The politics of creditor–debtor relations and mortgage payment strikes: The case of the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual-Aid Housing Cooperatives

Abstract

Mortgage debt and concomitant forms of financial expropriation continue their largely uncontested expansion across the social terrain. The atomisation of debtors and commodity fetishism are two key factors that underpin this process. The collective and partially de-commodified character of mutual-aid housing cooperatives in Uruguay and their conflict-ridden mortgage debt relations provide a contrasting, reverse mirror image. This paper analyses how in the case of a collective debtor, the spatial fixity and temporal uncertainties that result from the establishment of mortgage debt relations can work against the creditor. Housing cooperatives make up a geography of spaces that are opaque to the creditor, in the sense that mortgage debtors cannot be individually identified and pursued. Once homes are constructed and inhabited, the creditor’s debt claims can be collectively challenged. In the context of the most recent mortgage payment strike (2001–2011) carried out by the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual-Aid Housing Cooperatives, what is presumed a voluntary contract between equal parties is revealed as a power struggle between owners and non-owners of capital. This atypical case provides an opportunity to empirically attest to the political nature of creditor–debtor relations, often rendered socially invisible due to the extreme power imbalance between counterparties.

Keywords

Housing cooperatives debt mortgages fetishism spatio-temporal fix Uruguay

Introduction

Interest-bearing capital has, in recent decades, increasingly woven itself into activities in the realm of social reproduction. This is particularly apparent in the case of housing, with the expansion of mortgage credit throughout large swathes of the planet (Aalbers, 2016; Sassen, 2008). These developments point to the need to further inquire how capital–labour and creditor–debtor relations are intertwined. Insufficient practical and theoretical engagement with these overlapping battle-lines not only hinders our critiques of contemporary political economy, but might also anticipate the ‘death knell’ of the workers movement (Lazzarato, 2015: 208).

In the sphere of production, collective organisations such as trade unions and syndicates often mediate the distribution between profits and wages. In the sphere of circulation, however, fee-based and interest-based revenue resulting from secondary exploitation (Marx, 1999a) or ‘financial expropriation’ (Lapavitsas, 2009) has in few cases been challenged by the development of comparable collective forms of intervention. The creditor–debtor relation has been grounded on the individualisation and atomisation of debtors. As the Debt Collective (2015) points out, ‘Organizing debtors is complex, and the barriers to organizing debtors’ unions are high. There are no shared factory floors’. Consequently, underlying power relations are rarely made explicit in open social conflict and thus are commonly mystified by the apparently neutral and a-political language of money and finance. Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, there have been relevant experiences where debtors have found shared arenas in which to organize. Online debtor forums, for example, have provided consumer debtors with the opportunity to overcome their isolation and collectively engage their shared predicaments (Deville, 2016). In the case of mortgage debtors, community-level organizing has developed in the countries where economic turmoil was most strongly linked to the mortgage market. This has been the case in Spain, for example, with the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (García-Lamarca, 2017; Sabaté, 2016), or in the USA, with Occupy’s anti-foreclosure activism (Arnold, 2012) and even mortgage strike initiatives in Ohio (Strike Debt, 2014: 93). These experiences, however, constitute the exception rather than the norm.

This paper is centred on a case where mortgage debtors have developed a shared groundwork from their very constitution: the mutual-aid housing cooperatives in Uruguay. The collective property of these cooperatives means that the mortgage debt of individual households is mutualized. That is, cooperative members own a share in the collective property of the cooperative that gives them the right to use a housing unit and to vote in its general assembly. It is the cooperative itself that is the mortgage holder. In turn, their federation at a national scale via the Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas de Vivienda Por Ayuda Mútua (FUCVAM) transforms them into a powerful collective debtor. FUCVAM currently groups together more than 500 housing cooperatives with 22,000 households and represents approximately 3% of the country’s housing stock (FUCVAM, 2017). It is upon this basis that FUCVAM has confronted its public creditor with two sector-wide mortgage payment strikes and mortgage debt renegotiation processes.

The present study focuses on the latest strike (2001–2011) and draws from field-work carried out in Montevideo during the spring of 2016. The main objective of the study is to analyse the ways in which the creditor–debtor relation was politicized and the institutional, economic and social context that underpinned this process. It draws from primary sources, including (a) 13 semi-structured in-depth interviews with key actors from the side of the creditor (6) and the debtor (7), over half of which participated directly in either side of the negotiating table during the conflict’s key moments and highest media exposure, (b) a compilation of the conflict’s media coverage, comprising 126 articles from mainstream media outlets extracted from the Factiva database (2003–2013) and 24 articles drawn from a manual search of the El Solidario archive, FUCVAM’s official newspaper, as well as (c) relevant official documents and reports.

The article traces the cooperatives’ credit/debt through ‘spacetime’ (Peebles, 2010) and argues that the collective character of their mortgages provided the material basis for the politicization of the mortgage debt relation. On the one hand, the temporal dimension of mortgage debt anticipated a regular stream of payments that had been nominally voluntarily accorded and numerically defined. On the other, its spatial dimension produced inhabited territories that became opaque to the creditor. As mortgages were not individually imputed, debtors could not be individually identified and pursued. This opaqueness is precisely what granted debtors the necessary room to manoeuver and collectively organize. This collective clout weighed into the correlation of forces between both counterparties in a way that pushed the creditor to engage with the debtor in the latter’s own terms. In the process, the mystifying language articulated around the formal equality of exchange relations in the market and of citizenship in the political arena, with which the public creditor upheld its claims, was challenged. As a result, the objectivity of the numerical representation of these debts could no longer preclude deeper social questions regarding wider income distributions. That is, between owners and non-owners of capital in the provision of housing as a basic wage good and social right. This case study proves particularly useful in attempting to deconstruct the moral, juridical and ideological edifice that overshadows mortgage relations under ‘normal’ conditions in which debtors are individuals.

