I am a landlord to my kids. They get discounted rent, I get my 2nd mortgage paid and a little bit extra to cover maintenance. It is a win win for everyone involved. Plus if / when me & the mrs die it is theirs to do with as want if we don’t sell it to pay for our retirement expense. Point is not all landlords are bad.
Landlord = banned. Your kids will get back at you some day, no doubt about that.
Owning 1 extra property and renting: Okay
Owning apartment complex and renting: Okay
Owing millions of single family homes and duplexes and rent hiking/price hiking the entire market: not okay
I wish people here understand this. It costs money to buy property, and so effort needed to be applied into buying one was done beforehand by being good with money. Rich people don’t need to go through this, and should rightfully be criticized.
Being exploited in the past does not justify exploitation on your part in the future.
Exploited? You mean working to earn money, like everyone else?
Not like everyone else. Capitalists do not work for their money, they exploit workers through paying them less than the value they create.
Owning 1 slave: Okay
Owning a dozen slaves: Okay
Owning hundreds of slaves: not okay.
/s obviously
/uj
Of course slavery and landlordism aren’t identical in every respect, but they both are based on a parasite class doing no work, and extracting labor value from people who do. Large-scale vs small-scale doesn’t make landlording any more ethical.
Do you have a problem with public housing or are landlords okay when it’s the state?
Publicly-owned and controlled housing is the solution to this problem, yes. Then rents, upkeep, and all housing questions are determined at the level of public/political decision-making and not by petty tyrant landlords acting only in the interests of profit.
You support this alternative with completely a completely different dynamic and incentives??
Another win for pithy internet hypocracy gotcha debatelord!
It was a reasonable follow up question, governments are corporations after all and they stated they oppose all landlord/renter situations
governments are corporations
no
When you’re ready to be a communist we will be waiting
Since when is communism against administration and social planning? Since when have Marxists said governments are corporations? This is deeply silly.
We don’t have an instance stance on landlord apologia, but maybe we should make one, based on the number of people from other instances defending these mooching rent-seeking parasites.
/me sorts by controversial
i hope you do; seeing it is a depressing reminder of how much americans think that exploitation like this is okay and even more depressing to see people exploited like this want to perpetuate it.
I know this will be downvoted to hell, but this whole let’s rally against landlords is kind of stupid in my opinion.
You can say the exact same thing about a bank that gives you a lone, they do zero work and get money.
Or a company that leases or rents out cars.
For a landlord you can make the argument that a home is a primary life necessity. But when you borrow money from a bank it’s pretty much the same thing.
Some people don’t want to stay in a place too long and like the option to rent. Also it’s not like a landlord hard zero risks, you can get tenants that are horrible and trash a place.
Just to be clear I’m not a landlord myself, but also not someone that just hates them because it’s a thing now.
Brother, what Lemmy instance do you think this community is on? You aren’t going to get a good discussion with this topic here.
I think we should make the same argument against banks, leasing, and other highly financialized capital.
Maybe but there is a market for it. To me it’s crazy people (students) in the Netherlands pay 15 euros a month for a bicycle, while you can find a working second hand one for about 100 euros.
Same goes for cars, I always save and buy second hand, I would never even consider borrowing for a car. Rather have an older model than debt.
But some people are different and don’t mind to pay extra for less hassle, like the bicycle thing. They replace it when you get a flat tire for example.
For some people that’s also what they like about renting a house, roof has a leak? Landlord has to fix it.
As a fellow Dutch, you’re overpaying your secondhand bikes ;)
I mean you can always find cheaper, but 100 euros on markplaats will definitely get you a decent bike. I tried to sell my old one (we where moving and I didn’t want to take it with me). It still worked even the brakes and gears, although it was a bit rusty, anyway even for 15 euros almost no one showed up. Maybe it was too cheap.
The utility of being able to borrow a use-value rather than needing to own it is a real thing, the form under capitalism is the problem, and is where exploitation and usury comes in. Better to have public transit, bikes included, at non-profit rates or even subsized to be free at point of service.
sure, however ownership still has a place in that public/borrowed goods typically have usage restrictions that make sense for the health of the device but limit its utility. such as using an SUV/truck to do yardwork or repurposing a bike as an elliptical.
