By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
While the concept of class warfare is verboten and greeted with expressions of bewilderment and fear in the West, at least now everyone is familiar with the 99% versus the 1%. However, this is really too facile an analysis.
It would be more accurate to talk of the “not-so-talented, toadying” 10% versus the 90%. But while this can prove quite accurate for neo-imperial clients, a genuine rise of the middle class in the West renders it less accurate than this distinction:
Today’s “proletariat” is Mao’s “property-less class”. This is easily understood – the propertied class has lives which are more stable by orders of magnitude.
I am a socialist and I want property – this is not a contradiction. In fact, the lack of property is making me crazy – fortunately, it turns out that I am not alone.
In my 2019 book Ending Western Propaganda on Red China (Part 5: The Cultural Revolution’s solving of the urban-rural divide) I relayed a fascinating transnational study which found that Paris and London had the highest rates of social psychosis; more importantly, they concluded that owning your home – or not – was found to be the single biggest predictor of mental and emotional stability.
Of course: being forced to hand over one-third of our pay checks every month to a rich, two-home owning landlord (which he or she probably just inherited from their parents) is a huge stress. I estimate my current landlord has received about €130,000 of my money over the past 8 years.
All that sweat of mine down the drain simply because I need a roof to live yet I can’t possibly qualify for a loan in Paris, where last year the real estate crossed the €10,000 per square meter mark.
As I summed up: “‘Bread, peace, land’ can be translated to ‘Bread, peace, a decent apartment’ in modern times. But it’s not only China and not only Maoism which has solved this issue, proven by their 90% home ownership rate: 80% of Cubans own their own home and thus pay no rent or mortgage.”
Please believe me: when I think about all that money in my landlord’s pocket I get pretty stressed, to put it mildly. I’m not edging into social psychosis, but the recalcitrant capitalists will probably want me locked up for making the following demand/social service announcement.
Now is the time for the landlord class to show who they are as individuals
Across the world there has been an incredible overreaction to the Corona crisis – in my estimation – as the global economy is shutting down. Places like the US, India and many other areas simply do not have the social safety net to accommodate such a move… but they have done it anyway.
Landlords across the world must do the following:
- Talk to their renters to gauge their economic situation.
- Admit that a poor economic outlook for their renters is an undeserved injustice.
- Admit that their renters must be aided, and that landlords have already profited enough.
- Waive this month’s rent – and perhaps for months to come. Give some profits back.
- Or, at the VERY LEAST: reduce rent charges in order to only cover the landlord’s monthly mortgage payment on the property/property taxes/building assessments, etc.
- If their renter has a good economic situation, landlords must donate their rent-profits to charity, because they have already profited enough and their nation almost certainly does not have the social safety net to take care of other poor renters.
This is all simple justice, and it is in the hands of individual landlords to do so.
I am not asking landlords to ruin their credit rating by refusing to pay the mortgage on their properties (though they should demand such an agreement with their lending bank, in order to force banks to consent to widespread debt furloughs), merely to forego gaining profits on their properties.
Can they not afford do that for one month? Perhaps three?
Of course they can.
If they cannot, then they have proven themselves to be the true “(rent) welfare queens”, because they must be living such unaffordable, extravagant lifestyles; they have proven themselves to be as bad as the most ruthless venture capitalist and job-moving globalist; they have proven themselves to be traitors.
Is traitor too harsh a word?
No – failure to do so means that your landlord is only looking out for himself and his nuclear family, so of course he has necessarily betrayed every other larger group: neighborhood, town, metro area, province, region, nation and earthlings. Furthermore, there is constant public and media shaming of “welfare queens”, poor people and non-college educated workers. Have you ever read somebody calling out the landlord class like this? Not in any Mainstream Media and probably not even in Anglophone world, where the landed petit-entrepreneur is supposed to be the rightly-guided class of moral heroes.
This is the best I can do: if not “traitors”, then “deserters”. Feel better?
Won’t do it? Then fear the revolution
Last spring I wrote an 8-part series about China’s Cultural Revolution precisely because I witnessed that France’s Yellow Vests were essentially demanding a French Cultural Revolution: a near-total shutdown of society in order to have huge discussions about their society’s most contentious socioeconomic and cultural issues and their current trajectories. Of course, such trajectories are quite, quite unpopular, and this was before the Great Recession threatened to turn into the Great Depression 2.
