Hey folks
I have been receiving a lot of messages every single day about federation with hexbear. Some of our users are vehemently against it, others are in full support. The conversation does not seem to be dying down, rather, the volume of messages I receive about it seems to be increasing, so I am opening this public space where we can openly discuss the topic.
I am going to write a wall of text about my own thoughts on the situation, I’m sorry, but no tl;dr this time, and I ask anybody participating in this thread to first read through this post before commenting.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that for anybody who participates here, it is required to focus on the quality of your posts. That means:
- Be kind to each other, even if you disagree
- Use arguments rather than calling people names
- Realize that this is a divisive topic, so your comments should be even more thoughtful than usual
With that out of the way, there are a few things I want to cover.
On defederation in general
First of all, I am a firm believer that defederation must be reserved only for cases where all other methods have failed. If defederation is used liberally, then a small group of malicious users can effectively completely shut down the federated network, by simply creating the type of drama between instances which would inevitably result in defederation. In my view, federation is the biggest strength of Lemmy compared to any centralized discussion forum, so naturally I think maintaining federation by default is an important goal in general.
I am also a believer in the value of deplatforming hateful content, but I think defederation is not the best way to do this. Banning individual users, banning communities and establishing a culture of mutual support between mods and admins of different instances should be the first line of defense against such content. There are some further steps that can be taken before defederation as well, but these are not really documented anywhere (in order to prevent circumvention). The point is: for myself, defederation is the absolute last resort, only to be used when it is completely clear that other methods are ineffective.
Finally, I am wary of creating a false expectation among lemm.ee users that lemm.ee admins endorse all users and communities and content on instances we are federated with. Here at lemm.ee, we use a blocklist for federation, which means our default apporach is to federate with all new instances. We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities, and the ability to block entire instances is coming very soon as well.
Having said all that, in a situation where all other methods do indeed fail, defederation is not out of the question. Making such a call is up to the discretion of lemm.ee admins, and doing it as a last resort is completely in line with our federation policy.
Regarding hexbear
Hexbear is an established Lemmy instance, focused on many flavors of leftism. They have quite a large userbase who are very active on Lemmy (often so active that they leave the impression brigading all popular Lemmy posts). One important thing to note is that while some forms of bigotry seem to be quite accepted by many hexbear users (but seemingly not by mods - more on that below), they at least are very protective of LGBT rights (and yes, I am quite certain that they are not just pretending to do this, as many users seem to believe). Additionally, while I have noticed quite high quality posts from hexbear users, there are also several users there who seem to really enjoy trolling and baiting (very reminiscent of 4chan-type “for the lulz” posting), and it’s important to note that this kind of posting is in general allowed on hexbear itself.
The reason this whole topic is important to so many people right now (despite hexbear being a relatively old instance), is that hexbear only recently enabled federation. A combination of their volume of posts, their strong convictions, the excitement about federation, and the aforementioned trolling has made them very visible to almost all Lemmy users, and this has sparked discussions about the value of federation with hexbear on a lot of Lemmy instances.
My own experience with hexbear
I want to write down my own experience with interacting with hexbear users, mods, and admins over the past few days. I believe this experience will highlight why I am hesitant to advocate for immediate full defederation from hexbear at this point in time, and am for now still more in favor of taking action on a more individual user basis. Please read and see how you feel about the situation afterwards.
Background
My first real contact with hexbear users was in the comments section of a post in this meta community requesting defederation from hexbear by @glimpythegoblin@lemm.ee. That post is now locked, because several hexbear users very quickly started doing the aforementioned “for the lulz” type spamming of meme images in the comments (these are actually just emojis, but they are rendered as full-size images on all instances other than the source instance, due to a current Lemmy bug).
I did not want to take further actions in that thread in general (for archival purposes), but I did take one action, which in retrospect was a mistake: I removed a comment which contained the hammer and sickle symbol. I ignorantly associated this symbolism with Kremlin propaganda, and the atrocities my own people suffered at the hands of the soviet union during the previous century. Many users (including hexbear users) correctly (and politely) pointed out to me in DMs that the symbol has a much broader use than just as the symbol of the USSR, and people elsewhere in the world may not associate it with the USSR at all. I am grateful for users who pointed this out to me without resorting to personal attacks.
Let me be clear here: while I do not have anything against leftism or communist ideas in general (in fact in today’s world, I think discussion of such ideas is quite necessary), Kremlin propaganda has no place on lemm.ee. Any dehumanizing talking points of the Kremlin on lemm.ee are treated as any other bigotry, and if communist symbolism is used in context of Kremlin propaganda (that is the context in which I have been exposed to it throughout my whole life), then it will still be removed. But there is no blanket ban on communist symbolism in general on lemm.ee, and discussing and advocating for leftist and communist topics (as distinct from the imperialist and dehumanizing policies of the Kremlin) is certainly allowed on lemm.ee.
Hexbear user response
Coming back to the events of the past few days: soon after my removal of the comment containing the symbol from the meta thread, two posts popped up on hexbear. One was focused on insulting and spreading lies about me personally. Another was focused on diminishing the horrors of the soviet occupation in my country. In the comments under both of these posts (and in a few other threads on hexbear), I noticed some seriously disturbing bigotry against my people. There were comments which reflected the anti-Estonian propaganda of the current Russian state, things like:
- Suggesting that my people has no right to exist
- Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
- Claiming that anybody critical of both nazi and soviet occupations is themselves a nazi and a holocaust denier
I expect to hear such statements from the Russian state - here in Estonia, we are subjected to this and other kinds of bigotry constantly from Russian media - but to see it spread openly in non-Russian channels is extremely disturbing. Such bigotry is completely against lemm.ee rules in general. Additionally, my identity is public information, because I feel it’s important for the integrity of lemm.ee that I don’t hide behind anonymity. Considering this, I’m sure you can understand why I am very worried about my own safety when people leave comments in many unrelated threads (where my original posts are not even visible), baselessly calling me a nazi and a holocaust denier.