Fetishism and the spatio-temporality of mortgage debt relations

Debt is more than just the product of an exchange that has not yet been brought to completion. It is also everything prior to that exchange that pushes two supposed formal equals into an unequal situation and everything that happens in between the debt is taken and not returned (Graeber, 2012: 221–222). A historical materialist understanding of money and credit (and monetised debt relations) must go beyond the realm of exchange, where social relations are fetishized, to grasp their social construction in the context of a capitalist society (Soederberg, 2014). For Marx (1999b), social relations under generalized commodity production and exchange are continually reproduced in fetishized form. They appear as natural and neutral as their historical character is mystified and veiled. This is rooted in the exchange of commodities expressed as a relation between ‘things’ that have qualities of their own, rather than as products of human labour, constituting a relation between persons (Marx, 1999b). Commodities thus seem to acquire an autonomous character, whilst human agency is erased from the picture. The commodity fetish permeates all other social forms in capitalism (rent, interest, the State, etc.), in that ‘they are seen as a “thing” standing apart from other “things”, rather than as a historically determined form of the social relation of capital’ (Holloway and Piccioto, 1977: 80).

In the realm of exchange, commodities are voluntarily interchanged as equivalents amongst independent commodity-owners (including owners of the commodity labour-power). Money, the general equivalent, is what mediates this circulation. Money is not just a ‘thing’, however, but the incarnation of all abstract human labour. It is the embodiment of the value that labourers embed in commodities and conceals the unequal and exploitative conditions that underpin this process (Heinrich, 2004: 64–70). The latter characterize the underlying realm of production, where labourers do not receive the full value of what they produce, but merely what is required for their own social reproduction. Exchange is the realm of an illusory ‘community of money’ (Marx, 1973; Soederberg, 2014: 22), where equality and liberty formally reign. Some members of this ‘community’, however, amass money that can command social power over others (money as capital), the rest use it to meet their subsistence needs. It is through this lense that money is revealed as a historical class-based social relation of power and the formal equality between individuals in the ‘community of money’ is called into question.

When housing is a commodity, one of the ways of accessing its use-values as a ‘home’ is to purchase it. For many workers, the gap between their income and the cost of housing requires them to borrow money to realize this transaction. Workers must mortgage a part of their future wages in order to receive a lump sum to be paid back with interest. The claim creditors lay upon this future income stream of debt repayments, on the other hand, can then be treated as a form of fictitious capital (Lapavitsas, 2013: 127). It is fictitious in the sense that it represents a claim on the uncertainties of future income streams whilst not directly contributing to the process of surplus value production ultimately required for that claim to be validated.¹

The fees and interest placed by creditors on the loan occur within the realm of exchange and appear as an exchange of equivalents, as the ‘price’ of getting money in advance. Yet, the unequal social conditions that have compelled the worker to get indebted and to pay overprice for the house (the fees and interest on top of its real sale price) suggest that she/he is being swindled. She/he is suffering a secondary form of exploitation, which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself (Marx, 1999a). This form of exploitation is another avenue through which worker’s real wages can be modified (Harvey, 2006: 285). The fees and interest payments that dig into their disposable personal incomes are a form of ‘financial expropriation’ that occurs in the sphere of circulation (Lapavitsas, 2009, 2013). In addition, as Soederberg (2014: 38) points out, ‘credit money does not walk around with a natural price on its head. It must be constructed’. Beyond the abstract supply and demand of money, a variety of factors enter into its determination, including the institutional framework, legal arrangements, information flows and the social power of the counterparties.

Debt, as Lazzarato (2012: 8) argues, is ‘a product of power relations between owners (of capital) and non-owners (of capital)’ and simultaneously is ‘the creation and development of the power relation between debtors and creditors’ (p. 25). The creditor–debtor relation has a temporal dimension which is related to the promise of repayment. It anticipates a future in which the debtor is compelled to regularly turn to the market, to sell one’s labour-power in the case of workers, so as to fulfil that promise. It thus becomes a disciplining mechanism, an apparatus of control and subjection to capitalist social conditions that reinforces the proletarian condition (García-Lamarca, 2017; Langley, 2009; Lazzarato, 2012, 2015). It effectively becomes another avenue through which the enslavement of living labour to dead labour operates (Peebles, 2010: 230).

The reverse side of the obligation to pay are feelings of guilt, conscious or unconscious, in case of defaulting (Balibar, 2013). This occurs because the individual is deemed to have entered into voluntary exchange at an equal standing. Inability to honour this is seen as the fault of the individual to fulfil his or her personal responsibility. The profoundly depoliticized and individualized character of this condition is what makes debt such a potent mechanism of social control. Structural determinants and silent compulsions are veiled. Debt takes over a regulative social function by virtue of the autonomy it has gained in the process of abstracting itself from its social and historical context. Mobilizing Foucauldian notions, Lazzarato (2015) understands debt as a form of governmentality that traverses subjectivity and García-Lamarca and Kaika (2016) frame mortgages as biotechnology that engineers an intimate relationship between practices of everyday life and practices of real estate and financial markets. The way an abstraction, a ‘thing’, wields power over people, can also be understood in light of Marx’s concept of fetishism, in this case, the fetishism of debt (Denning, 2011; Taussig, 1987).