The West has now shut down, but still appear far from joining China and Iran as the only two nations with state-protected Cultural Revolutions. However, the horrendous economic impact – which will create such widespread poverty, unemployment, homelessness and death precisely because they do not have the big government of socialist-inspired nations like China, Iran, Cuba and others – seems certain to eventually push the entire world towards the leftism and cooperation of socialism rather than the continued greed, selfishness and competition of “capitalism with Western characteristics”.
From the the very beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution landlords were openly vilified, along with the “four olds”, unrepentant capitalists and known-to-be-corrupt party members. The bad ones were paraded around in dunce caps, or sent to (finally) work for a living instead of living off of parasitic rent-seeking, and – if we listen to balanced Chinese sources and not Western ones – abused physically pretty rarely for an event I refer to as the “Chinese Socialist Civil War” (here, Red Guards ain’t all red: Who fought whom in China’s Cultural Revolution?).
So landlords can either double down and grab as much cash as they can, or when the Cultural Revolution comes to their town people can testify that during this crisis they were true human patriots. It’s an individual choice landlords must make now, and they may not ever be judged harshly by their society for their choices… but they might be. Asian societies know this: Fear and shame are perfectly acceptable motivations for good deeds, after all – but why not just go socialist?
For the people reading this in huge housing developments with corporations for landlords, there are easy ways to resist:
- Organise on a building-by-building level to refuse collectively to pay your rent as normal, or at least to collectively demand some reduction.
- Follow the Chinese, if only because what they did worked: outside your buildings put up dàzìbào, or big-character reports/posters to publicly shame your corporate landlords.
- Contact your local newspaper media and insist they cover your actions against unfair landlords.
- If your local media won’t side with the People, then resort to social media. Social media can be quite effective, but it is easily overestimated – apply pressure on your local journalists and publishers.
- The youth class has had it bad enough since 2008, eh? The average age of the Yellow Vests is, in my estimation, 50 years old because, in my estimation, people that age and older have comparatively little to lose. So be an elder leader and risk your credit score, blacklisting, harassing phone class from bill collectors, etc., so the youth can resist in other ways and not live so very long under Western capitalist-style stigmatisation.
Many medium and large businesses are reportedly already telling their creditors – banks – that they are stopping parasitic rent payments for the time being; they have to keep their savings for the long, slow Corona recovery which will surely eat through their cash. (Again, do the doctors, helicopter Moms and Western politicians have any understanding of economics on a micro- or macro-level? I wonder….)
The non-propertied class doesn’t have these types of levers but social shaming is one – I suggest you use it with your landlord.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.
Pitting the hungry masses against some ordinary folks who inherited some properties, only works in favor of Blackrock and similar hedge funds who hold billions/trillions in properties. Instead of calling for big systematic changes you ignite envy. Just remember, there is always someone poorer than you, the African or the homeless who might want to share your clothes/shoes with you.
Re: “All that sweat of mine down the drain simply because I need a roof to live…”
It was not all down the drain … you were paying for something you got … since when is anything ever FREE????? ;-)
Plus you always have to consider the freedom of transportation, and the cheaper you make your own transportation costs, the cheaper you can make your own life in the form of rent.
Now that’s not saying you’ll get more years out of life, just the few years you get, will be cheaper.
Warning!
If we revolt against paying our rent just to go against the Landlords’ profit … then they won’t be obligated to fix your clogged sinks or toilets or take away your garbage/trash or anything else that needs fixing/doing in your rented apartment/flat/house that is usually paid for with your rent.
I’m not saying Landlords shouldn’t work something out with people who have suddenly lost their income because of the Pandemic … no … we all have to do our part to help each other out.
And … like I said in my previous post … our rent money is not “wasted/lost/for nothing” … it pays for our shelter & all the services needed to maintain it … everything costs something … nothing is ever free, is it? No.
@Ramin Mazaheri
Greetings, I hear you Ramin. This are turbulent times indeed. We really don’t know whats going on. May God mercy be upon us. My comment is based on the qoute below;
“Now is the time for the landlord class to show who they are as individuals”
There is a concept called ownership. Never do we as individuals interrogate it fully. Its got its brethren in the name of permanence and control. Individualism is a privilege, not a given. He who subscribe to the concept of class is an automaton (head mentality), they need to evolve to a different status. Why limit self? Class, tribalism,racism,’nationals & “religion are the same thing. A convenient escape from individuality to the safety of a template.(i.e ?) Don’t we all do it? The “landlords” have yet to get in touch with reality. However it takes love to realize the landlord is non either than me. Hence the reason why the shia fight with the sunni.
