Less of a decent argument against landlords than it is in favor of better inheritance taxes.
I find it interesting how in every single video game that involves fostering a population, it’s up to you to make sure everyone is housed. Too logical and efficient for billionaires, I guess.
What I love about those video games is that they teach us very clearly that a command economy leads to prosperity (unless you suck as a player I guess), but then billionaires tell us no, free market capitalism and trickle-down are the way we have to go.
Funny, because it taught me that that task in reality is impossible, given real nations can’t load an old save file to fix their fuck ups in a simulation far, far simpler than reality.
Of course you could certainly argue that one person wouldn’t be in charge of doing literally everything.
I’ve had similar thoughts about the auction house in World of Warcraft. Since the game caps the amount of gold you can have at a small fraction of the overall economy, no one person can buy everything and then jack up the prices.
Ya
Like, what are the other options? Homes seem mandatory for societal and economic interaction.
I’m enough of a socdem that the hexbear types ban me at first sight when I comment in their communities, but I’m still of the opinion that everyone is entitled to have A home. Something that is reasonably sized given the location, and there may be compromises in location itself (not everyone is going to fit in Manhattan after all). So an apartment in NYC or a single family home in flyover states somewhere. This is just using the US as an example because it’s so culturally dominant, I think everyone knows what NYC is like. Everyone should be able to live in a home that affords them basic human dignity.
Now rich people can still have their mansions or whatever, but they’ll have to pay for the privilege. The rest of us, if content with the aforementioned social housing, wouldn’t have to pay. There would still be premium developments. Premium apartments or houses to rent or buy. But there would be no more profiting off the working class’s basic need for shelter.
But there must be ads on every inch of the house until you purchase premium. Cmon, you can’t just exist without suffering. What would be the point of life, if not torture?
That sounds great, devil’s advocate want to know how we do get projects.
Uhh hives? We could all start burrowing into the ground and living in communal tunnelways connected to nest rooms and grain storages.
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.
if society doesn’t have enough homes then it should reduce birth rate, change my mind.
One in ten houses in the US are vacant.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/
“Society” has more than enough housing. We just distribute it poorly.
The idea of ownership is kinda silly.
“Private property is the smallest unit of warfare.” — The Terraformers (2023) by
Becky ChambersAnnalee NewitzEdit: author name
Oh gosh, we love Becky Chamber’s work. This is amazing that we didn’t know this one. Thanks for sharing!
Edit: Seems you might be incorrect. It was written by Annalee Newitz
Ah, shit, you’re right. They’re right next to each other on my mental bookshelf. I was introduced to their works via this talk they gave together, have been reading both their works, and so I have trouble distinguishing them. >.<
Right? “My ancestors beat up your ancestors, so I deserve to live in wealth and opulence, while you deserve to be my slave”
It really is pretty fucked up.
There’s that poem(?) about that
“”"
“Get off this estate.”
“What for?”
“Because it’s mine.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From my father.”
“Where did he get it?”
“From his father.”
“And where did he get it?”
“He fought for it.”
“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”
“”"
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9358361-get-off-this-estate-what-for-because-it-s-mine-where
I mean this in good faith, what’s the alternative? That anyone could enter anyone’s house freely? Or that everything is shared (owned by the state, which would give it too much power).
Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.
The general idea is recognizing a right to “personal property”, which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of “private property”, which you get from buying something.
Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.
In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.
Landlords hate this idea.
Here’s a really super basic summary:
https://www.workers.org/private-property/
And here’s a long complicated discussion:
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property
Part of the problem, I think, is that in common vernacular, ‘landlord’ also applies to people that are renting out a room of their personal house. The pro-landlord propaganda likes to hold them up as the gold standard we’re attacking.
We need to be clear that we’re absolutely not talking about the couple that’s renting out their kid’s old room to get through tough times. They’re also victims of the same system, being forced to sacrifice personal property at the altar of capitalism.
We’re talking about a very minor amount of priviledged people who have the spare property to rent. Even a room. Most impoverished people live in apartments. We do not own them, none of the income taken from us for rent is returned to us (unlike property ownership via a mortgage in which case value is literally returned to you), and we are only able to roomshare or sublet. Neither of which is what youre describing.
Not dismissing that middle class property owning families cant fall on hard times and have to fight to maintain the class position they occupy, just pointing out that the majority of us would do anything to have a home with a spare room to rent out. Thats a dream that many many people in my generation will never come close to achieving.
