It seems like something is kinda happening in response. People are buying guns and joining orgs like PSL. Maybe not enough people, but looking from afar it kinda seems like there’s interest in moving beyond the democrats for people who don’t want to accept this crap.

I suspect a lot of the people making basic errors in this thread get their knowledge of politics from memes. A lot of people saying stuff like “big corporations are the problem, not mom & pop landlords” which, if they read something like this single page from Wage Labour and Capital they’d understand is false. Capital is capital, and its relation to labor is the same regardless of its size!

cause on one hand, buying property to rent out is one of the ways out of wage slavery

This is not complete thinking. It’s not a way out of wage slavery when you’re just pushing the can down the road and making the condition of someone else’s wage slavery worse. You have to realize that your condition as a worker and a potential tenant’s condition is one and the same, and the way to abolish that condition is to unite as a class to seize and exert political power.

I also don’t really think the answer is all property being state-owned, but what do I know

It really doesn’t have to be. There’s already countries where they have a 95% homeownership rate and that’s been achieved by heavy regulation of housing and real estate speculation, and expropriation programs (also a lot of liquidation of the landlord class).

The $8000-9000 municiple taxes, utilities, upkeep, are all supposed to be paid by the landlord at a net loss.

Can you link to the comment where anyone said this? On my own, all I’ve said is that if you do rent out a property and generate a profit, that profit is appropriated surplus value.

No, they’ll be overthrown in a social revolution that abolishes the present social relations and conditions of production. The state established after that point will seek out a program of expropriation of all private land.

Why don’t you rent it at exactly the cost of maintenance?

In every capitalist country in the world the ruling class is organized to ensure its continued ability to appropriate surplus value and leech off labor. I assure you any transient condition that is presently causing the profits of real estate speculators to falter is going to pale in comparison to the massive amount of profit they are set to make over the next decades. It’s no different than the temporary valley in 2008 which was only an opportunity for capitalists to move money into the real estate market.

Does “dishonestly” include a situation where the state’s monopoly on violence is utilized to leverage someone into a bad deal?

Money isn’t itself evil. Appropriating surplus value is what’s being criticized.

What’s your definition of theft?

I’ve left a ton of comments in this thread that essentially boil down to this. You’re exactly right. Owning a property comes with some operational costs, renting it out adds some operational costs too, but the whole point of being a landlord is that rent exceeds the sum of the operational costs, then there is some surplus that goes toward covering the capital expense of buying the property in the first place; once the capital is paid off, that surplus is pure profit that goes to the landlord for providing absolutely 0 value to the world.

We all gotta start reading beyond volume 1 of capital :( there’s a lot of useful stuff in 2 and 3!

You’re theoretically right about those examples. In a competitive market, the proprietor of some depreciating and universally available property with a finite useful life like a car renting it out to people who only need it for a short period of time isn’t exploiting them. It’s no more exploitative than selling them that car. In theory, the ability for a competitor to buy a car and rent it out for a competitive rate means that you can’t exploit consumers in this industry. The profit would have to come from the labor power involved in the rental industry, like any other industry.

In practice you’re describing an industry that is highly financialized and that operates inside imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, where monopoly rents are the norm. So the rental company and Uhaul aren’t making all their revenue out of the theoretically fair arrangement where their clients are essentially just paying off the depreciation and operational expenditure that goes into their property, they’re also paying some ground rent or monopoly rent.

The fact that there were profits to be made by owning a house and renting it out, even if those profits used to be smaller, is itself the problem. That $400 exceeded the cost of maintenance and property taxes (if any) that the landlord paid. That’s profit a landlord is making for doing no work. You know what happens when you can accumulate money without putting in work? You can freely invest that money in more capital to make even more profits ad infinitum, and the rate at which you can do this isn’t bound by the rate at which your labor power replenishes.

In total, that system creates a process where landlords and all others who own capital can have unbounded and relentless growth. It’s not fundamentally different from the factors at play that allow an industrial entrepreneur to start a business expending coal, labor power, and thread to make textiles, turn a profit, and expand that business; over several hundred cycles of production that process culminates in that industrialist (or their heirs) amassing an incredible amount of wealth and even a monopoly.

In either case, it would be insufficient to look at the system 200 years in where the rot had already set in and say that the problem is the system in that instant. No, the problem existed before. There is no time and place for rent and landlords or capitalist exploitation of any kind.

who determines the number of properties?

The number of properties is generally 1. You generally don’t need to live in more than one house. If you’re working in some kind of situation where that’s absolutely necessary because you’re staying in distant places for extended periods of time, you’d need some kind of special exception.

Once everyone (or pretty much everyone, barring people who desire to live as nomads) owns a house, we can talk about letting people own vacation homes.

what if a landlord buys up 1000 properties and rents them out below market rates, is that systematic harm?

If they’re making a profit, yes. If they aren’t making a profit, no, but they won’t be doing it for long unless they’re getting funding from somewhere.

immigrants should just learn place and forever rent and be miserable and poor so they can joint the glorious proletariat revolution! not be evil greedy capitalists who want to provide for their kids!

Immigrants can buy a home and live in it. There’s nothing exploitative about that.

If a person, regardless of their background, buys a property and makes profit off of charging rent for that property, the profit is extracted from the work that other people are actually doing. They’re leeching off of others. This is simple, it doesn’t depend on whether the landlord is a mom & pop landlord or if it’s a giant private equity firm. Every dollar someone earns that they didn’t work for is a dollar someone else worked for and didn’t get to keep.

The personal demeanor or intention of a landlord doesn’t change the nature of the arrangement. The nature of the arrangement is one where the landlord makes money that they’re not working for, and the tenant must give up money that they did work for in exchange.

If a landlord makes a profit from owning a property after all is said and done, the amount of property maintenance is irrelevant. No landlords would exist at all if there wasn’t profit to be made from charging rent, they aren’t gonna do it for charity.