Her in the US, unemployment eligibility was expanded significantly. Additionally, for the time being the weekly state payments will be increased by $600. So for most in the near future, no rent concessions are needed.
Sorry to hear Paris is so expensive, but it must be a super place to live!
I almost bought a place in Paris once (I had enough money for a nice place in Marais – one of the best parts) – but my French aunt persuaded me not to
Last time I went there (I was staying close to Bastille) I was shocked with how polluted the air was (I flew in from LA) – the most polluted air I have ever seen I think. Then at night I could not sleep from the noise coming from little scooters – all night long. Then at around 3 am people started shouting and fighting outside.
I could not wait to get out of there
Well, I agree with Ramin, again. Time is coming for the big change. No way will the upper class escape from the revolt that will take place very soon. Looting at the food stores will be the beginning, when hunger arrives.
For the present generations, this will be a difficult time.
Lol to enjoy Cuban or other socialist paradise comfort? It is funny how an outsider is agitating for a socialist revolution in a basically socialist country. Beware my foreign friend it might come the day when the European people bring the 1% including their European socialist friends to the court.
Ramin,
Ces gens ne discuteront jamais. Ça doit leur être imposé, point a la ligne. J’ai lu ton dernier livre sur la Chine et c’est évident ce qui s’est passé. La route a été longue et difficile, pénible mème, mais ils n’avaient pas d’autres choix: faire sauter le système ou demeurer esclaves. Il ne sert absolument rien de discuter avec ces gens. Il faut s’aligner avec d’autres forces pour changer fondamentalement cette structures qui ne sert qu’à exploiter fondamentalement l’humain a des fins financières et de pouvoir. Je viens de voir un documentaire sur Kamtor ( cie minière canadienne pour de l’or au Kirgistan – pas certain du nom.du pays – ) et voir comment ils réussissent a contrôler le pouvoir pour asseoir leur domination sur ce pays est révoltant, même aujourd’hui. Le plus scandaleux c’est que – il parait – le gouvernement canadien ne peut rien faire . Étrange quand même. Qui est le boss? Le gouvernement ou ces seigneurs des corporations , phares du capitalisme extrême. Pas très différent de ce qui se passe en France avec Macron, non?
Yandex translation. Mod:
“These people will never argue. It’s got to be imposed on them, period. I read your last book on China and it’s obvious what happened. The road was long and difficult, painful meme, but they had no other choice: to blow up the system or remain slaves. There is absolutely no point in arguing with these people. It is necessary to align with other forces to fundamentally change this structure, which serves only to fundamentally exploit the human for financial and power purposes. I just saw a documentary about Kamtor (Canadian mining company for gold in Kirgistan – not sure of the name.of the country – ) and to see how they manage to control the power to establish their domination over this country is revolting, even today. The most scandalous thing is that-it seems-there is nothing the Canadian government can do . Strange though. Who’s the boss? The government or these lords of corporations, Lighthouses of extreme capitalism. Not much different from what happens in France with Macron, right?”
Gypsy friends of mine have worked their asses off playing gypsy and flamenco music where and whenever they could and finally after years they saved enough money to buy some very old ruined buildings in our little town.
Then they worked their asses off to restore the solidity of those buildings and repair the roofs, and finally they were able to pay qualified people to help them to create sane and well insulated apartments in these buildings, slowly, one by one, year by year..
Every time they managed to finish an apartment they rented it out to be able to pay off loans while still working their asses off to be able to live, eat, pay their taxes and repair/create a home for themselves and finish their rental properties.
During all those years the bums in town were sitting in front of the local supermarket begging for money while drinking and smoking, and after hours getting wasted in the local bars.
My gypsy friends can now, after over 30 years of hard work, live a decent but still simple life without constantly having to search for gigs and/or doing other work. They will have relatively low retirement income once retired in a couple of years. So these rental properties will be their retirement income, providing them with a decent monthly sum but not more than that.
French government punishes home owners quite badly, but even more so private people who have rentals or homes in which they don’t live themselves. Renters are quite well protected in France, and much of the maintenance and all of the property taxes are payed by the owners.
And now you want to tell my friends to give (part of) their retirement plan to other people? You must be nuts. In this kind of cases it would be much more reasonable to ask the government to give the surplus tax the owners have to pay on these properties to the renters.
It is one thing if you want to fight the excesses and unfair situations and overly priced low quality rentals, but you must also admit that not every homeowner is a money-grubbing crook and that sometimes renters are getting a real good deal without much, if any, of the responsibilities the owners must live with…
Cheers!