We shouldn’t have to appeal to the class anxieties of middle class people. The fact that we suffer is a rallying cause enough. There are enough poor people to tear the system down if we all worked together. Its appealing to our shared suffering. Class consciousness and solidarity. Its recognizing our collective struggle and fighting back against power. It doesn’t happen by making concessions to land owners. The threat of having to downsize is nothing compared with the threat of being homeless if you have to go to the hospital. The threat of losing everything if you get an injury. The impoverished and the marginalized live with guns aimed at every one of their vital organs. From birth to death under duress at the hands of the state. I dont really give a fuck what land owners are going through. We’d kill to have to downsize.
We’re talking about a very minor amount of priviledged people who have the spare property to rent.
Proceeds to rant about them for multiple paragraphs without mentioning the corporations that own entire subdivisions of apartment complexes.
Nice aim.
As always, the poor are human shields for the rich.
Ain’t no war but class war.
Or even honestly, the middle aged couple that was able to upgrade houses without selling, and lets their old house to a young couple for a reasonable rate because it’s paid off. Which, in my rural experience, is really common. I am very grateful to a man that I didn’t and still don’t particularly like, because he rented me a nice property for a very fair rate. I could say similar things about other past landlords. The difference is when it’s not an investment, but a business. Treating housing like a business interaction cheapens human life, and I have lived in that situation as well, to varying degrees. The worst was an apartment in Park City UT that was owned by some yuppies in Massachusetts, part of some sheisty lease/timeshare property LLC, where the building super was just a power tripping asshole with no accountability. I’m rambling, but Landlord Bad is too simple for a complex situation.
Or like if somebody inherits a house while they already have one, and decide to rent it out, that’s fine too.
The private vs personal is introducing vocab to make a difference between ‘walmart is private property’ and ‘my house is private property’. We’re proposing that it’s ‘walmart is private property’ and ‘my house is personal property’.
I’m baked and deleted a paragraph because it turned to rambling.
I don’t like corporations owning housing.
How does no private property square with something like a car, that costs money to produce, has less inherent value than a home, and depreciates in value unlike a home?
I think I understand, but it gets murky for me after a point. Not trying to argue, just learn.
The idea is, we abolish the concept of private property, but retain the concept of personal property.
Personal property being stuff that’s used by one person, or ome family, or one small group, and ownership rights come from that use.
So a car would be the personal property of the driver or drivers who use it - the same as a computer or microwave or toothbrush would be the personal property of the person or people who used it. You drive it, you fuel it, you repair it, and that’s what makes it yours.
How to produce and distribute goods (like houses and cars and toothbrushes) without a system of private property, purchase, and ownership is a major site of leftist contention 😆
Word, thank you, and anybody else that commented on my stoned Wondering. I agree in concept but it’s always difficult to imagine in practice because we’ve all just lived with this
If we can’t dream big, all we can do is maintain the status quo. And the status quo kind of sucks.
Anarchists (including us) mostly talk about personal vs private property. For example in an anarchist society nobody is going to take your toothbrush or house, but you aren’t allowed to own a house you don’t live in (yet still charge for) nor a factory where other people work, those things would be communally owned and cared for, or given to someone in need (in the case of a house). So it’s kind of a semi-ownership at least compared to how it is now, you get what you need, not more than that.
You don’t own the stall of a public toilet and you can still expect to use it without having people walk on you. It’s like we can all agree to distribute resources and keep rights like privacy without the need of property.
how about instead of restricting all ownership, you instead just limited it.
My idea is that basically once anybody hits 10 million in net worth (for example), then we just say ‘well done, you’ve completed it mate’. Now fuck off down the beach and don’t come back.
Basically tax any further income of any kind at 100%.
This. Then just put up a scoreboard of who’s excess revenue is providing the most tax revenue to the public, then they can play for first place and we can all benefit off of their sociopathic narcissism. Everybody wins.
While I agree with you, in principle, I much prefer my toilet than a public toilet with partial privacy and partial cleanliness.
I think it’s going to be interesting when we move from private ownership of cars to self driving, shared, how there may be different classes again, like trains of old. It’s inevitable we transition. The gig economy is effectively a more even distribution of resource usage with benefits environmentally. However, we need to ensure it’s more even ownership too, which is looking unlikely at this point.