Note that the goal of this post is not to start a new debate in the comments about the the repressions of the soviet union in Estonia or other occupied territories, but if the topic interests any users, I can recommend the 2006 documentary The Singing Revolution (imdb). The trailer is a bit cheesy, but the actual film contains lots of historical footage from the soviet occupation, and also many interviews with people who experienced it, who share stories which are deeply familiar to all Estonians. If anybody is interested in further discussion, then I suggest making a post about it in the Estonian community here: !eesti@lemm.ee.
Hexbear admin response
After the above events had played out, I reached out to hexbear admins for clarification on their moderation policies and how they handle such cases. I was actually very happy with their response:
- They immediately removed the personal attacks and dehumanizing comments containing Kremlin propaganda from Hexbear, and assured me that such content is always handled by mods
- They told me that while there are all kinds of leftists on hexbear, Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods
- They implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
My personal take-aways
Let me play the devil’s advocate here and employ some “self-whataboutism”: among all users that have been banned on lemm.ee for bigotry, the majority were actually not users from other instances, and in fact people with lemm.ee accounts. If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content. Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
At the same time, I am aware of some internal conflict between hexbear users over the more strict moderation they are now starting to employ, and I am definitely keeping an eye on that situation and how admins handle it.
I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don't have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.
Where thing stand right now
I am not convinced that we are currently at a point where the “last resort” of defederation is necessary. This is based on the presumption that our moderation workload at lemm.ee will not get out of hand just due to users from that particular instance. My current expectation is that as the excitement of federation calms down (and as new rules on hexbear go into effect), the currently relatively high volume of low effort trolling will be replaced by more thoughtful posts. If this is not the case then we will certainly need to re-evaluate things.
Additionally, nothing is changing about our own rules regarding bigotry. Especially relevant in the context of Kremlin propaganda, I want to say that dehumanizing anybody is not allowed on lemm.ee (hopefully I do not have to spell it out, but this of course includes Ukrainians, LGBT folks, and others that the Kremlin despises), and action will be taken against any users who do this, regardless of what instance they are posting from.
Finally, I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users. I am super grateful to anybody who actually took the time to read through this massive dump of my own thoughts, and I am very interested to get a proper understanding of how our users feel about what I’ve written here. Please share any thoughts in the comments.
Awoo has already noted some important refutations, but I want to unpack something here.
Landlords and Bourgeoisie are class identities. Importantly, these are not the result of things outside of your control (i.e. ethnic origin, nation, etc.) but instead determined by actions in the world. While one can't say that one is subhuman because of where they are from, isn't being a landlord (and thus extracting rent from people for shelter) a behavior? A series of actions and choices? And can't we characterize a behavior or action as evil/immoral? Basically, when I say "landlords are evil and deserve to die or surrender their assets to the collective" what I'm describing is a particular set of actions. It's not different from having an opinion on if murderers deserve capital punishment.
Btw, I believe in rehabilitative punishment. However, if we're going to talk about people who deserve to die, I think capitalists and landlords are up there. A person who kills someone else -- either due to mental illness or a crime of passion -- is far less damaging to our social fabric than people who, through institutions, contribute to the death of our world and the immiseration of many. For instance, how many unhoused people have gone hungry/died because of the executives at Starbucks who decide that food thrown out should be covered in coffee grounds to be inedible? We don't have the numbers, but shouldn't we call this behavior subhuman/evil? I think you're missing the distinction between saying the executive who designed that policy deserves the gulag -- a specific inhuman action that deserves a specific response -- and calling all insert ethnicity/nationality here subhuman.
This is highly offtopic flamebait that will trigger a protracted argument of little substance.
Further, how you've casually slipped into a debate about capital punishment for enormous swathes of population is disturbing and disgusting. This is the lack of self awareness that others have mentioned here.
Clearly you missed the "or"? Or is the choice to redistribute resources (rather than having billionaires like Bezos accumulating wealth by theft) odious to you on the merits? I don't mind if Bezos were to turn Amazon into a worker-collective, for instance, rather than accumulate wealth extracted from his workers. Indeed, I would prefer this outcome (and it is in fact the original Marxist approach - the dialectical aufhebung of capitalism into communism).
Why are you still going on about this, it is so off-topic for the thread it hurts. You have completely deflected and warped the conversation, not even talking the OP, from which this is worlds apart but even from this single comment thread. And yet somehow you are +15 on upvotes despite this sort of behaviour being the reason this thread even exists.
Not brigading my ass.
This is why noone wants to interact with hexbear outside of your instance, this is why world got rid of you, this is why I block every single hexbear comm the second i see it in all and why I hope to god ml will have this conversation as well.
lots of big words there sir that don't really have relevance besides dictionary waving
This is the kind of thing I really hate to see. It's the reason I'm going to be leaving. You guys make a blanket statement like all landlords are evil because they extract rent for shelter. You don't give any further reasoning. I'm sure you've collectively decided that through some illogical conversations on your home instance but you fail to make a valid point in the wild.