Many Thanx JC. Exactly what i was trying to express (you described exactly mypersonal situation, the bank is still the owner of my appartments for a couple of years still). To give another perspective to this one-sided unbalanced article: if the rents are not paid, 22 years of my work will go to the garbage. And i will have to go to social services, since i will (not a joke) go broke (yes, i made a lot of investmentall i have- in thos appartments who should be my retirement).
I don’t know what happened to Ramin when he wrote those lines.
He is usually a moderate and open-minded person.
This article is pure bigotry, and feels like envy/panic had to get out of his system.
All in all, thank you Ramin for your very good articles up to now, i really hope you change your jealousy/rage into bienveillance/respect for the hard work (7 days out of 7) of other poor people exploited by the system, like you are.
Hi Doc,
My pleasure!
We’re wishing you best of luck with your renters and please never lose faith. Be smart and flexible and make your plans work, one way or the other.
Take care!
JC
Thanx, indeed it’s gonna be tricky not to make the banks/government the big winners and the renters/myself the big losers of this situation.
My moral issue/test would be to reconcile that period of time when the renters start not paying their rent (which i fully understand why, and which will probably happen at one point) and the equivalent money i’ll still owe the bank for the next 10 years…
I guess it will be case by case discussion with my renters to look for alternative solutions (since the government -oh surprise!- does not help self contractors in reality : their narrative is nicely packaged though) which will not put them or me in a too big jeopardy.
You have been essentially robbed of €130,000 that you paid to the landlord over the past 8 years. Let us assume that the original price of the property 8 years ago was €130,000 for the sake of argument. If you had this money initially (say from an inheritance or from some other source), then there would be a (2-way) exchange of €130,000 (money you paid to the original owner) for the property, which you would have acquired in lieu of the money. However, in your actual case, at the end of the 8 years, the landlord not only has kept his property (whose value would have also appreciated over 8 years), but he has also “earned” €130,000 over the last 8 years. This is pure exploitation and the fate of most of us who do not have capital. I have worked my entire adult life so far, but would be hard-pressed to come up with $3,000 in case of an emergency. The situation for most people on our planet will be much more dire than this. The subject of ground rent has been discussed by Marx in the 3rd volume of Capital.
Nuts to any commenter who doesn’t agree with this article.
You’d think you’d read or watch something like this in some major media, but no.
Not your best piece, Ramin (and I usually like your work). Reminds me of when kulaks were chased off their land – only later to discover that that they were hard-working people, who grew crops that fed the society. You make lots of assumptions that don’t stand up to reality (inheritance, lavish lifestyles).
Here’s my response if I am part of the landlord class you speak of. I can be compassionate especially in times like these when compassion and allowing my tenant to temporarily live rent free would be obviously the right thing to do but try to seize from me what’s rightfully mine and I’ll drag you (not you personally) out to a vacant field and put a bullet in your head. At least that’s my sentiments om the matter. You could be shocked by that answer or you could try to understand my point of view. What’s mine belongs to me and my family. My children will inherit what is mine one day as has been done through the ages. Anyone who wants to take that from me by force (even with the “law” on their side) is a damned thief and I will not allow anyone to steal from me or my family. I will stop them by force even if that means I have to kill someone or more than one person. I feel strongly about this especially with those neo-Bolsheviks from ANTIFA being on the rise in my country. You start talking about seizing other people’s property and I start thinking reactionary like General Franco if you get my drift?
You obvisously haven’t read the whole article and/or didn’t understand it.
I am a socialist and I want property
Ramin is apparently not talking of the small landlord that uses his rental income for retirement purposes, but the absentee, rent-seeking landlord class who buys up homes on credit to push up asset prices in order to pay the interest on their loans to the banks. I don’t know what it is like in France, but Anglo-Saxon banking practice consists of 80% for mortgage loan to buy up property already in place. So the root problem of affordable housing lies in the conduct of banking and the tax laws as Michael Hudson writes so persistently in his The Bubble and Beyond.
This is very correct, its the banks that are keeping the price of rent and home prices as high as possible. But in the long run you have to blame the politician for enabling this practice, if a higher taxation rate was applied to vacant houses, buildings, and second and third homes, the costs of rent would be reduced as the need to occupy these dwellings would overcome the need to make an outlandish retirement profit.
