this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Because in practice the line between capital and personal property is very thin. Can a car or apartment not be used to generate income in a modern economy?
When the soviets were in power they would force multiple families under one roof (kommunalka). Think 4-8 families sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Each family was given just one room and all housing was considered communal housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment?wprov=sfti1
After Stalin’s death families began receiving single family apartments due to massive housing reform by Kruschev, but were hastily built and called ‘khrushchyoba,’ a cross between Khrushchev's name and the Russian term for slums. That by the way still leaves a multigenerational period from 1917-1954 where the kommunalka would have been the primary unit of housing.
You can generate money with a car or a farm. The whole problem with capitalism is getting money without working because you let people work with your stuff. So owning a car and use ist as a taxi is fine with communism. Having a taxi company is not. But you can form a taxi company with others. The difference is no one has financial power over others. No one just profits because he/she is the owner. There are people in charge but they are in charge because they have the knowledge and ability not just because they own everything and can do what they want.
Listen, I’m a worker who saved money through my labour. Why should I not get to use my saved labour by deploying it into an investment?
Where do you think the value for your return on investment comes from? It's extracted from the labor of workers.
It’s not extracted it’s combined with labour to produce higher output than labour or capital on their own.
For example a worker with a shovel could only dig a small hole a day, but with the injection of capital (ie a backhoe) they can dig many more holes. The worker can increase their pay compared to what they would’ve made with just a shovel and the person that provided the backhoe can also generate a healthy return for their capital contribution.
How is it healthy that some rich investor gets to play golf all day because he can afford to buy backhoes and hire people to use them? How is it healthy that he earns more money if he pays them less, or that he alone is in charge of resources that a whole community worked to produce? What is healthy about any of this?
What you are describing is the entire fucking premise of socialism: workers cannot afford the means of production, so production ends up controlled by a handful of wealthy capitalists with perverse incentives and no loyalty to the rest of the human race. An entire tradition of thought is dedicated to how unhealthy that is.
Again, capital is extracted from labor. Who do you think built the back hoe? It didn't fall off the back hoe tree. Workers built it, workers designed it. If some capitalist pig didn't own it, then the laborers could just use it.
Even a labourer who has saved up can buy a back-ho. The backho could have been produced by a communist country or work co-op. Who produced the back-ho is not important.
The important thing is that value is stored, invested and combined with labour to make everyone better off. This is why wages are higher in countries with more capital such as the USA.