Not sure if this is just ingrained "American Dream" mentality but I want to get away from landlords and buy my own house. Partly this is so I can have my own space to work on my own projects, be messy, grow weed, walk around naked, etc. Lately this is looking like a real possibility since I've paid off my college debt and started saving money for a down payment. I'm also expecting house prices to fall in the next year as the economy implodes.
Despite all that, housing is still really expensive where I live and I probably wouldn't be able to afford a house without a partner or a roommate paying part of the mortgage. My romantic prospects aren't looking too good and I really don't want to be a landlord. And I don't know how I would feel buying a foreclosure. Not to mention I'd be locked into a 30 year mortgage that won't be paid off until after climate change has forced us all to migrate to Nunavut.
Tell me chapos, what's the moral thing to do here? Should I keep renting? Buy a house and try to be an "ethical" landlord? Move in with the next woman I meet after the 2nd date? Go join a commune/cult?
There are communists who own bars and businesses and shit here, too. But there's definitely some weird discomfort from the left about actually controlling means of production.
Because deep down, they know they're not going to change the existing order so the only thing that really matters is their own personal purity.
I'll admit it right now, I would 100% buy my 3-unit apartment building if I had the money and continue renting to the other tenants. The idea that you wouldn't because landlording is unethical is honestly pretty fucking funny. As if we are all just supposed to wear barrels on suspenders and eat out of trash cans so as not to be heckin capitalists. Like do these people not invest in a 401k because it is extracting surplus value from other workers?
you can survive without being a landlord mate
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Becoming a landlord is vastly different than owning a pub.
Landlording absolutely is unethical unless you are not making a profit and are giving equity to the tenants.
How is landlording any less ethical than directly exploiting the surplus labor of workers? And does it really matter if you do revolutionary praxis or use your class position to finance revolutionary activities? This is all hypothetical for me anyway, I don't own shit and probably won't ever anyway lol.
This right here. There's a material difference that's pretty obvious.
In your hypothetical situation of owning a bar, would you be okay with laying off an employee if sales were down?
Oh... you guys aren’t?
It's called Freeganism, Charles!
In your hypothetical situation, you'd be OK with evicting someone if they couldn't meet their rent payments?
Also, it's one thing to talk about means of production, and another thing to talk about that in relation to the ambiguities of something like housing. Many major cities have housing run by landlords that are effectively engaging in rent seeking behavior.
Like seriously... buy the housing unit, but make that shit a co-op. Like what the fuck, "I'm doing praxis by making my income from other peoples' need for housing"?
Lol who said it is doing praxis?
All landlording is rent-seeking in the most literal sense. Idk why people act like I'm saying landlording is ethical or praxis.
Question: I'm just a worker. I install security cameras in retail establishments pretty often for my job, and they 100% get poor people put in jail for stealing. Does that make me reactionary? Of course I could get a job as a cashier or warehouse worker, but I would likely have to work more than one job and forego any irl organizing I do currently out of lack of time. Which is the more "leftist" choice to make?
Under chud economics, being a landlord doesn't necessitate rent seeking, since depreciation exists, and doing upkeep on your real estate returns value that was lost with depreciation. In a purely ideal sense, it isn't so bad if you are a very good landlord, but those tend to be far and few in between, especially under the current system.
As far as your job installing security cameras is concerned, that's a much better example of not being so hung up on personal purity tests, since you're clearly stuck in this capitalist mode, and you still gotta live. The issue of personal purity tests would come into play here, but I don't really think any general ideas about that go anywhere, since every individual has to deal with that internal struggle in different ways.
It could be zero sum, or maybe it won't be. I think it's different from something like being a landlord, considering housing is an absolute necessity that is being artificially depleted in order for some to profit.