A fetish construct is not merely an illusion that can simply be unveiled through individual thought processes. It possesses a material force, as the social practice of capitalist society constantly enacts a process whereby ‘things’ take on a life of their own (Heinrich, 2004: 75, 185). ‘It is real enough’, as Harvey (2011) puts it, but ‘it is a surface phenomenon that disguises something important about underlying social relations’. The fetishized surface of capitalist ‘reality’ can only be shaken if the material force that underpins it is disrupted, and this can only occur through collective praxis. As Holloway (1991) notes, however, there is no ‘pure’ or ‘innocent’ subject that that stands outside the real and perceived fetishisation of human existence under capitalism. The struggle against fetishism is to be understood as a struggle in and against fetishisation as a process that is contradictory and always in movement.

Mortgage debt has a spatial dimension which produces the terrain upon which such collective praxis may or may not develop. Harker (2017) coins the term ‘debt space’ when conceptualizing the role debt plays in making space and connecting different people, communities, institutions and sites. The importance of this spatial dimension for the organization amongst borrowers is clearly illustrated, for example, in Krippner’s (2017) account of how the spatial concentration of the effects of neighbourhood redlining was conducive to collective mobilization and claim-making in the USA. The neighbourhood has also been a key spatial scale for the mortgage debtor movement in Spain. One of its most active groups is unsurprisingly located in Ciutat Meridiana in Barcelona, a neighbourhood popularly dubbed Villa Desahucio (Eviction Town) for being the area with the highest concentration of evictions in the country after a wave of subprime and predatory lending (Blanco and León, 2017; Palomera, 2013). In both cases, the socio-spatial stratification in which credit/debt is intertwined placed individuals with similar predicaments in close proximity, which was conducive to them overcoming their isolation and coalescing with their peers.

In the Uruguayan case, housing cooperatives’ collective rather than individual ‘social unit of debt’ (Schuster, 2014) has a correlative collective ‘spatial unit of debt’. Cooperative mortgage debtors do not just live side by side, but are also only collectively, rather than individually, liable to their creditor. This combination has provided them with an indivisible shared spatial groundwork for collective praxis. By halting income flows to their creditor, these cooperativists disrupted the material force that sustained their debt relations. It evidenced that their debts did not have a life of their own and attested to the political nature that characterizes relations between persons.

The creation of a collective debtor

… the formation of an important number of cooperatives led to the development of an entire sector […] it is largely inadequate for, or doesn’t totally marry with, the idiosyncrasy of our citizens, and in many cases it contains certain features that are worrying from some points of view, as they can become a [national] security problem. (Julio César, president of the Uruguayan Mortgage Bank during the dictatorship, quoted in FUCVAM, 1995: 10)

Uruguay’s housing cooperatives are largely the product of the National Housing Law of 1968 (Plan Nacional de Viviendas, 1968). This law set the basic normative and institutional framework that underpins the country’s housing sector up to this date. The inclusion of a chapter on housing cooperatives can be understood in light of the heritage of Batllism, the State-driven development and welfare policies that have marked the country since the influential early 20th century presidencies of José Batlle y Ordoñez. More concretely, this chapter was inspired by Nordic European cooperative housing models (Nahoum, 2013: 155; Solanas, 2016: 166–173). Although initially a rather uncontroversial and marginal section of the law, it soon became an increasingly popular option for groups of people that formed in workplaces and trade union centres. These received loans from the State-owned Uruguayan Mortgage Bank (Banco Hipotecario del Uruguay, BHU), that had been nationalized in 1912 and held a de jure monopoly over mortgage lending until 1996. Mutual-aid housing cooperatives purchased publicly owned land and carried out the construction work themselves.

Housing credit took the form of wage-indexed payment mortgages. Mortgages were denominated in Readjustable Units (Unidades Reajustables, URs) that are adjusted according to the variation in the Average Wage Index (AWI) produced by the General Direction of Statistics.² In the context of an economy with high inflationary pressures, such an index was originally created to protect the bank’s assets and simultaneously consider the mortgage holder’s ability to pay. Payment capacity was to be further assured via the possibility of extending the amortization period up to 35 years and a subsidy to cover mortgage payments if these surpassed 30% of the debtor’s income (Law 13.728, 1968, art. 35). The subsidy mechanism was further developed in early 1973 by the Law 14.105.

The universalist approach with which the law upheld housing as a social good, however, was linked to a welfare State that was soon to come under attack (Magri, 2008: 21). The incumbent dictatorship (1973–1985) did away with much of the institutionality that had been forged since 1968 and put a break on the promotion and financing of housing cooperatives. In the year 1983, an abrupt 15% increase in the UR set the stage for a direct confrontation between FUCVAM and the regime. In a difficult economic context for its members, FUCVAM demanded the increase be subsidized (FUCVAM, 1995). Given the BHU’s negative response, a mortgage payment strike was launched that was also conceived of as political offensive against the regime (González, 2013: 86–90). The regime struck back against the foundation of the sector’s power: the cooperative’s collective property. A Horizontal Property Law was passed that sought to break up the cooperatives and forcefully convert their members into individual homeowners so as to atomize, personalize and repress the organized mortgage delinquency. FUCVAM responded with a nation-wide signature collection campaign for a referendum against the law. These events constituted one of the highpoints of the increasing social turmoil that marked the final stages of the faltering regime (González, 2013: 102–106). Overall, FUCVAM’s first mortgage strike was a process that bolstered the organization’s political capital and contributed to its public recognition as one of the country’s key social movements (Chavez and Carbajal, 1997; Di Paula, 2008; FUCVAM, 1995: 12).