Sure, renting vs owning is fully accomodated by public and personal ownership. Private usury is a drain on social wealth.
tf is “social wealth”?
The overall wealth in society. Usury produces absolutely nothing of value, and purely exists as a legal means to serve as a drain on resources. Landlords are such an egregious example of usury that they have been near universally hated for as long as they’ve existed, even by liberals.
like the option
Nobody likes renting. Nobody likes moving. If there wasn’t the premium cost from renting, there would be less pressure on these people to change their life arrangements.
When I was in college, renting made sense. I wasn’t going to be there but like two years. I wouldn’t have hardly accumulated any equity and had the pain of trying to sell at the end.
I’ve known people with like two year work assignments where renting made sense.
I cannot fathom it, but I have a coworker who swears by renting even though he hasn’t moved in years and has no intention to move ever. I think the ‘mantaining your own house is scary’ articles hit him hard and he’s now convinced that owning a household means you are somehow constantly having to fix things yourself for lots of money. So he may have been bamboozled, but certainly limited term living makes sense.
That’s not really true, one of my friends rented an apartment for about 2 years specifically because he didn’t knew if he wanted to live abroad or in a different city. Same goes for my sister she really didn’t want any long term commitments to have the freedom to go anywhere. She didn’t even wanted a 1 year phone contract.
Lots of young people rent because it gives them more freedom and less burden when they want to move.
Also about the premium cost, it really depends on the laws, like in the Netherlands after you have rented a house for over 1 year, the landlord can only raise the rent a certain percentage. Some people have been renting the same apartment for 30+ years and pay a ridiculous low rent.
It’s really interesting that rent can only raise by a small amount each year there. I’m rolling around in my head whether that would work in the US. What happens when the assessed value of the property raises over the years and causes the taxes to skyrocket? Do the landlords just sell the place in that case? I could see that being a good way to keep the market moving and give people a chance to enter owner-occupied homeownership.
Also it’s not like a landlord hard zero risks
Then they should sell instead of renting.
You know what’s the fastest way to make landlords disappear? Ask about some broken shit around the house that they are required by law to fix. Radio silence for months guaranteed. Until the next rent increase of course.
For a lot of them, they don’t even care if there’s tenant turnover, especially if its a high-demand area. There’s no incentive to fix a broken AC; the tenants already signed the year lease. They can get to it next year when its time to clean up the place for the re-listing.
If it’s a longer term tenant, the landlord is actually disincentivized from fixing the AC, because they can fix the AC and jack the rent way up as soon as the old, abuse tenant inevitably leaves.
One of my friends suffered through this during the recent heat wave. They’ve been told there’s no budget for AC despite a recent $50 rent hike.
Their landlord is an independently wealthy multimillionaire — they don’t even need the money!
When I married my wife and she moved in we tried renting out her house with a property management company. She got one tenant and had that tenant for over 2 years with no complaints and we never raised the rent, just enough to cover taxes going up too.
But when we wanted to move to a larger house we gave her an 8 month notice we couldn’t renew since the market is so bad and we needed to sell. And my wife wasn’t profiting at all, she was still in the red from the repairs and setting up the house to rent out. We offered her like $10k off the price.
Anyway long story short, the tenant gave us hell for those 8 months, and when she moved out we found she never complained about anything because she ignored all the problems which made things worse and the house needed thousands of more dollars to prepare and sell.
She’ll never try being a landlord again, she hated it and the tenant shit talked her “landlord” on Facebook all the time like she was some evil monster.
I don’t know how anyone else does the landlord thing, this must be all the ones run by evil corporations.
This was a house my wife bought for like $150-180k originally.
Yeah being a landlord makes you into the bad guy despite intentions. You’ll always make back whatever “losses” you incurred in equity, because we have a crazy for profit housing market.
Landlord/renter is an abominable financial relationship.
Tough shit. Must be so inconvenient for you to not keep up on repairs to your own building. That’s on you.
