I feel like this is one of the finer points to convince people of, and doesn't have as many resources to explain it to someone who's been indoctrinated in Capitalism their whole life.
Let Adam Smith do the heavy lifting for you:
“Ground rents are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which best bear to have a particular tax imposed upon them.”
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
“A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground.”
Someone needs to translate this into more modern language, shorten it and paste the text next to a picture of Marx.
Even my good little old lady landlord whose dad passed down two properties to her which she rents out very affordably.
But fact of the matter is she pays her rent and groceries off my rent. She gets to live a privileged sheltered life for no other reason than the fact she was born into a landowning family.
Guess what, plenty of good, deserving people weren't so lucky. And it's a pyramid scheme, only so many people can own rental properties that then get leased out: if everyone did, there'd be nobody to rent. It's literally a case of the upper class mooching off the (very difficult, and during COVID, deadly) labor of the lower class.
What do you call someone who never has to work a hard day in their life because their parents passed investments down to them? A trust fund kid, spoiled rotten, etc. For a culture that supposedly values meritocracy and hard work, we sure have a weird way of showing it.
I'm relatively liberal for a chapo subscriber (DemSoc / Bernie, not so much accelerationist and certainly no tankie) so don't count this perspective out too quick. "Middle America" values hard honest work, and landlords ain't it unless maybe they're doing a lot of moonlighting as property maintenance and management, letting their family/friends live at-cost, etc.
Here's a rough ELI5- town has 10 homes, 10 people want to live in town, 2 people buy 1 home each, 1 person has the money and buys up 8 homes, lives in one, rents the other 7.
7 people now have no homes and all the benefits that come with ownership and are at the mercy of the 1 for fair prices and good living conditions.
One of the people that bought their own place moves away, house for sale, now 7 people who are renting want to buy it, house value goes up because of demand, maybe even the landlord wants it too. Demand drives up value for all homes which in turn encourages landlord to raise rent on the homes they own.
It's a big ol cycle of artificially driving a price up, and landlords benefit from it while renters/people trying to buy a house are pushed out. Current home owners don't speak out cause they benefit
They don’t work. You work to pay them and then they steal money from you to provide a living necessity.
<still playing the character with responses I've gotten>
Aha! But don't they maintain the house/apartment? Isn't it them who acquired it through their own hard work?
That’s not work. That’s maintaining their asset and often times they don’t take care of the property or they get the renter to fix everything and not pay them for the work they did to fix up their place.
But regardless of how much of a slumlord they are. We shouldn’t be putting people in situations where they are forced into explorative relationships because they need a place to live.
Tell them to go on Craigslist and find all the johns demanding prostitution for a place to live. The fact our society allows landlords, enables the conditions for them to exploit people because it’s an exploitative relationship.
the value they add by performing maintenance (assuming they actually do that, maintaining the place is only a legal obligation that is often overlooked) is not nearly proportional to what they charge, which is pretty much always based on market prices and not the actual value they provide
So what if they bought it themselves? Now there's a spreadsheet somewhere that says "X owns Y," real fucking cool, that's not work and definitely not worthy of payment every month. Maintenance work, sure, but that's only a fraction of the rent.
What's the rest of that rent for? If you don't pay it, that's not some extra work going unpaid somewhere. All that happens is the landlord is allowed to call the government to make you homeless.
My usual explanation is:
Under capitalism there are 2 classes, those who sell their labour for a living(producing) - proletariat/workers/the 99% - and those that do not sell their labour but instead capitalise upon the labour sold by the proletariat, these are non-workers - bourgeoisie/capital-owners/the 1%. The bourgeoisie do not work because working is selling your labour in order to receive a paycheck, their money does not come from selling their labour(producing) but instead comes from slicing a cut from what the proletariat produce using their labour. The bourgeoisie does not do labour they have other people do labour for them via what they own.
The easiest, simplest and most obvious explanation of this within society are landlords.
A member of the proletariat goes to work, he sells his labour in order to receive a paycheck. He comes home to a rented property and he gives 60% of that paycheck to the landlord who has done nothing except take this labourer's money. The landlord provides nothing, the landlord did not build the home as it was already there, maintenance is also paid for with the renter's money so that too comes from the renter not the landlord. The proletariat is the one doing the work while the landlord parasitically takes his labour. He provides absolutely nothing. He is a parasite.
The proletariat had his labour stolen twice in this example. Once by the owner of his workplace who makes their income from the theft of the combined labour output of every employee there, and a second time by the landlord who contributes nothing while only capitalising upon ownership of the property.
But that's just not true! Many landlords are the ones who built the house, or they bought the house from the one who built it, and they are required to do stuff like fix things in the house that break.
Then the landlord in question should be a carpenter, electrician, or plumber, and make money directly from their labor rather than by holding a government-backed monopoly on a parcel of land and using that leverage to extort rent from the tenant.
Something I'd like to understand better is why many socialists seem to believe it's more acceptable to invest in the stock market than become a landlord
Indirect vs Direct exploitation? I don't know I've never considered the question before. Is the stock market even real? Does the buying and selling on it directly affect the workers in a negative way? Is it a meaningful thing that participation in directly creates exploitation that wouldn't be there anyway?
These are legitimate questions and immediate thoughts. I'm not sure. Something I'll have a think about and come back here later hoping someone gives a good answer.
Indirect vs Direct exploitation?
Yes this tends to be what I think, but I can't come to a consistent position on how and why it being indirect matters.
I don’t know I’ve never considered the question before. Is the stock market even real? Does the buying and selling on it directly affect the workers in a negative way? Is it a meaningful thing that participation in directly creates exploitation that wouldn’t be there anyway?
It's not so much that you're supporting the stock market as that you're owning a chunk of a company, whose workers' labour you're now capitalising on.
The only argument that anyone ever has for landlords is that the provide a service, but that service is property management and could be done by the state without the need for profit (and also it's not a real job if it's for a single unit)
Of course this doesn't even address the fact that by their very existence, landlords are a parasite on the free market through their monopolization of assets. If housing supply exceeds demand then the value of houses should drop until it reaches an equilibrium. By sitting on property, landlords ensure that supply doesn't meet demand so the price of housing doesn't decrease. This means renters can't afford to buy a home then the landlord steps in and parasitically extracts rent from the otherwise homeless renter. This in turn creates the rental market which incentivizes landlords to maintain a supply that does not meet demand (by keeping a small number of units empty or discouraging development) so that rents stay high.
There is also the very nature of the landlord-tenant relationship in which it is in the best interest of the landlord to charge as much rent on the cheapest housing possible, but it is in the best interest of the tenant to not be homeless. In the relationship between a landlord and their tenant(s), the landlord's interest is to extract wealth to the brink of the tenant's financial ruin. In the relationship between all landlords and all tenants, it is the best interest of the landlords to maintain a surplus of tenants who are then homeless or inadequately housed.
Make the argument that renters should be able to improve their homes without permission if the conditions are bad. This is a good outcome for landlords. Landlords should be required to invest a certain amount in their properties every year and work with tenants to improve quality of living. Make the argument that rent should never exceed significantly mortgage costs as the landlord still building equity or the very least it should be transparent how much you're being profited from.
Sometimes it's better to argue around the point. Weaken their shell rather than try to penetrate it.
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