Mangers and Warm Banks
An argument for the abolition of the home and the redistribution of warmth.
When trying to imagine a society where people live in comfort and security it may seem intuitive to start with the home. The condition, security, warmth, privacy and affordability of the place someone lives is at the heart of what determines quality of life, but these things need not be limited to the private household. And an obsession with the bourgeois notion of the home is more the cause of the housing and cost of living crises as it is a solution to these problems. Social housing, state subsidy, interventions into the energy market; whilst laudable and effective these measures hold us to a particular idea of what the home is and what it is for. The walls of the private home should not be the threshold of justice; and I think there is hope to be found in a political imaginary that looks beyond the private household. The imagination of the household in much discourse today is reproduces something like Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of the bourgeois interior of the nineteenth century: a fortification, but also a trap.
Until the current cost of living crisis a great many people have been able to take for granted a basic level of comfort in the home. As energy prices have increased many more people have realised the material cost of being warm. Watching smart meters tick ever upwards while the temperature remains stubbornly low any latent faith in the security of the home has been shaken for all but the most wealthy and blasé. But the bourgeois belief that the home can provide safety has always belied the experience of those who have never been able to find such trust in their living circumstances. In the winter of 2019-20 8,500 people are thought to have died because of cold homes [source]. The lethality of winter is not new. But these figures seem set to rise, even with current levels of government support it is estimated that energy prices this winter will be 64% higher than last year [source].
There is a crisis of the interior, but in seeking a solution to this crisis we should not limit our response to the private home. The private household is not a panacea for all social ills. On the left and the right the provision of housing is often positioned at the centre of policies which promise improvements to quality of life. It is self evident that life requires shelter, warmth, peace, places to socialise and enjoy leisure, and so on. It is not the case though that these can only be provided by a private home, or that all of these things need to be assembled in a single location. Furthermore, to believe that everyone having a home could solve the ills of society is to ignore the violence, inequality, and deprivation that has always existed inside the home.
The government has been unwilling to take any further action to support households and with successive governments having eroded the welfare state it has been left to the voluntary sector and underfunded local government to step into the void as they have done previously with food provision via food banks. Across the country things called warm places and warm banks are opening up to ensure that those who cannot heat their homes can find somewhere to spend time and not freeze. Like nutrition, warmth is now a privilege afforded to those who can afford it. The warm bank marks another social nadir that feels like the grimmest imaginable reality in a country which continually surprises with its seemingly voluntary descent towards the status of failed state.
But in the warm bank we might also find a hint towards a different way to overcome the housing crisis and the cost of living crisis. The ideological commitment to the private household as a key site of social reproduction means that in many countries it is the home which has been the locus of social justice. This has lead also to the political neglect and abandonment of spaces which might offer shelter, care, and nourishment outside of the home. The kinds of spaces that Edwina Attlee has described as Strayed Homes. Today the communal is a provision of last resort; we should not simply accept this spatial logic. Rebecca May Johnson writing about canteens describes the provision of “the space and time in which to unfold”, and in such simple generosity there is a route to a different kind of living together. There is, I think, another kind of living, one where shelter, care, privacy, warmth, comfort and nutrition do not find their realisation solely in the private household, but are made available at the point and location of need. A domestic commons.
‘Home’ need not be an exclusively private domain. The contemporary imaginary of the ‘home owning democracy’ presumes that everyone ought to aspire towards owning property, as if it were the fact of ownership that provided shelter, rather than the security of occupation that results from it. The idea of the private home is not as unchanging and fundamental to life as it may appear. This is well documented by Edwina Attlee’s history of post-war ‘Strayed homes’ spaces of living that spill out of the boundaries of property and into the public sphere. Cafes, laundrettes, trains, and other such spaces. Attlee writes “In these instances home is formed by practice rather than possession”. What would a politics look like which took the same view? The ideal notion that the home is a space where a ‘hard working family’ can find all that they need is a construction of the twentieth century. The model of domestic bliss reproduces the 19th century ideal of the bourgeois home, but now nobody is being paid to do the domestic labour.
Before the widespread introduction of central heating which became commonplace only really in the 1970s, the social life of the home was markedly different. The kinds of strayed homes that Attlee describes provided real opportunities for communal life. In a house heated by one coal fire, where it will have been remarkably hard to escape one’s family in the winter, the warm places that existed in the public sphere were crucial for all aspects of culture, politics, love, and leisure. Writing about contemporary accounts of the post-war café Attlee writes: “cafés are demonstrative of what is lacking in home-spaces, as well as their value to those who are seeking home and those who just don’t want to go home yet.” Today the private household is all, if you cannot heat yourself and feed yourself within the privacy of your home then you are treated as abject and pitiful, deserving of only the most meagre of charitable provisions. But the notion that the home is the ultimate sanctuary is a bourgeois lie, and one that does not serve life, but property.
In Britain the obsessive faith in the commodity value of the home has meant that all and any post-war efforts to de-commoditise living space have been gradually disestablished. The market must be free to bleed dry the pockets of those who seek the most basic of human needs. The final death knells came with the housing reforms of the Thatcher government and the expansion of both private ownership and rentier capitalism in the country. This, and the Right to Buy policy which dispossessed the public of their collective reservoir of shelter, have made the private household so vital to the national economy that governments makes policies to maintain the growth in property prices even as they acknowledge the housing crisis. All of this amounts to a kind of con trick, a politics of the bourgeois home and the family that favours capital through the maintenance of a permanent state of crisis. The widespread domestic chill in Britain constitutes an existential crisis, what is a home if it cannot keep you warm, how much less does it mean to be at home if you know you will be able to see your breath in your kitchen in the morning.
