There’s a particular kind of violence that comes dressed as paperwork. It looks like lease renewals, mortgage statements, and subsidized housing wait lists. This is violence wrought by financial capital, and we can see it written all over our region.
In Johnson City, median rents rose 24–35% between 2023 and 20251. The city’s own report admits these hikes “outpace household income growth” and “likely create some affordability challenges for area renters.” No kidding, especially with a 1% vacancy rate that gives landlords virtually unlimited leverage. Meanwhile, the number of mortgages in Northeast Tennessee that are “seriously underwater” jumped 29% last year2. More and more of our neighbors owe the bank more than their home is worth, making it impossible for them to sell or refinance.
This is the squeeze of finance capital. On the rental side, institutional investors and algorithms extract maximum payment from people with no alternatives. On the ownership side, the same financialization inflates prices beyond what wages support, leaving working people in mortgages they can get out of. The renter and the underwater homeowner aren’t in different situations; they’re in different rooms of the same burning house.
This financialization of everything, housing included, creates a society where a tiny minority owns the means of shelter, the resources, and the credit, while the vast majority works merely to service that ownership. Such a society is inherently unstable. It generates contradictions that cannot be resolved within the framework of democratic consent.
The Contradictions That Finance Capital Cannot Resolve
The first contradiction is that financialization extracts value without creating it. A private equity firm that buys apartment complexes, strips maintenance, and raises rents isn’t building anything, it’s siphoning wealth upward, steadily destroying the purchasing power and stability of the working class that the whole system depends on.
The second is that finance capital needs the state desperately—for bailouts, property rights enforcement, contract law, and suppression of labor unrest—while simultaneously needing to convince people that the state is their enemy and the market is freedom. This is why the same political movement that defunds public housing also demands the Federal Reserve protect asset values.
The third is that financialized housing turns a basic human need into a speculative asset class. The conditions that make housing profitable—scarcity, rising prices—are the same conditions that make it inaccessible. The system cannot solve the housing affordability crisis without devaluing the asset that millions of people’s retirement savings are tied up in. It is structurally incapable of fixing the problem it created.
When Reform Is Off the Table
These contradictions don’t stay abstract for long. They show up as evictions, as skipped medications, as payday loans taken out to cover rent. This misery hardens into anger, and anger, when it has nowhere to go, becomes fuel.
When that fuel starts to smoke, the owning class has two options: concede reforms, like with the New Deal, or redirect the anger toward scapegoats—immigrants, trans people, women—while consolidating control.
This second option is fascism. It’s deployed when the ruling class calculates that conceding reforms would cost too much. They capture the state instead, and make sure the machinery of government serves the extractors, not the people.
The post-2008 period essentially foreclosed the reform option: The political center spent fifteen years bailing out banks while telling working people that austerity was responsible governance. That credibility is gone. When the anger finally has nowhere legitimate to go, the scapegoating infrastructure—already built, already funded—is right there waiting.
Fascism isn’t a personality type or a brand of meanness, though it can feel that way. It is a political response to the contradictions that finance capital creates and cannot resolve any other way.
The Ground Is Ours
Here’s what finance capital cannot do: it cannot pick up your neighborhood and move it somewhere more profitable. Capital is stuck here, which means it’s accountable here—if we make it so. That’s where our power lives, and we don’t need to wait for an election to use it. We can organize now, right where we live, starting with the most basic act: talking with our neighbors.
The financiers count on us feeling powerless. But they need our neighborhoods, our towns, and our labor. They cannot extract wealth from a place if the people of that place refuse to be extracted from.
The road back from fascism runs through our home. When we take back control of where and how we live, we starve the beast. The rentier class knows this. It’s time we all did too.
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