Allowing you to occupy a perfectly good property while you’re no longer contributing to the community is a waste of resources. If you can’t contribute through your labour, then you’ll contribute through your sacrifice. (Admittedly, that’s more Animal Farm than Marx.)
That’s the reason communism tends to suck. You can’t just intelligently apply the fruits of your labor to amass capital for the purpose of generating profit.
As I understand it, communists are largely against any sort of form of economic rent collecting. Basically earning passive income off of things like land or businesses where other people put in the actual work. The whole point is to dismantle that very class structure where you have “workers” and “people who live off of the fruit of the worker’s labor”
This is a bit like “trickle down economics”. Yes, in theory, if you cut taxes for the wealthy, they could open new businesses to provide new jobs, or pay higher wages to existing employees. But in reality, most of the people who benefited the most from tax cuts didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. When they got the money, they just kept it.
Yes, in theory, a landlord provides a useful service, but in reality, most of them do as little as possible to keep the money flowing in, while oftentimes engaging in shady or outright illegal behavior to avoid letting one dollar more than absolutely necessary leave their hands. If they’d been honest and kept up their part of the bargain, there wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but they didn’t, so here we are.
The OP is confused, as are most people participating in this thread.
What Marx singled out for criticism is not residential rent, but economic rent, which is a distinct economic term for any income-seeking activity that collects money without adding value.
Landlording isn’t really rent-seeking in this sense. Yes, someone collects monies that are termed ‘rent’, but the landlord is providing something of value in return. No mistake, Marxists do have issues with property rights and tenant rights, but when they talk about the “rentier class” they’re talking about a much broader class of behaviors.
A proper example of rent-seeking behavior is Intuit lobbying the government to preserve its TurboTax profits. The IRS could save a lot of money and hassle for taxpayers by sending pre-filled tax forms, since they already have most of the information. But Intuit lobbies the government to kill anything that could cost them profits. Intuit is rent-seeking by using their lobbying power to cause people to buy products that they don’t need. This is economic rent-seeking, as defined by Adam Smith.
I would add that it isn’t just Marxists who denounce rent-seeking behavior. Anybody who cares about a functioning market economy should oppose rentier capitalism because it causes price distortion and economic waste.
But the land was his.
Generally speaking, modern council and anarcho-communists (that is, the form that is not in favor of vanguardism or state socialist solutions like Leninists or Maoists) oppose private land ownership in general, and even the concept of land ownership and housing markets.
There are two common threads here:
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The notion of “common land” and “common resources”, this doesn’t really directly relate to housing per se, but generally speaking there’s an idea that land is not public or private, but belongs to all. (Some may say that’s “public” but public has a notion of being governmentally owned in some way). Everybody can use this land to farm their own crops, build their own homes etc so long as it’s not actively blocking someone else from having what they need. If you’re familiar with practices the early Puritans in the US used, it’s similar to that. The philosophy of The Diggers are a big influence on this as well.
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There is a big outcry that we have more than enough houses to house everyone (the common statistic is 6 homes to every homeless person, but I haven’t fact checked that exact number), and that private owners charging money homeless or poor people can’t afford, or rich people buying a second home and leaving one empty, or leaving an empty home “on the market”, is in itself contributing to a social disease that denies people who need shelter, well, shelter.
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For those that are anarchists, house renting also falls afoul of the whole “no hierarchy” thing, since landlordship inherently places you in a hierarchy/position of power above the people you’re renting to, because you can leverage their place of residence against them.
It should also be noted there is a distinction between what we’ll call… moral communists and economic communists. These are in no way mutually exclusive, but for Marx communism was largely an economic exercise, if somebody suggested communism was an ethical or moral choice he would laugh at them (that’s not a hypothetical, he actually did that), because to him it wasn’t a matter of morality – capitalism was self-evidently ridiculous and flawed and would collapse under its own weight sooner or later.