Standard rent is at least 1-1.5% of current not original value per month and taxes are about that per year.
you probably bought for 150 you earned 100,000 when it ballooned up to 250k rented it for at least 2500 a month x24 months or 60,000 paid 6000 each to taxes and management pocketed another 48,000
When you sold realizing that cool 100k you naturally had to do all the repairs and upkeep you had been putting off so you ended up coming out of pocket for “thousands”
In the end you netted 140k for doing 10 hours work once whereas the median worker earns 200-250
You probably charged here so much to ensure you made the “market rate” eg people like you that she had no funds saved to actually move and you probably nickel and dimed her deposit away for stuff that was actually on you.
Where am I wrong?
Wow lots of assumptions here. My wife only rented it out enough to cover her expenses (mortgage, insurance, property management, etc). She only netted $100 a month as “profit” but that doesn’t include taxes at the end of the year, and she was paying towards $6000 she owed to house repairs. It doesn’t include repairs needed from normal wear and tear and tenant damage.
A lot of your assumptions are based on profit towards selling the house, which in this situation means its not sustainable on its own without you covering everything out of pocket.
The real kicker here is that her tenant made more money than my wife. The tenant was making at least $10,000/month per bank statements.
Your other comments are false also. State laws here are very clear on what can be charged as a deposit.
None of that was my point though, and I realize sharing that here on a meme was dumb on my part. I’m not looking for sympathy, I was just feeling a rare moment of sharing an experience often overlooked: two hard working people who independently buy a starter home, meet later, and one moves in with the other and tries to rent out their house. Landlords aren’t always evil but your reply demonstrated all the immediate assumptions and biases. After all, why should anyone be allowed to own more than one home, right? Especially if they try to rent it out? I guess Air BNB is better.
A lot of us lived in rentals and heard talk about the dream of rental supplemental income, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and not really feasible without an insane rate or having enough cash to not pay a mortgage. It’s probably why more companies are trying to buy up houses.
If your wife was only clearing 100 per month in profit from a rental house you all must be just amazingly bad at whatever you were doing and should have sold the house as soon as you weren’t living in it. Rent has skyrocketed and home value continually risen quickly for the last 40 years. I’m not even sure how this is possible.
Wow what a messed up situation. Surprising to hear the tenant was wealthy. I still maintain that the only winning move is not to play.
I have managed a building with 8 units before. Never again.
I once had a lady’s ceiling collapse. I then come to learn she’s been putting a bucket out to catch water for months, never told anyone about it. What should have been a quick 15 minute fix ended up being a total nightmare.
Had one dude who was a heroin addict. Kept flushing needles. The plumbing had to be taken apart multiple times to get his needles out.
Had a lady who kept adopting cats, wouldn’t get them fixed. She would then let them out into the hall to spray the walls with what was basically straight ammonia, except grosser.
I could go on all day, trash fires, fucking litter, a phycological inability to break down cardboard. I think my blood pressure just spiked writing this.
You couldn’t pay me to be a landlord. People are awful.
If it’s any consolation, I’m in an 8-unit owner-occupied condo rn and my kitchen ceiling collapsed last week because the HOA refused to fix a roof leak for almost two years. So now what should have been a couple hundred dollar roof patch is thousands of dollars coming out of my HOA payments.
Bullshit you just didn’t do any maintenance
people will ignore problems if they think someone else will deal with them
Yeah we know you did
Mod removed my post without reason. Maybe cussing offended them.
The market seems to self select for bad landlords. All the well intentioned ones I know got burned and stopped renting.
‘well intentioned’ and landlord dont go togther
We have a previous neighbor who got fuckin railed by a tenant. It was the first and last time they tried to rent a property. They were the old couple everyone loved in our neighborhood. And they only moved so they could help raise their grandkids. Some of the nicest people I’ve ever known became landlords.
The tenant was a state sponsored recovering drug addict. She had recently gotten her kids back. Then covid hit and our state put a moratorium on evictions. She immediately stopped paying rent, started breading dogs, trashed the house, ruined the septic, and barely took care of her kids. The dogs kept escaping and attacking other dogs, some sort of pit bread that she was trying to sell. The whole house was filled with feces. She bought 3 campers and parked them into our shared road. The county couldn’t do anything to stop this literal garbage human from fucking over these gold standard landlords.