The second mortgage payment strike

The newly restored parliamentary democratic regime continued with the processes of neo-liberal restructuring undertaken during the dictatorship (González, 2013: 111; Olesker, 2001; Rico, 2005: 33). The transition from a universal to a residual housing welfare system advanced, as public intervention was reduced and focused towards the most vulnerable (Magri, 2013). New housing cooperatives faced higher interest rates that ranged from 4.5 to 7% and were financed, from 1992 onwards, by the Ministry of Housing (MVOTMA) (Altoberro, 2008: 74). The quota subsidy mechanism was never systematically implemented and so mortgage holders incapable of meeting mortgage payments faced, in most cases, debt reorganization that provided short-term alleviation but an overall increase in the long-term debt burden. From 1984, moreover, readjustments in the UR that would have abruptly burdened debtors due to variations in the relative prices in the economy, where eased by postponing part of the projected monthly payment increase and adding it on to the end of the mortgage payment schedule, extending its overall amortization period (FECOVI, n.d.; Nahoum, 2006). These ‘add-ons’ are popularly referred to as the colgamentos (‘hangers’).

The years of neo-liberal restructuring also produced wage repression and dispersion (Kaztman et al., 2000). The evolution of the UR/AWI ratio and UR/inflation ratio in the 1968–2001 period, moreover, suggests a fall of real income for mortgage creditors in the first half of the period and an increase in the second (Gandelman and Gandelman, 2004: 14). This evolution, moreover, had an asymmetrical impact on debtors, not only due to the diverse conditions attached to different loans, but also due to the increasing wage dispersion.

In the year 1998, FUCVAM commissioned an audit of the debts its cooperatives had with the BHU. The audit argued that the UR had increased at a faster rate than any other relevant variable (Olesker and Osta, 1998). The UR had appreciated more than the dollar,³ the construction costs index and inflation (Olesker and Osta, 1998). At the time, some of the federation’s old cooperatives were reaching the end of their amortization period and only had their colgamentos left. FUCVAM’s position on the colgamentos was that they were unjust and illegitimate, as they were the result of the unilateral non-application of the mortgage payment subsidy mechanism (FUCVAM, 2011; Nahoum, 2006). The results of the audit were used to argue, moreover, that their debts had been more than paid off regardless. FUCVAM demanded the debts of these cooperatives be restructured, and where appropriate, cancelled. As a measure of pressure, FUCVAM’s cooperatives in debt with the BHU started depositing 50% of their mortgage payments in parallel accounts in other financial institutions towards the end of the year 2001. This measure was gradually expanded in the following year, effectively resulting in a complete cessation of payments towards the BHU. It involved 120 cooperatives with 7000 housing units (MVOTMA, 2006).

Economic recession also started to set in at the turn of the century and climaxed with a severe financial crisis at the start of the year 2002. These developments weighed into the BHU’s mortgage delinquency rates, which peaked at a spectacular figure of 57% by the end of 2002 (Colina et al., 2012: 40). The BHU suffered financial strain with severe fiscal implications, which according to some estimates reached 10% of GDP at the time of the crisis, and was a liability from a macroeconomic point of view (World Bank, 2005: 6). The institution was recapitalized and geared towards a process of thorough restructuring aided by two Structural Adjustment Loans from the World Bank (2005). In a context of spiralling unemployment and declining real wages, the rest of FUCVAM’s cooperatives that were indebted with the Ministry of Housing, many of which had only recently started returning their debt, unilaterally started to pay only what they deemed they could afford. This involved another 5000 housing units (MVOTMA, 2006).

The year 2005 was marked by an important electoral change with the arrival of the ‘progressive’ United Front (Frente Amplio, FA) to power for the first time. With the signing of two ‘letters of intent’ with the IMF, however, the incumbent government did not depart from the country’s previous commitments to macroeconomic stability and structural reform (Government-IMF, 2005). In terms of housing policy, the government inherited the residualist outlook from previous administrations and followed the recommendations that the international institutions had included as part of the package for macroeconomic equilibrium (Magri, 2008, 2013). From the year 2007, the government embarked on a transformation of the institutional and financial framework governing the sector, creating a new decentralized body, the National Housing Agency (Agencia Nacional de Vivienda, ANV) and concluding the transfer of the BHU’s ‘social’ and ‘difficult to manage’ portfolio to the Ministry of Housing (BHU, 2012). Accompanying changes also included a simplified foreclosure system that circumvented the system of judicial intervention prevailing until then (Magri, 2013: 45).

Housing cooperatives had been included in the first portfolio transferred from the BHU to the Ministry of Housing (Fideicomiso I) in the year 2003. Amongst its main objectives (ANV, 2008: 18) was to:

Ensure that all debtors of the housing cooperatives are incorporated into the normal circuit of payments, incentivizing in them a culture of social responsibility, upholding their moral and contractual obligation to honour their debts.

Midway through the conflict, the government claimed that FUCVAM’s cooperatives were 4.7 million UR (US$56.8 million at the 2006 exchange rate) behind in their payments (MVOTMA, 2006). Their total debt amounted to 34.7 million UR (MVOTMA, 2006), around US$400 million at the 2006 exchange rate, representing 2% of Uruguay’s annual GDP. Figures showcased by the government throughout the years, however, oscillated between US$150 and 400 million, depending on what elements were included, be it the fines and interest accumulated during the strike or the different colgamentos. The public display of figures was itself a highly contested battleground and was associated to the different levels of pressure the government aimed at exerting upon FUCVAM.

