All Landlords Are Bastards
We should be more radically, unconditionally opposed to the existence of landlords. Including your cute uncle who is on his third hip replacement.
Landlordism is parasitism - without exception. Did I just call your grandmother a parasite? Yes, I did, and I’m tired of seeing leftists defend her.
I don’t hate or blame her, personally or specifically. I recognise that she's trying to get by in a system that screws us all over in old age, and especially disadvantages women who often lose years of employment to care work, but being a landlord places her firmly in a class that needs to be made obsolete. People, especially those who fancy themselves socialists, need to treat landlordism as the universally harmful practice that it is if we ever want to free the basic human need of housing from the profit motive and the exploitative and inefficient practices that come with it, instead of seeing it as something that there is a “good” and a “bad” version of. It all has to go. And yet I continue hearing disclaimers from my fellow leftists about how the “small” ones aren’t a problem when they dunk on the common arguments landlords use to validate their existence.
If we understand that the owner of the cafe down the street isn’t very much different from the owner of a large coffee chain when we look at the larger economic framework, in the sense that no way of being a capitalist is worth protecting and maintaining, we also need to understand that the difference between small and large landlords is only one of scale in numbers and one group having more sympathetic stories to tell, stories that help them justify their legitimacy in the eyes of too many workers and tenants.
After spending two days at an economic planning conference, in which post-capitalist economic topics like the rational distribution of goods and housing were discussed, I listened to a Citations Needed podcast episode about landlords on the train ride home. (“145 - How Real Estate-Curated “Mom & Pop Landlord” Sob Stories Are Used to Gut Tenant Protections”)
In the podcast episode, they talked about the overrepresentation of sad stories of kind, poor landlords struggling to pay their bills during events like recessions and eviction moratoriums – oh no, how are Bambi and Jack going to eat next week if they can't leave Louise and her three kids out on the street? – in the media, about these stories being planned and designed to catch us right in the feelings and manufacture consent for tenants’ rights violations, because how else are these landlords supposed to make ends meet?
The hosts correctly described the issues with housing corporations hoarding and holding hostage for irrationally high prices something that should be guaranteed to all people, and the injustice that along with that property, they own the right to make you homeless at any moment through eviction or unaffordable rent increases.
What bothered me enough to motivate me to write this post was the implication that if every landlord was a black single mother who grew up poor and now has the power to evict her well-off white gentrifier tenant, to quote an example they used, we wouldn’t have much if anything to complain about - that’s a very identity political way of looking at things, and like most solutions that prioritise identity categories above anything else, simply incorrect.
I do understand that as workers who know the experience of struggling for income, it is easy to empathise with the stories of other people who are at risk of being unable to fulfil their financial responsibilities, even if their money does come from a property they own.
I also understand that as people who live under capitalism in which we all are supposed to be able to make it if we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and put in the work, many of us can find ourselves wanting to identify with little Richard from the head shop who just wants to have something to pass down to his kids. Maybe we have kids ourselves and would like to give them a comfortable start in life.
But here’s the reality: Many of us are closer to losing our homes than we are to becoming a homeowner, so we should stop nurturing misplaced solidarity with property owners who would leave us in the cold without a second thought to what happens to us next, as for them, we’re a means of extracting profits first and human beings second. If Richard wouldn’t care about you losing the roof over your head, you too should care less about whether or not he continues to be able to collect returns on his real estate investment.
Small landlords operate just like large ones do when it comes down to it. They share the same economic interests, which leads to the same attitudes and behaviours. Nothing would fundamentally change if we redistributed property ownership in a way that allows for small landlords only.
The struggle is between tenant and landlord like it is between the worker and the capitalist - it’s an opposition of interests in which the owning class is incentivised to take as much of your money as they can, while you’d prefer to keep as much of it as possible, because we’re looking at a coercive exchange under threat, not a truly voluntary agreement between two equal parties, unlike what the free market advocates love to refer to it as.
