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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Official communist stance: Corporate landlords who spend all their resources into buying more houses to price everyone out of the market. Renting out a single room out of your family house is immoral, but doesn't hold a candle to the absolute evil of corporate landlords.
Remember: Communists don't give a shit about individuals; that's liberalism. They care about systems and dismantling them. It's those who throw themselves in front of those systems to defend them who end up becoming causalities. There are plenty of examples in socialist history where the most evil of abusers would willingly give up their power (out of cowardice) and would ultimately go on to live a normal life. Perfect example of this was the literal king of China who the figurehead of the system oppressing them. When the communists won they gave up their power and their response was pretty much "You had no way of knowing what you were doing was wrong, we're going to teach you why it was wrong" and even though it was a LOT of work, they did eventually get the picture and integrated into post-monarchy society.
TL;DR don't die on the hill and you won't die on the hill
Why? It seems to me that if you’re accommodating having someone in your home, being compensated for that inconvenience wouldn’t be immoral. Certainly not any more immoral than having that room go unused would be.
You are entering a business relation where you have all of the power and their livelihood is completely at your whim. This is deeply coercive.
What’s the moral alternative?
Publicly owned housing.
Unionized housing is also a great option, where all rent is democratically controlled by the tenants and goes towards enriching your lives.
That's certainly a more directly achievable plan within the framework of Capitalism, absolutely. Still, ideally all housing would be publicly or personally owned.
Idealism is the enemy of material change. We can fantasize about a perfect world all we want but that won't make anyone's lives better. What does drive change is fucking around and finding out. Seeing what works, what doesn't, and then working off of that.
I'm a Materialist, I understand. They were asking what the Morally superior option is, which I provided.
Public and personal housing is therefore the goal, which can be achieved by building up the Productive Forces and working towards it. In the meantime, unionized tenants can form an immediate improvement on their material conditions at no cost to society at large.
And in this fucked up capitalist hellscape we won't even get that 😔
Decommodify housing so that everyone can buy a house if they want to. That way renting becomes a choice, rather than forced on them.
Right…
What’s the moral alternative for an individual without the power to make that change, who you said would be behaving immorally if they rented out a room from their family home?
Decouple immoral actions from your person. That's liberalism. No self-respecting socialist would see someone stealing bread and call them immoral for the situation their material conditions forced them into. They would call the situation immoral and they would be right.
Self-sacrifice is false consciousness and akin to moral austerity.
Oh! So your statement was basically “a situation where someone has to rent a room from someone, even if that person is just renting a room out of their family house, is immoral?” That clears things up - thanks for explaining.
A world where people don't have to be forced into renting is not the world we live in but is one which is worth working towards. Better you get the money to support yourself than some greedy capitalist who is the reason why housing is even a problem in the first place.
That's not what people are saying. The situation itself is immoral, but you would not individually call people doing the best they can within that framework immoral.
Saying that "there's no ethical consumption under Capitalism" isn't damning for the consumers, but for Capitalism itself.
Thanks for clarifying. Phrased / thought of as “a situation wherein X happens is immoral,” it makes sense.
My confusion came from not doing that, even after reading the “Remember:” text in the comment, thanks to my conflating my personal belief that the individuals who are part of corporations that purchase houses in mass and rent them out are behaving immorally (vs being actors in an immoral situation) being adjacent with a statement about an individual renting out a room.
That concept of morality feels more similar to what I think of as “fairness” (though not an exact match) than to individual morality.
I feel like there must be a different word used to convey the moral judgment of someone who isn’t doing the best they can within the framework - i.e., someone who is choosing to exploit laborers for profit in excess of anything they could use for themselves.
Because this is rent-seeking, which leads to exploitation of labor via owning Capital.
Rent-seeking behavior is when you seek economic rent (more compensation than is required for a resource to be employed) without creating value. If you repurpose a room to make it available to someone to rent, you’re creating value. Likely part of how you’re creating that value is via your own labor.
The home you live in is generally considered to be personal property, not private property, so ownership of capital isn’t happening in this scenario. “Doing X is immoral because it leads to you doing Y, which is immoral” (that it would lead to the exploitation of labor) is a slippery slope argument without any basis (and with plenty of anecdotal counterpoints).
You are not creating Value by allowing someone to use a room for a fee. This is just using the already created Value to rent-seek.
Using a room to rent out becomes Private Property, not Personal Property.
You created value when you made the room suitable for someone else’s use rather than your own. The room was not available and now it is. Value is an output, and the room didn’t intrinsically have value.
Your understanding of rent-seeking is not one I’ve seen literally anywhere else. What’s the basis for that?
How so?
The "Value" of the room was created when it was constructed and taxed. The "additional value" of a remodel will be reflected in the tax statements and property value (which is usually a return when sold). The room always had value, just not as a business asset which you want. These comments and the ones below are some of the craziest mental gymnastics I've seen this year. "but the landlord is my hero and stopped me from freezing by charging me 150% on the only place I can afford because all the real mean landlords took all the other houses". It's a scam, a con. A lord and serf arrangement carried on through centuries of oppression. It's a grift, has been since it's inception. Which came first, a house or a landlord? Which one was necessary and which one was created with excess capital that was distributed unequally?
There's no new value being created, the room was created once. Renting it out takes no labor, it isn't a service, it is literally just seeking income from ownership. "Value" isn't some mystical thing, it's a measure of inputs and outputs, and in the case of renting a room out, there are no new inputs.
It becomes Private Property the second you become a landlord and rent-seek. Rather than using it for yourself, you seek value from ownership.
I'm using fairly standard understandings of rent-seeking, pretending that allowing someone else to use something you own via a fee is providing a service is landlord justification, it isn't a service.
So there is absolutely no value to let someone else have a place to sleep safely?
No, there is no "value" being created by it. Value isn't a representation of "good" or "bad," but an expression of inputs and outputs, the inputs being labor and natural resources, and the outputs being Value itself.
The idea that someone can rent out housing and yet never lose ownership of the principle and thus perpetually gain money simply because they had more money in the beginning creates no new Value, and is thus rent-seeking.
Pretty sure you could count not freezing to death, having a space to keep your things safe, health, stability etc as a value output.
Did you read my comment? Value is an output measured by inputs, ie labor and natural resources, not how "desirable" or "good" a concept is.
All of what you listed is absolutely a good thing, but isn't value. Value is used for commodities, not what is individually a good thing.
Official Communist stance: there is zero distinction between personal property and private property. Hand over you toothbrush.
It's the People's Democratic Toothbrush, thank you very much. Now do 100 push-ups for Dialectical Materialism and become a Professional Letarian, a Pro-Letarian if you will, comrade! /s