Rent Prices and the Parasite Class
The state of housing in the US is an unmitigated disaster. The government does not continuously track the total number of people living without homes, but a study in 2024 found 771,480 people sleeping outdoors or in shelters in just a single night. The total unhoused population is likely several million. Racial oppression is reflected in the crisis as well. According to the government’s own research, “[Black people] made up just 12 percent of the total U.S. population and 21 percent of the U.S. population living in poverty but were 32 percent of all people experiencing homelessness”.
Of those who do have homes, 19.5 million people are housing insecure. Adding insult to injury, cities across the country have conducted sweeps of thousands of homeless encampments, destroying the meager dwellings of countless unhoused persons. The policy is so draconian that the 9th Circuit had to issue a ruling to stop municipalities from destroying people’s personal property. This tremendous human tragedy is underscored by one outrageously cruel statistic; across the country the number of vacant homes is over 15 million. We have homes for everyone. None of this needs to be happening.
In order to understand this bitter state of affairs, we must have a clear analysis of the economic underpinnings of this systematized suffering, and leverage that analysis to fight back.
The Parasite Class
Landlords are parasites of surplus value. They live off the labor of the proletariat, contributing even less to society than industrial capitalists.
This becomes clear when we look at how money circulates within the real estate industry. It begins with land, which is a natural resource, a gift to all humanity. Human labor power develops land into housing through construction. Real estate capitalists buy housing and sometimes the land on which it’s built. Separately, workers produce commodities and receive a portion of the surplus value they create – the rest being taken by industrial capitalists. This value enters the real estate market when workers pay a portion of their share of surplus value to a landlord in order to be allowed to live and produce more commodities.
At no stage in this process do landlords contribute to production. Their only role is to remove value from the economy. Even the industrial capitalist takes the surplus value exploited from workers and reinvests it into new means of production, resulting in more commodities and the expansion of the total productive forces of society. The landlord, if they invest at all, only purchases already-produced housing property, taking it off the market for the purpose of stealing more of the total surplus value from workers. Therefore, landlords are a net drain on society and are factually a parasitical class.
Landlordism is Perpetuated Through Theft and Violence
“The proletariat [was] created by… the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this “free” proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the [new industries] as fast as it was thrown upon the world.… They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers.
In England this legislation began under Henry VII.
Henry VIII. 1530: ‘Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s licence. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or to where they have lived the last three years and to “put themselves to labour.” – Marx, ‘Capital vol 1’, chapter 28 (emphasis mine)
Landlords are first and foremost perpetrators of violence. They remove housing from the public inventory, demand that workers pay to be allowed to live in housing that the landlords do not need or use, and then use the police to throw people out of their homes by force when they can’t pay.
Those who cannot continue paying rent, or who cannot afford to get an apartment in the first place, are forced into homelessness. Once forced to live on the streets, they are hounded constantly, again by the police, and any attempt they make to lessen the misery of living exposed to the elements is doggedly thwarted by the state.
Laws against “vagrancy”, which came into being to force the unpropertied masses into the proletariat, are continually expanded. This expansion is pushed in large part by landlords themselves, who are not content with abusing only those forced to live under their roofs.
Because landlords do not produce a commodity, the investment initially made in buying real estate is quickly paid back in rent. Afterwards, the rent – which is not reduced once buying costs are recouped – is over and above the cost of maintenance. The landlord has a constant flow of profit.
Even the vicissitudes of the market are no great threat to the landlord. Holding apartments in vacancy prevents rents from ever falling to the value of their labor costs. By restricting housing supply, tenants are forced to bid on homes and rents rise to the upper end of affordability. Because landlords’ expenses are almost always covered, they don’t lose money by taking a certain quantity of housing off the market. Rather than providing people with homes, landlords are the leading cause of homelessness.
Merger of Landlords and Finance Capitalists
Why does the parasite class hold so much control over society? This is due partly because the right to own and sell property is foundational to capitalism, and so any reform of housing would curtail the rights of all capitalists.
But there has also been an increase in the financialization of real estate. Capital, always in need of new markets to invest, has engulfed and dominated the real estate industry. Seven of the ten largest real estate private equity firms (including Blackstone, The Carlyle Group, and KKR) are listed as part of the ‘financials’ sector of the S&P 500 or other stock market indices. This is emblematic of the financialization of real estate.
Even if we only look at the ‘Real Estate Investment Trusts’ sector, the industry still represents 2% of the S&P 500 – that is a market cap of 122 billion dollars (taking the December 2025 total market cap of 6.1 trillion).
The primary concern of investors is the turnover of capital. That is, to invest money in a commodity and then sell it as quickly as feasible for more money than was initially invested. When the commodities are electronics or automobiles, this results in a glut of consumer goods. But when the commodity is real estate – homes – the logic of capitalism creates chaos and devastation, as turnover means the expulsion of great masses of human beings:
“Since city and state lawmakers started gutting the rent laws in 1993, the city has lost over 152,000 regulated apartments [as of 2018] because landlords have pushed the rent too high. At least 130,000 more have disappeared because of co-op and condo conversions, expiring tax breaks and other factors. And while government officials say the losses have slowed, even regulated apartments are becoming increasingly unaffordable…
After buying a building, they try to get tenants in regulated apartments to leave, often offering buyouts or harassing them with poor services or eviction suits. Once an apartment is empty, they tack on allowed vacancy increases. They often also perform renovations, enabling them to raise the rent even further while annoying the remaining neighbors, sometimes to the point of prompting them to leave.” - NY Times (emphasis mine).