For example:
where are you expecting people to live?
These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.
Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?
Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?
Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than "evil landlords must die and be redistributed"
How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain?
Why don't you go build your own house? Why aren't you giving these unfortunate souls your own place?
To cap it all- you follow each other around in groups and rather than actually discussing you strawman, point people to communist propaganda, and generally troll anyone who disagrees with you. No one wants to join your club, no one wants to read your Marxism books etc. If you have a point- state it. Don't point elsewhere and act like you won because we arent interested in your echochamber
I'm sorry. I do hope you come around to at least tolerating leftist perspectives before you leave for an echo chamber. That all wealth is created by labor is one of the core leftist beliefs, you'll find anarchists, communists, democratic socialists, etc all agree on that.
In houses. There's dozens of vacant homes for every homeless person. Just as capitalism requires some people be hungry to maximize profit of food, it requires some people be homeless to maximize profit of landlords.
The people who build houses deserve to be compensated for their labor. Owning a house on the other hand, is not labor.
Rent isn't compensation for the construction of a home, otherwise the renter would own the home after 20 years of renting paid off the mortgage.
I'd categorize the parasitic relationship as evil, but as for judging individual people for the poverty and homelessness caused by that relationship, it's more complicated as we live under capitalism.
Are you talking about the description of the cultural revolution in that one province in China people post? In the context of generations of peasants seeing their children die of starvation-related disease or conscripted never to return, the people were more merciful and practical than just. It's easy to criticize any change if you ignore the violence of the status quo. To quote Mark Twain:
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
It's not.
My partner and I should have a 50 percent equity in the apartment she rented for 10 years. Instead we were unceremoniously kicked out last year because the landlord's son wanted to make more money.
I accept this nuanced revision to my more angry framing. I have a personal vendetta, and this is actually the correct take.
What in the world makes you think you deserve 50% equity? Did you pay half the down payment? Did you pay half the mortgage and interest to the bank? Did you pay half the property taxes? Did you pay half the maintenance? Did you make any agreement woth the owner up front that this is what you would get? No? Did someone mention communism to you and you haven't thought twice since?
The amount it appreciated while we were paying the rent that whole time is how I got that 50 percent. Also, the property actually tripled in value 100k to 300k.
The total maintenance the owner did over the entire time we were there was 1000 dollars. One month's rent. Add painting and new carpet, ok, that's like 5k? We paid more than 100k in rent over that time.
It was pure profit extraction. The owner actually sent us the numbers to justify kicking us out. , His mother made more than him because of property tax, but after reassessing property taxes, he would have _only_been making 300 a month profit off of us. That's pure profit after everything. He was mad he couldn't raise our rent by 500 dollars all at once and instead had to do it yearly.
And? What makes you think you deserve any of that? If you'd wanted to rent-to-own that's a thing. It's something you should have talked about . Of course that appreciation you mentioned would still be a thing and your payments would have gone up to the point you couldn't afford it and null the contract... so... what point are you making?
Paying rent is NOT buying... buying is buying. And you are free to go give that a whirl. I guarantee you will pay more over the same time frame as a homeowner vs as a renters.
I genuinely don't see how you feel entitled to something no one ever agreed to.
I feel entitled to a place to live as such. The system and its facilitators that make it precarious is the thing I take issue with.
Great. i don't owe it to you. And I M not evil for not giving it to you. Make your case actually about the things you want- not some proxy bullshit that makes no sense and attacks me (and people like me)needlessly.
If you want to do something different- go do it. Go buy a place. Get a loan. Petition your senators. Give your house out as an example, etc. If you aren't willing to do anything no one will do anything for you.
This is a good post, but I think the person you're replying to is trying to bait a ton of belief statements out of you so that they can then piss you off by contradicting each one with effortless status-quo normalizing, and use that as a justification to defederate Hexbear. That, or they're just going to dig their heels in and you'll have wasted your time.
Buddy I'm replying to the things he's saying. If it hurts your brain that I'm detailing why the things he say make no sense that's on you. If hexbear is all people like you- that's on them.
I am new to lemmy and would prefer actual discussion- if certain groups brigade and shitpost in lieu of discussing- that's on them.
I could give you the benefice of the doubt. However, this is the calibre of argument you're throwing at us :
The obvious answer is that yes, the tenant pays for all these things, because that's why the landlord charges rent to begin with. This is such an obvious thing, irrespective of any political beliefs, that the mere fact of you having asked it makes you suspect. I'm not even trying to be mean to you here, I'm just describing the situation as I see it.
Uh- he literally didn't. The owner did these things. He paid the agreed upon amount to live in the house that he doesn't own and doesn't improve or repair or pay taxes for.
I pay taxes - does that mean I own some percent of the road? Schools? Emergency service? Of course not. Do I get to utilize these things that I didn't build but do pay a fee for over time? Yes.
That you can't see this makes you quite a bit more than suspect.
The money does not disappear when it changes hands, nor is it laundered. Most landlords cannot afford any of these things if the houses that they own are not occupied by paying tenants.
If they can't afford the empty house... either it is rented or they sell it. Do you think people are sitting on houses they can't afford and also intentionally keep empty? What point are you trying to make here?
Please respect hexbear user pronounsIronically an issue of pronouns, since you're directly replying to a he/him but it's unclear who the antecedent in the first sentence is. I'm gonna trust that you're not intentionally doing it tho, thanks.
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why not just stay mute all year?
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I'm not leaving for an echo chamber. I'm just leaving. It's your echo chambers I'm exiting.