Referring to Marx for what modern Marxists/communist-leftists believe is also… how can I put this… sort of like referring to Darwin for what modern evolutionary biologists believe. Which is to say, it is an important foundation and a lot of theoretical groundwork can be traced back directly, or even directly quoted from, Marx’s texts, but just as it’d be somewhat comical for an evolutionary biologist to “subscribe” to On The Origin of Species there are vanishingly few Orthodox Marxists left. Even the Labor Theory of Value* is somewhat out of favor, at least in its unmodified form. All of this serves a conceptual scaffolding, but referring back to what exactly Marx said to decode what modern far-leftists believe is only going to get you partially there. I remember there being a huge thing in Marxist spheres recently when there was a Marxist Economics book that used the unmodified Labor Theory of Value as a foundation and most of the Q&As with the author were asking them to justify this and cornering them on it, because being that Orthodox of a Marxist is so rare. Honestly if you’re going to go back that far Bakunin is probably closer to what a lot of modern Marxists believe than Marx himself, and even then you’re missing a century and a half of writing, theory, and controversy on the subject.
I know I link him a lot, but Philosophy Tube has a pretty good video on how a lot of modern Left-Libertarians (the umbrella term for anti-state socialists and communists) see the housing market in general, whether landlords are involved or not. I apologize profusely for the cringy framing story in the video, though. I love it but it makes it… not a great reference for random people trying to find info.
I’ll also note that I have no fucking idea how modern tankies (Leninists, Maoists, etc) see housing and landlordship, I don’t really talk with them.
- Technically speaking, Marx never used the Labor theory of value either, he used “socially necessary labor time”, “labor power”, and “law of value”, which are concepts that are related to and derived from largely Adam Smith’s formalization of the LTV, but even Marx’s own formulation is not widely subscribed to anymore.
I should say broadly similar, it’s very different in most of the details (for one, the Puritans largely distributed resources completely equally per family which is not typically advocated).
Hardcore communists regard private property as a sin. Since communism is about collective ownership, anyone enjoying or promoting individual ownership will be regarded as an obstacle to attaining the objectives of the communist revolution.
If you are developing a political platform it’s hard to go wrong with landlord hatred. Dentist and DMV hatred would go over as well as tax hatred. There’s always a way to justify these things as political philosophy but it’s just pandering to peoples basest instincts.
Before this disappears into the void, you are almost correct here. Marx’s criticism of rent-seeking isn’t specifically about charging money to use property, it’s any means that someone wrongly uses government policy to make others trade with them, usually in some sense of a privately-held government-mandated monopoly.
Tariffs are another good example of rent-seeking behavior. I want people to buy my widgets, so I lobby the government to raise prices of foreign widgets. I get more money from you and I didn’t have to do anything for it.
Landlording isn’t by definition rent-seeking, but it potentially can be if economic conditions create a monopoly on housing. (i.e. high rents in San Francisco are definitely caused by abusive rent-seeking because existing property owners fight hard to avoid increased density or new construction. They shroud their motives in “preserving neighborhood character”, but it’s all about constraining supply to protect their monopoly. That’s where rentier capitalism is objectively bad and harmful as relates to residential leasing.
Lest anyone think it’s just Marx and the smelly communists who have issues with rent-seeking, let me leave you with this Adam Smith quote in which he more or less was the first to characterize it:
FWIW I have met a few Russians and have noted they are very into outright ownership and cash and very not into debt, to the point that some of them I know ahs outright bought their homes instead of the mortgage. It seems to be that it came from their old country where if one doesn’t own things under communism, they can be taken away and one feels helpless in that situation and never their own person but just existing at the will and whim of the state. I would say they would dislike the idea of creating that same dynamic with having a landlord own your home.
This is a common mistake people make. Communists oppose private property, not personal property. Generally speaking, private property is defined as ownership that generates profit, or more specifically that which generates surplus value in excess of its operating costs, typically in the form of wage labor or renting. Private property is more of a form of social relationship, than a set of objects. You’re still allowed to own your home, your food, your toothbrush, your guitar, or whatever else. You’re even allowed to own your own means of production, as long as you’re the one operating and extracting value from it . For instance, owning your own lathe for your own use is fine, renting that out for a fee to another isn’t, and owning the whole factory and having employees certainly isn’t, things like a factory would be commonly owned for all tradespeople who need those means of production to do their own labor.
There is some fuzzy area when it comes to things like, say, farmland, and there’s is sort of a zeroth rule which is “if you’re being a ding-dong to everyone around you and taking a bunch of things just to deprive others we’re gonna take it back, ya ding-dong”, which covers a lot of stuff, e.g. holding acres of land you’re not using when the community needs that to farm or make homes, but generally speaking nobody is coming for any of your stuff unless you’re an employer or renter, and even then they’re only coming to give that stuff to the people you employ/rent to.
