adderaline

Eh, can’t win em all. I will say, just as a parting thought, the things you’ve been saying are also ideological. Believing clean separations between ideas and concepts are possible, appealing to existing systems as a way of validating the moral rightness of other systems, even believing that there is an objective “good and truthful answer” is an ideological position. I’d say one of the more pernicious ideological positions a person can take is to believe they do not have an ideology. It makes it very difficult to think about or discuss why you believe the things you believe.

Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. […]

that isn’t my point. my point is that rent has always existed within unjust systems, and is itself a tool for those systems to accumulate wealth. if we’re taking gears out of a meatgrinder and trying to identify just how much that gear contributes to the problem of grinding people into meat, we’re missing the point. in practice, the system in which rent operates is built to deprive people of resources. but even then your framing is not agreeable to me. we aren’t talking about a machine, we’re talking about a complex socio-cultural phenomenon that developed organically over generational time spans. the idea that we could even rip the word “rent” out of the context it exists in and get anything worthwhile out of analyzing it like that is not reasonable to me. like, cultures and economies don’t have parts like an engine do, they have trends and policies and outcomes, and those things can’t reasonably be reduced to cogs in a machine.

That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.

you’re doing the thing again. separating rent out from the system its built into and analyzing it only as the act of exchanging currency for housing itself. i’m trying to engage in a systemic critique, not a stubbornly isolated look at a single piece of a larger whole. the problem of students “having different means” is not the point. you have to look at the larger picture. on a population scale, how does the requirement to pay your resources into the pockets of wealthier people for basic housing affect a society?

rent is, in the case of the university student, a material obstacle towards getting an education. those who do not have money or home ownership are more likely to be denied an education as a result, and will have less access to money making opportunities in the future. the money they could have been saving for themselves goes into the pockets of richer (whiter) people, so they are less likely to be able to pass on money they make during their lifetime onto their kids. non-white people are much more likely to be renting than white people, and that is historically because non-white people were restricted from home ownership in the past, and were not able to build the kind of generational wealth that comes from home ownership. rental arrangements reinforce existing social stratifications by providing the means by which the wealthy (and white) can continue to extract resources from the poor (and brown), as they have done for generations past.

like… sharecropping was rent, and its sole purpose was to explicitly ensure that freed slaves continued to provide wealth to their former masters. the actual observable impacts of rent are to transfer wealth from people who have no resources to those with resources to spare.

[…] If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. […]

i was being facetious. my point was more that these factors you seem to think are separable are interlinked. just as a wake up call, there are currently more houses than people wanting to live in them. there are many multiples of houses left unoccupied for each homeless person in the United States, and the price of housing hasn’t done the thing you’re saying it would. instead, homelessness is increasing as landlords continue to raise rent, and the prospect of owning a home is becoming more and more out of reach for more and more people.

Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.

there is a rabbit hole i could go down about this, but i don’t really wanna. my position is relatively simple. housing is a human right. putting literally any barriers up that prevent people from getting a place to stay are wrong. imposing extra financial burdens onto the people who have the least money is wrong. rent is such a burden, even for public housing. nobody outside the people who live on the land should have ownership over the land, not wealthy folks, not the state. housing co-ops, self-governance, that is what we should strive for.

As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.

i don’t really know how to respond to this. air isn’t a socioeconomic phenomenon with a proven history of driving wealth inequality? it doesn’t interact with race and class in ways that structurally disadvantage people who are poor and brown?

And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.

lol. disagree, but fine, ill be less hyperbolic. “the parts of the universe we can build houses on currently are finite.” is that better?

That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.

i’m just gonna end with this: i’m not prepared to expand upon the exact shape of why i think you’re wrong, and why i think your rebuttals fail to provide a compelling challenge to the ideas i’m trying to convey. (that is not to say there aren’t compelling challenges to socialist ideas, there certainly are.) i used to hold a very similar position. the idea of doing away with private property once seemed ludicrous to me. then i actually engaged with socialist and anarchist arguments for why they believe the things they believe, and i found them compelling. i’m not saying you will too, but i am saying that the reasons i believe these things are knowable and there’s plenty of media out there that explains it better than i ever could.

This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.

hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be. if we are only figuring out whether it would be good in principle, we’re failing to recognize whether that principle is actually founded on actual observable fact. and the observable facts say that rent has always been a potent tool for capitalists to extract wealth from people.