All these empty houses aren't producing rent are they? You can go buy one and give it away if you want. Oh what's that? You don't want to do that?
What's the difference if I hammered the nail myself to build the house or if I buy it from the guy who did the hammering. This is the insanity that permeates your argument. I've done both by the way- either way that home is owned by someone and rented to someone else.
When did I say rent was compensation for building a home? You say that- and you are wrong for bringing it up. I built a thing- someone wants to use said thing- we make an agreement that we both agree to.
I characterize this insane rationality as evil. You want a thing to be given away for free without compensation. It's crazy to think this investment I've made is somehow going to magically fix something if I just transform it into some other thing you aren't all brigading over. If it wasn't a house- it'd be a restaurant, or a clothing business, or whatever. And you'd eventually get up in arms about that too. What you really want is others to give you an equal share even though you haven't done anything to earn it and I fucking have.
Personal charity is not a solution to a systemic problem! This will not actually get rid of the problem, it will palliate it! Also, I literally can't because I personally don't have the money that would be needed to buy a rental property off of someone who can afford to leave such properties empty, since if we assume they are willing to sell, it's a high price, but more likely they just won't because an apartment on the fourth floor of an eight-floor complex being someone else's property seems like a litigation nightmare if there's literally any type of water damage or anything of the sort that occurs after the sale.
Right. So because you can't afford it- it should be given to you for free? What have you bought recently? Am I entitled to that? How about you loan it to me for a set fee over time? Which makes more sense?
If I was monopolizing a resource people need to live, sure, repatriate it! I, uh, have a lot of books and I actually do like lending those to people -- even ones I hardly know or somewhat dislike -- so long as I think that I will get them back in good condition.
Part of the problem with your need to individualize everything is that we encounter class antagonism, i.e. people in different classes have different incentives. I am totally fine with the idea of virtually everything I own being held communally and living in a monastery -- so long as there was enforcement against just trashing things. What matters to me is use, not profit, because I am not in a class that profits but one that subsists on labor and therefore am mainly seeking to ensure the easiest subsistence possible by the means I know. I also see that many people are in my same position and we can't all subsist by lying at the top being fed grapes while being paid to own things, the viability of selling a commodity comes from people not having it. On that basis, since I don't want to make enemies out of my fellows (enemies are dangerous) and I don't want to be stuck under someone else's corporate boot heel if I fail, it is more appealing to me that we collaborate rather than compete, so that our best interests lie in mutual benefit rather than scalping scarce resources.
I have no issue with any of what you said. My entire argument is about the Individual ownership and the attacks I receive from you guys.
Your arguments have not been the system is bad and it's the mega billionaires etc... it's all landlords are bad because they own something you feel should be given away for free.
I would like to try to explain something while avoiding reference to those liberal economists that you seemingly care just as little for as Marx and friends.
Person A owns a car. Person B steals the car and fences it to an unwitting Person C. Person C fixes up the car in various ways and then tries to sell it. The origin of the car is discovered and it seems like perhaps Person A should get their car back, but Person C has put in work on it and didn't know it was stolen, and doesn't want their labor value to be for nothing. What is to be done?
You might disagree on or not see the relevance, but humor me here.
Except I do want you to be compensated, for the labor of building the home. Everything beyond that is theft.
You are the one expecting others to work for free. You are demanding a greater amount of wealth from the renter than you've produced.
To put it another way, construction and property management are forms of labor and deserve compensation for the wealth they've created. Landlord is not.
Cool- then buy my house and I'll just reinvest in something else for profit- which you will then move on to claiming is for everyone. And the cycle will continue.
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A core belief most of us have is that workers are very literally not being given what they've earned. But we also believe that all humans deserve food, shelter, and care. If you think that's evil, there's not much more of a discussion to have.
That's fine. That's not what you have been saying though. What you've been saying is take my stuff and redistributed because I'm evil.
Way more effective to actually say the things you mean because we didn't all buy into your Marxism and discuss it internally- so we don't know what that you mean y when you say x.
Okay.
Amazing logic. I worked so hard to buy this minigun, surely it's perfectly ok to unload it into a crowd. Don't tell me what to do with MY money!
Your post is far better than mine comrade. Much funnier example.
This is the following each other around bit.
Yeah, I just had to give props though, it's such a good example, way better than my lame one t.t
This is the strawmanning I referenced earlier. Goodjob being true to your roots.
It would be strawmanning if here was a point to make. But here was only only a bunch of cliches to make fun of.
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Most of those questions are full of tacit assumptions, but I'd like to answer the general question "Why do you commies dislike landlords so much?" You may restate any of those questions or present new ones if you feel them to be relevant in response.
You complain about people citing Marxist literature, so let's try citing the central figure of classical liberal economics, Adam Smith:
Wealth of Nations, Chpt 11 -- Excerpts
Obviously, Smith here is discussing a different type of landlord here, one who rents land for farming (etc.) rather than just habitation, but this contrast is largely to the detriment of the modern landlord as they leave it up to the geographic location of the rented property (i.e. availability of jobs within commuting distance) rather than have the possibility of issuing improvements to the farmland or otherwise assuring that rent can be paid by that individual.
