Permanently Deleted
ReFoRmEd ReAcTiOnArY
That Soviet Union episode of Well There’s Your Problem should have prompted some massive introspection. This freak is a judas goat for the same old fascism underlying all anticommunist bullshit.
Landlords are a feedback loop based on their material interests. If they’re not evil to begin with, their income and ability to pay the mortgage/taxes is dependent on the property remaining intact and anything which threatens the property becomes a threat to them. A principled communist landlord will still probably evict the single mother who’s months behind on rent or the tenant with a dog that destroys the yard. Their relationship to capital will change them over time and reinforce the overall structure. It’s no different than if we became good cops or ethical CEOs.
I’ve tried to solve the landlord thing, it just doesn’t work. I understand a bit of the financials behind being a landlord (I am not one myself). I tried to come up with a equity sharing solution, through a co-op. The answer is always the same. If someone doesn’t pay the rent, the system collapses. You will always be forced to engage in rent-seeking behavior, no matter how generous you are. Under capitalism there is no way to provide rental housing in which everyone shares the cost and benefits of property ownership. Because the system isn’t designed to do that. It’s designed around making money off property. No matter what scheme you come up with, the system will force you to play by its rules.
What would be better is to attack it at the structural level, push the landlord influence on local policy out of town. That’s a much harder fight than “I’m going to own property as my income.” But if you can do that, then you can change policies that fight against what you’re trying to do. But even then, this is only a temporary solution as capital will fight back. If you dominate the city government, you’ll fight the county. If you dominate both of those, you’ll fight the banks and state. You’ll never dominate the banks and state because it’s too big. You would have to come up with a parallel banking system to provide capital to your community. You would have to constantly fight state-level interference which means a huge legal team and probably going to the federal courts. We all know what the federal courts are.
Or, we could all just get together, decide to stop putting labor into the system, and beat the fuckers to death when they come to force labor back into their jobs.
The closest I can come to it is a confederation of personal property, like a co-op of homesteads that can withdraw from the collective agreements benefiting all of them (buying in bulk, selling together, community militias and mutual aid). One of the moral crimes of landlords to me is control over tenants and how those material interests drive things like disallowing pets or cohabitation with a romantic partner or a meaningful use of the lawn which might be detrimental to the value of the home. People should have enough to sustain themselves and the opportunity to self-actualise through their hobbies. The fundamental insecurity of renting means I can’t make a subsistence garden or learn most crafts at home or have the companionship of my dog because he’s 15lbs heavier than the arbitrary limit of most properties. That’s a sick level of Foucault shit which should be replicated where the landlords are sent.
I agree with you on advocating for public housing instead. The UK’s council estates can be tweaked into a great concept. Either raise the legal bar for landlords until it’s no longer profitable/desirable to own property there or rezone single-family housing districts and fund public housing. That will cause a cascade of positive outcomes which ends with them building highspeed rail networks they’re buried next to.
I think though, aside from full reclamation of property and redistribution of land, I can see the case for attempting to get a significant fraction of properties available as some kind of non-profit, tenant owned and run organization. Whether that’s a housing co-op or something similar - a way to get whole buildings and groups of people currently renting into ownership of their homes at an at-cost, below market rate.
That is, this would also pressure other buildings to lower their rates to compete, possibly, but at least getting people more affordable ownership now is something that would help them materially.
However, “leftist landlordism” is not the right move.
“Base, Superstructure, material conditions? Sounds like a bunch of redfash tankie bullshit to me.”
nothing about the unearned rent-seeking, which is what makes the landlord innately a parasite. Just a little padding around the edges is good enough to make you a “leftist” landlord apparently.
Wonder how much profit a self-proclaimed"non-profiteering" landlord stills makes. Still give me 40% of your income for zero work, but you also can’t criticize me on the internet because I give you a week grace period to pay your rent. Always knew this guy was liberal trash ever since he started apologizing for the Hungarian fascist uprising of 1956
Adam Azov is probably getting ready to make some property investments of his own right now. he goes on public trial like all the other landlords.
There is another solution to the problem which is ridiculous. . You would need a benevolent billionaire. They would buy million-dollar properties and then just rent them for the tax/insurance/maintenance. Over time properties build equity. That is they gain value because the bank comes back and says “wow, you’ve improved this place by painting and doing landscaping and adding a new roof. Now it’s worth x-amount more than it was.” So if you have a building worth $1M and you put $200k into fixing it up, but it’s full of poor people who don’t pay rent at market prices, what will the bank say? They’re not going to appraise it any higher than it was. So you can’t recoup part of the money to put into more property or continue fixing up the building. Meaning you have to charge more or keep dumping benevolent billionaire money into it.
You can do that for a while but eventually the billionaire dies and then what happens to the property? The people living there can’t afford to buy it. The banks take it or their children take it and sell it at market prices to normal landlords.
On a fundamental level, the value of a property is, at least in part, its ability to generate future income for someone. Buildings full of people who don’t pay rent is not generating future income. This is how capitalism pushes for profit by definition. It’s an axiomatic part of the system.
As ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it does put into perspective how a lot of people have an instinct to believe billionaires are generous. Because that level of hypothetical generosity could step around the boundaries of typical profit seeking behavior, so billionaires are capable of changing some people’s lives for the better much more than the average person. But they don’t because they have no reason other than pure altruism and they wouldn’t do that because they’re flesh automatons made from concentrated evil.
