was implemented as a result of a few factors, foremost among them the needs of a booming economy. Australian capitalism needed drastically more people; it needed more people to work in the factories, farms, and on the enormous “nation-building” projects, like the Snowy-Hydro scheme. These workers needed to be housed, and the government intervened where the private market failed.

Eighty years later, the Australian economy looks totally different. It is hard to see a boom on the horizon; it is even harder to see any future economic development being driven by massive population growth. In fact, the Australian economy does not bank on the mass importation of workers, but on incredibly restrictive, targeted schemes, allowing only migrants meeting particular skill shortages – say, in aged care or medicine. The refugee intake is relatively low and the Australian border is heavily militarised, preventing the immigration of any real number of “unauthorised” migrants.

Australian economic planners do not see the future economy in such terms, and their general focus is now on arresting the decline in productivity growth. We are a long way from the point where Australia’s most politically influential economists were Keynesians that tried, for instance, to get a goal of full employment into the Bretton Woods Agreement.

Neither is the working class on the level it was in the 1930s, when militancy in countries like France could lead to enormous strikes and factory occupations involving millions of people. Australian unions now not only represent a much smaller percentage of the workforce – in the 40s and 50s around half the workforce was in a union, now it’s something like 12.5% – but in the aftermath of the Accords they are less militant too, and more integrated than ever into the state-led arbitration system. Anti-capitalist sentiment is increasing, but it has yet proven to be able to destabilise the country, and politicians rarely see it as anything more than a possible electoral threat, to be dealt with by left populist gestures.

The UK-based Angry Workers of the World group made this point a few years ago, when dealing with the Corbyn-mania engulfing the British left:

Historically, social democracy developed during phases of economic upturns, based on a relatively strong national industrial production capacity. What we face now is an economic crisis and an internationalised production system. This limits both the scope for material concessions and for national economic policies. Secondly, social democracy primarily became hegemonic in post-revolutionary situations. Social democracy was based on large organisations within the working class and a ruling class that allowed workers’ political representation in order to avoid revolutionary tensions.

A working class way out

The point of re-telling this history – buried under a lot of left nostalgia for social democracy – is not to say that Chandler-Mather is a racist who wants public housing so Australians will breed more and be less prone to slum crime. It’s that the state institutes reforms under particular conditions, on its own terms. It holds off on reforms when it is not required to implement them, preferring other options to put off popular pressure. When it does implement them, it implements them in the interest of capitalism, not the interest of workers. 

We are not saying that the working class should be indifferent to improvements in conditions and wages under capitalism, but that we should fight for them with our own hands. That is the moral of the post-war story: that the gains were not granted from above by the Labor Party, but secured through mass strike actions by the unions. The goal of any successful politician is to ensure the stability and profitability of Australian capitalism. The goal of any successful union movement, on the other hand, is to undercut that system, to fight it tooth and nail, and to move towards getting rid of it.

Indeed, in order to set ourselves on the right path, we have to avoid separating the housing crisis from the general crisis of working class living standards. “Housing is too expensive” is ultimately another way of saying “wages are too low”. The housing crisis is another manifestation of one of the fundamental problems of capitalism – that workers cannot live decent lives on the wages they receive. 

Neither are we in the same boat as the other groups of people hit hard by the increased cost of housing. The working class is the class that is dependent on wage labour in order to live; we aren’t the same as small business owners or the children of the wealthy who may also be struggling to pay the rent. We don’t have any property to fall back on, or inherited wealth.

This class framing points to what is actually needed to fight for better housing for workers – namely, an all-out fight for higher wages, encompassing the public and private sector, going beyond inflation. Instead of relying on politicians to implement some scheme to increase housing stock, we can rely on the strength of our fellow workers – which is most significant at work, at the point of production. Instead of building up one or another political party, we can build up the strength of our unions, and turn them into real fighting bodies.

While it’s certainly true that massive amounts of public housing was built by the government after WWII, Chandler-Mather’s reformism obscures the class conflict at the heart of post-war reconstruction.

When it comes to public housing, we should stand clearly in favour of it, pushing for its drastic expansion. Neither should unions stand absent from this discussion, or be content with submitting resolutions to the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and ALP conferences every now and again. However, the struggle does not end there. Every public housing tenant knows this. However good public housing is, the government bureaucracy is a landlord, and a miserable one at that.

A substantial amount of the time of tenant unions and housing activist groups is spent on compelling the housing bureaucrats to actually do their jobs. Department employees treat tenants with scorn, and oblige the tenants to advocate for their basic needs. Something as simple as the construction of a disability ramp or staircase railing can take months, even years of advocacy. Often, local MPs step in, in order to make representations to the department and force the needed changes to happen.

The department may not be under the direct pressure of the need to make money on the private market, but they still have an incentive to undercut their own tenants and get rid of them whenever they can. There have been a number of cases where the government has let public housing turn to squalor, incentivising tenants to get out and then selling off the public housing on the private market, or turning it over to “non-profit” social housing providers. Governments will inevitably look to cut money wherever they can, and in public housing, that means attacking tenants. Money is still the name of the game, and it takes a movement of workers to fight back.

In response to decades of austerity-minded policies designed to undercut public-owned housing, the tenants of housing commissions under threat have fought back with a number of long-term campaigns. Organised groups like South East Queensland Union of Renters (SEQUR) in Queensland or the Renters and Housing Union Australia (RAHU) in Victoria have managed to secure victories for both private and public tenants using ground-up tactics. NSW housing advocates are currently campaigning for greater legal protections for renters. All of these struggles can only be intensified when they combine with workplace activity, like what occurred during the famous Barcelona rent strike of 1931 – led by the CNT’s construction union.

If workers don’t fight back on class lines, then disaster could follow. It’s not surprising that anti-class sentiment like racism can grow in the absence of active class struggle. The mainline understanding of housing is essentially that of supply and demand, with the solution coming through increased supply: whether that means a deregulated private sector building dwellings en masse, or a state body doing the same thing. 

The flipside to this, though, is the implied alternate solution – decreasing demand, namely through restricting migration. This has long been advocated for by the political right but it has caught on as a popular belief among everyday people. It’s a belief that has the potential to turn dangerous. In Ireland, a similar housing crisis has fed into a rising, violent anti-immigrant movement.

The precise means by which the ruling class applies band-aids to the problem is less important than the role the working class might play in forcing them to do so. After all, keeping all things equal, there is no fundamental difference between the costs of housing being borne by the private capitalist or the public capitalist, the state – even though workers in public housing justifiably hold on to what they have now, knowing that the alternative of privatised housing is worse. Rather than looking to politicians to solve our problems, we need only to look at our fellow workers. By taking matters into our own hands, we not only secure better living standards in the here-and-now, we also develop the struggle that might abolish capitalism altogether.

This is the only serious perspective on the housing crisis: that it can only be solved by the abolition of private property, which would allow for humanity’s immense productive capacity to be used for human needs. It is these needs that we need to build society around, not the needs of property developers, government bureaucrats, bosses and landlords. That will take a struggle that will go beyond the one terrifying Australian capitalists in the 1930s, but it’s one that has never been so necessary.