Self driving cars are not going to stop car ownership, that’s pure CEO fantasy. The logistics of it doesn’t make any sense. Gig economy it’s the opposite of even distribution, it’s companies owning everything and workers owning nothing. Stop drinking the neoliberal kool aid.
Gig economy is better distribution of asset use, as I said. The problem to correct is distribution of ownership, again as I already said. Stop drinking the socialism kool aid. Nobody owning cars is more likely than community ownership.
Car ownership may not go away but it’s likely to decrease. It’s rare in America to not own a car. It’s less rare in cities with good public transport, eg New York, Europe. Self driving, on demand taxis may mean the same effect is carried over to places that currently don’t have great public transport.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon#Private_property_and_the_state
Some good reading to start with.
One of the main things to take away is that there’s a difference between personal property and private property.
Personal property are things like your clothes, your home, the items you use regularly.
Private property are things you own but don’t personally use, don’t take real responsibility for.
For example, if you have the money, you can purchase a factory. But a factory is too large an item for one person to ever claim they personally run the whole thing and take full responsibility for. There’s many people involved in running a factory, from cleaners to accountants, do they not also take responsibility for their part?
If the factory could never run without all of these workers, can the owner really claim that the factory is theirs? It is everyone who works there’s. Why then does the owner get to keep all the money the factory produces? Because they stumped up some cash a few years ago?
The owners are smart enough to pay you for your labour. Maybe even a bonus for a successful year. Some benefits maybe when people start unionising and demanding more. But at the end of the day, the owner still gets the vast vast majority of the profits despite not putting in the vast majority of the work. How is this fair?
I’ve run out of steam now, it’s been a long day, but if you genuinely meant your comment in good faith have a read of the links above.
Concepts of ownership aren’t going to stop you from walking into someone else’s house currently
For the majority it will
And the majority wouldn’t go into other peoples’ homes because it’s someone else’s living space if we went to that model.
There’s a difference between “private property” and “personal property”. Arguably any personal property is private property but not all private property is personal property. And it’s that private property which doesn’t need to exist.
Everyone gets their own home. The land is shared and distributed among the population according to their needs.
Who decides what amount/type of land one “needs”?
The populus.
I haven’t seen a consensus, have you?
The richest trillionaire (Musk), who gets to bribe and cheat his way into a position of power. Guess how much land he’s gonna give you?
The Dude would just say fuck it and not even bother arguing and tell Brandt that the Big Lebowski told him to take any one of his rental properties as The Dude’s own.
that is what he did with the rug lol
thatsthejoke.jpg
i am the walrus
Ultimately it comes down to might makes right. That’s the final argument of kings (the barrel of a gun). For all the progress we’ve made we still can’t escape the account of Thrasymachus.
Relevant passage from The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow:
Let’s begin by asking: what did the inhabitants of New France make of the Europeans who began to arrive on their shores in the sixteenth century?
At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian and Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron), concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn’t refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen.
But if French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tended to be decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’ What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.
Twenty years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar, wrote similar things of the Wendat nation. Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following passages he was clearly echoing Wendat opinion: ‘They have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions.’ Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’
Hell I’d take the right to build my own at this point. But I don’t trust the U.S. to be worth living in for any foreseeable future.
I mean we’re staring down the barrel of total civilization collapse by 2050 if we don’t get climate change under control, so I mean, I’m not sure anywhere is gonna be all that good.
However, your point stands.
By 2050 due to climate change? I don’t think so.
There will be disruption, but collapse due primarily to climate change is further away than 20 years.
I mean, better to have 25 more years of relative normativity than 4 or less
False dichotomy.
Would you happen to be a landlord?
It’s not a dichotomy. It’s just a comparison. There is no suggestion that these are the only two options.
It’s only presenting two options while there are more reasonable options than the two presented. But we could say it’s a strawman since it’s presenting a scenario of an evil landlord in an attempt to make the alternative seem more reasonable.
Either way it’s fallacious logic and it’s all moot since free housing isn’t feasible. Another day, another leftist shitpost.
You wanna name any of these alternatives, or are we just using the fallacy fallacy to wave away arguments we don’t like?
Perhaps, as you claim, free housing isn’t feasible. But you can walk up any road in any street in any city in the world to find a real example of this “strawmanned” landlord.
Incorrect.