The other misconception is that everyone has the same things under communism. Like… no… if I have a gaming PC that doesn’t mean everyone in the commune needs to have the exact same gaming PC, people are allowed to have their own things according to their own interests and they may invest more or fewer resources in obtaining high quality goods for their own personal property.
E: The simpler, less exact, glib way of saying it is that personal property is what you obviously own because you occupy or use it. Private property is that which you don’t obviously use or occupy, but by decree of the state you still somehow own.
Hell. from Chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto itself
As a home owner in Romania, where home ownership is over 95% (compared with 85% in Russia), I’d say I’m pretty familiar with the concepts in your post. However, capitalism has given a new impetus to these ideas when banks flooded the market with slogans urging people to make loans so that they could invest their money ‘more wisely’ by acquiring their own homes rather than squandering their salaries on unreasonable rents.
I agree with you, but it is not a mistake that I make.
Radical communists are aware that they cannot ban personal property, but they question and frown upon on conspicuous personal property.
In a ‘perfect’ communist society, like the one in which I was born tended to be, the regime provided both free public services (for everyone) and special opportunities (for the most diligent and dedicated) but those who applied for all these were supposed to fill in forms where they gave details about their family’s history and wealth. People were supposed to mention whether they had relatives in the West, if their ancestors had been landlords or members of the bourgeoisie, if they owned land, buildings, vehicles. With every square they ticked, they accumulated points on a negative tally that excluded them from enjoying special opportunities and placed them at the bottom of the list for the free public services.
I want to mention that private property that allowed people to collect revenues outside the communist regulated economy was illegal. Every income was supposed to come from a form of state-owned or state-controlled enterprise or cooperative. The regime never managed to control every activity across the country, but gray or black markets were quite thin.
Many of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe followed the Russian model, where Lenin and Stalin clarified how peasantry and land ownership should be approached as well.
Like I said, my familiarity is more with anarcho- and council communist varieties (and influences on the philosophy like Revolutionary Catalonia, Zapatistas, some indigenous American communities to varying degrees, and the Diggers). State-communists (or rather vanguardists who believe state capitalism, en route to state socialism en route to “true” communism) or “tankies” such as adherents to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or similar (to varying degrees, Lenin is the… least bad of that trio) can and do vary on this in theory and practice. There is a reason that uh… anarchists and tankies do not get along at all in any way.
In the USSR under Stalin, that isn’t really how it worked.
[ul][li]Stalin didn’t just go after the kulaks who were being ding-dongs - he wanted to exterminate them as a class.[/li][li]The kulaks were farming their own land, not to deprive others of it, but to feed the whole freaking country.[/li][li]They didn’t give the land to the renters and employees - the state took it.[/li][li]They didn’t just take the land - they shot you, starved you, and sent you to prison camps.[/ul][/li][quote=UY Scuti]
Many of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe followed the Russian model, where Lenin and Stalin clarified how peasantry and land ownership should be approached as well.
[/quote]
Well, it was clear all right.
Regards,
Shodan
@Wesley Clark: Dude, communism is an ideal. It works pretty well in theory, just like the Golden Rule, as long as everyone follows it. Less so if they don’t. 
I pretty much subscribe to the communist ideal myself, but I sure don’t hate my landlord! She’s a very nice lady. And I would really hate to have to deal with the electricity company, garbage collector, plumber etc. myself. Better she take care of that! 
You have to remember the history of Europe, where communism was born, to make any sense of this. From the time of the middle ages land was owned by fewer and fewer people. If you were not one of those few then you paid someone for the right to live on their land. This eventually resulted in a few families collecting rents from everyone else, including entire towns. In some places this is still true today:
Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population
This resulted in many unfavorable conditions for individuals and the society in general. People who couldn’t meet their obligation to their landlord lost their freedom, became serfs, which were officially tied to the land that used to be theirs, and even slaves. Even in the industrial revolution the debtor prisons followed this same practice with just different terms applied.
In short the legacy of the abuses of the feudal system led to communism. At its core feudalism was based on everything being owned and controlled by landlords.