The apologetics around landlords would have a chance if not for the basic fact that they operate on the principle of monopoly, as all of the land has been "accounted for," it is all publicly or privately owned, and there are extensive efforts to keep people from sleeping on public land. There's often no camping in a tent, there are specific "public awareness" campaigns encouraging private citizens to report those for destruction, and the settlements that remain are at any time liable to be cleared out by a police squad for the crime of existing. Sleeping on benches, when the benches aren't specifically designed to prevent this, is "loitering" or "trespassing" (many public sites are officially considered to be closed at night), and in any case is immensely dangerous even if one only considers things like precipitation. Landlords make their profit from the fact that renting land and buying land are the only possible options for someone who doesn't want to die of exposure or state violence. If there was land open for grabs and it wasn't being bought up by land sharks, there would be very few homeless because they could at least have little shacks on such land.
Without the power of monopoly, rent would be drastically less, in proportion to the actual maintenance and management labor performed by the owner (or their property manager). We communists have nothing against paying for maintenance or management, but merely owning a vital resource that is monopolized is not a job.
Hey comrade, I'm on Memmy and the excerpt from Adam Smith won't render, might want to check that out. I'm guessing it's the one about landlords seeking wealth from land which they never toiled or something like that? There were a couple times he talked about the problems of landlords and rentier capitalism.
I put it as a spoiler, so you should be able to see it by clicking on it, but anyway I took it from here:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm
Paragraphs 1, 2, and 5. There are probably better passages to talk about, but that one was usable and tbh I was being a bit lazy.
Ah thanks for the clarification.
No yeah it says literally after I click the spoiler "For some reason Memmy cannot render this" :/
Did you just miss that the entire argument rests on unimproved land? By definition a home is on improved land.
Besides I really don't care what smith or anyone else says- I'm not giving you the things I've paid for for free. If you want to use it- you can make an offer. But I'm not evil for not giving you something I worked for. You are for wanting it from me for free.
Smith accounts for both, but says rent is not based on improvement of land but on the highest level of rent the tenant can sustain. Improvement of land would be expected to raise that amount, but unimproved land would still have a cost all the same. It's not the main element, though I think it actually does bear some relevance to the issue of monopoly since one could rent unimproved land for the purpose of housing and get takers, as it would provide the "service" of protecting from a large part of police violence.
I have already emphatically said that I'm speaking on a systemic level because hyper-individualized solutions to systemic problems simply aren't useful, so bringing it back to personal incredulity and your land isn't useful. I have no problem with you being compensated for the labor that you put in or even the labor that you can plausibly say you managed, you're making many assumptions about my stance. The right to personally own the land itself, however, does not have so strong a basis in liberal philosophy (you can see Paine argue against this in many later works).
But really, pre-Covid the numbers were something like 600,000 homeless a night and 18,600,000 empty housing units. I don't care to moralize about landlords, I just don't want people to be homeless due to anything other than wanting to be homeless (which makes up a tiny minority, barring "itinerant" homeless who should also be sheltered). Maybe public funds buy your properties off of you, or maybe you are not directly affected because there are so many extra units that only a small proportion are relevant. I don't care, I just don't want people to die of exposure.
Naturally, if you don't have your properties bought off to start with, that will drastically undercut the amount of rent you can ask for for your properties simply because there will already be a supply for people who need it, making your service more of a luxury because it no longer has the force of monopoly behind it, but you are all for voluntary agreements, so that shouldn't represent a problem to you if people simply choose not to rent out your units and instead they sit empty, right?
I do happen to have my properties bought off and I don't really care what the rent is as long as it's making a return that makes sense.
If your issue is with the system- great I agree the system isn't the best. If your issue is with people that happen to own a thing and rent it to people- get fucked.
Marxists are strongly and explicitly anti-moralist, our concerns are for strategy rather than deciding who is good and who is bad. You can see my description of what could be called a personal set of incentives in the previous comment which make no reference to anyone's particular value or morality in general, simply a method of people getting along and subsisting. I want for people to be secure, not for punishment to be meted out for the sake of meting out punishment.
The symbol of the guillotine is -- in essence -- a threat to those who fight to preserve the old order. I think that society as has been observed typically runs better when people are compensated for socially useful labor, so there is no reason a petite bourgeois like yourself shouldn't be compensated for the actual labor you put in just like everyone else, and there's no reason that even an earnestly bourgeois person cannot be reformed. If you support the destruction of the system in which people lie in misery under the open sky due to poverty, then the threat does not apply to you.
You'll get other people who think differently -- in my experience this is mainly a subset of anarchists who moralize in a detrimental way -- but I disagree with them.
Except in every other thread I'm also being thrown under the guillotine. So - you need to have an internal discussion so all of you are on the same page. You need to actually say what you mean rather than the buzzword salad you all spout. And most importantly you need to come up with a real solution rather than this hyper stupid and never gonna happen idea that people are going to just give away what they own.
When you orient everything in terms of you personally imagining yourself being deprived vs those pesky homeless, that's gonna happen. Even as we were speaking I had to keep saying "I'm not talking about individualized responses, I'm not talking about you and I" etc. to try to wrangle the conversation into staying on the level of systemic issues. If you instead say "Do I still get to be paid for the physical and managerial labor I put in?" I think you will get warmer responses, but the other thing about it is that Hexbear isn't a monolith, it has a bunch of different ideologies, even though the one that I purport to offer some representation of -- Marxism-Leninism -- is the most prominent.
I won't argue, I will say that Adam Smith is a notable figure who predates Marx, Ricardo, Madison, Stuart Mill, Hayek and Friedman, etc. All of whom were important figures who have shaped our current economic system and form of liberalism.