The idea of the home as commodity is deeply entwined with notions of family life. At the end of her book Abolish The Family [Link], Sophie Lewis reflects that “so engrained is the logic of the private household” that no question was raised that home was the safest place to be in during the pandemic. But as Lewis points out the house forms the spatial limits for the family’s privatisation of care; what Lewis calls “a process of enclosure”. Lewis here is making an expressly spatial account of the family as a form of enclosure. Of separating off obligations of care as the responsibility of the often invoked family, or as it is so often termed in political discourse, the ‘hard-working family’. This narrative fuels the justifications that are made for social policy where the state devolves all responsibility to the imaginary ideal family unit. The privatisation of care means that the safety of a household is attributed to love, not work; and when people inside or outside of a family need to seek support from elsewhere it appears as a shameful failure to fulfil normative expectations. The bourgeois notion of the home is not a location for the realisation of justice, it is a prop for a system which relies on inequality.
There have been numerous experiments in disentangling the relationship between the private household and care and shelter. For instance those undertaken in the early years of Soviet Russia. Narkomfin house, Ginzburg’s design for post-revolutionary living in Moscow, completed in 1930. The building collectivised cooking and social space with canteens and social space shared between residents in order to free them from gendered divisions of domestic labour. An unfortunately failed attempt to realise a utopian ideal like that set out by Alexander Kollantai in her 1920 essay Communism and The Family:
Women’s work is becoming less useful to the community as a whole. It is becoming unproductive. The individual household is dying. It is giving way in our society to collective housekeeping. Instead of the working woman cleaning her flat, the communist society can arrange for men and women whose job it is to go round in the morning cleaning rooms. The wives of the rich have long since been freed from these irritating and tiring domestic duties. Why should working woman continue to be burdened with them? (Link)
Kollantai hoped for a future where the collectivisation of the essential tasks of domestic care would ensure that such work would no longer be gendered and would not be done without pay. Affording all households the freedoms that had previously only been accessible to the very wealthy.
Rebecca May Johnson’s I Dream of Canteens identifies the echoes of a more equitable and collective form of care and shelter in war time British Restaurants and their contemporary echoes in places like the Ikea Canteen. A category of provision which Johnson describes like this: “A seat, a table, a glass of water, a plate of food with the calorie density to sustain a life for a good while; the space and the time in which to unfold” (Link). The idea being that through spaces that are genuinely open to all it may be possible to redistribute pleasure and sustenance in a truly radical manner. Similarly Attlee finds such a critique of the private home at the laundrette: “a reconfiguration of the outermost limits of the private”. When the components of domestic life are separated out it is easier to see the labour and cost which the household, and in normative terms the family, has been left to take responsibility for.
A different kind of home is possible, one which is made from bits and pieces and owned by everyone. A kind of home which is always where you need it to be. Shelter from the cold, a place to find books and entertainment, a familiar room to return to, a place for love, a place for food, somewhere to be alone, and somewhere else to be together. Not only would such a distributed home free us from the cruelties of tenure and property ownership by holding everything we need in common, it would open up new ways to manage energy in the interest not only of people but all life. The private household is a terrible way to manage energy and warmth, we heat empty rooms, we cook for one when we could cook for more, there is something good about the idea of warm places. Their necessity in our current society is an abomination, but perhaps the principle of heating fewer spaces for more people is a good one. The space of the home should not be held in private hands, its tendency to stray should be encouraged not prohibited, the domestic should be held in common hands and redistributed. Everyone should have a warm place where and when they need it, and they should not have to pay to be comfortable.
It is Christmas-time and I am trying to feel optimistic. I feared that the somewhat iconoclastic and angry tenor of this essay might be distinctly un christmassy. Then I thought about the story of the nativity. Not a religious person, I have always found moments of great meaning in the Bible, the New Testament has always felt profoundly political, de-colonial and anti-capitalist, a promise of a different kind of life yet to be realised. This is a diversion, but At university I was taught by Prof. Marcella Althaus-Reid whose classes on liberation, queer, and de colonial theology were the closest I came to taking up religion during my degree in religious studies! Her reading of Christianity felt so radical, in her classes the familiar stories of school assembly came alive as an agenda to transform all life into something more just.
In Luke’s gospel we are told that Jesus was laid in a manger after his birth because there was no room available for him in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem because the Romans were carrying out a census which required people to return to their home towns. But there was no home to return to, the imperial logic that held that family was the lens that defined population was not realised. In the shelter they could find, one shared with animals, Mary gave birth to a child who was not Joseph’s biological son. In a domestic space that defied the expectations of the state a child is born who is promised to overcome all inequality and violence and usher in a better kind of life. Later, the gospels tell us, Jesus said: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”. Which seems to me to be a solid principle for a society without private property. What kind of society would we live in if we worked to ensure that there was always a manger to lay down in. That family and property do not determine your access to shelter and warmth, and that all doors open to those who knock.