----- Original Message ---- From: Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 8:43:43 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Homeownership Makes You Fat and Unhappy
So while as you say - owning vs renting is an individual thing that depends on the particulars of any given piece of real estate - ownership often entails additional problems anw worries that may cause one to loose sleep.
[WS:] To follow up on this, this can be generalized to many other forms of personal property under capitalism. Unlike private income producing property, which as the Old Man argued is the means of surplus value extraction from labor, personal property under capitalism not only does not produce any value but it extracts value from the nominal owner.
Car ownership is a prime example. This form of personal property is perhaps the most expensive means of providing the utility of transportation - the cost of the car itself, interest, insurance as well as ununsurable liability (e.g. tickets, fines, the nuissance of finding parking etc.), registration, fuel, tolls, fees, maintenance etc. - all of it borne by the nominal owner and all of them sources of profit for assorted capitalists providing car-related services. Using transit is far less expensive and involves only a fraction of liability entailed by car ownership - which explians why monopoly capital bends backward to support individual car ownership (or home ownership) and makes it very difficult for collective provision of transportation or housing services.
Same about health - under monopolu capital you "own it" and thus it is your personal responsibility to make provisions to secure it - which provides ample opportunity for an army of profiteers. Again, "personal property" serving as a vehicle of surplus labor extraction from the nominal owner.
If memory serves, some Eastern European Marxist economists (A.V. Chayanov?) arued about super-self-exploitation entailed by small time proprietors (mostly small time farmers) under capitalism. I think this argument can be extended to most forms of personal property in modern capitalism - consumerism is the form of super-exploitation of labor just as effective as private ownership of the means of production.
Wojtek
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