[lbo-talk] Home Ownership and Revolutionary Consciousness

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Oct 19 07:35:57 PDT 2006


On 10/19/06, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Oh, Christ. Of course we mostly live where our parents live. What I was
> saying -- more in response to James -- is that owning a house is not worthy
> of dreams....and I was also trying to suggest the many ways in which home
> ownership works against 1) human survival and
> 2) revolutionary consciousness

According to "Home Sweet Home" (The Globalist, Boston Globe, 12 February 2006, <http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/02/12/home_sweet_home/>), many European countries have higher home ownership rates than the United States: Spain's is the highest, and Switzerland's is the lowest.

Country Home Ownership Rate (%) Spain 85 Greece 83 Italy 80 Russia 72 UK 69 USA 68 Canada 66 Japan 60 France 55 Netherlands 53 Denmark 51 Germany 42 Switzerland 31

Is that true? If so, it doesn't look like home ownership as such is correlated with people's rebelliousness. The Swiss, imho, are among the least revolutionary peoples in the world today (it's been some time since Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Revolution of 1798), whereas the Spaniards at least gave anarcho-socialist revolution a good try once in their history, and they recently showed their guts again by voting against the Right shortly after the horrific terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004 that the Right tried to exploit.

The French, the most revolutionary people in Europe or the entire global North, still very much rebellious after all these years of prosperity, rank in the middle, closer to the Japanese and Americans (who are together the most counterrevolutionary people in the world) than the Swiss or the Spaniards. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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