Housing: Europe's tenants set a date for 20 November

According to Mediapart, protests against the housing crisis are multiplying across Europe. In Paris, representatives of tenants' associations from seven countries met and decided to organise a pan-European day of mobilisation on 20 November. The details of which countries, which cities and which common demands is not in the summary available to us: we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Start with the kitchen table. Rent is the first bill to fall due, ahead of food, heating, school supplies. When it climbs, someone cuts back elsewhere. And that someone, in many households, is often a woman juggling the budget, skipping a meal, forgoing a treatment, doing herself what can no longer be paid for.

This is where the housing question meets what Marxist feminists call social reproduction: all that work, underpaid or not paid at all, which produces people rather than commodities. Cooking, caring, raising children, looking after the elderly. This work requires a stable roof. When cuts to health, care and housing pile up, they do not eliminate that burden: they push it back onto households.

On the other side, housing is also an asset. In the Marxist reading, rising rents transfer wealth from tenants to landlords. The needs of those who live in a home come into conflict with its value as an investment. We see it in evictions, in speculation, in empty flats a stone's throw from the homeless, in the financialisation of bricks and mortar. Marx already observed, in Capital, landlords who judge any pigsty good enough for their worker but haggle over the rent with the poorest. The scenery has changed; the logic, less so.

We readily speak of "tensions in the rental market", as if the market had nerves. We see instead a class struggle in plain clothes: landlords defending a yield, tenants defending a place to call home. Asking "who pays?" is often enough to clear up the ambiguity of the word "crisis".

That seven countries are coordinating is no small matter. Rents are set locally, but the capital that buys, resells and optimises moves without borders. Responding in disorder means playing on their turf. A European day is the start of a response on their scale, and proof that tenants in Paris, elsewhere and yet elsewhere again recognise themselves in the same bill.

What the 20 November day will produce remains to be seen: how many people, what demands, what follow-up. Will unions and collectives of carers, teachers and care workers join the tenants? Mediapart's report does not yet say. But rent, for its part, will not take a holiday before then.