I know these kinds of hypothetical questions are kind of boring, but I was curious what you guys that about this.
The situation is: I am a relatively wealthy person, with enough investment properties to rent out for income and live off. I decide to rent at a price below the market value and attempt to get tenants who are trying to live in the area but are not financially stable, so I can provide some sort of assistance by giving to them cheaper than they can get elsewhere.
I now don't have to work a single hour a day.
I use a full-time work schedule to do all of the following tasks (aside from other things like cooking, cleaning, exercise) (in no particular order):
- Manage the properties I own
- Study theory
- Attempt various worker organisation activities/union activities
- Participate in Communist Party meetings
- Partake in Communist Party activities
- Volunteer for numerous mutual aid groups
- Protest
- Write (online articles) and all the other sorts of activities. In other words, attempt to be a "professional revolutionary" as I believe Lenin put it.
Would this be a moral course of action? Or does living purely off the rent of workers outweigh dedicating basically my whole spare time to my nation's socialist movement?
Edit: Just for context I'm not actually in this position lol.
It’s not cool to expect working people to pay for your life of baizuo larping.
Yeah you're pretty much saying "me exploiting you is fine because that's offset by me being a great communist revolutionary" which is both probably wrong and most definitely narcissistic.
you could start your own business and just employ yourself especially if you have the capital to be buying up land
fair
I dunno, any more, I am inclined to think engaging with the market is just a huge risk of liberalism. Look and Dengism. it worked because they had the resources of the biggest country on earth and they still had to do several rounds of corruption purging
landlords are more likely to become liberals than people with jobs. Also calling someone getting a job "engaging with the market" is the most terminally online thing I have ever read
starting a business is becoming a manager.
Getting a job is getting a job. But jobs in America suck.Having to pay for health insurance and deciding weather or not to hire an old person or not because they will cost you more in health insurance and be less productive is the liberalizing force of engaging with the marker.
then we are back to the soc dem probelm. To a successful buisness you need to make money, to make money is to exploit others. What could be done that is worth the time?
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with half my pay check is a good guy with half my pay check
The actual moral position is to restructure your properties into some sort of coop where residents own the place equally.
All that income you get is the ossified labor value of your tenants. Even if you were a very excellent revolutionary, you wouldn't manage half the organization your tenants would if they didn't have to pay you a toll to live. Let's be real, you're a landlord so you're not. You're expropriating from the working class instead of the capitalist class, the latter having universally been the method of successful revolutionaries of history. Why not let them live rent free? Why not start a housing cooperative? Why not use that good will to educate and agitate them? Because it's easier to be a self-important parasite, and because society will bend over backward to validate you for it.
Your hypothetical here is class collaboration, a fundamental tenet of fascism.
Engels owned a factory. Capitalist class traitors are good, but you will always be caught in an uncomfortable contradictory position until you turn your properties into social housing, at which point they would soon be privatized anyway. Obsessing over morals isn't helpful in most cases.
I heard from some where that its not exactly true that engels owned a factory, in fact engels was cut out of his inheritance for his views.
True he was wealthy and owned some shares, but i dont think he ever owned a factory, merely working as middle manager for his father
as Lenin said "he who does not work should not eat" if you can support yourself but won't that's parasitism
there is only one ethical way of getting an income for doing no work and that is working from home and not doing any work
He did list several forms of "work" that would presumably be done. Thankless work + workless income = a real job™? I think that's at the core of what OP is asking.
Depending on the properties you could make the argument that if you don't own them to rent (at below market rate), then someone else would obtain them for that purpose sooner or later anyway. There are very few properties in a big city that are owned by the same people who use them, as it stands.
At the end of the day this example is pretty contrived. I doubt there are even 3 such landlords in the US.
the issue with the idea that the landlord does work by maintaining the property is that the work done to maintain the property contributes and maintains the value of the property which the landlord owns thus they do work, keep the value all while charging the tenant.
I agree but that isn't what I meant by work. I'm including the agitation and study as work as well here. This hypothetical landlord would be doing work that might, hypothetically, equal the amount of money they take in. The labour and the income would be decoupled but there would still, again hypothetically be worthwhile labour done.
I think the problem comes down to whether it's reasonable that those specific renters have to pay "for" that specific labour. Would this professional revolutionary and class traitor really make enough of a difference locally that it would be worth the cost to that group of people? Unlikely. So it depends on how you frame it whether this one good landlord™ would be a leech. In a bigger picture perhaps not because useful labour is being done, but if you place the frame around just the landlord-tenant relationship, definitely.
I will say however, if you restrict your revolutionary activities to those that look good and balanced from any angle, in any framing, you limit your chances significantly. Assuming you are doing truly good revolutionary work, those who would call you a hypocrite wouldn't have taken you seriously or engaged with you in good faith anyway.
