Comment on Landlords are parasites
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 4 days agoMarxist here. The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right, whereas rental of a car isn’t and neither of a hotel room. It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.
You are right in that landlords offer a commodity in demand for a fee, but it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work: it’s purely an unnecessary wealth transfer from wealth-less individuals who can’t afford a home to wealthy individuals who could afford (or more likely inherited) one. We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.
As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income. We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 4 days ago
So is food and water, but we still pay for them. It doesn’t take an economist to understand that it takes a lot of capital and labor to get these things to us, and these require money. Therefore, they have to be traded for to cover the costs. In this case, it’s by paying a fee.
This is ignorant because it assumes that rental market is static, when in fact, it is very much dynamic. How expensive or affordable rent is depends on things like supply, demand, and policy.
Who told you this? This is just wrong. This is the issue with Marxism as an ideology, it’s entirely a built on a house of cards. It’s entirely on baseless assumptions built on other baseless assumptions. Simply insisting that landlords don’t do anything without providing any substance is not a valid argument, that just the assertion fallacy.
Landlord do actually do stuff. They’re responsible for their property. This means they have to put in the work in maintaining it, not only to preserve their property’s value, but also because they’re liable if their property causes harm to their tenants or anybody else. Landlords are responsible for things like
Repairs for any structural decay, damage, or malfunction (this ranges from changing light bulbs to changing the entire heating system)
General maintenance like snow removal, pest removal, the general appearance of the building
All the legal mumbo jumbo like drafting up the leases, following regulations, and meeting safety standards
All the finances of the building, this is especially true for multifamily buildings. They have to pay for the sewage and water, because they’re shared by the whole building as well as the common electricity (usually has it’s own panel). They also have to deal with the hassle of paying the taxes and house insurance on the building.
Tenant relations, again this is especially true for multifamily buildings. Landlords have to be able to settle disputes and complaints between their tenants, and they have to be willing to take legal action against tenants that are causing harm to the others
This is all stuff that tenants would have to personally deal with if they owned property, but because they’re renting all of it get outsourced to the landlords. However, all of these involve the tenants actually being in the building. If there’s a vacant unit, the landlord is also responsible for inspecting the unit, cleaning it, advertising the vacancy, screening applicants, and signing the new tenants.
You might scoff at this as nothing, but it’s actually really annoying time consuming. So much so that there’s an entire industry that revolves around property management. There’s a reason why even rich people sometimes opt to rent instead of just buying a new place. To some people the hassle of owning and maintaining a property is just not worth it.
I’m aware, and Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true. Labor is just one component in the economy, not the only one. An economy needs capital, leadership, entrepreneurship, specialization (education/expertise), and innovation on top of labor to function.
It’s funny you say this because this show that you actually have no idea what you’re talking about. Three things:
Soviet workers didn’t have a normal income like we do. Their incomes were centrally planned by the government, and they were distributed as a part of national budgeting scheme. Soviet incomes were not based on merit, demand, experience, or specialization but on administrative policy. This means that a doctor and a factory worker got paid a similar amounts, and Soviet salaries were notorious for being very low.
The Soviet Union actually set the rents via policy. A part of the reason why the predetermined government salaries were so low is because so many things were heavily subsidized, including housing. That was the government’s grand argument as to why people got next to nothing, they argued that they’re getting benefits elsewhere. Now, the government decided they would impose a symbolic 3-6% (depends on the regions) rental fee to remind people that housing was allocated, not owned, and could be revoked and reassigned at any time.
The Soviet Union solution to housing is one of the most historically famous examples of failure. They central government was very inefficient and ignorant in their planning. They allocated a lot of resources to build factories but barely any for houses for the workers that moved there, they set out of touch housing quotas that did not align with local needs, and they were rigid and uncoordinated in their execution which led to a lot of poor quality buildings and a lot of delays. The buildings that did get built were plagued with mismanaged, poor maintenance, and extremely long wait lists. You might not know this, but the Soviet housing model that you idolize actually had a lot, and I mean a lot, of housing shortages. That system collapsed for a reason.
