landlords arent bad because theyre “lazy” or “parasites”, theyre bad because they take advantage of poverty and manipulate housing availability for financial gain. you people have GOT to stop framing your critiques of the bourgeoise the same way eugenicists talk about the disabled
I was going to sneakily reply to this with “but they’re also parasites” but
I did some introspection and you’re right. While landlords do suck up value without giving any back, the idea that every individual needs to “contribute something” to capital is an inherently manufactured take.
What should be criticized is the coercive nature of the transaction between rentiers and their tenants; the artificial scarcity employed to maintain the power imbalance between the landed and those without; an ideal world is not one where we retributively attack the gentry but find a way to make them irrelevant.
Framing landlords as “they’re bad bc they’re lazy parasites” actually opens you up to further attacks! Several are in fact not lazy, they sometimes do stuff like act as professional middlepeople (“something is broken, it is their job to find someone else who will fix it”). And so they might say “actually, managing property is quite a bit of work therefore landlords aren’t all useless, just the bad ones, therefore we deserve to exist, ha!”
But that’s not the point! The point is that they manipulate a massively necessary need (housing) for their own gain, raising prices while threatening people with homelessness! That’s what’s bad, not the fact that they’re “lazy”. You could have the most hardworking landlord in the world, and it would still contribute to harm.
