this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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You are entering a business relation where you have all of the power and their livelihood is completely at your whim. This is deeply coercive.
What’s the moral alternative?
Publicly owned housing.
Unionized housing is also a great option, where all rent is democratically controlled by the tenants and goes towards enriching your lives.
That's certainly a more directly achievable plan within the framework of Capitalism, absolutely. Still, ideally all housing would be publicly or personally owned.
Idealism is the enemy of material change. We can fantasize about a perfect world all we want but that won't make anyone's lives better. What does drive change is fucking around and finding out. Seeing what works, what doesn't, and then working off of that.
I'm a Materialist, I understand. They were asking what the Morally superior option is, which I provided.
Public and personal housing is therefore the goal, which can be achieved by building up the Productive Forces and working towards it. In the meantime, unionized tenants can form an immediate improvement on their material conditions at no cost to society at large.
And in this fucked up capitalist hellscape we won't even get that 😔
Decommodify housing so that everyone can buy a house if they want to. That way renting becomes a choice, rather than forced on them.
Right…
What’s the moral alternative for an individual without the power to make that change, who you said would be behaving immorally if they rented out a room from their family home?
Decouple immoral actions from your person. That's liberalism. No self-respecting socialist would see someone stealing bread and call them immoral for the situation their material conditions forced them into. They would call the situation immoral and they would be right.
Self-sacrifice is false consciousness and akin to moral austerity.
Oh! So your statement was basically “a situation where someone has to rent a room from someone, even if that person is just renting a room out of their family house, is immoral?” That clears things up - thanks for explaining.
A world where people don't have to be forced into renting is not the world we live in but is one which is worth working towards. Better you get the money to support yourself than some greedy capitalist who is the reason why housing is even a problem in the first place.
That's not what people are saying. The situation itself is immoral, but you would not individually call people doing the best they can within that framework immoral.
Saying that "there's no ethical consumption under Capitalism" isn't damning for the consumers, but for Capitalism itself.
Thanks for clarifying. Phrased / thought of as “a situation wherein X happens is immoral,” it makes sense.
My confusion came from not doing that, even after reading the “Remember:” text in the comment, thanks to my conflating my personal belief that the individuals who are part of corporations that purchase houses in mass and rent them out are behaving immorally (vs being actors in an immoral situation) being adjacent with a statement about an individual renting out a room.
That concept of morality feels more similar to what I think of as “fairness” (though not an exact match) than to individual morality.
I feel like there must be a different word used to convey the moral judgment of someone who isn’t doing the best they can within the framework - i.e., someone who is choosing to exploit laborers for profit in excess of anything they could use for themselves.