Challenging ‘financial justice’

The negotiations between FUCVAM and its creditor, the latter a team made up of representatives from the Ministry of Housing, its General Directory (DINAVI), the ANV and the Ministry of Economics and Finance, only started in earnest as the economic and political situation started to stabilize. The negotiations were, however, fraught with a conceptual dissonance. As expressed by the director of DINAVI at the time, ‘we approached the same fact from a different viewpoint’ (Interview, 2016). The creditor’s starting point was that the cooperatives had simply, ‘taken out a loan, signed it and gotten indebted, the debt is in UR’ (Interview, 2016). Their debt, as a BHU staff member managing the cooperative portfolio reiterated, ‘is registered, accounts-wise it is there, it is a debt to be collected’ (Interview, 2016). With regard to FUCVAM’s claims about the excessive cost of their housing, the response on behalf of the director of DINAVI was that:

Of course you pay for the house many times, but they told you that on day one […] We can discuss the banking system, the sinful interest of the Bible, we can go to whatever level of discussion you want, but that is what you agreed to, nobody forced you. You can’t take out a loan and then come to me to tell me that you are not paying because you find it too expensive. (Interview, 2016)

With regards to the determination of interest rates, the creditor simply should, ‘adjust prices according to its own financing costs and to the costs of recovering the credit’ (Interview, 2016).

Despite the creditor departing from this standpoint, debt restructuring was still on the cards in the context of widespread mortgage delinquency rates in the wake of a financial crisis (MVOTMA, 2005: 109). Furthermore, cooperatives where part of the ‘social’ portfolio that had been transferred from the BHU.⁴ This debt restructuring, however, was initially to be based on market logic and in line with the terms applied to other debtors (e.g. ANV, 2009a, 2009b). The inhabitant’s income was a factor to be taken into account, yet debts were to be restructured to reflect the market value of their underlying asset.

FUCVAM, however, rejected ‘economic fundamentalisms’ (De Souza, 2005) and considered that ‘taking things out of context and seeing only an “account” was a frivolity’ (De Souza, 2007). It sought a restructuring that arose ‘from “social” justice and not “financial” justice’ (De Souza, 2007):

They tried to convince us that we were debtors […] We should not feel like debtors, we should feel like subjects of rights to be gained, exercised and defended. (De Souza, 2007)

Housing cooperatives are, according to an ex-president of FUCVAM:

Not housing for a real-estate business, but a question of housing policy. You pay back what you can and the State should cover the rest, that’s the predominant concept. (Interview, 2017)

They did not accept readjusting the debt of their homes to reflect the market valuation of their physical state and location. Housing cooperatives are of collective property and limited-equity. Cooperative member’s shares cannot be bought and sold in the open market. The model is formally set up so that outgoing members can only get back the equivalent to what they have contributed in work hours and paid into the cooperative’s mortgage during their stay, minus a 10% commission that the cooperative retains (Law 13.728, 1968, art. 153).

FUCVAM’s position also drew from their lived experience and own ‘common sense’. The debt audit had confirmed their feeling that their housing costs had been rising at a higher rate than everything else around them. When the cost of their debt was compared to its closest comparable use, the cost of building a house in the present, the divergence was especially apparent. According to a member of FUCVAM’s debt restructuring commission:

For every brick that they lent us, we were returning more than 3 or 4. In reality we should be giving back one brick, plus 2% […] but the value of the UR and of the loan itself had increased so much that it was impossible to gather the money to pay our mortgage quotas. (Interview, 2017)

In addition, the evolution of the UR was based on the average salary, whilst FUCVAM’s members belonged to the lower-middle to lower income working classes. Their wages had, moreover, experienced a relative decline during the de-industrialization and economic restructuring of the neo-liberal years. Consequently, they had been experiencing how the evolution of their income had increasingly decoupled from the evolution of the UR (Comisión de Reestructura, 2011). Their subordinate insertion in the economy as workers implied that the difficulty to meet their mortgage payments was no fault of theirs.

FUCVAM wanted to pay, but to pay ‘lo justo’ (Caballero, 2011). This is a play on words that reflected both what they believed to be ‘just’, as well as their disposition to pay no more or less than that which pertained to them. The amalgam of factors that configured what was seen as a ‘just’ payment derived from their understanding of housing as a social right and of what could reasonably be alleged to be its corresponding duty. This clashed with the ‘technical’ parameters in which the creditor wished to engage. Reflecting upon the conflict, an ex-Minister of Housing (Interview, 2017) explained that the negotiators:

[…] were not fully aware of the history of the cooperative movement. They came to know about it when they confronted the debtor. For an economist or an accountant, the criterion of ‘I will pay no more’ is as if somebody came to me to tell me they will construct with water instead of with cement and on top of that demand I pay for it. It’s the same, I cannot accept it. It has to be cement. Well, it was like a kick in the face, they had to sit down and negotiate with a person that would say, ‘I don’t give a damn about your bank that serves me no purpose, because this is not housing policy, its usury’.

‘General interest’ versus corporativism?

Contentions were not only based in and against the language of money and credit, but also pivoted around another fetishized construct, the State’s embodiment of the ‘general interest’. This construct is sustained upon the separation of the economic and the political as distinct ‘moments’ of the same social relation of capital (Holloway and Picciottio, 1978). Whereas the ‘moment’ of appropriation of surplus product occurs in the ‘private’ realm of production and exchange, the necessary ‘moment’ of coercion is enforced by the State (Wood, 2000: 19–48). This separation simultaneously implies the constitution of abstract commodity-owners, on the one hand, and abstract citizens on the other (Holloway, 1991). It provides the political sphere with an apparent autonomy, where decision-making processes that derive from the representation of formally equal citizens are conceptualized in isolation of class relations. The State, like money, is constituted as an abstract universality that mediates relations between persons (Kurz, 2012). It is the realm of the ‘illusory community’ of politics (Lima, 2017: 101). The State is thus the embodiment of the ‘general interest’ that derives from democratic brokering within this community of equals. In contraposition, lay the particularisms, corporatisms and sectorialisms in ‘civil society’.

