No, they need a place to live, and it just so happens that the landlords have collectively bought up most of the available housing. It's like saying that a ticket scalper is providing value.
GarbageShootAlt2
joined 2 years ago
This will not change unless the government adds regulations that add “fairness” to pure capitalism.
This is an impossible dream. Capitalism demands that the majority of people are perpetually in an underclass (with some shuffling of who specifically is in it). You can't have an entire population of small business owners, most people need to be wage-laborers or some equivalent.
Your comment reminded me of a quote about the Bolsheviks and the idea of communist "equality"
long quote
The kind of socialism under which everybody would get the same pay, an equal quantity of meat and an equal quantity of bread, would wear the same clothes and receive the same goods in the same quantities — such a socialism is unknown to Marxism.
All that Marxism says is that until classes have been finally abolished and until labor has been transformed from a means of subsistence into the prime want of man, into voluntary labor for society, people will be paid for their labor according to the work performed. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Such is the Marxist formula of socialism, i.e., the formula of the first stage of communism, the first stage of communist society.
Only at the higher stage of communism, only in its higher phase, will each one, working according to his ability, be recompensed for his work according to his needs. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
It is quite clear that people’s needs vary and will continue to vary under socialism. Socialism has never denied that people differ in their tastes, and in the quantity and quality of their needs. Read how Marx criticized Stirner for his leaning towards equalitarianism; read Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme of 1875; read the subsequent works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and you will see how sharply they attack equalitarianism. Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant “communism.” Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with Marxism can have the primitive notion that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally. That is the notion of people who have nothing in common with Marxism. That is how such people as the primitive “communists” of the time of Cromwell and the French Revolution pictured communism to themselves. But Marxism and the Russian Bolsheviks have nothing in common with such equalitarian “communists.”
I'd articulate my stance slightly differently, but "handiwork" and even "property management" are real jobs that produce value, but neither of those are "being a landlord", as evidenced by the fact that the more successful and/or lazy landlords hire managers, etc. and let the "passive income" roll in. The fact that they can outsource even the relatively small amount of labor sometimes associated with their occupation and then still profit endlessly shows that they have a very parasitic social position.
If making a given ruling is political, it stands to reason that a contrary ruling would also be political. It's not like slavery is political and abolition is apolitical, it's just that one has a positive character and one has a negative character (in the mathematical sense).
Some things are dangerous to the people and political, some things are beneficial to the people and political. We should support a system that encourages judges to do promote the latter.
No, judges are mostly appointed in the US
Slavery looks a lot more popular when you don't let the slaves vote. If the slaves could vote -- i.e. if there was a greater degree of democracy -- there would surely be no slavery. It was the repression of the political power of a large segment of the population that enabled slavery.
Surely, if we educate people on class consciousness, they will generally act in alignment with the common interest, right prole? Certainly it's not a better solution to dictate morality to them unilaterally through some technocratic institution (that's rather like what the aristocracy was), because we have no particular way of ensuring that they will act in the common interest -- which is not especially their interest -- unlike the common people, for whom the common interest is their interest.
Not doing that is also political
Between these two options:
-
indulging in the delusion of neutral judges and letting the elite pick the ones who do the best job of pretending to be neutral while representing their interests
-
discarding the illusion of neutral judges and picking ones who openly state (and ideally have a record) that they will seek to pursue and enact justice as both they and the better part of the population interpret it
I think one of these is clearly superior for "promoting justice". Do you disagree?
There is no such thing as an apolitical judge. The judges you see as apolitical are just centrists supporting the status quo, but that is not actually an apolitical frame of action.
both the Communist and the Nazis were against democracy
This is ridiculous, the Communists opposed the Weimar Republic, but they absolutely supported democracy. In their view, in fact, they supported a much more authentic form of democracy by extricating private interests from the process.
Hindenburg used decrees to work with the Nazis so they could form a government.
We keep glossing over this "liberals siding with Nazis" thing
The Communists however never tried to work with the democratic forces.
I really think the word you're looking for here is "liberal"
Point should be obvious.
You're making significant assumptions, such as any of the liberals actually being willing to work the with the Communists, which would be a hell of a change for the SPD after that business with the Freikorps. Otherwise, the argument is just "join the SPD" and assume that they can bring their voters with them while completely abandoning their revolutionary project and putting themselves under the discipline of a liberal party. I feel that this is something of a muddy issue that you're interpreting in a convenient way.
"Aren't you as well?" Fair question, and there's a lot about this situation that I can't speak to, but what I said before I am completely sure holds, which is that Hitler gained power, on the most proximate level, because of liberal collaborators.
It seems to me like all it's accomplishing is another layer of abstraction rather than a real mechanistic distinction, but I've seen what "bipartisan" action looks like in the US, and the billions in arms given to Israel are a decent start. Republicans and Democrats absolutely have the capacity to collaborate and, when they do, it's monstrous.
Voting at least gives the people a chance to resist the machinations of the bipartisan consensus and get progressives installed.