The Rose Outlook

A strange what-if occurred to me the other day, “What if a worker bought a flat and rented it out while still working to survive?” Of course, land-lording is a very bourgeois thing to do, even though landlords don’t often have a stake in the means of production. Many of them have enough private property so they could live off their tenant(s) and not work at all. In my scenario, the worker would still sell his labor for a wage in order to pay his own rent, while at the same time renting out a flat. So is he a part of the bourgeoisie? Proletariat? Is it possible he can be both?

This worker-landlord, for lack of a better expression in the modern era, would be petit-bourgeois, just like all other “mom-and-pop” landlords; this is because he bought the flat for the purpose of extracting his tenant’s surplus value. There is still a parasitic relationship between him and his tenant. If he was someone who lived off the exploitation of multiple families, he would be bourgeois. But no, his class, the petit-bourgeoisie, is composed of petty landlords, small business owners, artisans and people who generally work for themselves. Some of their interests are even aligned with the working class. Unfortunately, our land-lording case can simply described as the exploited trying to escape exploitation by exploiting other people.

Our case of the worker-landlord shows us an example of ‘class contradiction’ in the capitalist system, wherein the exploited are themselves incentivized to exploit others for extra profit or even survival. This man has positioned himself within the petit-bourgeoisie, renting out his flat and selling his labor at the same time.