In the words of an FA Senator:

A just and real solution to the problem of the internal indebtedness of all the sectors […] cannot be reached if the general interest is not prioritized. Nothing is more damaging to the good resolution of problems than corporatist reactions. The diverse sectors of debtors operate as pressure groups […] those of us that take up posts in the government must be committed to the common good, that of all the citizenry […] The general interest, the diffuse interests of society, commonly does not have strong defendants willing to go out and occupy public buildings or block traffic. Its defense is the task of the government. It must explain the terrible consequences of easy and demagogic short-cuts that may be applauded in the tribune, but that satisfy the few in detriment of the many. (Rubio, 2006)

Whilst ‘housing cooperativists fought for what was theirs’, in the words of an ex-director of DINAVI, the public creditor had to ‘look at the globality of the whole system’ (Interview, 2016). Publicly, the call was that ‘cooperativists return the resources that society has lent to them, which we believe must be recovered’ (La República, 2006). Not honouring their debts would constitute, according to the Minister of Housing, an ‘unsolidaristic appropriation’ of public resources by those that have already accessed a house (El País, 2006b). This was based on the assumption that, ‘the country has limited resources […] only if those resources return, other cooperativists and other needy citizens will be able to access their housing’ (Director of DINAVI, quoted in Pippo, 2007).

The president of FUCVAM contested the idea that ‘the workers of this country are to blame for the lack of resources’ (De Souza quoted in La República, 2006). He condemned the government for:

Believing that by exerting pressure on those at the bottom to pay for the crisis of others, the resources needed for housing will be generated. Through this process they contribute to forgetting and condoning those that have enriched themselves and really have not contributed. (De Souza, 2008)

What was being argued was that ‘the money was there’ (Nahoum, 2007), that underlying the assumed scarcity of resources in fact lay a social question of income redistribution.

FUCVAM was denying the universality of the State by insisting that the State in fact expressed the particularities of ‘civil society’ and its class relations. It highlighted the endemic corruption in the past administration of the BHU and the ‘party for the construction companies’ it had thrown (De Souza, 2008). The BHU had moreover required capitalizations and ‘bail-outs’ that ultimately drew from the taxpayers pocket (FUCVAM, 2007). On the other hand, the government ‘honoured its foreign debt and did not honour its social debt’ (De Souza, 2007). It had ‘got on its knees in front of the IMF and now wants us to get on our knees’ (De Souza quoted in El País, 2006a). Also looming over the conflict, as expressed by an ex-Minister of Housing (Interview, 2016), was the concern about its ‘impact on our national accounts’ and ‘our sovereign rating’. That is, concern about the diffuse influence of finance capital in determining the State’s own borrowing costs, as well as the overall prospects of investment and economic growth that were a precondition for the government’s ‘progressive’ policies of ex-post redistribution.

In the context of electoral change and the processes of socio-economic recomposition arising out of the financial crisis, the president of FUCVAM claimed that, ‘the struggle is not based only on the interests of cooperativism, it is unequivocally linked to the struggle for the deepening of social changes’ (Figoli quoted in La República, 2005). Further elaborated in the interview for this study:

They are not purely and exclusively corporatist expressions. Despite having a corporatist content, because we are a social organization that defends a specific group in civil society that organizes and fights, we are not political illiterates. We understand that there are politico-strategic objectives linked to our class condition. It is from within these coordinates that the mortgage strike must also be inscribed […] How FUCVAM processes its corporatist needs and how these needs are situated in the concert of society and the political struggle, in a country where the workers are always forced to pick up the tab, is an element also at play. Here there is a tension that is very difficult to resolve, between corporatist interests and the general interest. They tell me, if I concede this to you, I will have to concede it to everybody. Well, I don’t know, those are the risks of governing. To govern is to take decisions. This brings us to another terrain of the debate, to whether it is possible to govern for all, which is not a minor question. (Interview, 2016)

Expressed more succinctly in the words of another historic leader of FUCVAM, the terms in which the government had engaged the conflict were, ‘because they had moved on to administer Capital (…) it is a government that administers poverty’ (Interview, 2017).

In its logic of ‘deepening changes’, FUCVAM looked back on past social conquests. Their claim regarding the illegitimacy of the colgamentos, for example, was based on the argument that they were the result of the non-application of the mortgage payment subsidy mechanism set in the National Housing Law of 1968 and the posterior 14.105 Law. This mechanism had never been properly established due to the advent of the dictatorship and the neo-liberal continuity the posterior democratic regime had upheld. Yet, in the words of the ex-director of the Ministry of Economics and Finance (Interview, 2016):

To say, they should have subsidized me… it’s like saying, I lost the war, but you should have pardoned me, yes, of course… But you lost the war and that is part of the process. One has the right to struggle and resist this process, but things change. The Law of 1968, yes, but it says things that another law changes. It forms part of their narrative but it has nothing to do with mathematics, nor justice. In other words, I can wish for the Law of 68 to continue and for the subsidy to appear, but history is already over.