Even if you don't care it's important to note the effect he's had as it largely effects you even to this day. Warren Buffet, notable capitalist, said one of his two favourite books was Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Think of it like the Bible of economics. It's where the phrase "invisible hand of the free market" comes from (wording might be off but I hope you get the idea!!)
If someone's living in their own home, I don't have a problem with that at all. The problem is purchasing a home just to extract rents and profits.
And btw, I think all those things should be collectivized and socially available. Landlords contribute no value (as shown by their unwillingness to do maintenance/repairs), and merely extract. After all, what really is the benefit, to society, of a landlord? They serve no purpose (hell, even a CEO has more purpose than a landlord, and they -- as Elon shows -- don't really contribute much either). It's entirely extractive. Your "why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves" is because of how they're using it. Just like how if you own a gun and defend your home, we consider that moral, but if you own a gun and shoot a person on the street, we consider it immoral. If you build a house and live in it, that's moral and fine(though, in a perfect world, this would be produced through the government/taxes rather than individual accumulation, but we're not talking about utopia, we're talking about moral judgments on our world as it exists). If you build a house or purchase a house, then use it to extract ever-increasing rents from people for a thing we require to live (shelter), that's immoral.
I think it's a pretty simple distinction actually.
To return to the starbucks example, the company "produced" that material. Is it "moral" of them to throw it away rather than donate it? After all, they made it - just like your example of houses.
Finally, I'll just note, the very idea of private property when applied to land, etc. is odious to me on philosophical grounds.
So your argument clearly states that we are living in capitalism... and at the same time states that your moral problem is one of idealism/communism. Your argument cannot exist in one and then transmute half way through to make it fit your narrative.
We live in capitalism. I have worked and saved to buy off my house which I now rent out at market (below market actually) and provide a home that my tenants could not afford to buy on their own. I haven't increased rent since I started renting.
You are now blanket yelling I should be stripped of my investment. My effort. My money that I've worked for. And these other slack-jaws are frothing at the mouth because they can't conceive of a difference between me and the multibillion dollar company who is actually doing what you are saying.
What I'm saying is there shouldn't be a situation like this in the first place. Your tenants shouldn't have to come to you to rent, housing should be freely available to all.
It's a difference of degree, not of kind. And the goal is to change the relationship to society/production/the state such that this relationship no longer needs to exist. After all, investing in housing/real estate is the one "safe" thing to do under capitalism if you have surplus money. I doubt you're a true "capitalist" in the sense of having true economic leverage, and the question for you is ultimately, would you side with the workers, your tenants, etc. and willingly join in the socialization of basic human needs? Or will you ally with the capitalists above you and protect private property at all costs.
A difference in degree but not in kind exists historically. Guatemala. The operations of the United Fruit company through exploitation were very profitable. They "built" them. The new government offered to either buy them out at the rate they had claimed on their taxes or reassess their taxes to redistribute their profits more equitably. Instead, the CIA coup'd them.
The question for you ultimately is, if given the chance to exit from the exploitative relationship imposed upon you by capitalism, will you? Would you let the government buy you out or raise your taxes to fund collective housing? Or will you instead employ the forces of reaction?
Then fucking say THAT. Not all landlords are evil. I'd be willing to bet 90% of these frothing loons don't realize why you are trying to accomplish and are just riding the hate train.
He'll yeah I'm all for more taxes to pay for healthcare/education/collective housing. Hell no am I ok with just giving my shit away because you happen to think I should. Sure- pay me for my investments at fair market value- and I'll just go an reinvest in something else that you guys will inevitably think should belong to all.
So no- I'm not going to ever stand with you because you will always want something from me. Do I think things can and should change. Yes- but your way is a ridiculous way of going about it.
I did note later in another thread, a comrade had a good revision. The relationship is evil, not the actual person. Here's what was said:
Again, I've got some salt because my landlord kicked me out last year just because he couldn't extract enough profit from me. Needless to say, his anger at basic tenant protections has stuck in my craw ever since. I'm earnestly glad you're for social housing/education/etc as well.
Houses and apartments. Like they do now.
Nope. Not worked/paid/built themselves. The vast majority of homes are made by people paying others to build homes for them. Labor is the source of value, not investors. This is like billionaires claiming to be job creators. You're extracting the value of their labor to make your investment property. You're paying them a fraction of what it is worth to you because you happen to live in a society where that is normal. Your lack of imagination beyond your current circumstances is not my problem.
Oh yeah, and even if you happen to build the house with your own hands, it is owned by someone, the bank where you got your construction loan.
Why do you think people who work and toil away should pay your mortgage on an investment property and then some?
Because helping themselves comes at the cost of someone else, and everyone else.
You can say what you want about the rest of Hexbear but I can actually explain myself. Yeah, I'm one of those who have actually thought about stuff. In fact, I know more about real estate investing than you do.
It's not. They all belong to those who actually made them, the workers.
I can't. Investors have inflated the cost of construction and increased the barrier to entry. They snuff out competition. Capitalism is built on lies. They don't actually like competition. The whole idea is to consolidate and monopolize. If I did try to build low income housing I'd be ran off by all the investors who own everything. Housing poor people next to their investments lowers the value. This is multi-family 101 kiddo. Read a book.
The arrow of history disagrees. You probably should study the past sometime. Capitalism creates the conditions that make people want to join our club. It's pretty much a law of human society.
Yes worked/built/paid for themselves. Why does it matter if I personally hammered the nail or paid someone else for the house that he hammered the nail into? Work was done and value exchanged hands. Your mode of thinking means you don't deserve any thing you didn't create yourself. I own most of my houses outright as I have mentioned I worked my ass off to pay for them. So yeah...
