Landlords and Tenants: A Class‐Theoretical Approach to the Relations of Social Reproduction

ABSTRACT Current understandings of landlords and tenants are primarily based on individual attributes each group possesses, usually conceptualized as binary divisions or gradational distinctions. In this paper, we offer an alternative: a relational, class‐based concept of housing market actors. We argue 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 social reproduction (specifically 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. After identifying the weaknesses in gradational approaches to landlords and tenants and laying out our relational alternative, we offer a set of examples which demonstrate the utility of employing a class‐based conceptualization of landlords and tenants.