Sorry to inform you sir but the fee for our sage advice is $59.99 per character, $22 per minute, on top of a $199.99 posting fee. You better start paying up.
You do t get to do Communist Pennance to make up for being a capitalist. The people who pay for you not to work would probably rather have the free time you enjoy off their labor for themselves
You'd not be moral, but you'd be basically in the same position Engles is in. Sure you should, morally, take Jesus' advice and sell everything and give it to the poor. But we're not in the business of individual morality, we're in the business of changing the world.
So if you are in this position just accept some workers are going to call you a leech no matter what you do, because they're kind of right. But if you're gonna abandon the cause because people are mean to you, why were you here to begin with? A lot of people are going to be very mean to all of the Left before this is over.
on the other hand people can only be effective in persuading people if they are someone that can gain the people they want to persuade's respect. Becoming a landlord puts you beneath respect from most people especially your tenants.
Following the Christian theme the advice given in the Bible for the selection of religious elders is that they shouldn't be someone that is disliked or not-respected by the community they are supposed to be leading, if there is anything to be learned from Christianity practically especially early Christianity it's how to grow and expand a movement even when faced with official hostility.
In conclusion from a practical standpoint there is a real issue with this as people generally do not like their landlord and frankly the people who do like landlords are the ones least open to radicalisation. This isn't just wrong from a standpoint of being immoral it's massively stupid from a practical standpoint
The maoist landlord smiles, shedding a single tear as their tenants bend them over the chopping block. "I just want you to know how proud I a-" chop :sicko-wholesome:
this is a bit of a misleading idea the maintenance costs also go to the landlord as they maintain the value of the house that the landlord owns
We might not have had the ussr or china without engles. So there is no telling what the consequences of any particular action could be.
However generally you would expect any action you take at this level of a handful of individuals to have no long term effect.
Look at frank lloyd wright and his cheap housing communities. His plan lasted to this day and I think was successful enough to turn the workers in question to pmc and then they liberalized because he didnt have persistent revolutionary goals to maintain the system.
So my advice would be a three point plan.
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Join an org. Probably the psl as they seem to be the best going for now.
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Look into funding a large high density low income housing and then give it to an org to run in perpetuity as a non profit with specifically revolutionary goals.
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Since you have now basically created a small feudal state organize with the people over to start creating a shadow government and taking over the rest of America.
Only kindda kidding. Look at new Hampshire, it just takes a small dedicated group of people to change things here. So once you have an entire community developed you can start sniping small city government positions and using those funds to further empower your group. Imagine you get a few poor poc kids into city council seats and then start a postal bank?
In retrospect I am just describing how Mormons took over Utah, but hey, that just proves it works.
We might not have had the ussr or china without engles
is this seriously the level of great mannism people on this site engage in? also are you seriously comparing engels and marx writing the capital to a landlord renting out cheap apartments?
I am specifically saying it is the opposite.
You are right, there might have been better forms of communisms to evolve had marx not have been there at the start to get popular. However it is also likely that another lesser ideology would have risen up. Look at Germany, and how that experiment went.
Most importantly it isn't a great man case. Engles was not a man as such, he had the generational wealth and resources to make him the embodiment of a great deal of workers. Anyone of the thousand other people in his shoes could have done the same but they didn't.
We can't assume that history is so predetermined that people doing things is unimportant.
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Attempt various worker organisation activities/union activities
But you're not a worker?
Just as long as you're not kidding yourself. If you do this, you are not a socialist, but a very friendly capitalist.
But like NonCompete said, you don't have to be the vanguard, so long as you can inspire the person who will become the vanguard.
Just stay out of their way once they take off. You might find that your material conditions will make it extremely difficult to actually stand down when it comes to it.
Moral course of action is take rent compensating you for your labor as property manager, which, assuming my understanding of labor of property manager and average rent price should be like: 1-10 hours a week as a manager, assuming average rent is 25 percent of paycheck, you should rent one property for 1-10/40 average salary? So unless you manage one property for 10 hours a week, it should be significantly lower.
You still get property appreciation even.
Hypothetically
If that’s kinda on the low end and you don’t want to work, you can either sell one of the properties and slowly burn money as cash (which should be enough for like 10 years with property prices, and assuming you have your own place), or make contract where surplus rent directly transfers partial ownership to the renting party over time :shrug-outta-hecks:
I’m actually very sympathetic to the last one: you don’t get an argument “if I sell, other party will rent for more, so it’s morally bad”, and if they buy out their property this way you become small story of friendly commie for couple of future families/friends of those people