In short, according to the former ministerial director, FUCVAM was stubbornly not accepting ‘reality’ and the passage of time and not letting go of a series of social conquests that had been obtained in a past historical context and scrapped thereafter. Their refusal to let go was, however, a strategy for attempting to reactualize these social advances and achieve them in the present. The temporal dimension of the debt relation provided a tangible link between the past and the present. Many housing cooperatives had been constructed before the dictatorship and so provided a material reminder of another time period. The insistence on the concrete historical events that underpinned the State’s changing legislation contrasted with the abstractness of its embodiment of the ‘general interest’.

A dissonant spatio-temporal fix

The conflict between FUCVAM and its creditor was marked by a unique correlation of forces. The creditor had difficulties employing its main repayment enforcement mechanisms, the threat of financial exclusion and of eviction. In declarations to the press, an informant from the ANV conceded that:

The truth is that FUCVAM enjoys a kind of ‘shield’ […] they will never pay because they know that despite the threats, the State will never evict a collective property in which children, families and the elderly live. (El País, 2010)

FUCVAM knew that ‘collective property was their [the creditor’s] pain’ (Rodríguez, 2007). Housing cooperatives’ mortgage delinquency could not be tracked down to the individual household level. Members did not risk a ‘black mark’ on their credit history record. Attempts at collective evictions not only raised the stakes but would immediately enact a collective response. Through FUCVAM, this collective response would be replicated nationally. As a staff member of the BHU (Interview, 2016) explains, the prospects of individual debtors paled in comparison:

What happens is that if the individual cannot pay his mortgage he is alone, he doesn’t have a movement behind him. In the long-run he convinces himself that he is poor and moves out, it sounds horrible but it’s real.

From the year 2003 to 2008, 4700 emptied-out properties of individual BHU debtors had been auctioned off, the same amount as in the previous 26 years (Últimas Noticias, 2008). The newly created ANV adopted a credit recovery policy that sought to be compatible with the permanence of the inhabitants in their homes. Out of the 25,592 debt restructuring cases it dealt with from January 2009 till May 2013, 75% reached a ‘sustainable repayment schedule agreement’ (ANV, 2013). Foreclosure auctions, however, were on the cards for the remaining 6378.

Whilst the latter developments had affected other BHU debtors, FUCVAM’s members had been, in the words of one of its ex-presidents, ‘comfortably sat on top of our bricks’ (Interview, 2016). Housing cooperative mortgages had generated a debt relation with a temporal, but also a spatial dimension. Whereas a claim had been laid by the creditor on a part of the future income of their residents in the form of regular mortgage payments, an actually existing inhabited collective housing stock had been formed at the very beginning of the repayment schedule. As the director of DINAVI at the time explains, these ‘facts on the ground’ made:

The eviction almost absolutely inapplicable, because it would require nothing less than a territorial occupation. There are inter-cooperative areas, the ‘Mesas’, the ‘Zonas’, that are hundreds of cooperatives, that is, they would be occupied territories. (Interview, 2016)

As can be observed in Map 1, FUCVAM’s housing cooperatives in Montevideo are often found in clusters. Map 2 zooms in on one of these clusters and illustrates the close proximity and even territorial contiguity between housing cooperative ‘spatial units’, which together make up a large territorial ensemble.

Map 1.

Location and population size of FUCVAM’s housing cooperatives in Montevideo.

Map 2.

Territorial layout of a cluster of FUCVAM’s inhabited housing cooperatives in the neighborhood of Las Canteras, Montevideo.

In addition to their established territorial presence and legal ‘shield’ of collective property, FUCVAM had also accumulated important political capital from their participation in the struggles against the dictatorship and the popular mobilizations against posterior neo-liberal reforms. Evicting a housing cooperative was consequently politically unfeasible. FUCVAM and the FA, in the Gramcian terms employed by one of FUCVAM’s ex-presidents (Interview, 2016), had formed part of the same ‘historic bloc’ of socio-political alliances that had ruptured the country’s traditional two-party political regime. The links FUCVAM had with certain positions that had been taken up within the apparatus of the State further tipped the correlation of forces in their favour.

Despite the fear of eviction being low, the public creditor did still exert pressure playing on the moral subtexts surrounding debt. ‘There was a strong campaign of aggression’, explains an ex-president of FUCVAM, ‘that the cooperatives were freeloaders and didn’t want to pay was the government’s slogan’ (Interview, 2016). The future growth of the federation was also compromised by the conflict, as the State started setting up a separate cooperative housing finance programme through the trade union confederation (PIT-CNT), sidelining FUCVAM.

The drawn out negotiations and conflict, including direct actions and demonstrations by FUCVAM, culminating in a 8000 strong march in Montevideo’s city centre in 2011, finally produced an agreement on debt restructuring later that year. According to an ex-director of the Ministry of Economics and Finance, the agreement was reached:

Out of fatigue, there is no government that can stand the permanent discussion with FUCVAM and that is what happened. Pardon after pardon, housing director after housing director, because when I went I gave up 20 million, the next one gave up 20 more and then the next another 20. Finally, the debt kept on shrinking without anybody paying a penny, until one arrives and asks, ‘what’s left?’ 40, give me 10 and let’s call it a day, it’s over, because the fifth minister is not going to continue discussing (Interview, 2016).

