Okay so I'm going to subtweet some Discourse going on in my TL right now, with the disclaimer up front that all of this is completely hypothetical as far as my own life goes (I've never collected rent from anyone): Suppose my parents die and leave me my childhood home
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Suppose that it's a fairly large house (big enough for our family of five when we were growing up), too big for me to live in by myself Option 1) I advertise for tenants and charge them rent, turning the house into an income-producing asset, at the inconvenience of sharing space
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Option 2) I decide I enjoy living in a house too big for me, and hold onto it, even though I'm just one person I pay for the higher maintenance costs by working extra hours at my job, or just letting the house decay The empty rooms remain empty, maybe I use them for podcasting
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(Option 2a: I use the space available to be as income-producing capital in some other sense that doesn't involve residential tenants I turn the extra bedrooms into an escape room, or a recording studio, or a hydroponic farm or whatever)
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Option 3), I sell the house, move into an appropriately sized apartment, and put most of the profits from the sale into a stock market index fund, whose dividends pay my rent
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Here's my thing All three of these options involve me still owning capital, they're all different ways to be a capitalist The assertion there's a hard moral bright line between option 1) and the other two seems wrong to me
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Replying to @arthur_affect
While kill all landlords memes CAN get silly and even leftists realize that (I’m reminded of the landlord joke in the start of Sorry to Bother You) I do think the hard moral line is that 1) puts you in a position of direct, ongoing power over other humans’ lives. 2 and 3 do not.
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Replying to @Antifagator @arthur_affect
That direct, ongoing lord-tenant relationship wouldn’t be quite so toxic if we lived in an environment where tenants weren’t fucked over all the time. But we do and they are. All the choices are capitalist, but 1) is capitalist and semi feudal as well.
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Replying to @Antifagator @arthur_affect
There's no valid abstract theoretical reason not to do 1) over the others, but there's a very strong one once you factor in what that kind of direct power relationship does to people. Power corrupts. Renting out just ONE house might not be a lot of power but it's still up there.
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Replying to @Antifagator
It's exactly the assumption that personally assuming a direct power relationship makes you a worse person than if you're part of a diffuse, crowdsourced power relationship that I'm questioning
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Do I think everything was great when the middle and upper classes in America actually had servants, no, obviously not But is the "gig economy" where you have no relationship to the people driving you around other than hitting a button to summon them better for the workers? Idk
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Replying to @arthur_affect
It's not better for workers. Master-servant is a fossilized feudal relationship like landlord-tenant, and under feudalism the idea was that the subordinate got some kind of patronage or protection benefit out of giving up so much autonomy. The gig economy gets rid of that. But...
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Replying to @Antifagator @arthur_affect
...feudal relationships work to preserve micro-class distinctions, while the gig economies work for one single class distinction, so "consumers" don't have as much social power in them. One day they get an Uber, the next they drive one. It's not like having a chauffeur.
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End of conversation
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