The degree of exploitation, how much or how little property or capital someone has, is and should be irrelevant. One either lives off of other people’s labour or works to produce wealth for the aforementioned class, which can then afford to let their money work for them, as they call it – while conveniently leaving out that this money does not materialise out of thin air, it comes from other people’s hard work. How much or little money that is does not change the fundamental relation in which they’re making passive income through the money of people who actively contribute to society.
Therefore, ALAB. In the same way we don't say “not all cops”, we should also say: yes all landlords, even your sweet aunt who is barely collecting enough from her monthly payments and finds herself struggling when a tenant misses a month of rent due to an economic crisis putting them out of work. Anything else distracts us from the real issue and blurs perceived class lines in a similar way that inventing the concept of a “middle class” distinguished from the “working class” has done.
Most leftists and tenants’ rights activists already agree that in order for housing to be made available and affordable, large real estate corporations need to be expropriated.
Campaigns like "Deutsche Wohnen enteignen" focus on doing exactly that - demanding for the state to take over all the properties from large corporations to ensure a fairer distribution to the people and put an end to rents being raised to the point of complete unaffordability for the average worker. Stop unjustified vacancies, make places more accessible for people who work in jobs which keep the city going, but aren’t well paid, like the service sector, construction, retail - these much needed workers should not all have to be pushed out into far out suburban hell and have a long journey to work so that the better situated can sit idly in their furnished city apartments that have been “luxury” renovated by putting in a new bathtub, painting the walls and calling it a day, all for the price of an additional 800€ per month.
I have a lot of respect for the work these movements have done. DWE has managed to get a majority of Berlin’s inhabitants on their side in favour of expropriation, which is definitely a win for the working class and shows that there can be massive support for socialist policies. Socialising these large companies is a strategically smart point to start with, as well, which is why I support this prioritisation for concrete action completely – as soon as one of these corps is in the hands of the state, so are hundreds of thousands of apartments.
But making renting easier and less of a financial burden is not enough if we want to be safe from the possibility of the next neoliberal reform coming around to re-privatise all of these properties. In the long run, we need to establish a better system for housing distribution entirely, one that operates completely without landlords. Making this happen as soon as possible should be every single socialist’s goal. It should be one of our easiest goals, as well, since landlords simply are not needed for, well, anything.
If they disappeared, nothing of value would be lost. People wouldn’t suddenly be homeless, they’d continue living in their homes as they do now, but with more disposable income by being freed from the legal obligation to buy their landlord an apartment by indirectly paying off their loans to the bank. As Dash the Internet Marxist calls it in the much recommended text “Marxism for Newbies: Landlords”, the landlord is “simply an obstructionist; a vile troll blocking the pathway between human beings and shelter”.
They’re an unfortunate leftover from the feudal age, the most useless form of being a bourgeois, and have little to do with our current system in which at least theoretically, people are supposed to work for their wealth and provide some kind of value, which is why even pro-capitalist economic theorists like Adam Smith would not miss an opportunity to denounce them:
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
They love to reap where they never sowed. They collect profits from properties they had no part in building. The people who do the actual work, like construction and repair workers who have built the property and keep it in shape, do legitimate jobs that will still be needed under socialism. Owning an apartment, however, is not a service or producing and providing anything of value at all. Landlordism is called passive income for a reason. They sit around and watch Love Island, while you work to subsidize their idleness.
We’d be much better off economically if we ended this outdated feudal relation by expropriating every last landlord, established a more efficient and reasonable way of housing allocation, and made these people do actual socially necessary labour.
So now, instead of defending the existence of small landlords, we need to ask ourselves: how should the distribution of housing be handled if there are no longer any kind, gracious landlords to take on this responsibility by picking whomstever fits their fancy based on arbitrary criteria and personal preferences? What would be possible solutions to this problem, and what needs to happen in order for them to be implemented successfully?
I’m happy to explore possible answers to this question in a future post, which will most likely be titled something like “Kreuzberg Is Not a Human Right”.
Until then, remember that ALAB. Definitely do not spray it on a wall, that would be property damage.
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Recommended Reading:
Marxism for Newbies: Capitalism (about ownership and property relations)