Landlords and tenants: A class-theoretical approach to the relations of social reproduction and potential new research directions in housing studies

Current understandings of landlords and tenants are primarily based on individual attributes each group possesses, or artificial binary divisions with the social relations of these groups and their relationship to social reproduction obfuscated. I will argue that, much in the same way that a constitutive antagonism structures social relations with respect to control over the means of production, there is a constitutive antagonism that drives conflict over control over the means of reproduction (most notably housing), and that by understanding this antagonism, we can better understand the political economy of housing and social reproduction. In the relational Marxian sense, landlords, tenants and homeowners are housing classes. A relational framework built on this basis different normative questions and solutions moving past policy debates on which type of landlord should be encouraged to understanding questions of how landlord and tenant classes are formed and structured.