Berlin Housing Referendum

Expropriate Real Estate Corporations Without Compensation
– But Only Socialist Revolution Can Provide Housing for All

The following article is translated from a September 2021 Internationalistische Gruppe leaflet.

Berlin 2021: Skyrocketing rent, students can’t find housing, people forced out of the city because they can’t afford to live here. Some 8,000-10,000 homeless living on the street, while 100,000-plus apartments stand empty. The capital and many other cities around Germany are in the throes of a real housing crisis. Behind it are the real estate corporations that are making a killing from speculation. The tenants movement has repeatedly brought tens of thousands into the streets to defend rent control, and now for the initiative for “expropriation of Deutsche Wohnen & Co.,” which owns 114,000 apartments in Berlin, along with Vonovia (43,000), Akelius and other real estate sharks that together control 240,000 of the city’s 1.5 million housing units.

In the Berlin referendum on September 26, voting “yes” in favor of the expropriation of corporations that own more than 3,000 housing units will be a protest statement against these parasites. It will also serve to test Article 15 of the Constitution, which allows for “socializing,” or transferring to public ownership of “land, natural resources, and means of production.” Remarkably, this is first such attempt in the history of the Federal Republic. But the referendum is not on a specific law, so even if it passes, it would depend on the bourgeois Greens and/or the reformist Social Democrats (SPD) and Left Party to implement it (or, more likely, water it down). And, of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that the capitalist courts won’t arbitrarily reshuffle federalist “principles” to invalidate the results of the referendum.

The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in April cancelling the Berlin rent cap law was already an attack on all working people and tenants in Berlin. As a result, tenants have been hit with increased monthly rents of hundreds of euros, and in some cases now owe back rent amounting to thousands of euros. According to the high court, the 2020 Berlin rent cap was rendered null and void by the national “rent control” law of 2015. This law permits individuals in selected urban areas to challenge rent increases of 10% above the average increases in rent there. This feeble law looks very much like a preemptive strike to block any more effective rent control measures – which is no doubt why the Christian Democrat (CDU) and SPD government parties supported it.

This is not the first such attack by the Constitutional Court on Berliners. In October 2006, it ruled that the city could not receive federal subsidies until it had further slashed educational and cultural spending and sold off public housing. The city government of the SPD and PDS (forerunner to the Left Party) hastened to comply. Soon after its creation in 1951, the court outlawed the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and reaffirmed repressive laws against homosexuals. It later overturned the 1992 abortion rights law, upholding the ban on abortion of §218 of the criminal code (while accepting that it is in the discretion of parliament not to punish abortion in the first trimester). And it has given a green light to German imperialism’s military adventures abroad

In short, the Constitutional Court is not a neutral arbiter of “justice” but the defender of capital and enforcer of capitalist rule. Hence to raise the slogan “No confidence in the Federal Constitutional Court,” as the Revolutionäre Internationalistische Organisation (R.I.O.) does in a call for an April 21 public meeting is to claim that this central organ of the German bourgeois state is merely unreliable, rather than a direct representative of the class enemy.

Rent control has existed in various forms, at different times and places in Germany and elsewhere as an aspect of the capitalist welfare state. It is a minimal reform that can benefit the working class analogous to the minimum wage. Nothing more and nothing less. It is perfectly legitimate to fight for rent control, to defend and extend it, but without pretending it is any kind of solution to the housing crisis – which it isn’t. The SPD/Green/Left government had no plan B for after the Constitutional Court decision knocking down the rent cap, and did not contest its verdict.

This exposed the Left Party’s role in prettifying the red-red-green coalition, as the rent cap was its justification for participating in this racist, repressive capitalist government. To call for a national campaign for a new rent cap law, and to denounce solely the CDU as the party of the real estate corporations, as the Left Party is now doing, is to cover up the dirty role of the SPD and the Left Party itself in previously privatizing municipal housing, and in carrying out tenant evictions and evictions of squatters now as part of the city-state government.

So what is to be done now in the face of the rent increases and demands for payment of back rent? The government has promised financial assistance to those unable to pay the increased rents. There is however, no information as to how this assistance is to be provided. Sozialistische Alternative (SAV) conjures up the fantasy world of a “left government” that would encourage tenants to “refuse to pay the back rent they underpaid” and that would “pledge to finance back payments and legal costs from public funds” (www.sozialismus.info, 21 April). Similar sentiments from the Sozialistische Organisation Solidarität (SOL), which envisions a truly “left government” that would guarantee that it would “assume the risk for legal penalties or back payments” (Solidarität, 18 April). Don't bet on it. Of course, the SAV and SOL both call for voting for the Left Party, as always.

