Capitalism’s rent-to-live society and the abolition of private property

AP

Karl Marx quite famously says in The Manifesto of the Communist Party that “…the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” This quote has been used over and over again by the capitalist class to scare workers away from contemplating socialism. After all, according to the capitalists, the Communists will take your home from you.

Scott Hiley gives a very good response to a reader who writes into the Communist Party citing this passage from the Manifesto and objecting that Americans are unlikely to hand their personal property over to Communists. Hiley argues that Marx never intended for the abolition of private property to include confiscation of personal property. What Marx intended by these words is the confiscation of the means of production, that property that produces wealth.

As both Marx and Hiley point out, huge percentages of our nation’s wealth are already controlled by a very small minority of rich Americans. The very top 0.1% of richest Americans control almost 13% of all the wealth.

In case you are not very good with percentages, let’s examine that number a little closer. Suppose we had an auditorium that seated 1,000 people, and those people represented all the people in the United States. Using a similar calculation, the total net wealth of the nation would be represented by $400 million.

Under this scenario, the wealthiest person, alone, would control 13% of that $400 million, or $52 million. The next wealthiest 10 people in the room would own $76 million of all wealth, and the next 100 wealthiest people would own $152 million. Now add those figures up, and we will see that the wealthiest 111 people in that auditorium own $280 million, 70% of all the wealth.

So let’s be clear here: What exactly does wealth mean? It means anything that can be owned and has value. That means all the homes, all the cars, all the jewelry, all the clothes, all the furniture, all the factories, all the investments; anything that has any financial value whatsoever. And yes, 10% of the people in the United States control 70% of all of that.

And if we take a look from the bottom, 50% of the entire population, that’s 500 people in our 1,000-people room, control just 2.5% of the wealth. If your household, as a whole, makes less than $75,000 per year, then you are in the bottom 50%.

My argument is that most of us have very little for the Communists to confiscate, EVEN IF we were to interpret Marx as wanting to literally confiscate ALL private property. And all the trends point to this situation worsening. Here are some interesting developments in how capitalism is letting us own less, requiring us to lease or rent more.

Let’s start with the largest asset that most American families own (partially, of course, until the mortgage is paid off): the home. The home real estate market has seen a trend towards the financialization of housing. Large corporations and private equity firms are buying up large swaths of housing in order to rent them out and make profits.

From 1990, the percentage of 25-34-year-olds that owned their own home decreased from 45% to 42%. And 2022 saw the smallest share ever of first-time home buyers in the real estate market: 26%. It’s getting harder and harder for young people to own their own home.

Automobile manufacturers are moving gradually towards requiring vehicle purchasers to pay monthly fees to unlock safety, engine performance, and creature comfort features in their cars. You’ll no longer be able to “own” a high performance engine, you’ll just be renting it. If you fail to make your monthly payment, the manufacturer just turns your car into a regular performance vehicle via computer.

Ibid for such things as heated or cooled seats and steering wheels and safety features that let you know your car is getting too close to some other object.

Automakers are laying the ground for a future in which they will make more money off of technology than off the sale of individual cars to consumers. Many auto industry analysts project that by 2050 most of us (except for those 111 people in our auditorium) will be getting around using completely automated ride-share programs with robot drivers.

Finally, a pet peeve of mine is music that is available for downloading or streaming. I could write an entire People’s World article about how poorly designed iTunes is and how frustrating I find it. The trend in the music industry is to get consumers to subscribe to a streaming service with millions of songs by millions of artists available at the touch of a keyboard or a simple voice request.

Even those hardcore baby boomer troglodytes like myself who refuse to subscribe to these streaming services never even get to purchase our music anymore. What we get is a license to listen to the music for our lifetime. It is not as though Apple is going around checking out the obituaries to ensure that no relative continues to use our music after our deaths, but, legally, our rights to the music go away when we die.

Be clear, I am not arguing that any of these trends are necessarily bad in and of themselves. In fact, many of the examples I have listed are particularly good for the environment and for economic efficiency. And, part of my problem with these trends may stem from me just being a senior citizen and frustrated with all them new-fangled thangs.

(Although I will note that I have a master’s degree in information sciences and once, long ago, was on the cutting edge of information technology; now I can’t even turn my television on without help).

My point is that in the future, on average, you will own an even smaller percentage of the wealth than you do now.

So, don’t be too worried about the Communists taking over. They don’t want your property. And, you won’t have very much left over anyway if capitalism gets its way. You’ll be renting everything.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Laurent Ross

Laurent Ross is a professor of philosophy and mathematics at the Technological University of Santiago in the Dominican Republic.