The Housing Monster, Second Edition

A house is more than four walls and a roof. From its design and production to the way it is sold, used, resold, and eventually demolished, it is crisscrossed by conflict.

The Housing Monster is a scathing graphic guide that takes one seemingly simple, everyday thing—a house—and looks at the social relations that surround it. Moving from intensely personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces, it reads alternately like a worker’s diary, a short story, a psychology of everyday life, a historical account, an introduction to Marxist critique of political economy, and an angry flyer someone would pass you on the street.

Starting with the construction site and the physical building of houses, the book slowly builds and links more and more issues together: from gentrification and city politics to gender roles and identity politics, from subcontracting and speculation to union contracts and negotiation, from individual belief, suffering, and resistance to structural division, necessity, and instability. What starts as a look at housing broadens into a critique of capitalism as a whole. The text is accompanied by clean black-and-white illustrations that are mocking, beautiful, and bleak.

This new edition includes analysis situating and exploring the text's impact around the world by Lazo Ediciones in Argentina, Ben Kritikos in Scotland, and Sean KB of the Antifada podcast in the US.

The anonymous author who posts manifestos on prole.info has lived in half a dozen different countries and has had a lot of different jobs—all of which were … shit. His texts are an attempt to bring this personal experience of living in capitalist society into contact with history and theory he's read. He writes anonymously for practical reasons but also on principle. Ideas are no one's property, and even original thinkers are only putting possibilities from the real world into words. The point is not to build up an authorial persona. Ideas or arguments shouldn't be judged on if the author has (or doesn't have) academic credentials, working-class credentials, or militant credentials. The point is to try to learn from other people today and in the past, to recognize how things work today, so that we change them.

Lazo Ediciones is a group who write, translate, and publish communist, anarchist, and working-class texts in Spanish. Their members also participate in the Biblioteca y Archivo Alberto Ghiraldo, Biblioteca La Caldera, the magazine Cuadernos de Negación, the newsletter Oveja Negra, the podcast Temperamento, as well as other projects. They are mainly located in the geographical region controlled by the Argentinian state.

Ben Kritikos is a writer, broadcaster, and worker based in Glasgow, UK. He co-hosts the podcast Spaghetti for Brains, as well as writing and hosting the radio show Red White Blues: an Anthology of America’s Music, which explores the history of American power and its reliance on petroleum through the lens of jazz records. He’s provided voiceover for film, radio, and audiobooks, including the audiobook version of The Housing Monster. He regularly publishes cultural histories through his newsletter Spaghetti for Brains and elsewhere.

Sean KB is a union construction worker in New York City and co-host of the popular communist podcast the Antifada.