There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.

also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project. what does the necessity of rent for students do in practice? well, the extra costs involved in having to rent space on the market in order to go to school structurally disadvantages marginalized students. students whose parents can cover the rent are able to maximize their time learning, take advantage of more extracurriculars, or save the money they make from a job for themselves, while students who can’t have to live in their cars, take jobs to cover costs, or just not get the education they want. the scale of the problem is smaller, but the nature of the problem is the same. those who have not must give their money to those who have in order to have a place to live.

rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption

lets just go through this. the supply of available property will always be limited. capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production. corruption implies a system not working as intended. capitalism is intended to maximize profit, capitalism requires private ownership, resources are always limited, and rent requires private ownership. you might as well just say “private property + the limitations of a finite universe + private property + the incentives of private property is a problem”. i’m kinda joking, but not really.

And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.

this is a problem of terminology. generally when socialists or other lefties are talking about private property, they’re talking about land and the economic abstractions of land ownership. socialist politics makes explicit distinctions between personal property and private property. i hear this argument alot, honestly, and if you find yourself making it as an argument against criticisms of private property more than once, i’d just recommend learning a bit more about what socialists believe, because its kind of just talking past what we think the problem is, and how we propose to solve it (democratically, instead of at the whims of rich folks).

you’ve talked about corporations a couple times, so i do wanna just say that those aren’t necessarily reasonable structures in and of themselves. it isn’t a given that the owners of a corporation should earn a profit, or that owning shares in a company is something beyond critique. there are more democratic organizational structures that don’t concentrate power towards those who have the most stuff.

rent doesn’t exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction. if its “perverted” today, it definitely was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. if you aren’t aware, this is a pretty basic leftist thing. if property can be held privately, those who own the property can use that ownership to extract wealth from people who need water, food, and shelter, but do not themselves own property. they can use that extracted wealth to buy more property, depriving ever more people of places in which to live their lives without paying somebody else for the privilege. and so on. thus “private property is theft”.

in any case, rent isn’t an uncontroversial example of how to fairly pay people who do things. rent is deeply political, and has been for most of modern history. it isn’t just common sense that we ought to allow people who own things to make money off that ownership, that’s a political statement, and one that should require some justification, considering its material impact on poverty, homelessness, and the accumulation of wealth.

if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven’t been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can’t afford to own.

that’s such a wild thing to say lol. if you’re looking at the world and it seems self-evidently simple, you are missing something.

i don’t know why they need to be mutually exclusive. individuals in communities with other individuals are what comprise a system. its all built from people.

that’s far from what the study says. there is no research on the effects of plastic chemicals in human beings cited in the study, the vast majority of the data is in rats and mice. saying that its responsible for trans people requires some very large leaps of logic that aren’t supported by the data or the conclusion of the study.

we have a great deal of anthropological evidence that other cultures conceive of sex and gender in wildly differing ways, both through history and in the modern era. gender identity is a complex social and cultural phenomenon, not some essential trait of the human body with a basis in endocrine function. maybe i’m just sensitive to this shit, but i can’t see somebody making a claim like this without just fundamentally misunderstanding what being trans is.

…Are a thing. They’re around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This…just isn’t a huge deal. It’s a public policy tweak away from being solved.

you can’t be serious about this, right? have you done any research on this at all? vast quantities of people live in food deserts in a ton of places. 23 million people. and its suspected that that figure is under-reporting.

you make a bunch of comments about being essentially fine with monopolies, which i’m going to just ignore, because if you can’t understand why entrusting so much of the things we consume to a couple megacorps is really dangerous i don’t know what to tell you. historically that doesn’t tend to lead to people having a great time, and all evidence suggests that the people working for those corporations are suffering pretty bad right now. we actually have quite a few protections in place to theoretically break up monopolies, specifically because they’re known to cause lots of suffering for people.

…In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it’s authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.

i genuinely can’t believe this one lol. you are actually going to pretend that market forces aren’t the explicit driving factor of slavery in these regions. their work is directly linked into global supply chains, you bought the slave labor phone with dollars, how is that possibly something that can be solved with a market economy? the market economy is already there, and it has driven human beings into bondage. whatever. if a country is the target of rampant resource exploitation that directly enriches corporations existing under capitalism, its not non-capitalist. and even if it were true that countries that are “anarchic” or “authoritarian” weren’t capitalist by their participation in the global system of capital, the way the government got that way is not some accident of history. the exploitation started with colonial expansion, and it never stopped. rich countries pillaged these places, enriching themselves even further, and then you go and blame them for being unstable enough to continue pillaging.

Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.

is the US noncapitalist? nestle is doing this in impoverished regions of the states too. sometimes not legally, but mostly while protected by the US government.

And there just isn’t a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it’s kinda fucking irrelevant, isn’t it?

now i know you really haven’t explored these ideas at all lol. that’s just marx. from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. he actually did propose such a government, and laid out a pretty detailed roadmap to get there. the failures of that system are well described, but nah man, there are a ton of proposed models of government based specifically about getting people what they need. that you seem not to have heard of them doesn’t really make your defense of capitalism seem well considered. wouldn’t it be nice if the government gave everybody what they needed? why shouldn’t that be our goal?