After she was evicted the whole house had to be renovated and the septic system had to be replaced. Over $100k in damage by 1 tenant. They will never rent again. Which is sad because they were very forgiving landlords. Rent was like 50% of what they could charge and the house was very nice.
The whole situation convinced me that its not really that good landlords can’t exist. The problem is the few shit tenants scare the good ones away. The only ones that stay in the game are the bad ones because can tolerate the dogshit tenants. This was my worst example, but I know two other families that tried being landlords and got burned as well.
based tenant fuck your eldery leechlords
Have you tried getting a job?
No sympathy for landlords.
No sympathy lmao, you dont get to cry
Very similar situation.
Cry us a river
If i had Jeff Bozos money, I’d buy a bunch of houses and offer them to the homeless to get the back into society. Fucking bozo Bozos is. And that’s why I’ll never have Jeff Bozos money.
Capitalism rewards the worst most selfish hoarders of wealth. How can we build a system like this and expect this type of altruism? Makes no sense. The system was always broken.
Oh, I know. I was just explaining why I’ll never be a billionaire. I care about people. Sad that that’s a fact of life
“understood, create a factory town and offer housing in exchange for employment.” ~ Bezos
is that not the only way to do it?
This is such a shit show of a post.
Landlord said to me “property tax has gone up. This is my only form of income. Will need to increase rent”
Told him “yeah, everything has gone up and my paycheck is still the same”.
Like, these types of relationships are so parasitic. This is the “nice” mom and pop style landlord too that every liberal seems to want to give a pass too.
Sure, are they less bad than the big corporate faceless landlords? Yes. But the entire relationship is the problem.
They get to justify forcing me out of my home because the value of the house that they own WENT UP.
That’s why their property tax is more. They literally own something that is more valuable and making it further impossible for me to ever buy a place of my own.
If they offered to let you buy it for the fair market value of the home, would you? That’s the only viable way for them to extract that house value without evicting you. A fair answer could be absolutely, and perhaps that should be something renters are given some rights to do, but just pointing out that a tax assessment doesn’t mean they have usable money unless they can do something to cash in.
I literally asked. He said he’s not selling.
That is unfortunate.
Old guy or younger guy? If this is their retirement income, they would probably be better off selling it and putting the proceeds into a nice account.
Of course those accounts also profit off of the inconvenience of others, but with social security all messed up, some form of screwing with the active working generation is needed to model retirement of the older generation, and a financial account is less egregious than sitting on potentially available housing stock.
I think I can answer most of your questions by saying he comes over to discuss the lease in a Mercedes Maybach. An SUV that starts at $178,000.
I don’t think age or other things really matter at that point.
He owns multiple properties and houses.
But, still, my entire point is that this relationship in itself is what needs to die. It’s not this individual dudes fault. It’s a system that allows people like this to exist that produce nothing.
If that’s their whole retirement investment (as they said it’s their only income, no idea about us retirement details) if they don’t increase your rent, their net income will GO DOWN. Prices of everything also went up for them, if you think it’s hard with constant income, imagine with declining income.
The value of their house going up is useless to pay for bread.
You should get a bigger paycheck, average wage growth is around 5% in the US, higher than inflation even.
Sounds like they should get an actual job, rather than expecting someone else to pay for their retirement; someone who probably won’t get to retire themselves
If it’s their only income source I assume they are retired. If they aren’t, you are absolutely right.
Why do we have to sacrifice our future ability to retire and own a house because they bought all the houses and retired first?
How are the two related? It’s not a zero sum game, there’s new houses being built all the time.
There are studies recently released that show that the people who are buying houses 20 years ago are the same people buying houses today. It is a zero-sum game because nobody else is able to buy a house, especially not if they’re younger.
If that’s their whole retirement investment maybe they should get a job
They probably had a job for many decades, it’s how they bought and paid the house.
Sorry why should you pay NOW for a guy that workED many decades? Can you pay me for the work I did yesterday?