Keep in mind, I am not against the idea of public housing. I do think that government has role to play in helping solve the housing crises. There are some people who lack the means to ever get housing on their own regardless of how affordable the market is, and those people should get government subsidized housing. However, this means that public housing should only apply to a specific subsection of the population, not the whole population. Trying to centrally control and plan the housing market will just lead to a fiasco similar what the Soviet Union experienced. That’s a not a real solution, that’s just introducing a host of unnecessary problems.
Our current system works, it’s been proven to work. What it needs is some tweaks and updates to get it back on track. It’s really not that complicated, we have a housing shortage, so we need to build way more houses. We want lower prices, so have to build so many units that the supply eclipses the demand. We want more dense, less car centric housing, then we have to update our zoning laws to allow it. We want to speed things up, so we have to remove obstacles standing in the way like unnecessarily long approval processes for new construction.
We can’t cling on to failed ideologies like Marxism as some sort of new and innovative solution, because it’s not. Marxism is a proven failure, and that won’t change this time or the next. If we want to get anything done we have to remain practical, nuanced, realistic, knowledgeable, precise with our discourse and policy. That’s our only way forward.
You never explained why you think this is the case, you just insist that it is by constantly repeating it. Tell me the specific mechanics that you believe make private renting inherently unfair or exploitative, because I don’t see any legitimate case for this position.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 4 days ago
But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again. Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott’s 2014 paper. There has been no serious reply to this paper, or any followup by neoliberal economists finding any other variable explaining the creation of value to the extent that labour does. It is empirically true that labour is the only source of value, and you would need empirical evidence to argue otherwise, which you don’t have because it doesn’t exist.
Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I’ll come up with the references later, busy now, but you’re just making stuff up.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Source: Dude, trust me
I know that you just linked the very first link on google that appeals to your confirmation bias, because based on the content of this paper, you 100% did not read it.
First of all, this is not a study. It’s a response paper by 3 Marxist academics to another study that they disagreed with. Second of all, at no point in this response do they ever make the claim that labor is the only source of value in an economy. They just argue that it is a significant factor of value, which was supposedly not factored in the study they’re critiquing. So you saying that they argued that “labour is the only source of value” is just you making things up. Third of all, nobody ever responds to response papers except for the authors of the original study being critiqued, and that only ever happens on occasion. So this is not the smoking gun you think it is.
You won’t provide anything, ever, because you have nothing. You’re just straight up factually wrong on this.
…and there it is! You tried googling for anything to confirm your biases, but you couldn’t find anything because you’re wrong. Instead of being honest and admitting that you’re wrong, you did what all Marxists do and made up the lamest excuse imaginable as to why you can’t provide sources for your own claims. You can’t even defend what you say. This is just sad dude.
Your grand rebuttal is just you saying that I’m wrong without even providing any substance, you’re not able to provide sources because there’s nothing that supports what you say, and you can’t even elaborate on your own opinions. Yeah, I’m totally the one who doesn’t listen to facts, get real.
Look, Bart just did the thing! When a Marxist is called out on their bullshit and they’re clearly proven to be wrong, they can’t be honest and admit they’re wrong, that’s would be acting in good faith and that’s just against the core of the ideology. Therefore, you have to come up with any lame ass pejorative or insult to shut down the conversation without addressing anything. That way you get to feel like a pseudo intellectual without actually accepting your ignorance. Classic Marxism.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 2 days ago
I literally provided a source lmfao
I did not, I’ve read the whole exchange between Nitzan and Bichler and Cockshott, he has many videos on his YouTube channel talking about LVT and empirical demonstrations, and you can go through the references of the paper I sent such as the Zacchariah multi-country study.
That would be a good point if LVT wasn’t an extremely politically important point. If neoliberal economists had any sort of empirical proof showing otherwise, they’d be more than happy to share it, but there are no studies in the academia providing this. Please search them for me if you will.
As for references for why you’re wrong, you can go through Albert Szymanski’s “human rights in the Soviet Union”, Robert B Allen’s “Farm to Factory”, Pat Sloan’s “Soviet Democracy” or Alec Nove’s “economic history of the USSR” (paraphrasing the title of the last one because I read it long ago). You can go through my comment history and find references to all of those books if you want, but I have nothing to prove to you.
I gave you a summary paper collecting references several studies on labour theory of value, that’s already more evidence than you have provided. When you actually bring up sources to the conversation you may change my mind and make me do the effort, but you won’t do that I bet.