this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Individual, alienated, consumer decisions are ethical? This is what happens when no class analysis. Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents. Landlords are bad because their interests align with the interests of the ruling class, and they oppose the interests of the working class, who they exploit as a class. the contingent material realities of owning property for the sole purpose of getting personal income has the effect of changing peoples beliefs and behaviors. The system warps their worldview and pits them against the workers, but it is the system that benefits one class by exploiting another that is the enemy, not individual landlords. It is the system that alienates and exploits.
There are undoubtedly evil, unethical people who are drawn to real estate and speculation, and I would have serious reservations calling the bourgeois capitalist executive of some giant real estate development/property management company a "good person." But an individual owner of a 200k property (which is essentially nothing, a tiny house far from any urban area), which may have come to them through a lifetime of earnings, or just lucked into it or inherited it from a family member, is not by default a class enemy or individually ontologically evil. They may become that, though owning a single small property wouldn't produce much income; forcing them to either sell or expand with the market.
I really don't see the point of lecturing somebody over a fucking 401k. Must be nice living in a perfectly hermetically sealed ethical bubble, into which no evil ever permeates. People out here calling themselves leftists while recreating the underlying logic of religious purity politics.
I’m sorry, what? Any form of unearned income (i.e. not producing any real goods/services) is fundamentally taking away from productive investment and therefore bad.
Let’s not even talk about class interests or exploitation for the moment. If you spend 30% of your income on paying rent, you now have 30% less money to spend on real goods and services, spending that actually keep the local economy going and circulated into the hands of the working people.
Instead, 30% of that money (and that’s a huge proportion in aggregate of the whole population) are being funneled to the top 1%, most of whom will not re-invest into their local community or economy. Instead, those money will be spent on driving up even higher property prices, which in turn makes rent and mortgage more expensive for everyone else.
But yes, most people investing in 401k aren’t even anywhere close to the obscene amount of wealth of the top 1%. So there’s no point scolding them. However, the point that landlord’s rent seeking behavior isn’t “bad” is just pure nonsense.
The original argument was "any form of investment is a form of rent seeking, land lords are rent seeking, landlords are bad, so investment is bad."
I didn't say landlords aren't bad, I said that what makes them bad isn't their individual consumer decisions, but the decisions they are likely to make with the ruling class against our working class.
When I'm talking to other leftists I'm hoping that we share some common values. My fear is that we share values but we don't understand the material circumstances from which those values manifest. There is a reason we are against private property, rent seeking, etc., but it isn't ethical. We use a materialist dialectic. If not we are no different from religious zealots and liberals. Our beliefs aren't shibboleths, they emerge out of revolutionary necessity. I'm not picking friends or people I agree with, I'm trying to engage with messy, contradiction laden politics; History, not dogma.
The action of rent seeking is bad, but it doesn't make someone a class enemy by sheer virtue. It dehumanizes over time, people become class enemies, they arent born evil. And people can change. All I was saying was there are cases where regular people are just going along with what their material circumstances dictate, like op, and there's absolutely no point in trying to make them feel bad about it or alienate them from the broader movement. We should be bringing people in, not locking people out. This is an ethical value that I believe more than nit picking their investments or lack thereof. If we don't understand why rent seeking is bad, then we end up making lousy formulations like the one I was responding to.
When you quote me like that its like you're just trying to misconstrue what I'm trying to say, and I don't know what the point of that would even be. The post I was responding to used a really bad example, with the $200k investment even, so it was clear to me where they were coming from. You seem to want to make it look like I'm saying being a landlord is okay. What I'm saying is that if you ever want to get something done politically for the working class, you will have to do it in a way that splits the petty bourgeoisie; and the only way to do that is by objectively understanding and appealing to their material interests, and not alienating them as individuals. And that is never gonna happen when your method of critique coarsely amounts to "Landlords bad."
this is Tailism, plain and simple. we won't ever unite the 'workers of the world' by adopting less rigorous theory and softening our platform for the benefit of whatever portion of the 'petty bourgeoisie' is more centrist/fascist than right/fascist, especially if we are trying to 'appeal to their material interests'. the 'petty bourgeoisie' do not have the same material interests as the proletariat, they are in fact diametrically opposed. first world workers at least, especially 'labor aristocracy' or 'petty bourgeoisie' will necessarily have a decrease in their material comfort and economic 'well-being' in the case of revolutionary world communism, they have an unequal share of the world's wealth as imperialist citizens. any bourgeois class traitors should be using their unearned wealth for the cause, not to grant them the most comfortable life they can get under the circumstances. if you are investing a bunch of money, put it towards strike funds or something, not just your retirement.
You're right, the petty bourgeoisie will have to work with the proletariat to abolish their class, just as the proletariat will have to work to abolish our class. They will have to work against their interests as capitalists. This has happened before and it will happen again, because if revolution is to happen it will be a necessity. So "appealing to" material interests as capitalists is impossible, I agree. But unless you plan on guillotining millions of people, there will have to be an appeal to a material interest that emerges as a contradiction to their interests as capitalists, that will emerge from the struggle for revolutionary conditions. So you caught me out on a technicality, but my point still stands. The mass movement will include people who are from the petty bourgeois classes, unless you disqualify them from it on essentialist grounds. If you can't deal with contradiction in your analysis then you're not doing critical analysis, you're participating in an aesthetic.
the point i meant to make is that class traitors cannot be motivated by material gain, because they will never get it under communism. we have to unite everyone that actually does stand to gain to implement communism, diluting our methods and platform so that lanyards can stay comfy is not communism. no one is disqualifying class traitors, but they absolutely cannot be primarily or even partially motivated by material gains for themselves, because they will choose capitalism over communism every time in that case, they will misinterpret theory and dilute the cause and message. paying into your 401k for your retirement is not revolutionary, it is normal selfish behavior. it doesn't disqualify you from participating in revolution, but is not itself a revolutionary activity.
Only if you limit "material interests" to the realm of capital. As materialists, we only deal with material interests, and those interests include the realm of social interests.
But I can think of historical examples too. During the Minneapolis uprising of 1934, the Teamsters shut down all trucking within the city that attempted to ship goods without the truckers union. One of the groups that emerged was petty agricultural producers that trucked their own agricultural goods to markets. The Teamsters gave these petty producers passes to truck their goods, which while keeping the food supply for the city available so that people wouldn't starve, it also split these petty producers from the reactionary forces. I can think of a more recent example in Seattle with the campaign to pass a $15 minimum wage. small restaurant owners were allowed a few years to implement those changes whereas other cities which required an across the board implementation for small businesses as well as large ones, the campaigns failed or were quickly rolled back. And no, neither of those movements were revolutionary (though the teamsters rebellion was pretty spicy) but they were progress for workers that was only successful by splitting the petty bourg by making concessions to their material interests.
And maybe this is where we diverge as communists, as I don't see a road to actual communism that comes from an uncompromising adherence to the maximum program. Its politics all the way down.
My point in the post above is more directed toward the creation of a socialist material interest that supercedes capitalist material interests, but I can support both perspectives given the right historical circumstances and a powerful materialist dialectic
Leftists can do a little landlording as a treat