And now they are taking away the next generations ability to buy and pay for a house by making them fund their retirement.
People Mike that are not tge reason housepricees increase so mich that is 99% big speculators owning thousands oft units and hiking prices and rents.
How are they taking it away? There have always been people who rent and people who buy. Someone renting doesn’t prevent you from buying.
Hey, those buildings and apartments aren’t gonna rent themselves! /s
Please use gender neutral inclusive language, instead of landlord, use the gender neutral term, landleech.
I was ready to hate on this post… but you right.
Seconding this motion
*2/3 of the tiny portion of the value someone creates that their boss actually lets them keep
Its not the first time I’ve heard this, but I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment. The product I produce only has the value it has, because a lot of people work to make it so. And a huge part of that is managing costumers, understanding them prioritizing they requests and managing a team. If my workgets sold for 100 I would only be able to sell it at 50 because I do not have the costumer relationship
managing costumers, understanding them prioritizing they requests and managing a team.
All of which is also being done by employees who are being paid less than they produce.
What do you think a boss does? They are also employees.
Not at the top.
The labour theory of value is completely compatible with everything you just said.
10 workers do 1 value worth of work on product, whether that be manufacturing, shipping, logistics, marketing, so on
boss pays them 0.5 value each
boss sells for 10
boss lives off the stolen 5 value
I am posing this in the most abstract simple way possible. Obviously in an actual supply chain, many bosses would be stealing different amounts of value all throughout the process, as each worker added value to the final product over time.
You are assuming that bosses do nothing. They add value. Not all of them, but in general they do. At my work place we pretty much begged my boss to please hire someone between him and us to manage tasks. Because my boss adds value Ina bunch of ways but he was so busy he could spare the time for the things we needed him so year long projects failed.
Management is labor, sure. It all adds to the collective labor expended necessary for producing a widget, say, 1 hour of cumulative labor expended through dead labor (the percentage of tools used up) and living labor. Let’s put constant capital at .5 hours, and variable at .5 hours. The value of the widget is 1 hour of socially necessary labor time, and it is sold for this price on the commodity market when supply meets demand.
Where do profits come from, then? From living labor. The price of the commodity labor-power is regulated around the average cost of subsistence. A worker may only need to truly work for 3 hours in a day to produce their social consumption, but they are paid for those 3 hours as spread out over 8, 9, 10, etc. hours. The difference between paid hours and the unpaid hours forms the surplus value extracted, which is the chief component in profit (though not the same).
That’s an oversimplification, but the point is that ownership adds no value. Management and administration can, but not ownership alone.
I didn’t read it all. But I think we agree. The problem is owners. Not bosses. People who get to do nothing and still get paid
Then I think you should reread @glimmer_twin@hexbear.net’s comments with that understanding. We all agree that management is a necessary part of the social production process, but that it is ownership that entitles people to stealing from the working class.
I now understand what they mean, but I stand by my coment because it does seem to blame bosses. It’s just a matter of wording
Rent is due in 5 days.
Once again, may I introduce you to GEORGISM.
Please, I know lemmy is a bit left leaning, and georgism are mostly libertarians/liberal, but the ideology is so centrist and common sense I’m sure even far left communist advocates can get behind it.
Georgism is great but we also have problem with corporations so georgism isn’t enough. We need socialism or at least distributism
Can you give a TLDR for this if possible
Georgism is an ideology broadly based on taxing the full value of land, in order to prevent rentseeking.
So rather than taxing people for the property they built/bought, you tax the land which no one made.
The value of the land is based on the progress society made in that area, so when you tax the full unimproved value of the land, you prevent landlords from essentially leeching on the results of society progress that they did not directly contirubute to.
You can still buy land, but when you do you must pay full rent to the government, so technically, if the government did own all the land and lease it out for rent, it would be goergist in practice(but not in spirit, since goergism wants to protect property rights)
It boils down to property tax as a means of preventing land accumulation and tax revenue generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
I don’t see how that would have worked even when it was invented.
Right now you can see how the rich own all the land and have no need to use or sell it. This way they create a shortage and can charge a higher price for the land they use or sell. IMO the only way to break this up to stop charging property tax at all - because all land ownership goes back to the state. If someone wants to use land they rent it from the state. If they do not use or misuse rented land the land goes to a different renter (or to the state).
Doesn’t Singapore or some other country have a system like this, where you don’t own the land, just get long term leases
The reason Georgism fell out of favor on the left is because Marxism already develops beyond where Georgism falls flat. It’s certainly broadly appealing, in that liberals can get behind it rather quickly, but it falls short of Marxist economics in completeness, to the point that it doesn’t really bother resolving the fundamental problems with capitalist exploitation, centralization, crisis, or production and overproduction, it just focuses on rent.
It’s also very difficult to get through, it’s a reformist approach that depends on asking those that have full control of the economy to make it less exploitative. That doesn’t happen without revolution, at which point you can go far beyond and address core, systemic issues.
Hey there. Never heard of it, actually. Thanks, I’ll find a time to read about it.
What I find interesting in this particular libertarian initiative so far, is that it is addressing an existing systematic issue. Almost all other libertarians I come around seem to be speaking about their and everyone else’s morality and righteousness, naively thinking that once we all become moral and righteous, society would become as well.
To be fair, you haven’t heard of it because it isn’t particularly relevant. Marxism already develops beyond where Georgism stops, so anyone who is disgruntled with capitalism already has a much more influential, developed, and accurate framework to go with.
To be fair, you haven’t heard of it because it isn’t particularly relevant.
I think that is because georgism is a centrist ideology. Centrist ideology isn’t attractive, and therefore georgism isn’t popular.
But your opinion isn’t wrong either. Georgism will only fix landlord problem but it will not fix corporation problem
That’s like saying that some culture doesn’t require my attention because the European one is superior
No, it isn’t. What are you talking about?
You’ve dismissed the other person’s political views on the premise of Marxism including the Georgism. There are reasons why this person is not aligned with other Marxists’ takes and I would like to know them. You just view yourself superior to them
Georgism is both reformist, so it requires asking the ruling class to willingly kneecap their profits, and only covers rent, really, meaning it ignores exploitation, production, imperialism, overproduction, and crisis. Marxism answers those, and is revolutionary, it’s more relevant because it works and is more complete.
I’m missing your point. Why then would a person have Georistic rather than Marxist political views?
That’s like saying “I’m racist”
Exactly. Georgism could be studied as an interesting historical curiosity, but it never took off, and was a historical failure, whereas Marxism especially in the USSR and China abolished land-owning rent-seeking, and the massive economic drain that caused.
Absolutely, Marxism has teeth to it because it works in real life.
I know I’m going to get downvoted for this, but since the USSR was a historical failure and Marxists claim China isn’t actually Communist but Capitalist, can’t we say the same for Marxism? An interesting historical curiosity, but it was never actually implemented and thus can’t be said to have ever taken off.
Both Georgists and Marxists get to complain about how things would be so much better if someone would actually just do it the right way for once. I say this as a left leaning Georgist Libertarian, to my heart in the right place Marxist cousins.
IDK why are you being downvoted here. Here’s not a tankie perspective.
USSR was a historical failure
Was Rome a historical failure? The USSR was a controversial state. Stalin did seize the power, but probably not for his own benefit. I wonder how tankies can defend him as he killed almost as many communists as Suhatro. What I find the main reason for being a communist after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is that they built a state where the main goal in life wasn’t the pursuit of wealth. People felt much more secure than in the modern states, though without the latest advancements in technologies.
China isn’t actually Communist but Capitalist
Well, politically they are in the middle: they do exercise something that is similar to New Economic Policy - a short-term return to capitalism. For USSR it was for 7 years, for China it’s over 50 years.
I know that a lot of tankies will defend China, but I’m not among them as I’ve been there recently. People literally sleep at their work desks as the commute is 50km, you can’t put your child in a kindergarten without a bribe and the famous help from the government is 100kg of watermelons per family in Inner Mongolia. It’s not a shit hole either though: if I had to choose between South Korea and China to live, I’d choose China.
was never actually implemented
Marxism is vaguely defined to be claimed as if it was or was not implemented. I prefer to think about Marxism as a lens I see the world through.
