Rent is theft? I thought rent empowered people. How is it theft for a car rental company to rent you a car at at an airport? How is it theft for uhaul to rent you extra storage space when you need it?
Renting a home to live in is theft. Work with that example in your head, not cars or uhauls. Not many people say hotels are theft (though, it’s worth considering as well)
I suspect a lot of the people making basic errors in this thread get their knowledge of politics from memes. A lot of people saying stuff like “big corporations are the problem, not mom & pop landlords” which, if they read something like this single page from Wage Labour and Capital they’d understand is false. Capital is capital, and its relation to labor is the same regardless of its size!
You’re theoretically right about those examples. In a competitive market, the proprietor of some depreciating and universally available property with a finite useful life like a car renting it out to people who only need it for a short period of time isn’t exploiting them. It’s no more exploitative than selling them that car. In theory, the ability for a competitor to buy a car and rent it out for a competitive rate means that you can’t exploit consumers in this industry. The profit would have to come from the labor power involved in the rental industry, like any other industry.
In practice you’re describing an industry that is highly financialized and that operates inside imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, where monopoly rents are the norm. So the rental company and Uhaul aren’t making all their revenue out of the theoretically fair arrangement where their clients are essentially just paying off the depreciation and operational expenditure that goes into their property, they’re also paying some ground rent or monopoly rent.
Rent is theft? I thought rent empowered people. How is it theft for a car rental company to rent you a car at at an airport? How is it theft for uhaul to rent you extra storage space when you need it?
Renting a home to live in is theft. Work with that example in your head, not cars or uhauls. Not many people say hotels are theft (though, it’s worth considering as well)
We all gotta start reading beyond volume 1 of capital :( there’s a lot of useful stuff in 2 and 3!
Wait, you guys have read Capital? 😂
I suspect a lot of the people making basic errors in this thread get their knowledge of politics from memes. A lot of people saying stuff like “big corporations are the problem, not mom & pop landlords” which, if they read something like this single page from Wage Labour and Capital they’d understand is false. Capital is capital, and its relation to labor is the same regardless of its size!
You’re theoretically right about those examples. In a competitive market, the proprietor of some depreciating and universally available property with a finite useful life like a car renting it out to people who only need it for a short period of time isn’t exploiting them. It’s no more exploitative than selling them that car. In theory, the ability for a competitor to buy a car and rent it out for a competitive rate means that you can’t exploit consumers in this industry. The profit would have to come from the labor power involved in the rental industry, like any other industry.
In practice you’re describing an industry that is highly financialized and that operates inside imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, where monopoly rents are the norm. So the rental company and Uhaul aren’t making all their revenue out of the theoretically fair arrangement where their clients are essentially just paying off the depreciation and operational expenditure that goes into their property, they’re also paying some ground rent or monopoly rent.
When’s the last time you rented a car at an airport?