As we’ve discussed, control over capital flows gives investors the ability to disrupt the economy. Combined with lobbying, any elected official who rejects the dictates of capital is immediately stymied. This is what has supercharged the dominance of the real estate industry over society.
Rent control and Legislation
Because we live under a dictatorship of capital, there is no way to curb the predations of landlords through legislation. This is why democratic socialists, who in reality are liberal reformists seeking to obscure the contradiction between labor and capital, never make proposals which would infringe on the parasite class’s plunder (i.e. property ‘rights’). They do not propose state ownership of some or all of society’s stock of housing. Instead they propose non-solutions like rent control, rent stabilization, or housing vouchers.
This doesn’t fix the problem of already high rents or housing shortages. In fact, it creates new opportunities for investment and exploitation. From the previously cited article:
“Almost organically, a similar class of landlords rose up, always looking for buildings with regulated apartments… Some got mortgages based not on a building’s current rent roll but on its potential earnings. Some flipped buildings quickly, emptying and renovating as many regulated apartments as possible before selling to the next company, remaking neighborhoods from the inside out.
One fairly recent example: In June 2013, BCB Property Management bought 1059 Union Street, in the fast-gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, for $8.2 million. Twenty-eight of the 32 apartments were rent-stabilized, tax bills show.
In January 2015, BCB sold the building for $13.2 million to Sugar Hill Capital Partners, which 14 months later sold it to Sterling Equities for $17.9 million. Only 15 stabilized apartments remained.” (Emphasis mine).
Rent control and stabilization laws, in whatever meager form they currently exist, provide more wealth for landlords than they do protection for tenants.
Nevertheless, capitalists see government regulation of the free market (their freedom to buy and sell private property) as offensive on its face. Therefore, even weak reforms spur parasite rebellions in the form of mass vacancies. Landlords take homes off the market and refuse to rent them. How do they justify this crime against the public welfare? Under the false pretense that the cost of renovation or maintenance exceeds the price of rent controlled units.
As discussed above, this is untrue. But if it were, progressives and democratic socialists could propose (at a minimum) that vacant units be purchased by the state, which would immediately resolve this problem for all sides. Liberals refuse to do so because they know it would expose the contradiction between capital and the working class.
Obstacles Faced by Activists
Understanding the economic and political forces driving the housing crisis, we must examine direct action by the masses. Many activists propose, and some have attempted, rent strikes. What is the tactical purpose of a rent strike and what is its efficacy?
As seen above, our opponent is not the individual landlord, but capital itself which seeks to use housing to extract further surplus value.
Capitalists obtain surplus value by exchanging money for commodities which are in turn exchanged for more money than originally invested. Usually, the commodities purchased are means of production and labor power, which are combined to produce a saleable product. When workers go on strike, they halt the application of the labor commodity to the means of production, which halts the turnover of capital altogether.
In real estate, the commodities purchased by the capitalists are, generally, land or building structures and construction labor. The resulting process can entail anything from renovating an apartment to demolishing a building and constructing an entirely new one. However, capital can’t apply the labor commodity (construction work) to the real estate commodity (land or buildings) while a tenant lives on the property. Paradoxically, the landlord can lose potential profits by renting their property. Therefore, if the landlord-capitalist is competent, they can use evictions to facilitate the turnover of capital.
Tactically, a labor strike is an offensive measure against the capitalist. A rent strike, on the other hand, is defensive. The latter provides reprieve to tenants from rent extraction, but if it results in the eviction of tenants, it creates the potential for a faster turnover of capital and thus greater profits.
How Do We Solve the Problem?
When workers go on strike, we must expand our demands to include the reduction of rents and freezes on evictions. We must also be willing to go on strike in retaliation for evictions in order to create a more viable defense. This will enable rent strikes to provide relief for exploited tenant-workers without being a boon to investors.
As we educate workers about the need for a general strike, we must explain to them the rising cost of housing is part of an attack by the collective capitalist class against the collective working class. Our response then must also be collective.
As we struggle for revolutionary democratic control, we must also bring the fight for housing justice into the broader proletarian struggle. We must explain that the parasitical landlord class is but a substrata of the capitalist class. Therefore, a blow against capitalists anywhere is a blow against capitalists everywhere.
“Houses are for living in, not for speculation.” – Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China
Unlike socialist China, the workers in our country have not yet replaced the dictatorship of capital with the democratic will of the working class, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without control over the economy and the state, we cannot establish full public housing or fix rent prices to a negligible percent of income. As such, above all our duty is to work for revolutionary democratic control by the working class, to construct socialism here and now.