I knew I would be catching plenty of downvotes, but I am glad to get a non-tankie perspective. I even agree with some of it.
Rome lasted between 400 and 1500 years depending on the measurements, so it is hard to make the parallel with the USSR. There are many similarities, the Caesars and Stalin, impact on political philosophy, etc, but the scales are still orders of magnitude apart. Stalin may have had the best of intentions, but as you said, his means could never be justified by any ends.
As a concept, Communism is indeed a state where the main goal isn’t about the pursuit of wealth and is very admirable. Once we have obtained a Star Trek level of post-scarcity advancement, I expect the end result will look very much like Communism. I also see the politburo and Party living in wealth while many commoners starved or rationed in basically every Communist country ever.
The Tankies blame this on the Capitalists besieging them, and that plays a role, but the hardship is never shared equally at the top. Post-revolution Castro never went hungry, Stalin never stood in a bread line, Mao never wanted for anything. That to me is a betrayal of the ideology.
For every Lenin there is a Stalin, for every French Revolution a Napoleon. There seems to be an inherent vulnerability to revolutionary political actions to co-option by charismatic strongmen. That is not to say other democratic states are safer, the corruption is just usually different. The US legalized it and called it lobbying, and I won’t even start on regulatory capture by capital. It still has never fallen to a dictator (quite yet).
I prefer to think about Marxism as a lens I see the world through.
I like this. I leaned Marxist in my younger days, but as I don’t think an actual Marxist Utopia is possible at our civilization level, I would at least prefer if the government only exists to provide for defense, the common good, and ensure a level playing field for the market while staying out of everyone’s personal life. Thus libertarian wanting universal healthcare, UBI, and strong monopoly busting and protections of the commons.
Rome lasted between 400 and 1500
I don’t think the timeframe is any good at identifying the failure. I’m not sure that Rome has seen as many historical events as the USSR: two world wars, television, nukes, space, computers to name a few. The correct answer here is that we can learn from experiments such as Rome, Paris Commune, and the USSR. We can’t learn from Putin though, assuming we both don’t want to build a relatively stable authoritarian proto fascist regime.
Stalin never stood in a bread line
Realistically, how do you imagine that? Because I can’t: you’ve built an authoritarian state with one party on the top, the country is not in the best condition. right now. There is no place for martyrdom here, you are obliged to rule the state while the things are as they are. I do not agree to shit on Stalin/Castro/Mao for exercising more lavish lifestyle than the common people. I can agree to shit on them for creating the system where they are the center of the country though.
On a side note, do you know the story of Vasily Stalin? He was Stalin’s son and he did not have such privileges.
There seems to be an inherent vulnerability to revolutionary political actions to co-option by charismatic strongmen.
Historical irony here is that Lenin himself discusses this in “What is to be done?”, giving the example of Napoleon if I’m not mistaken. He’s all for democracy though.
staying out of everyone’s personal life
The first thing Bolsheviks did, was cancelling the persecution by political reasons (being gay included) and legitimizing abortions.
Overall I see that although you identify as a right winger, we don’t have that different world view and how the world should be. I very much appreciate you being honest. Such threads make me love humanity more
since the USSR was a historical failure and Marxists claim China isn’t actually Communist but Capitalist
Both of those claims are false.
This short video on obstacles to the China path in Latin America gets into exactly what we’re talking about, the abolition of the rent-seeking parasitic sector of the economy that the Chinese revolution abolished.
The USSR was a historic success. The dissolution of the USSR is one large failure, but doesn’t negate the century of success after success in proving socialism works, siding with national liberation movements, and advancing the needs of the working class. The USSR worked, economically, its dissolution was more of a political failure than one pointing to Marxism not being able to work.
The PRC is socialist, those who say it’s capitalist typically conflate markets for capitalism, when the process of sublimating private property is a gradual one once the large firms and key industries are siezed. Both the USSR and PRC are examples of socialism working.