The final agreement was eventually based on FUCVAM’s terms and was considered a victory for the organization. It included a ‘gigantic haircut’, in the words of the ex-president of the ANV (Interview, 2016). In the case of the cooperatives originally indebted with the BHU, haircuts for pending debt ranged from 100% for the oldest cooperatives to around 25% for those that had paid off a third of their mortgage (see Table 1). Debt reduction effectively got rid of the colgamentos and accumulated fines and charges and resulted in affordable monthly mortgage quotas. Interest rates for the remaining debts were also slashed to 2%, reflecting the historical conditions set before the dictatorship (MVOTMA, 2011). The mortgage payment subsidy mechanism was also put in place (MVOTMA, 2011). Although detailed figures of the debt restructuring process carried out for the different debtors of the portfolios transferred from the BHU to the Ministry of Housing and ANV are not publicly available, all interviewees as well as insider informants suggested that FUCVAM had achieved the best deal amongst mortgage debtors.

Table 1.

Housing cooperative BHU debt haircut scale.

% of debt amortized to date	Computed as amortized (%)
Up to 33	50
33–39	55
39–48	60
48–55	65
55–58	70
More than 58	100

Source: MVOTMA, 2011.

Housing is part of the trail of investments in the built environment, of spatio-temporal fixes (Harvey, 2004, 2006), in which capital is stored in expectation of its realization and mobilization in the future. The mortgage credit involved has a fictitious character, in the sense that its return pends on the claim that creditors place upon debtor’s future labour. This claim, however, is vulnerable to the counter-claims of organized debtors. Their bargaining power reveals the fictitious nature of the ‘hard numbers’ behind their debts. FUCVAM’s members have effectively managed to keep more of their personal income for themselves, to the detriment of the creditor’s expectations.

Conclusions

This article has explored how FUCVAM’s mortgage payment strike disrupted the material force that sustained two interconnected fetishized constructs: monetized debt relations and the State’s embodiment of the ‘general interest’. The ‘illusory communities’ of money and politics, realms of formally equal individual consumers and citizens, were shaken up with the arrival of a collective debtor to the scene. The cessation of payments evidenced that what mediated the income stream between debtor and creditor was a question of power and the correlation of forces between both counterparties. FUCVAM’s collective action was grounded upon the collective property of housing cooperatives. This prevented the creditor from individually pressuring defaulters via the threat of financial exclusion and of eviction. Moreover, it provided debtor’s with a collective framework from which to federate at a national scale. This relative force permitted debtors to push their own terms, language and experience to the forefront of the public debate. These expressions are otherwise commonly veiled behind the parameters of voluntary exchange and individual moral responsibility.

FUCVAM denaturalized the incurring of debt to access a basic necessity such as housing. Its position was aided by the partially de-commodified and limited-equity character of housing cooperatives. Their self-management is predominantly grounded upon their use values rather than their exchange value. This facilitated pushing the terms of the debate beyond the simple exchange of commodities. The fact that the creditor was ultimately the State, habitual receptor of social demands, also facilitated the politicization of the debt relation. With such a creditor, what was a distributive conflict between the creditor and the debtor was soon scaled-up to become a conflict over the wider distribution of the total social product. The State, however, exploited the separation between the economic and the political to shun away from the conflict’s real political dimension, the class character of the ‘housing question’ (Engels, 1974). On the one hand, the public creditor engaged with debt from the objectivity of its abstract numbers and formal contracts. On the other, it framed the conflict as a zero-sum negotiation between a community of equal citizens. The latter, however, was to pivot around the former. As such, following the market logic of debt contracts was what was in the ‘general interest’.

The abstract universality of money and the State contrasted with the concrete terms in which FUCVAM highlighted the historical events that underpinned the State’s position and the material conditions faced by FUCVAM’s members. The State was alleged to be only an illusionary embodiment of the ‘general interest’ as it had its own interests (including that of its bureaucracy) as well as reflected the particular interests and dynamics that structured social relations in ‘civil society’. Although the government was aware of its structural dependence on capital, it acted ‘as if’ it maneuvered on a different terrain. The fetish is precisely that act whereby something is treated ‘as if’ it is not what it actually is (Bratsis, 2006: 46). It is in this sense that its character is both illusory and real. FUCVAM’s own position was not particularly cohesively expressed and the tensions between the corporatist and classist aspects of its mortgage debt strike remain unresolved. Yet FUCVAM did draw a different dividing line, that between owners and non-owners of capital. In emphasizing its working-class composition, it linked its member’s debts with their future wages and the contested distribution of the total social product as occurring between capital and labour. The latter involving the determination of their ‘social wage’⁵ via the State’s mediation. The partial aspects of the ‘social wage’ rise, nonetheless, involving only current FUCVAM members, do not necessarily entail a general increase in the value of labour-power in the country. The costs for the State of the cooperative debt reduction can be covered via an intra-class wealth redistribution amongst labour, rather than an inter-class redistribution from capital to labour.

Within its syndicalist dynamic, cooperativist praxis included taking in the necessary capital to build their homes, spatially fixing it and then contesting its temporal claims. Departing from the understanding of debt as a power relation, FUCVAM’s experience can practically and theoretically inform housing strategies in a context in which debt relations are increasingly at the core of access to housing in many countries around the world. FUCVAM’s praxis rests on a geography of spaces that are opaque to technologies of social control and disciplining mechanisms rooted in the individualization and atomization of subjects. These spaces thus become propitious to collective organizing. Beyond conflicts surrounding debt and housing, recognizing the significance of this underlying element is also relevant to contemporary social struggles more broadly.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Henrik Gutzon Larsen, Melissa García-Lamarca, Mara Ferreri, Claus Mullie, Chloé Atkinson, the editor and three anonymous referees for their feedback and comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to Laia Gallego Vila, Javi Sastre and Débora de Pina Castiglione for their help with the maps.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: “la Caixa” Foundation fellowship.

Notes

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