Goats, Private Property, Karl Marx, and The American Dream

The other day I was visiting my father, step-mother, and half brother, who live in a rural town in central Maryland. The house they live in is a moderately-sized single family home with a large grassy yard; seemingly quintessential “American Dream” material. However, one only has to walk into the back yard to depart radically from that ideological fantasy scape. This is because, as you round the corner, you're confronted with a small herd of sheep and goats.

I've always found it interesting that the culturally encouraged “ideal life” for a member of the American middle and lower class is to own a house on a small slice of land. Intuitively, this seems to go against the logic of the capitalist system, as interpreted by Karl Marx. Marx put forth the idea that society is divided between two classes: the class that owns (as private property) the means of production (e.g. factories, tools, real estate, etc.), and the class that survives by selling its labor-power to the owners (Wal-Mart clerks, factory workers, and high-paid corporate lawyers would all fall into this category). It would follow from this that it is in the interest of the owning class (bourgeoisie) to discourage the working class (proletariat) from owning any property that has the potential to create value. It would seem that, if the capitalist owns the worker's dwelling, the rent value extracted helps to expand the owner's total accumulated capital; if the worker owns his own dwelling, however, the rent value of the home belongs to him. By owning property that creates value, the worker would need to work less to maintain him or herself, reducing the coercive power that the capitalist can exert over him. A striker who doesn't need to worry about rent or eviction can last longer on the picket lines than a striker who rents.

The answer to this seeming irrationality, I believe, can be found in several factors. First of all, it has been noted that, in terms of making a profit, rental housing is a poor and risky investment. Renters know that they don't own their homes, and so they care very little about maintaining the property beyond what they need to live comfortably in the short term. This can lead to the infrastructure of a house gradually breaking down, causing the value of the property to decline and often leading to eventual expensive remodeling or demolition. Furthermore, even with a well-maintained dwelling, the average return on a house's value (the current credit-bubble induced housing price bubble excepted) is about 0.2% per year. The combination of these factors makes renting in general (excepting certain niche markets) a poor use of capital.

The capitalist system has found a way to circumvents this issue through the use of mortgages, a strategy which brilliantly kills a whole flock of birds with one stone. First of all, it shifts the responsibility for the upkeep of the property onto the debtor, and gives the debtor motivation to invest labor in it on the premise that s/he owns it. In reality, though, it takes the debtor thirty years to actually own the house, and, during that period, the capitalist is guaranteed a much higher rate of return with none of the headaches of being a landlord. Furthermore, this theoretical “home ownership” creates the illusion that the worker is actually the owner of property, and is thus psychologically (and is thus led to believe, materially) invested in the capitalist system of property rights (which, in actuality, allows the surplus value generated by his/her wage labor to be appropriated by capitalists). By following this path, the capitalist accrues all of the political benefits of giving the working-class control over property without having actually done so.

With the nature of the house explained, lets now bring the yard part of the “American Dream” into focus. At first glance, it seems like a trivial afterthought to the house, which contains the potential for $1000+ per month in rent-value. However, the way the lawn is viewed and treated by American homeowners is actually quite telling. In the past, land has always been a source of wealth and subsistence. In premodern Europe, peasants would often support a family off of the produce of an acre (a much smaller area than many suburban yards). Immigrants came to America, lured by the promises of free land in the empty West, and this old idea of land equaling prosperity has been distorted by capitalist ideology to create the lawn. The distortion occurred thusly: originally, land produced value, it was an investment. Therefore, owning land was evidence of prosperity because it was a means of production. Capitalist ideology appropriated the cultural significance of land, and re-packaged it as a consumable good, devoid of value generating capacity. Instead of being a source of wealth, land in the form of lawns have become resource sinks for “homeowners.” They expend resources fertilizing it, and then expend more resources on equipment and gasoline to cut it down, meaning they have to work x-more hours per year to maintain their “property”. This is justified because it supposedly increases the value of the property (while it actually increase the price while reducing the value), which is the justification for coercive rules enacted by homeowner associations to codify this ideology into laws (of sorts) in many communities.

Furthermore, what kinds of animals are acceptable to have running around on a suburban lawn? The simple answer is, pets. By very definition, a pet is an animal kept for sentimental, not economic reasons. The difference between having two dogs and two sheep in your yard is simple: sheep produce income while dogs consume income. That a middle class person would get a lot of strange looks for the sheep, but not a second glance at the dogs, is evidence that generating value independent of wage labor is the anathema of the "American Dream" ideology. All of this is ample evidence that a house, which was, incidentally, the cornerstone of Bush's "Ownership Society" initiative, is a very different kind of property than capitalist property. What capitalist would be willing to pay more for a piece of property after its value-producing capacity has been reduced?

In essence, the house of the working and middle class person is not an investment; it is a culturally sanctioned consumptive activity that is given the illusion of value-generation to convince working-class people to feel invested in capitalist ideology. Owning a home is a way in which working people are encouraged to work more hours so that capitalists can more efficiently extract surplus value from their labor, both directly and in the form of mortgages, lawn care, and many other small things that quickly add up. With all of this in mind, I would assert that my father's family grazing meat-goats and sheep (along with planting a garden) in their back yard is something of a revolutionary act. It has turned a source of consumption in their lives into a source of real value that, even if only marginally, decreases their reliance on selling wage-labor to survive and thrive. Capitalism doesn't only require the exploitation of workers to thrive; it also requires the diversion of their independent creative powers into consumption rather than personal investment. While small, this act is a window into the nature of the system, and one countless small nudges that are hopefully leading us towards a better future.