Oh I'd love to hear all of your education on real estate investing. I bet that'd be fun for everyone. Especially since you've already stated you can't seem to buy any place on your own...
Stating a thing does not make it so- helping myself does not harm anyone else. If anything it helps people like yourself who can't afford to buy the place to still live in the place.
How do you even begin to think something is owned by the workers when they are not the ones paying for any of it. If those workers were the ones getting the loans, paying the taxes, filing the permits, getting the required certificate, marketing, selling, delivering, etc... you might have the start of a point. As it is- they are the ones receiving a wage to work the land. Physical labor does not equal ownership. Again this mode of thinking means you aren't entitled to anything you didn't build yourself. You like that burger? Did you raise that cow? Did you slaughter it? Feed it? Work the soil to make the feed? Etc etc etc.
I think people should pay to use my property that I'm providing for a fee. There's really nothing more to it. We could transmute that house to a restaurant, a store, a farm and it all means the same thing. I built it. Or bought it. You didn't. Now you can use it if you want- for a fee. Under no circumstances do you own any part of it unless you and I come to some agreement about it. You are welcome to buy it- or try to make a rent to own deal...
Oh that's funny because somehow I did manage to do just that... and I didn't come from money or any special background. I applied for the scholarships, the loans, put in the work, forgo eating out for decades, looked for opportunities, leveraged my meager earnings into extra payments until I finally paid off my first house. Made sure I didn't make a baby or get into massive credit card debt etc. I went and lived in the low cost areas no one cares to go to. I made the required sacrifices to eventually get to a better position.
So yeah in conclusion- you just said a bunch of rhetoric with no backing and also no solution. Fairly typical if less vitriolic than normal... oh you dropped this 'kiddo'
Because that's the definition of building it yourself.
Stating a thing does not make it so. Just stating you're doing no harm doesn't make it true. I can explain why you're doing harm but you can't explain why you're not. Explanatory might makes right. We're talking about the science of society, not vibes.
Value comes from labor. A forest is nothing without the lumberjacks. A pile a logs is nothing without the workers of the saw mill. A pile of lumber is nothing without framers. A frame is nothing without drywallers, roofers, plumbers, electricians. The ownership you claim is just a piece of paper given by the state based on historical premises of property rights. It's not a default state of nature nor a universal truth.
Wages are specifically designed to not pay them the full value of their labor. If you own a horseshoe factory that produces each horseshoe for $1, then you can't pay a person $100 an hour to make 100 horseshoes in that hour. You wouldn't make any money as the factory owner. So you must pay them less than the value they're producing. It's how businesses work. Likewise you can't rent a house for profit without charging more than its worth. You can't afford to build all those investment properties unless you pay the people who actually built them a fraction of what the house is worth. You exploited the people who built the house so you can sit on your ass and exploit workers who need a place to live. It's quite simple.
There's two ways to build wealth under capitalism. One is to get a bunch of people to work for you and pay them less than their labor is actually worth. The other is to leverage your capital, buy property and then become a rent-seeker and/or lender. That's what you did. You were fortunate enough to be able to get loans and leverage your debt and get scholarships. Most people don't get all that. The people you rent to don't get that.
I said a bunch of arguments against yours. You can't demand an argument from everyone and then when someone gives you wave it off as mere rhetoric. Yes it's rhetoric. That's what the word means. I think you're just saying stuff based on vibes. You don't actually know what words mean or have any real sense of your own position. You just know that you feel a certain way and want that to be as valid as my rational argument. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
It's also funny how you think not eating fast food and living in a place nobody wants to go is some grand sacrifice and the reason for what you have. Dude millions of people live without McDonald's or a suburban home in the nice part of town. They also don't get loans and scholarships. Their prostrations before capital go unnoticed.
Rather than demanding we disprove your views maybe you should spend some time thinking about why you believe them beyond "I'm a hard worker." Like do you really think you're the only person who has ever worked hard? Do you think that the reason why most people don't have rental properties is because they're not hard working? Imagine the hubris to think something like that.
Bla bla bla- no you.
That's what you just did. Which is fine but doesn't explain any of the original points being made.
Go get those lumberjacks to cut down that forest... wait a minute... they won't do it unless someone pays them??? Really? But they will own the lumber... oh they don't need that lumber? Oh man. I guess no one owns that lumber and no one is gonna cut it down then. If only there were some way to get those guys who are experts at cutting down trees to cut them down. Then wed have lumber to build houses.... but wait- the guys that know how to build house wont build them? But since they don't wanna do it I guess there's nothing to be done. Since... ya know... paying people for their work is not valuable and apparently inherently worthless.
Guess it's just up to each member of society to learn all the things and do all the work themselves. Because paying each other for things means you don't own it and only making yourself means anything.
Also curious how I'm paying these wildly inflated housing costs but also somehow paying the people who build them wildly below the worth of their work... Man your mind just works in mysterious ways I guess.
Yeah it really is too bad that not everyone can go apply for those scholarships... the millions in unclaimed scholarships, welfare, etc just... too bad not anyone can file the paperwork.
Yeah I know it's also hard not to build credit card debt, have families with no viable plan for the future, not buy the things you want but are too expensive etc.. your right- literally everyone is doing that.
Oh mustnt forget the hubris of thinking people aren't slaves to where they start and COULD choose things like joining the military for the literal free education it gives, or contracting their particular expertise out... but I guess that involves being paid for labor... so that's out...
