i hope my anticapitalist friends don't hate me too much for my brazen materialistic indulgences
@typhlosion I'm a supposed anarcho-capitalist but I enjoy a lot owning stuff. I'm a pretty contradictory human being
@splatoon @typhlosion I really hate the very notion of money & capitalism in general. I just like my PC, my turntable, my vinyl records, my 3DS...
@Siphonay @splatoon @typhlosion Generally socialist/anarchist theory makes a distinction between PERSONAL property (that stuff you mentioned) and PRIVATE property (The stuff that folks can hold and use to enforce class distinctions, e.g. means of production, land)
@typhlosion @indi @splatoon Is a house a personnal property itself?
@Siphonay @typhlosion @splatoon See, this is where it gets complicated. As we can see, all the constructs around home ownership cause a whole mess of capitalist problems too, but yeah, people deserve a place that they can use for shelter and protection and expression.
@typhlosion @indi @splatoon I'm super attached to having my own personnal space too
@Siphonay @typhlosion @splatoon Yeah, personal space is a basic need, in the same way that food and water is, y'know? The trick I suppose is figuring out how much someone NEEDS rather than just... stockpiling it?
@splatoon @typhlosion @Siphonay A lot of the land-ownership stuff that raises ire in anti-capitalist circles isn't "I have a homestead and I raise crops for myself there", it's "I buy up houses so I can rent them out on AirBnB" (Just as a couple of extreme examples)
@indi @Siphonay @splatoon ah i see
so if you take that idea as an axiom, then the logical continuation is to apply that thinking to the entity you're buying the land from in the first place, and so on until you come to the conclusion that land-ownership under capitalism is basically unethical as a rule
i mean i guess i'm not gonna argue but idk enough about anything to make salient contributions to this discussion
@typhlosion @Siphonay Yeah, land ownership is sorta one of the Big Hard Problems in anti-capitalist theory, where trying to go from theory to practice basically requires reconfiguring the entire world all at once.
But it's still helpful to think about the theory, because it can help to avoid being a capitalist asshat, and more importantly try to mitigate the damage of other capitalist asshats, in the places where you can.
Yeah exactly, and as a recent house-buyer myself I've been thinking about this a lot.
(Now going EVEN FURTHER into "just Indi's own thoughts" land)
For me, part of what resolves this sort of conundrum is a spiritual perspective; I think of the "the land" not as something I have dominion over but instead as sort of an entity I'm working with, it's 'mine' in the same sense that someone is "my friend", I'm in relation with it and need to respect that.
@indi @Siphonay right, the paying for it really is just like -
it's not like i own the land in the sense that this physical patch of earth is now mine to inhabit, destroy, carry with me, etc. because that's weird
the owning really just means i can do stuff there and ostensibly get some kind of claim to it if other arbitrary people try to do stuff with it against my will, if that makes sense
ownership is a social construct wait no i swear i'm not anticapitalist
@splatoon @typhlosion @Siphonay My thought (to be clear, here we're getting into Indi's semi-informed theories about stuff, and not any actual sourcing I can point to) is that that makes housing a 'public good' in the same sense as stuff like education and healthcare, where we need to figure out a way for communities to provide it for folks in a way that leaves everyone feeling fulfilled and no one lording it over someone else.