No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it.

fuck that noise. the specific suffering caused by capitalism are not natural consequences of our lives as humans. there are identifiable harms caused by structures that extract resources from places without any to spare. the “developing world” is often in the state they’re in because capitalist governments took all their shit and kept all the profits.

Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently.

this one’s just ignorant. the frequency of crop failures in india increased drastically under British control, and there is fairly solid research to support the assertion that the extraction of wealth and food from the region by the East India Company directly led to the famines there. that is not to mention that the resource extraction capitalism has driven worldwide has made crop failures a lot more likely, and increasingly so, as we continue to ramp up our fossil fuel usage, despite knowing about the very real dangers of climate change for fucking decades.

Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you’re just whining.

nah. i don’t need those things. i can criticize the many many flaws inherent to the current economic system without having a perfect alternative available for you. not that i don’t have any alternatives. again, there are so many fucking books on this stuff its insane. i know you seem to think that capitalism is not responsible for the many things capitalism is directly responsible for, but capitalists of yore fought tooth and nail to keep slaves, to work people impossible hours under unsafe conditions, to deprive people of food, water, and shelter, and they are continuing to do so to this day. the only way that’s gonna change is if we make it change. the only way we’ve improved things through the past is by directly opposing the ability for single dudes to own all the land and all the stuff and all the tools to make the stuff, and the same is true today. but you go ahead, have fun licking that boot.

if you don’t want to acknowledge the vast swaths of the human population for which options are strictly limited by capitalism seeking profits, i genuinely don’t know what to tell you.

food deserts, where the most impoverished people in the country are forced to eat processed foods because the nearest produce isle is miles away. the complete market domination of amazon. local repair shops being subsumed into corporate enterprise. planned obsolescence. the fact that nearly 100% of the vast variety of cereals you’re referring to are produced by like two corporations, alongside the vast majority of the products you see in grocery stores period. the fact that all the grocery stores are large corporate chains. the fact that nearly every single piece of consumer electronics you have in your home is almost certainly made from resources extracted by actual real life human slaves. nestle sucking up all the water from already drought stressed areas, and also more slave labor, this time with children. millions of tons of single use plastics funneled into our oceans. the fact that our access to life-saving medication is dependent on our wealth, rather than our need.

Overall, when I compare the system I’m living in with the alternatives that we’ve tried in the past…well, it’s very much a no-brainer.

i would encourage you to apply your brain to the situation. i understand, you find yourself in a comfortable position, where the luxuries of modern capitalism have availed themselves to you. not everybody is so lucky. capitalism is currently causing massive amounts of real human suffering. everything you buy, everything you’ve mentioned, has been made possible by widespread ecological destruction, rampant pollution, and exploitation, all of which have a cost in human lives.

the history of capitalism is also not so rosy. the East India Company commiting horrific acts of violence against the people of India, and contributed to massive famines that killed 15 million people. the slave trade being directly powered by capitalist interests. banana republics like in Guatemala, where the US government helped the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, actively coup an elected leader and install a military dictator in his place to protect their monopoly over fruit farms. many South and Central american governments still suffer from the consequences of US backed dictators, as a direct result of the US government putting the profits of fruit companies over the lives of millions.

even if this is the best system we’ve ever devised, uh… its really not that fucking great for a vast quantity of human beings. the status quo causes immense amounts of human suffering, and will cause even more as we spiral into climate catastrophe.

uh huh. because our current system has definitely demonstrated that shitty companies fail, right? i don’t know how you can look at the landscape of modern corporations and come away with the thought that capitalism has in any way increased our freedom to choose, or that that really important part actually in practice weeds out shitty business practices in any way.

what companies do you like? are any of them the large multinational corporations swallowing up every speck of available market share and spiraling us towards climate apocalypse? if so, you’re wrong.

food insecurity is a huge problem in many places today, including in some of the wealthiest countries on the world. there aren’t too many communist regimes around to blame for it anymore.

how are being a capitalist and despising the direct product of capitalism compatible lol?

i don’t know what to tell you man. not everybody who develops open source projects for a living does it in their free time. for a lot of projects, particularly the big ones, there is full time development staff.

but i’m sorry, the thing you’re describing, music performance being out of reach for everybody but the rich? uhh… that is how things are right now. lots of musicians are struggling to afford touring, even the very wealthy ones, and tours often don’t do much more than break even. its gotten worse in recent years, too, as large corporations monopolize venue spaces and independent artists are pushed further and further into the margins. musicians have been talking about how much the live-music industry is fucked for a long time. its almost like the problems you’re imagining would occur under a different system are exactly how it works under this one.

