In Madrid, they're clearing the camp, not the housing crisis

According to Le Monde, the encampment set up in Madrid at the end of September to demand the right to housing was dismantled in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday. It had held out for several weeks. The paper does not specify, in the summary available to us, who gave the order, how the operation unfolded, or how many people were on site. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start with what is certain: people pitched tents to say that they can no longer afford a home. And it was at night that they were moved on. You do not dismantle, at the hour of the evening news, what you want to see vanish quietly.

Our angle is simple. A housing camp is a protest that sleeps on the spot, as close as possible to what it denounces. It unsettles because it lasts. A march files past and goes home. A tent stays put and reminds everyone, every morning, that a roof has become a luxury.

Under capitalism, housing is a commodity that yields a rent to its owner. When rents climb, money flows, month after month, from the pockets of tenants into those of property holders. Evictions, empty flats beside people sleeping rough, speculation: all of it expresses the same conflict between the use value of a home, where one lives, and its asset value, where capital is parked. In this conflict, the state is not a referee in a white coat. Police, courts and planning rules are institutions shaped by property relations, and they protect those relations most of the time. The state also enjoys a relative autonomy, and it can give way under pressure. But its limits are set by the need to let capital keep accumulating. Dismantling a camp is a reminder of where the line is drawn.

And who pays the difference? Households, and women first. When rent swallows half the wage, cuts have to come elsewhere: on the shopping, on heating, on healthcare. This reproductive work, cooking, caring, minding children, keeping the home running, does not disappear when budgets tighten. It shifts onto households, and above all onto the women who already do the double day. Rent that rises is also paid in lost hours of sleep.

A camp can be cleared in a night. The monthly bill of those who slept there cannot be cleared that way, nor that of those who only came by to visit them. What the occupants become, we do not yet know, and that is the first question the authorities will have to answer.

The digger has finished its job. The problem, meanwhile, remains furnished: four walls that are too expensive, and tenants counting every end of the month. (our translation)