Here in NY we have 1 year leases capped at an increase of 3% per year. However landlords can increase rent another 3% if they can show that they had to do upgrades or emergency repairs or some other nonsense. They've applied for and received this exemption to double our increase EVERY SINGLE YEAR I've lived there, and it seems there is nothing to stop them from doing it every year until the end of time.

The infuriating thing? There are no actual upgrades being done. The roads are constantly full of potholes. The water lines constantly spring leaks. The power is constantly cutting out - brownouts are common, and blackouts happen every winter. We are responsible for paying all our utilities, mowing the lawn, and maintaining our lots, and the office is apparently responsible for nothing and spends nothing upgrading or maintaining the park. But somehow they qualify for that extra 3% increase every single year without fail.

• I live in a trailer park owned by Horizon Land Management. There are youtube videos detailing how trailer parks used to be cheap housing for the poor, but now that private equity companies like Horizon are buying them up, they're raising lot rent sky high and parasitizing the people who are so poor they can't afford to leave. Trailers were the cheapest housing many of us could afford. Where else could we go? They basically suck the blood out of us like vampires.

Everybody wants to wear the boot.

Exactly. The words used to describe the model are just that. Words. The ruling class is always shitty people who have their heads in the clouds. They cannot fathom the struggles of the working class and have no idea how to actually make things better. It doesn't matter how you structure the government when our rulers are always human-shaped embodiments of shit.

I understand why my post above gets so many downvotes. It's natural for people to want to believe they have an answer that works. That what they believe in is correct and everyone else is wrong. I'm telling you that everyone is wrong, and we don't have a model that works. Nobody wants to hear that, but it's the answer I've arrived to after thinking about politics and economics for decades. It's also why the people are so susceptible to demagogues. A man with a plan will come along, tell everyone what they want to hear, and lead society towards its next mass atrocity. It's going to happen again. It will happen here in the USA. You can bet on it.

Tell us you don't understand what communism is without telling us you don't understand what communism is. 🙄

Show me your proof, liberal. And no... reruns of The Walking Dead doesn't count.

Oh my, I would have never though that this comment will actually cause this explosive reaction.

Nuclear-level dumbassery tends to get that kind of response, yes.

I live in hope we can get rid of the smelly old boot.

The main issue with anarchism is that absolute freedom for you is a double-edged battle-axe. It assumes all people are good and trustworthy without any guardrails if they aren’t.

The current system is biased towards bad people getting into power. History is full of wars and genocides because we concentrate power into the hands of the few. If everyone had equal power, bad actors couldn't do nearly as much damage as they would if they held state power.

That sort of tyranny is the defining characteristic of these primitive, tribal social structures.

This seems like you're projecting your views on hierarchies and domination, being raised in a highly hierarchical, individualistic and competitive society under capitalism, into the past. The sort of tyranny you see in class based societies is not seen in Hunter gatherer society.

I'm just going to copy paste the society section from the Wikipedia page on hunter gatherers as it refutes a lot of what you're saying:

Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos,[26][27] although settled hunter-gatherers (for example, those inhabiting the Northwest Coast of North America and the Calusa in Florida) are an exception to this rule.[28][29][30] For example, the San people or "Bushmen" of southern Africa have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods.[31] Karl Marx defined this socio-economic system as primitive communism.[32]
The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never total but is striking when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by paleoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.[33][34][35][36]
Most anthropologists believe that hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.[37][38][39]

Capitalism wants us to think domination is natural so that we'll weigh the grand tyranny of the capitalist state to the petty tyranny of tribal rule and choose it. So they'll downplay the tyranny of the state and wholly fabricate the tyranny of tribal societies to manufacture consent.

They don't want us to think anarchy/communism is possible, much less the natural state of man before agriculture.

Words are just tools we made up. If fascists are willing to break the meaning of language to get what they want, maybe we can too!

Down with those communist fascists!!

The sort of tyranny you see in class based societies is not seen in Hunter gatherer society.

We can see this sort of tyranny evolved not just in humans, but in a wide variety of species. What makes humanity special in this regard? Why do you think our evolutionary ancestors were immune to these sorts of behaviors?

have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods

The sharing of food and material goods does not imply a lack of tyrannical behavior. A focus on the "carrots" does not justify ignoring the "sticks".

There are people who would be elected endlessly thanks to their sheer competence. My town had one such mayor, but opposing party passed country-wide limit to amount of times one can be re-elected.

And I bet americans would love to still have Teddy Roosevelt as their president, especially now, though that might require a bit more than forceful election, a bit of necromancy perhaps.

Look, you just need to build your downstream. I take your bribes and give you some power. Then your downstream bribes you for parts of it. The more downstream you have the more bribes you get. With no borders, the whole world can be your downstream. It's not upper and lower class, it's upstream and downstream! See? Classless.

Thats objectively an elevated class imbued with power over others.

I know it's hard but you really gotta question whether what you're reading is absurd in context. If it is, it's possible it's sarcasm.

Managers are objectively not an elevated class, assuming they have the same relations to ownership of the means of production, in Marxist analysis. You don't need to read Capital for this, Marx's Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy makes Marx's position explicit:

Power and hierarchy is not class. Class is a specific relation to ownership of the means of production. Principals and teachers are both proletarian, yet the principal's job responsibility is in managing teachers, while the teacher's job is to educate. Administrative labor is socially necessary and compensated in wages, not via ownership and entitlement to the profits of accumulation and exploitation.

Your condescension is undue. You are free to take issue with administration and managerial labor, but to conflate those with class is a horrendous misreading of class dynamics and muddies the water when discussing Marxism and anarchism.

I have to agree.

