Thread by @arthur_affect, Okay so I'm going to subtweet some Discourse going on in my [...]

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

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

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

(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)

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

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

They all involve taking some kind of unearned economic surplus that exists based on the fact that houses are a thing you can own in our capitalist system

3) isn't any less capitalist than 1), it just crowdsources the capitalism so you can't see it and have no control over it

(It does so on both ends, because whatever I put my pile of cash other than giving it away I'm contributing to some kind of investment in private property

And because even if I sell the house to a deserving family of five I have no control over them renting it out or selling it)

And, like, holding up the people who do 2) as making the moral choice seems extremely perverse to me, that's the NIMBY outlook

Again it's just deeply perverse to say that the landlord in situation 1) is wielding power over someone but 2) is "staying out of people's lives"

As someone in the situation of desperately needing a place to live, I wouldn't think landlords were doing me any kind of favor, I'd obviously prefer to stay someplace for free, but on a brutal practical level anyone who picks 2 instead of 1 is fucking me over

I feel like there's a form of discourse that says if you get your hands dirty you're always worse than someone who doesn't

That you don't get to judge people who haven't "gotten involved" in a situation but once they "are involved" then you be to hold them to an ideal standard

Like yeah from an ideal leftist POV the best thing to do if you own the title to a house is to set up a housing co-op with terms that guarantee the rooms will be occupied by people who need them in perpetuity

Almost no title holders ever do this, including the leftist ones

Or if you lean towards 3) because you don't like organizing and running things and you just want to be left alone, you'd sell the house, give the money away to a charity buying malaria nets, and go right back to living paycheck to paycheck in the crappiest apartment you can stand

People generally don't do that either

And I don't feel like it gets interrogated in the same way either on the consumption side ("Do you need an apartment this big? Couldn't the extra rent you pay be spent helping people?") or investment ("Why do you have a 401k at all?")

I mean yeah, actually being someone's landlord *feels* ugly in a way seeing the money go up in your 401k doesn't

It's a direct personal relationship, you have to look someone in the eye and know they're giving you money to avoid you kicking them out

But that doesn't mean it *is* more exploitative

Like I freely admit the way in which I'm a capitalist (having savings in a Vanguard IRA) is as hands off as possible because I don't like thinking about it or taking any active role in it, but that doesn't decrease my complicity

You could in fact make an argument that the fact that most stockholders, numerically speaking, are people like me who don't even know what we're invested in makes us collectively morally worse than actual petit bourgeoisie who actually personally own a restaurant or whatever

I dunno, I don't have an answer

I freely admit I have no plans to give away all my money, and I'll even say that while I might indulge in saying "I'm just a bad person like that" I don't think it actually does make me a worse person than average, I mean you haven't done it

It just seems to me like black and white textbook Marxist definitions of who's good and who's bad are kind of pat and lead to obvious perversity

Like leftist NIMBYs who think the people taking option 2 are heroes have actually really fucked up American cities

Like San Francisco has a record homelessness crisis because no one is actually doing 1, a lot of people who think of themselves as hardcore leftists are fervently defending 2, and the majority of people who don't want to be made to feel bad just wash their hands and do 3

And everyone's saying the mythic option 4 (be a rich person who voluntarily sets up a low-income housing co-op, or be an angry mob of poor people who seize the property by force to create one) is the only acceptable answer

Well, yeah, but it ain't happening

I mean I've never had tenants and I've also never run a business with employees

And I get the argument "There shouldn't be private business owners with employees, it should be worker-owned co-ops or nothing", just like "Landlords shouldn't exist, only housing co-ops"

And yet in the world as it is, starting one of those is a huge pain in the ass and nobody does it

Not even your socialist favs (Jacobin Magazine is a privately owned business, not a co-op, so is Zero Books, so are most of them)

I know it makes me an incrementalist neoliberal shill but hey if all landlords and owners are scum and it doesn't matter how low the rent you charge is or how high the wages you pay are then... The incentive you've created isn't really so much for co-ops as for owners to hide

Like my read of it isn't that it means most people with money will go "Okay, I will give up all my power and put the money into a co-op" or "Okay, I will just straight up give all the money away"

It'd be "I'll just put my money in the bank or in a mutual fund like everyone else"

"It's not ideal but it's easy and comfortable and no one will even see it as a specific action on my part to single me out or yell at me for it

I can just forget about it"

Am I actually saying "Be nice to landlords so they'll have an incentive to be nice"

Well, maybe I kind of am

At the very least I'm saying there's a reason to make the distinction between better and worse landlords or bosses

The counterargument is that by giving cookies to individual nice landlords you're enabling an overall exploitative system

And I guess what I'm saying is... the system is fine with individuals becoming uncomfortable wielding that power, it's already evolved around that discomfort

Like our society is already shot through with mechanisms of abstraction, if you want to make money from the fact that people pay rent without ever knowing the people or making any decisions it's really easy, and the shame-based discourse just guarantees that system will grow

It's like the argument over small business

I'm very well aware lots and lots of small businesses suck and are run by awful tinpot tyrants

I still think it's worse for the country to have one giant faceless corporation be everyone's employer

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