Of the so-called “far left” groups, only ArbeiterInnenmacht actually calls for a rent strike. But while envisioning a mass tenants movement “based on the mass organizations of the workers movement,” it underscores that this would be to “pressure the incoming state government.” Thus it calls to “demand that the Left Party make socialization a condition for negotiating a new coalition,” along with pressuring the “left” wings of the SPD and the bourgeois Greens (Neue Internationale, September 2021). So instead of opposing this class-collaborationist coalition on principle, ArbeiterInnenmacht wants a tenant-friendly popular front. And while saying “Expropriation? Sure! Compensation? No Thanks!” in the fine print it calls to “keep compensation as low as possible.”

For its part, in the aftermath of the Federal Constitutional Court decision overturning Berlin’s rent cap law, R.I.O. called for work stoppages against rent increases, but then in the next breath calls on the government to pay tenants who have had to pay back rent, and to “massively tax” companies that demand repayments (Klasse gegen Klasse, 16 April). But since there is no rent cap, this would be passed on in the form of new rent increases. On the referendum, R.I.O. focuses on the call for expropriating real estate companies without compensation. Revolutionaries, of course, oppose paying even one euro to these parasites. Yet the constitutional clause on which this referendum is based mandates compensation.

In its propaganda, R.I.O. calls on the DGB to “win the right to housing through strikes” (Klasse gegen Klasse, 2 September). As if it were so easy. In another piece it calls for “no profits from rent” and for a “massive program of public housing construction, paid for by property taxes and taxing the profits of the large real estate corporations” (Klasse gegen Klasse, 8 September). This is the usual “tax the rich” rhetoric common to all reformists and bourgeois “progressives.” And since the referendum for a municipal takeover of about one-seventh of Berlin’s housing would have to be implemented by the city/state government, R.I.O.’s call, although with slightly more militant language, is like those of the SAV, SOL and ArbeiterInnentmacht, amounts to a pressure tactic on the popular front.

Municipalization would be a supportable minimum reform, but hardly a first step towards “socialism.” It would simply return to state control various holdings sold off after 2006. It could perhaps put the brakes on runaway rent increases for some tenants. But it would not solve the need for new housing. Far from building public housing, the “red-red-green” Senate is now buying back, at inflated prices, run-down housing that it had previously sold to Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia. Some in referendum movement envisage a scheme in which representatives of the tenants and workers would be involved in administering municipalized housing. But when implemented by a capitalist government, these schemes would be at best tokenistic and, like trade-union bureaucrats sitting on company supervisory boards, would help chain the working class to the bosses.

With millions of people who have been hit by the coronavirus and the resulting lockdowns (e.g., small businesses, freelancers, workers on reduced work schemes) unable to pay rent, genuine revolutionaries defend rent strikes and resistance against evictions. Unoccupied apartments, which in Berlin are so plentiful that they could provide housing for all the homeless, should be occupied with the backing of labor, so that no one should be thrown on the street during this pandemic. But instead, the red-red-green coalition government has taken the opportunity to liquidate various occupied buildings/centers (Liebig 34 last fall, Meuterei this year) as well as dispersing homeless encampments that are getting in the way of the real estate sharks. Mobilizing the workers movement against such attacks is essential.

In addition to the Berlin Tenants Union, a number of important unions are supporting the “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen” referendum, including the GEW (education), Ver.di (services), IG Metall (auto) and IG Bau (construction). Their power must be harnessed to turn even minimal reforms into reality, particularly as the SPD and Greens, while not opposing the referendum outright, have no appetite for “socialization” of any kind. But the various ostensibly revolutionary groups in and around the Left Party are mainly engaged in pressure politics on the capitalist government, while blowing “pink soap bubbles” with their various schemes to resolve the housing crisis under capitalism. This is just municipal reformism, when what’s required is revolutionary class struggle.

Written almost a century and a half ago, Friedrich Engels’ pamphlet on The Housing Question (1873) was a polemic against the petty-bourgeois socialists of his day, notably Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with his push for home ownership by the workers. According to the Proudhonist, says Engels, “capital invested in houses shall produce no interest,” just as today R.I.O. today calls for “no profits from rent.” Engels goes on:

“But one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real ‘housing shortage,’ given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. Immediately upon the proletariat conquering political power such a measure dictated in the public interests will be just as easy to carry out as other expropriations and billetings are by the existing state.”

Engels’ conclusion: “As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself.”

In the propaganda of the opportunist left over the housing question in Berlin, you will look in vain for calls for socialist revolution. To achieve “affordable housing,” at most they call for “socialization,” “nationalization under democratic control,” “socialist measures,” “expropriation without compensation” or even an occasional mention of “socialism,” but all without bringing down the capitalist state. Instead, they all seek to exert pressure on that state to resolve the crisis. Ultimately, resolution of the housing question can only come in the framework of a collectivized, planned economy. And as the influx of Swedish and U.S. capital into the Berlin housing market underlines, rooting out the parasites means international socialist revolution. ■