Poe's law is a bitch as always, but between the display name, the flags and the message itself (particular words as well as the fact that the statement is bordering on incoherent), I'm fairly certain this position is not sincerely held by the poster.
Now, whether it's a leftist satirizing unhinged right-wingers or a troll account posing as leftist to portray them as deranged - your guess is as good as mine (though I'm leaning toward the former).

I'm not discussing Marxism.

You were attacking the idea of a vanguard as has been utilized in Marxist-led revolutions.

Yes.

What do other species evolutionary tracks have to do with ours? Legs have evolved in a wide variety of species, but many species don't have them, including some like snakes and whales that have ancestors with legs. These species were formed by evolutionary pressures that made that trait detrimental. Above is a summary of how tyranny is detrimental in a nomadic hunter gatherer society.

Along with the disadvantages one of the key advantages of tyranny, intra group conflict resolution, is less of a draw as we have other ways of resolving conflicts, namely speech which no other species has to the same degree. Resolving conflicts with talking is way less costly to the group then resolving with violence, so a tribe that resolves there conflicts with words is going to be in better shape then one constantly fighting and injuring each other.

The sharing of food and material goods does not imply a lack of tyrannical behavior.

What is this tyrannical behavior then, and what's it in service of? Tyranny takes a lot of effort and risk to maintain, so why do it? Your not getting more resources, your not getting prestige through displays of authority.

Your not going to get a harem, polygyny was rare in Hunter gatherer civilizations and even the guys with multiple wives usually only had 2 wives. . Extreme polygyny and harems don't show up until agriculture as shown by the bottleneck in y chromosomes

So please provide some sort of ethnographic case study showing this tribal tyranny you speak of.

oh yeah, definitely! i agitate toward socialist (and anarcho-syndicalist) policy at every chance i get! On top of that, I'm also continuously attempting to plant subliminal ideations toward it among people with whom i interact on a daily basis putting it in terms my propaganda-poisoned colleagues' minds might actually grasp--

'if only we could decide this democratically, huh?`

'after all, we're the ones who actually have to do the work and see how things transpire here on the front lines of the whole operation...'

'nobody upstairs knows how things work around here better than us.'

'btw don't we have some kind of right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, ACTUALLY...?'

'idk i just like democracy bro ;3'

'kinda sucks how our tax dollars are being spent to prop up a genocidal regime so they can give their citizens free healthcare while we're stuck with nothing, doesn't it...'

'hey if you want cheaper eggs, i know a place near here...! it's a co-op market owned and operated by the local farmers and a dozen fresh eggs is like ... sometimes HALF of what the big chain stores charge!'

"ohhh i'm so sorry to hear your cable company treats you that way...! it's awful! y'know, it seems like every time people ask a corporation to handle infrastructure it just makes more waste, fraud and abuse... but as for me, the fiber optic line to my house is fast and stable and cheap, and it's owned by all us residents in my town. Municipally owned! I would love for you to have that too. wouldn't you? why not ask your neighbors how they feel about it?"

all of these examples are exaggerated and hyperbolic for illustrative purposes. i usually have to be a lot more subtle in order to avoid tipping them into a performative faux-patriotic 'four legs good two legs bad' thought terminating cliche fugue state.

At least they're honest.

So then we were also talking about Marxism. Even if you were doing so from an anarchist perspective, for any Marxist reading your comment it comes across as absurd. Marxists have never claimed to be getting rid of any and all hierarchies, and to judge Marxism by its ability to do so is like judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

My autism strikes again

No, it's a dictatorship. Dictatorship of capital. Soviet union was also a dictatorship, which is why they also had elites that dictated how much of what you can have. It wasn't because of the communism that they had elites, it was because it was a dictatorship.

Of course the funny thing about capital is that it tends to accumulate, so you get a dictatorship pretty naturally.

The vanguard is not to “relinquish power,” but instead raise up the level of political education of the rest of the proletariat to their level.

They will never lmao, that would be the same as giving up power. Power is subjective. The vanguard may not de jure "own the means of production", but they de facto "own the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do", which can be worse. Once everyone has the same amount of power, nobody has power over anyone else.

And yet in every socialist country, literacy rates and education was made a top priority. Using the USSR as an example, literacy rates jumped from 20-30% all the way to 99.9% in around a decade, and education was made free, with professors and teachers seen as incredibly valuable members of society. This pattern has been followed in every socialist country. The truth of the matter is that it's very difficult to educate people, it's a complex matter that requires nuanced decisions on how we teach, what we teach, and more.

Further, "power" is not subjective. There is no supernatural force called "power," what exists is what is material. Administration and management of production and human labor is socially necessary for large-scale mass production, the type that is necessary for communism to begin with. To dogmatically oppose any and all hierarchical organization does not actually help the working classes in breaking their chains, so to speak, but instead holds them back.

So then we were also talking about Marxism

No I'm not discussing that.

Even if you were doing so from an anarchist perspective, for any Marxist reading your comment it comes across as absurd. Marxists have never claimed to be getting rid of any and all hierarchies, and to judge Marxism by its ability to do so is like judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

I direct you back to my previous statement:

question whether what you're reading is absurd in context. If it is, it's possible it's sarcasm.

It's feeling less undue with each reply 🙃

Yes the $7.25 minimum wage is why rent is $1500 (/s)

Adam Smith wrote about how much he hated landlords because they are feudalism.

This is unironically how every power structure in the entire human society in the entire history of the world works.

That's how Bitcoin-libertarians describe themselves, too.

Have you seen these knives? Damn they're good knives! Can't afford them? Just buy 10 and selling 9 will pay for yours! Now, can i put you down for a monthly shipment?