Socialism_Everyday
@Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 4 days ago:
You claim I haven’t read the papers, yet you’re confusing social mobility (not mentioned in the paper) with residential mobility (the one referenced). From the study you linked:
In addition, reduced housing mobility stemming from rent control can lead to decreased labor mobility
Housing mobility or residential mobility is a distinct concept, and you’re either not reading or misunderstunding. It’s what I referred to when I talked about evictions. The article is even explicit about it:
This mismatch can lead to situations where, for instance, an elderly widow remains in a large rent-controlled apartment long after her family has moved out, while larger households are desperately looking for homes of an appropriate size
This is explicitly about evicting people so that others can move in, that’s literally what “residential mobility” means, and it’s the mobility that the study is referring to, not social mobility as in ascending in income.
- Comment on Moon talk 6 days ago:
Yeah, if it weren’t for NATO making EU subservient to the US, it would have been invaded by them.
- Comment on Moon talk 6 days ago:
The greatest human invention murdered hundreds of millions through colonialism?
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 6 days ago:
Almost as if I had already given answer to those points in my previous comment about supply of housing (Buenos Aires example) or reduced construction (publicly driven construction) and you just refused to address those points! I explicitly said rent control is a band-aid and I gave solutions to literally every “problem” you brought up in the study such as higher rent for uncontrolled units (control them all), lower mobility (that’s a good thing meaning people get evicted less), and reduced residential construction (can be solved by public construction and has historically been solved like that).
Half of your original claim was that it does nothing to solve rent prices, and your own source claims that you’re wrong on that, and you have the ballz to be here questioning my sourcing abilities lmao
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 6 days ago:
Your original claim:
Rent control does NOT control prices
Your source:
rent control appears to be very effective in achieving lower rents for families in controlled units
You are very smart
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 6 days ago:
Source: Dude, trust me
I literally provided a source lmfao
I know that you just linked the very first link on google
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.
Third of all, nobody ever responds to response papers
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.
you’re not able to provide sources
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.
- Comment on Soon... 1 week ago:
You can do both, I don’t see the problem with doing anticapitalist propaganda on the internet, it’s probably what pushed me most towards organizing
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
I don’t know why you keep bringing up the word “ideal”. Marxists are opposed to idealism, we’re staunch materialists. Saying that “things change over time and place” doesn’t automatically negate historical examples , and following those historical examples doesn’t imply not achieving progressive victories over time.
You claim to follow the path that works, but that’s what the western left has been following for the past 50 years and look where that led us.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
You’re describing the Soviet model of housing. Flats were often assigned by the union of the worker, and the rent dues were about 3% of the monthly income, which paid for basic maintenance. Homelessness was eliminated and housing was constantly improved through the construction of literal millions of housing units per year, more than any country at the time.
Urban planning was also cool, organized in so-called “Mikroraion” (microdistricts) with accessibility on-foot to basic services being the core of planning. Green spaces, health centres, childcare and social activities were all within a 15-minute walk (the neighborhoods in most Eastern Block countries retain these features with whatever services haven’t been dismantled in capitalism). Quality affordable public transit (e.g. Moscow metro) also ensured mobility.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
The landlord is casting the grenade and knife rain spell on the child
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
I’m glad you’re a human with empathy and good intentions, but tenants shouldn’t be in a position that their housing (one of the most fundamental rights of people) relies on the good will of whatever landlord they happen to be stuck with.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Why not though? The experiments done in housing nationalization have been extremely successful in abolishing homelessness and guaranteeing access to affordable housing. In Cuba, if you study in (completely free) public university, the state assigns you a flat at no cost. In the Soviet Union, housing used to cost 3% of monthly incomes back in the 1970s.
Imagine the possibilities that we could get with 50+ years of technological and industrial development if we nationalized housing in the west…
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
It’s not a utopia, housing has been nationalized successfully in several countries, with the result of the abolition of homelessness, extremely affordable rent (think 3% of monthly incomes), and evictions essentially not existing.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
I’m genuinely happy for you getting a good landlord, but access to housing shouldn’t be conditioned by being lucky to get a decent and altruistic landlord (a minority in people’s experience, hence the massive upvotes of the post).
