this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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Landlord = banned.
What did he say? Not a landlord myself, but I'm always curious to hear both sides. I think there can be good landlords, had one myself.. Didn't raise rent on us, took care of the place when things went wrong, even offered to sell the place to us but we weren't ready financially at the time..
Some people choose to rent instead of buying for the sake of not having to keep up with house maintenance, and in that case, the landlord I speak of, I'd argue was a good landlord. Win win for both parties. Not common, I know, but speaking in absolutes is rarely productive.
The landlord was still exploiting you and taking a ton of the wages you keep, which are already being stolen from through capitalist exploitation. If you prefer renting, then it would be a much better system to have publicly owned housing that isn't run to make a profit, or even with the expectation that cheap or free housing is a social cost.
The reality is we live in a capitalist society whether we like it or not (at least in the US - emigrating isn't easy). Free housing would be the local shelter for the homeless.. It's there, but it's a bare minimum most of us don't want.
Your idealized expectation sounds nice, but a lot of houses and their lots wouldn't look like what they do outside of a capitalist society.. I wouldn't have two spare bedrooms in my home for an office and guest room when I want to have family visit. I wouldn't have a backyard for my dog to run around in.. It'd be more like what you see in North Korea. No excess to spare (to some degree is a good thing, but I also believe one should be able to earn themselves nicer things should they decide to take on the extra work to do so).
Rather than have some assigned lesser unit to live in that's paid for with my taxes, probably sharing walls with my neighbors, I think I'd rather put in the decade of renting I did while saving for the house I get to live in now.
Again, I'm not saying we have a perfect system, or even a great one.. It's fucked up in many ways, you'd have to have your head pretty far up your own ass to miss the amount of corruption that capitalism invites into our society (mostly stemming from money in politics), but there are also some good parts to it.
Maybe I'm the outlier here with this take?
You're confused on 2 primary accounts:
That I am saying we can accomplish better, more equitable housing within capitalism. I'm a communist, I want socialism, and that's the first step towards communism. I am not pointing out exploitation and a solution to it as some actionable goal within capitalism, but to point to the fact that a better world is possible, and we get there through revolution.
There has never been a society where people could not work to get better housing. Not in the USSR, with the famous soviet housing, not anywhere. Public housing does not mean all housing is the same, just that fewer people go without. Further, your wages are being taken from you, in socialism that isn't a problem, so you won't have to put in a decade of renting to get something nicer.
Guess it's more a matter of ignorance on my part (also seems I'm out of my element here), I don't know much about how current communist societies are living - do you have examples of what you're talking about? You've piqued my interest, I'd like to see an example of housing in one of these situations and how they vary, what kind of amenities people are living with there, what it takes to achieve something similar to what I have here (3 bed 1ba SFH on a 5th acre)?
Different socialist systems have had different levels of development, policies, and social wealth, so there's no one comparison to a presumably western country. For starters, western countries have inflated social wealthy due to imperialism, which is not a benefit for socialist countries. Countries like the USSR had different systems from modern Cuba, the PRC, etc, but all have different houses, and different wages depending on jobs worked.
I don't have anything in-depth on hand, but surely you can see that eliminating usury from housing makes housing more affordable without needing to compromise on quality.
Capitalist countries often have less freedom overall. When your needs are taken care of, and you have more control over how the economy is run, the average person has more freedom. There's nothing about capitalism that improves freedom for the average person, it's all used to justify maintaining imperialism and capitalist exploitation.
Do they not have dogs in north Korea?