Marxism was implemented, and still is. Rather, Marxism-Leninism is a tool for analysis and revolution, to bring about socialism, and is has many historical successes, and continues to succeed today. Marxism-Leninism is the guiding ideology of the largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity.
So no, you can’t really say the same of Marxism as you can of Georgism. Marxism works, still works, and will continue to work. Georgism was a curiosity for a while and fades while Marxism-Leninism became the defining ideology of the 20th century, and will continue to prove even more relevant thanks to the rise of the PRC over the US.
The vast and rapid modernization and industrialization of Russia at the start was a success, but my opinion is that Marxist-Leninism stopped in the USSR when Stalin seized the country and turned it into a crony dictatorship. I don’t believe that lasted long enough to be truly called a success, as it immediately fell to the authoritarianism it overthrew from the monarchy.
If you don’t think that Stalinism was the death of Marxist-Leninism in the USSR then the bread lines, famines, forced labor and relocation, imperial expansionism, etc. as broadly reported by those that lived there and lived through it are a product of socialism. I also believe that would count as failures of socialism and not proof of success.
I agree with you that the PRC is still nominally socialist, but believe they also went Stalinist instead of Marxist-Leninist. I would call them Stalinist Communist rather than socialist. I also do not think the juice was worth the squeeze with the number of dead in the revolution and aftermath, but there is no telling what an alternative would have looked like so that is just, like, my opinion man. I personally don’t consider China as a socialist success story, but instead another warning example for how easily Communism can be corrupted/captured from within.
I totally give you that Marxist-Leninism was the defining ideology of the 20th century, but I’d call it the fuse that lead to “Communism” the failed authoritarian ideology. Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is to WWI. That is a hell of a lot more than Georgism ever got, to be sure, but would still say there has never been a successful Marxist country because they never remain Marxist for long.
Stalin did not “sieze the country and turn it into a crony dictatorship.” You can read works like *Soviet Democracy, This Soviet World, and Is The Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union. The Soviets had a robust system of democracy. It didn’t “fall into authoritarianism,” it entered into a state of siege in all sides from capitalist invaders and as such had to defend itself. You should really read about the soviet government structure and democracy.
As for your lightning round:
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Bread Lines - it’s a good thing to feed people in times of crisis. The US did it too, and that was a good thing.
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Famine - famine was common in Russia before collectivization, which ended famine in the USSR.
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Forced labor and relocation - this part is an issue, but it isn’t intrinsic to Marxism or socialism, and was phased out over time.
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Imperial expansionism - the USSR was not imperialist. It did expand, but expanding itself is not a bad thing, especially when the majority of people who lived in the Soviet Union said they were better off then.
“Stalinism” isn’t an ideology. Stalin had his own policies during his time as the leader of the Soviet Union, especially Socialism in One Country as opposed to Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, but Stalin was a Marxist-Leninist. Marxism-Leninism was synthesized by him. There was no betrayal of Marxism-Leninism until the Khruschev era, where reforms began to work against the centralized socialist system, leading to the utter disasters of the later Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras and the dissolution.
The PRC is Marxist-Leninist. There’s no such thing as “Stalinism,” to begin with, but you can’t use Stalinist to describe the PRC anyways because there’s no Stalin, so you can’t even use it to describe Stalin’s specific economic policies. Either way, over 90% of Chinese citizens approve of their government. The revolution saved countless lives and doubled life expectancies, same as in Russia.
I really don’t know what you think Marxism-Leninism is. If you want, I have an introductory reading list you can check out. It also isn’t just the guiding ideology of the USSR and PRC, but other countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and more, with similar success stories.
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Leftists are aware of Goergism. They don’t generally take it seriously because it’s just ‘one weird trick’ reformism that’s trying to save capitalism from itself. It doesn’t change what capitalism is or the historical process it drives, it’ll get clawed back immediately just like every other social democratic reform, and it would cause a full on capital revolt if you somehow magic lamp’ed it into practice such that you might as well just do the real revolution and actually overthrow capitalism for the same amount of effort.
but the ideology is so centrist and common sense
I really just commented as an excuse to lol at this line.