“I am a socialist and I want property”
Thank you, Ramin, for reviving this paradoxical concept. It is called Distributionism, a form of Religious Socialism which was proposed 120 years ago by two brilliant English Catholic-socialist writers, Hilaire Belloc and GK.Chesterton. Both were struggling against the first Anglo-Zio-Capitalist Resource War of the 20th century: namely, the British invasion and takeover of the immensely resource-rich Free Afrikaner Republics of South Africa.
Belloc’s prophetic book, The Free Press, correctly identified the forerunner of today’s MSM; including our current terminology: the Capitalist-owned Press.
“I am a socialist and I want property”
That says it all.
“I am a hypocrite.”
A possibly decent man lent me his property for use. Thanks to his confidence in my honesty, I was able to live for many years in a city where probably tens of millions of people would love to live. (I take it that you don’t live in the turbulent outskirts.)
Strange article indeed.
This article doesn’t consider the majority of landlords. It also considers only – in my opinion – those landlords who own a lot of apartments/houses and are mostly rich ones. Also it considers mostly big cities and better quarters of any city. Most European states have laws that apartment/house landlords have to pay everything of appliances if some goes broken, i.e. installed heaters, warm-water boilers, electricity if it concerns the general installation etc. Landlords have to take care that drinking water and sewage, garbage etc. as well as other important installations are properly working. Those things belong to the landlord’s responsibilities.
In Europe – since the banks stopped to give any percentage for savings – what should people do ?
Considering first that inflation is always present, second when going to retire and knowing that the monthly income would be – in most cases – lesser than during working life time.
Your article didn’t consider these points more balanced. All what most people in Europe do is to buy some property (during their working life time), trying to get some loan from a bank and rent the property in order to pay back the loan at the bank. In this way they hope that when they have to retire from work life to have some sort of additional income monthly. This means too that they have to distribute their monthly income wisely. As pensions usually – this differs from state to state – aren’t very high (exceptions are with some state owned companies I think or politicians and not to forget some religious people).
The majority in Europe are working people and neither owners of bigger companies nor millionaires and surely not billionaires. And owners of smaller companies usually don’t have so much money and property wealth.
Therefore their monthly income when being retired doesn’t being too big. Some are less 40 % out of 100 as during their working life.
The crux lies within the banking system too. In former times Europeans were savers on bank accounts.
This has naturally changed due to circumstances and different outlook.
There are always two sides. To see one side only is not balanced.
LOL, the landlord class sure was itching to respond to this one. Well, don’t blame me – blame Mao and his “property-less” class idea.
Just as the “this is about survival-class” came for the landlords in China, they’ll come for them in the US one day. And, of course, they will start in California.
‘This is about survival’: California tenants plan rent strikes as Covid-19 relief falls short
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/california-rent-strike-coronavirus-eviction
What is needd is a Robin Hood tax, or wealth tax, on the 10%, especially the 1%. Not just on income, but properties and securities as well. And not just on individuals but on the largest corporations, a revenue and property wealth tax. Instead, of course, we give the wealthiest the tax dollars to buy back shares in their corporations.
Coronavirus Forces Landlord To Cut Back On Taking Care Of Building From 1 To 0 Hours A Week
https://local.theonion.com/coronavirus-forces-landlord-to-cut-back-on-taking-care-1842458722
At press time, Jacobson added that despite the current public health crisis, he would work his hardest to ensure that rent collection and evictions would continue operating without interruptions.
something missing from all of this ‘class warfare’ ideology is any sense of scale. There is a huge difference between a hard working individual who builds a second house to rent out for some extra income, and a megacorporation that owns whole districts with thousands upon thousands of tenants. I built the house i live in. It took me eleven years and i did as much of the work with my own hands as possible, but still cost every spare cent i could save all that time, working hard and not spending anything beyond basic necessities. No loans or debt though, that is poison. The various places i rented over the years to live in, i don’t begrudge the owners that money. Someone had to go to the trouble to build those places and maintain them, that isn’t free. Nothing is free. My father in law, when he was young, spent three years of his life , with his wife, hauling bricks and cement and building, with their own hands, a small apartment building. Now old, yes they rent out three apartments. That’s the overwhelming majority of what they have to live from these days. Is he somehow bad for that?
All this class conflict ideology ends up actually being the tool of the large and powerful, to get the little people to fight each other. The big corporations, the state, the banks, theyre all the same thing and all the same people. they are power. they are enormous scale. they are not human. And they keep on selling all sorts of ideologies to try to get humans to fear , envy, and hate each other.
so, please, ALWAYS remember the distinction of scale. individual humans are dealing with you on an even level. Corporations, governments, banks, these things are the unnatural monsters of our age.