Repost because @Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com’s original post got removed from !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net for dunking outside the dunk tank
To give a serious answer, landlords have a material class interest in conducting the unearned expropriation of rents from workers/tenants (and to be honest, literally everyone who isn’t a landlord). Even from a classical liberal perspective (i.e. Adam Smith) landlords have done nothing to merit these rents, they’ve simply partaken in the principal expropriation (that is, the expropriation of what once was and ought to be the provenance of all people, the land and nature more broadly). Landlords do not merit the revenues of their property, since any revenues they obtain are generated from the value of the property itself: all the landlord does is own it (i.e., “passive income”), and that ownership was/is established by a system of violence. In the modern day, landlords rely on the state system of violence to protect their property and force others to fork over rents to use it, which is a change over the original landlord system, where the landlord and their armed flunkies would have to do it themselves. So, an individual landlord can preach liberal platitudes, but when it comes to the fundamental economic relationships, their existence as a class is predicated on the preservation of a fundamental/primordial injustice and the deprivation of their fellow human beings.
In summary:
Engels was a dirty blue blood who owned a factory but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that ConfusedAZ’s idea of ‘left-leaning’ is more right wing than Boris Johnson.
You can but it’s exceedingly unlikely because your own material interest is tied to these things:
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Ever-increasing land values (largely financial speculation and the creation of housing-limiting regimes).
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Private ownership of housing as a profit-generating asset (commodity) rather than a human right.
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State violence in the form of the police, who function to protect private property interests.
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The direct extraction of working people’s money simply because you have more than they do. You could afford the down payment, they could not. Now they pay for your mortgage and more simply because they are poorer.
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Landlords are traditionally shitty people that think of others, particularly their renters, as trying to pull one over on them.
You can but it’s exceedingly unlikely because your own material interest is tied to these things:
People are more complicated then that, you really think this is an accurate point of view?
You ever seen someone get evicted, or get evicted yourself?
That’s a landlord showing you how much humanity corroded by those material intersests.
It kills people.
I think it’s subjective, but this quote seems to align with my perspective:
Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”
For the sake of argument, let’s run with that. Now, which of those lists does landlording fit into?
The left/right distinction is to determine if something is pro or anti capitalism. If you like capitalism or think it can be “reformed” then you are right wing. If you want to see capitalism destroyed, then you are left wing.
The 2 main classes of people under capitalism are the proletariat (working class, 99%, people who make a living by performing labor and receiving a wage), and the capitalists (bourgeois, ownership class, 1%, people who make a living by owning shit). Landlords are firmly in the capitalist class, which means their entire livelihood is based around capitalism continuing to exist in it’s current form. It’s nearly impossible for a landlord to be left wing because it goes against their own self interest. I guess class traitors exist, but I doubt the person in question is one since they’re trying so hard to downplay being a landlord.
TL;DR:
