You’re being facetious. Rent is not capital harboured for the maintenance of lands or buildings. From Wiktionary:

Noun; rent (countable and uncountable, plural rents); (economics) A profit from possession of a valuable right, as a restricted license to engage in a trade or business.

I want to make this point absolutely clear: landlords in Australia have been a cohort that’s been cultivated by the capitalists as a bulwark against labour domestically. In law and in economic-systems privileges have been carved out solely for them, to the detriment of the industrial-capacity of Australia to produce tangible goods.

Australia has a housing crisis–which is not a state that is unique to Australia. Housing is a human right. Australia’s government acknowledged this and promised to act on it. It has failed in every domain–deliberately!

The right to housing is clearly supported by international law, indeed at the very foundation of the international human rights system in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This Declaration, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, establishes an internationally recognised set of standards for all persons without qualification. Article 25 of the Declaration provides, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing”.

—Chris Sidoti, Human Rights Commissioner, 4th of September, 1996.

Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Australia is a party, recognises the right of all people to adequate housing and commits state parties to take appropriate steps to ensure the realisation of that right. Article 11 recognises, “… the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing…” and that “States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right”.

I do encourage readers to read the linked document (especially Australians). It will help shed light on why the privileged children of Western-democracies are looking back at the USSR as an ideal to work towards whilst they face worsening material conditions with the political classes unanimously declaring: it will get worse; deal with it. Users such as whoisearth@lemmy.ca are being, I think, disingenuous.

The children of Australia are aware that the adults (that are in privileged positions now, shaping Australia’s future political- and economic-landscapes) were the recipients of public-housing, cheap private-housing and free tertiary-education, whilst ending those same programs for them. This injustice is further inflamed with the deliberate inflation of asset-classes, of which housing has become an overwhelming salient sore-point in the Australian context.

Rents in Australia do not go towards the maintenance of the property. They overwhelmingly go towards the financing of new mortgages. A rental-property is a political-license to freely create private misery for your tenant as you attempt to extract unjust amounts of capital to finance a mountain of new mortgages in an attempt to join the politically protected class: landlords.

I pay $300.00 AUD a week to rent a room, with no access to laundry or cooking facilities. Meanwhile the property fails Australia’s national-standards for housing. There are no smoke-detectors in the bedrooms. A glass-panel in one of the windows has a hole in it. The bathroom’s exhaust fan does not work. Mold is a never-ending issue. These conditions are illegal, but good luck getting the landlord to meet his legal-obligations! If you live in Australia you know tenants are treated as an underclass.

Tenants are supposed to maintain the building and the land, not the rent. That’s the expectation and the reality here. It is certainly different to what I’ve read of European-tenancy expectations. I can only defend Australia by saying it’s a young, naive nation led by lazy and entitled morons.

In Australia homelessness is increasing. Asset-classes are over inflated. Rents are crippling. Wages are insufficient. The leading thought of the domestic political-class is that A.I. will increase productivity, leading to higher wages which will erode that asset inflation, leading to a nice, comfortable equilibrium. Of course this ignores the fact that the historical gains of increased productivity have gone towards profits, not wages. Somehow the future gains will be different! Everyone knows that’s a lie, which means the current cohort of leaders are promising nothing. No change. We will continue this course of destructive neoliberalism.

What the USSR accomplished was remarkable. What the Chinese have accomplished is astonishing. All under the frame-work of socialism, working towards communism. Meanwhile the Western-democratic nations seem to be in endless internal-squabbles, external-wars and domestic degradation.

I see something in the commentary I can’t exactly define. It’s probably bigger than a single word can encompass. Regardless of how revolutionary and forward thinking the leaders of a polity are they are still leading groups and individuals who have their own cultural beliefs, of which their positions would be inherently antithetical towards revolutionary ideas–if they were not the revolution would have occurred earlier. There’s a cultural threshold that must be passed before revolutionary activities can occur, but that threshold may be with a minority of people who can enable those activities to start. They will still be leading a majority who simply do not care intellectually. Most people do not give a thought towards the economic system they live under.

A white-class who materially benefits from a black-class’ oppression will be racist towards that class regardless of what the leading mouthpieces say, especially if that benefit has been enforced throughout many generations. “Equality feels like suppression to the privileged.” When a strong revolutionary polity enters a territory they–by definition–are fought against. It’s intellectually lazy to call this push-back the “suppression” of religion–ethnicity, sexuality or any other category–by the revolutionaries.

Revolutionaries were on the correct lines. One cannot attack the revolution’s failings on the actions of uninterested participants or more accurately: counter-revolutionary actors. The communists were more socially progressive than the capitalists. That’s a fact not up for debate. Communists are more socially progressive than capitalists.

Rents should be abolished. It’s a tax and I do wonder why taxes are still in use by national-governments today. They’re inefficient and create absolutely needless friction and dissent amongst payers. Money has long left the bounds of reality. Of a nation state to issue money, but then tack back a small fraction due to cultural-legacy, should it not be ridiculed? Likewise the ill effects of landlords has been well documented economically: their patronage is solely for the oppressive effects on you–the worker.