And so I wrote this thing up
and I kind of said, well, you know, housing has an exchange value.
Housing has a use value.
And the bit of the problem in Baltimore is that when you look at how
housing is provided, you're looking to the market system
to provide housing and therefore the exchange value is something
which is going to have to be orchestrated in such a way
that it is profitable for people to rent housing
or buy and sell housing, and people have to have the money to do that.
So the exchange value aspect of housing is terribly important.
And then you can start to say, well, housing has a set of use values.
If you go through those, it's a shelter, it's
privacy, it's a place of sociality, and it's very often a protected space.
So you could talk at length about the use value of housing
and then kind of say, well, the problem in Baltimore
is that the provision of housing is orchestrated through the exchange value
and it is not able to deliver the necessary use values for housing
to the mass of the population to allow for,
if you like, a stable social and political and economic situation.
So this was, if you like, the sort of argument I started out with.
And it was so, you know, it was a bit like me taking the first
few pages of capital and projecting them into the study in this way.
Well, I didn't mention capital, of course,
knowing full well the anti Marxism and the anti communism of everybody.
So I didn't say a word where it was all coming from.
I just used the concepts and laid out an analysis of
as the Baltimore housing market around the theme of use value, exchange
value and problems in the exchange value system, which were generating
difficulties in terms of use value of housing to the mass of the population.
Everybody around the table thought this was a fantastic way to look at it.
You know, they kind of said, yeah, this is a really interesting way
to look at things and one of the people who had been part of
it had been one of the landlords who participated in economic study
who kind of said, you know, they came down from Penn and they had this
big study of our functioning and it was a really total waste of time.
It was all about supply and demand and all those kinds of things.
And that's all nonsense.
But this idea, you can study this whole thing through the categories
of use value and exchange value, that's a great way to do it.
And then you kind of talk about and the way you systematized
the exchange value system and
it showed how it therefore did not work at all
well in terms of what it was, it was great.
So there we were
and there were the bankers and people from the FHA and the landlords.
And so on actually loving this, you know, use value exchange value framework,
which I had set up, which was, of course, page one of Marx's capital.
And I felt like saying to them, Do you realize this is page
one of Marx's capital?
And I realized what a disaster it would have been had I done so.
But for me personally, I was only on page one of Capital really
and I found it therefore so interesting that the framework
that Marx sets up for capital, it provided
such a intuitively interesting and fascinating way
in which to approach a social problem.
And as long as you didn't say it had anything to do with Marx,
you could really get away with it.
I started to have much more confidence
in the Marxian theory because the categories,
when they were put to work in a situation of this kind, made so much sense
to all of the people participating in the system, and they could see that it was
making sense.
So one of the things I then did was to say, well,
you know, if I can get this from page one of capital,
yeah, maybe I should go to page 40 or something
and find out what else I can get out of the capital.
And that set me off
with a great
deal of confidence in exploring Marx's framework.