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Personal belongings ≠ private property (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/socialism@lemmy.ml
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[–] 14 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

Actually, no. If you have 10 houses and 9 are vacant and remain vacant then your nine vacant houses are contributing to the surplus that keeps rents high. Landlords not only rent homes but crucially, keep homes/units empty to control rent prices. Developers and landlords often work hand in glove with local governments to craft policies for just this purpose. Blackstone holds a high number of empty houses in their portfolio, it would be silly to believe that those homes are not capital.

Personal vs. Private property is not really an individual choice but a systemic set of incentives and consequences. What happens when one of the houses has property taxes that come due? What happens when the roof leaks and needs replaced? In the winter, pipes in vacant buildings are kept from freezing by running water, and there's going to be electric and/or water costs associated with that maintenance. will it just remain vacant while the owner hemorrhages money indefinately? If all ten units are empty and creating no income, and the owner has no plan to appreciate them as assets to resell them (because if the owner does, then they become capital) then is the owner really just like a wage worker, or do they have capital that makes them enough money that they can have 10 houses for personal use?

I'm sorry, but you are misunderstanding how capitaliam functions as a system. If someone has one extra house, maybe because of circumstances, I could see your point. But ten? No at that point they're practically no different from a landlord, as they are propping up rent prices whether they intend to or not. As long as there are ten families who need homes who can't get housing, that is private capital whether the owner uses it to make money or not.

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  • [–] 0 points 19 hours ago* (3 children)

    If what matters is the number of houses possessed, then the criterion is quantitative rather than qualitative. So who decides the right amount? Is it private property if the ten houses are super small and old, comparable to one big new house? Will it cease being private property if I give birth to 10 children, raise them and then give each a house compared to never having children at all? Ultimately, if passively owning ten houses is propping rent prices, then owning one house is still propping up prices, just on a 10x smaller scale.

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  • [–] 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

    This is all hypothetical. These are hypothetical houses and a hypothetical owner in a hypothetical market, frozen in time. There is a direct correlation between quantity and quality, since changes in quantity lead to changes in quality. This is a fundamental part of socialist theory of change. This is not a moral consideration, there is no "right amount." Because there are absolutely no possible scenarios where someone owns 10 vacant houses and just loses money on them indefinitely. Is this someone who owns and maintains ten houses all for their own personal recreation and use? How can they afford 10 houses?

    The discussion is about the difference between personal and private property. The definitions of these things are socially contingent. We cannot conduct analysis outside of the social context and be serious about truth or social transformation. There is no arbitrary number cut off, splitting this hair in this way is completely besides the point. There is no reason for someone to own and maintain 10 empty properties while others have nowhere to live. My point is even if we aren't consciously capitalizing on the houses, the houses exist within a context. Broadly, that's capitalism, and broadly the properties still function as part of capitalism whether the owner intends it or not. Trying to further abstract this hypothetical in a desperate search for a generalization that is so alienated from reality that you "might be" sort of correct if viewing the situation from one very narrow perspective does not help anyone understand the relationship between personal property and private capital. Because over time, at some point, circumstances beyond our ideals decide that our ten houses are worth more if they have a use value or an exchange value for us. The system asserts itself upon our lives, and there's no real escape.

    You have not discovered a loop hole by inventing a kind of property that has neither a use value or an exchange value. You've merely discovered a pit of idealism where material relations exist to suit one's own confusion and wrong headedness. This is not a road to understanding socialism. But I do appreciate the contribution to discussion.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    Changes in quantity do lead to changes in quality, but there is always a precise point where gradual quantitative changes cause a sudden qualitative change. Water remains liquid from 0C to 99C and then suddenly starts boiling at 100C. To have a proper definition of something, such a dividing point is to be found.

    I meant "right amount" as in "right amount for something to be private property" and not as in "morally right".

    There could be a miriad of scenarios for having 10 houses without renting them. I would love to have my own place in 10 different cities or countries so I could just go there and live without worrying about renting somewhere to stay. I could have my own little data centers in those houses and host lots of decentralised media. I could use the houses for separating my workflow: one house for my musical instruments, another for engineering etc. But whether it is a real scenario is not important. Owning 10 houses is just an example of possessing more than the majority. If it is considered to be private property, then following the same logic having a personal computer while living in an area where few people have one should also be considered to be private property and, in the case of a revolution, the computer should be seized as such. So this is not merely something hypothetical.

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