Call me cynical, but good things don’t last if we even get them at all.

i am gonna call you cynical, at least a little bit. the reality is, we are today far closer to the kind of utopia i’m describing than in any other point in human history. access to knowledge has improved massively in only the span of a couple of decades, and even with how much things suck right now, its still like the best time to be alive. most of human history has been pretty miserable for most people.

climate change spooks me real bad, and i have felt the way you do. i have never lived in a country where we had the things you’re describing you have lost. it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t even matter if we are going to kill the planet and everything’s gonna die and things will just get worse and worse.

the reality is, our bodies have less than a hundred years, maybe even significantly less, before we become nothing, and in the long run, humanity and everything we’ve ever created will also become nothing. with that perspective, at least for me, the problem of what to do about the various injustices of the modern world becomes fairly simple. imma do what i can until i’m dead in the ground, then i won’t care if we’re in an anarcho-communist solar punk utopia or a nuclear wasteland.

its not necessarily common, but its weird to make this kind of point while using a platform that works by the exact principles i’m describing lol. open source projects are very frequently built from community support and public funding alone, and the people building them seem to be fine with their jobs.

However, the fact that you don’t care about how business works means you ignore the root of the problem - how business works.

i can see how you might read that as me not understanding or otherwise being ignorant to how business functions, but its more that from the foundation upwards the way that we conceive of ownership and property is objectionable to me. the specific ways and methods by which capital is used to deprive people of resources and exploit their labor for profit are secondary to the problem of them doing the deprivation of resources and exploitation. i don’t believe there is some sort of mechanistic solution that will give us good or fair capitalism, so all my solutions to the problem involve to the greatest extent possible providing all resources we can to everybody who needs them, and doing away with institutions that prevent us from doing that.

I’m not going to argue for communism

then we’re definitely not on the same page lol.

according to Larry Lessig, i would be an extremist. i can admit that. i am. i am proudly pro-piracy. i would download a car, and i want everybody to have unfettered access to the sum total of human knowledge. i have negative respect for the intellectual property of corporations. i think generally looking to legal frameworks as a tool to prevent the exploitation of artists is kind of just a half step. we should be imagining a world where our ability to create, share, modify, and collaborate is unrestricted. that, to my mind, implies a world that does not have corporations owning our art, music, and technology.

copyleft. make contributions voluntary, credit mandatory, and commercialization impossible. gift your creations to the collective knowledge of humanity, and if people like it, they will in turn give you support. cut out corporate middle men, and cultivate an audience that will reward you generously for what you give to them.

i’m a radical, so i’d say don’t use copyright, use copyleft. make everything free. use open source software. let people listen to your music if they want to, and donate to you if they choose. make it so that the best products on every market are freely available to all people to modify and alter as they wish, and make it so the modifications must also be freely available. allow anybody anywhere to produce any medication they have the means to safely synthesize. make our culture free to use and free to participate in. the open source economy is a great model to look at, and its how we’re talking to each other right now. every piece of information can be that way, if we choose it. information scarcity is already a lie, copyright just artificially imposes antiquated notions of scarcity onto a limitless resource. its a gift economy! we freely contribute, and receive support in turn.

Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.

my point is that people seem to think copyright law is somehow protecting artists from corporate exploitation, when it categorically is not doing that. you’re right, streaming as a business model is legal, and it does mean that lots of artists don’t profit as much from their work. that’s the part i object to, the part where copyright law did not in any way prevent record companies from eating into artist compensation.

It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.

here’s the thing, though. the revenue is being generated on the basis of their ownership of that portfolio, and the only way that works is if there is an enforcement mechanism for that ownership. that enforcement mechanism is copyright law. that state of things as they currently exists allows people who did not make music to make the vast majority of the money from the music that gets made. that is wrong.

But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.

they already aren’t getting paid though. copyright law just isn’t ensuring people get paid. like, have you paid attention to the WGA strike at all? companies use copyright law to legally strip the rights artists have over their art far more often than artists use it to prevent their art from being used by corporations.

The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy. A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.

look. i really don’t care how business works. if it’s depriving people of the fruits of their own labor, we should make it work a different way. in any case, making a comparison to a system of agriculture which routinely tortures living beings, forcibly impregnates them, steals the milk meant for their babies, then kills them when they are no longer useful is not the slam dunk you think it is. i’m not particularly fond of that business model either.

Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.

right. i’m fully aware this isn’t a streaming only problem, but its one that streaming has exacerbated. that doesn’t make it more okay. functionally, the fact that we have a mechanism by which the legal ownership of artistic works can be transferred to corporate entities concentrates the wealth generated by working artists into the hands of rich executives. i don’t know how i’m meant to ignore the way in which ownership of music is the primary mechanism by which record companies separate the wealth that music produces from the artists that make all the music, no matter how much its actually supposed to make doing that more difficult.