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away
Me too and you make a great point. The problem isn’t with renting homes as a concept, it’s with renting from a private owner at market prices. Publicly owned housing for rent at maintenance cost-prices would eliminate the exploitative relationship and still allow people to rent for as long as they want.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Vienna isn’t a bad model but it’s progressively becoming less significant because in capitalism you have to be constantly fighting to maintain the little progresses you make.
We’ve had better, such as the Soviet Union, where housing was a guaranteed right, rent costed 3% of the average income, and homelessness was abolished.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
There’s mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues
Rent control obviously reduces prices. By setting up a maximum price, prices can’t raise further, it’s not rocket science. This policy was literally implemented in my homeland, Spain, when a few years ago an inflation-cap was implemented so that rents can’t rise above CPI. This has saved millions and millions of euros of tenants, again, because it’s not rocket science: if you correctly implement a rent cap (not difficult), prices don’t go above the cap.
The same happened with the Berlin rent freeze that passed through referendum and was applied to some areas of the city. The comparative economic studies that analyzed the evolution of prices in rent-capped areas proved empirically that prices had gone up slower in rent-capped areas than in free market regime. I don’t know what kind of bullshit neoliberal YouTuber you’re watching, but they’re lying to you about empirical evidence.
As for housing supply, I agree, rent cap affects supply, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When Milei removed rent caps from Buenos Aires, it became easier to find listed flats for rent in the city: because the people formerly living there were evicted since they couldn’t afford to pay fucking rent! What a great solution neoliberals offer us: just fucking evict the poors!! I’ve already brought up evidence you can look up, can you do the same to prove your point? Spoiler alert: no you can’t because neoliberalism is anti-scientific.
Regardless, rent cap is only meant to be a temporary measure and I agree that it won’t solve fundamentally the underlying issue behind housing: treating as a commodity instead of as a human right. Build millions of public housing units, force businesses to move to smaller cities to fight overcentralization, do good urban planning, and establish socially owned housing. It’s the only model that has abolished homelessness in history, and you can keep denying reality, but Soviets enjoyed rents of 3% of average income throughout their lives while people in the modern capitalist world can choose between spending 40% of their wage in housing or literally dying in the streets.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Ok, agreed, but then the problem is with disgusting urban planning, people living in cars is just a dirty band-aid
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Thanks for your insightful responses to the replies of my comment, I won’t respond to them because you already perfectly explained it. Good work, comrade
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
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
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.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Just wanna point out that both BlackRock and your average landlord gramma have exactly the same class interests in fighting against rent control, rent freeze, or construction of affordable social housing.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
That’s more of a testament of how fucked up housing is in your area. That would be like saying tents are more vital than housing because many homeless use them instead.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Marxist 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
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
It’s only a parasitic financial relationship when the rented property is on the hands of a private owner. We could totally have collectively/publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs, which would 100% remove the exploitation.
- Comment on Landlords are parasites 1 week ago:
Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart
Your comparison is valid, but it works against your interests. Your local grocer, as a business owner, is every bit against rising minimum wage as Walmart is: both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased, so the class relations between them and their workers make them support anti-worker-rights policy.
In the same manner, your local landlord has every reason to be as opposed to measures such as rent caps or rent freezes as BlackRock.
Yes, rent should exist as an alternative to home ownership, but the housing for rent should be publicly owned and rented at maintenance-cost prices as has been done successfully in many socialist countries before that managed to abolish homelessness. As an example, by the 1970s rent in the Soviet Union costed about 3% of the monthly average income.
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 1 week ago:
You may disagree with the first statement on being an imperialist propaganda outlet, but the rest of information is relevant.
I don’t get your point of posting the article on the Shining Path, though
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 1 week ago:
supplementary wikis
We have them, e.g. ProleWiki, but good luck trying to explain to the average western Wikipedia user that for certain geopolitical topics they might be worth checking out and contrasted with Wikipedia. My problem isn’t the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia in geopolitically charged topics.
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 1 week ago:
Tankies don’t think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.
Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.
For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.
This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the “both sides are bad” style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.
So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don’t specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn’t really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.
- Comment on Employers Who Steal Wages Should Be Made Criminally Liable 1 week ago:
So, all employers? Surplus value is wage theft by definition.
- Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel 2 weeks ago:
Which of the several things I mentioned while paraphrasing the video titles?