What a quandary.
”This education is free! Except for all the civilians I had to kill for it.”
insert tangentially related counter strawman
It's not tangential, it's the primary function of the military of the US at this point. Kill at the periphery in order to expand the markets to cheap labour once that war is over and project the threat of violence everywhere else to maintain that position (like coast guard and military in allied countries). The free education is, once again, because the war profits are much higher than even the exploited soldiers produce for the empire. That doesn't make it ok, but it's good to clearly understand that the soldiers are exploited for the "value" captured from wars through the expropriation of the lands at war (look at theft of oil in Syria and Iraq for the easiest examples). Soldiers could, theoretically, be paid much more if capitalists didn't primarily take the value taken. The whole process is horrific and everyone involved guilty for the horrors. That's how soldiers get free education, though, by being exploited for their "work" of theft through expropriation
also, fuck off landlord. Mao was right.
Yeah- that didn't take much. Goodluck reconciling your future with your halfassery.
what halfassery? I wasn't the initial person speaking,
Humans are a productive species and have produced many things necessary for survival long before capitalism or English property rights ever existed. You're doing that thing again where you don't know anything about history but you feel very strongly about defining the boundaries of human nature to be 17th century commerce. People don't need money to produce things.
People also have shared responsibilities and duties. Nobody learns every single aspect of everything else. Some people are farmers, some are not. Some people build houses, some don't.
Also paying for things is not unique to capitalism. Commerce has existed long before capitalism. It's not like before 1800 everyone just traded chickens for everything.
You do, in fact, think people are slaves. You think they should work for a fraction of the value they create and then come home to pay you 2x the amount in rent. That way you get to pay off your mortgage and then keep collecting rent once your original investment is paid off. I guess that part is different from providing a necessary service, right? You just want to provide homes and get a huge return on investment. How pure are your motives?
I'm sure you're clever enough to buy a farm and rent the fields to the workers and then rent them housing too. They give you a portion of their grain, it's a fair trade after all, you own the farm. They should pay you for the privilege of working to keep you fed and housed. You should just chill and collect a check and bushel of grain every fall because you worked really hard to own that property. Totally not slavery.
Hey that's all you bud. I mean the numbers are made up and the facts don't matter apparently. But cool story.
Meanwhile I'm still going to go with providing homes at a reasonable price. You do what you do and I'll do what I do- curious which of us gets something done.
If you provided them at a reasonable price you wouldn't make any money. Kinda telling on yourself there. The only way your business works is if you charge more than your mortgage. The bank is charging you for borrowing money so even they're marking it up. The reasonable price would be the price without the bank's markup and yours.
But hey you're the Donald Trump of lemm.ee, so don't let anyone ever tell you how da business goes. You grab your copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad and you solve the housing crisis by doing credit checks and marking up rents.
We had houses before we had money, dumbass.
Yeah... we so were tribal nomads without society at all... so I guess that's what you want?
Wait, just so we're clear on the timeline of human development. There were tribes and no society. Then there was the industrial revolution, English Common law, and then now?
You really, really, need to study history. You're missing a few thousand years there. That's probably why you're confused. You really do think humans were savage tribes before 1492.
When Rome was established, city walls built, aqueducts constructed, complex trade networks established, no one was being paid a wage, but that was certainly a society. They eventually got money and used it, but it wasn't essential to running a society and still isn't.
I don't think you make a bad point, but it takes years to develop a leftist, collectivist, anti-imperialist world view. Vulgarizing leftist theory to anyone who will listen is a colossal waste of time when 95% of you are not interested in interacting in good faith to begin with. As much as loaded political slogans, easy gotchas and plain old derision suck from a debate-fan point of view, they are too useful to ignore. Even more importantly, you are doing the exact same thing when you talk about "kremlin propaganda" like there's ever any substance or truth behind that accusation.
Here's the trolling/bad faith.
My response to this 'argument':
"No, you"
What the fuck are you on about Kremlin propaganda?
I can definitely see why you would want to be protected from us
Well the Communist argument is that the government will provide all of the infrastructure and services. In real life, a good chunk of infrastructure are provided by the government. However, as far as services are concerned... It can be a pretty mixed bag depending on how functional your government is.
When I was young, edgy and anti-business I used to believe that government was absolutely the answer to all of our problems. Did I voted for something like 15 tax increases and saw my quality of life and the city itself just go down the drain. Wait no, it became a dumpster fire. Cost of living has skyrocketed about 500%, crime and homelessness are up 300 to 1,000%, and there hasn't actually been enough housing constructed to house people. We still don't have a social safety net and medical prices are astronomically high as well.
The fact is that the world is a complex place and whenever there is a disproportionate amount of economic disparity between classes, it doesn't matter who's running the show but there's going to be a lot of unhappy people.
Sure. That'd be great. Just curious why that hasn't been implemented yet.
On topic, but I've actually had a couple of good landlords over the years. One guy would stop by once a month to check on the house and do landscaping. We used to have really good conversations when I saw him, and we would talk about how the neighborhood was doing, any issues with the house and so on and so forth. Whenever I had a maintenance issue, he would be there within a few days to handle it. He even kept rent increases to below inflation.
On the other hand, I've also heard people denigrate architects, lawyers, engineers, and tech support people. But landlords and lawyers in particular make great punching bags.
I mean ironically, the guy who kicked us out's mother was totally fine. Just an old lady who needed the rent to supplement her fixed income. When she died, 6 months later the "I'm selling the place, you need to be out by X day" email came.
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