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.
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.
Join an org. Probably the psl as they seem to be the best going for now.
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.
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.
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.