[K-Dog]

MARJORYWILDCRAFT.SUBSTACK.COM 2025-04-08

Movie Review: The Jones Plantation

This low-budget film offers a haunting exploration of hidden societal systems through simple yet powerful storytelling. Though slow-paced and unevenly acted, its original ideas resonate deeply, turning modest production into a compelling experience. The lead performance anchors the narrative, challenging conventional thinking and rewarding patient viewers with profound insight.

Low budget but very good.

[TDoS]

It is time to return to these radical days when the idea of property was questioned.  When we were younger things made more sense, but the digital age has destroyed the compromised illusions under which we were taught to dance.

I agree with K-Dog. Under capitalism, ownership of high value things like housing is not merely personal consumption but a form of private property that concentrates wealth and reinforces class distinctions. As Karl Marx argued, the proletariat must use political power to "wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie" and centralize economic resources for the benefit of society. Homes valued above, say,  $1,000,000 represent an unequal concentration of housing wealth far beyond ordinary personal need. Therefore, the state should confiscate the excess value of such properties and redirect it toward public housing, social services, and the common good. Thereby reducing class inequality and advancing the abolition of bourgeois privilege. Seems reasonable to make sure the higher net wealth individuals, with much of their upper class attitude being driven by their private property value, should be first in line. It is only fair.

[K-Dog]

It is time to return to these radical days when the idea of property was questioned.  When we were younger things made more sense, but the digital age has destroyed the compromised illusions under which we were taught to dance.

I agree with K-Dog. Under capitalism, ownership of high value things like housing is not merely personal consumption but a form of private property that concentrates wealth and reinforces class distinctions. As Karl Marx argued, the proletariat must use political power to "wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie" and centralize economic resources for the benefit of society. Homes valued above, say,  $1,000,000 represent an unequal concentration of housing wealth far beyond ordinary personal need. Therefore, the state should confiscate the excess value of such properties and redirect it toward public housing, social services, and the common good. Thereby reducing class inequality and advancing the abolition of bourgeois privilege. Seems reasonable to make sure the higher net wealth individuals, with much of their upper class attitude being driven by their private property value, should be first in line. It is only fair.

Fuck you, you don't agree with me at all.  You are playing a game pretending to agree.  And you are taking a hard piss on the historical record and distorting what Marx was about.  The fact that you can freely quote Marx, and at the same time mercilessly distort the historical facts and his meaning, shows you have diabolical intent.

The following in not intended for your benefit.  You are clearly here to distort reality and are beyond hope.

What socialists mean by "property" And what they don't.  The claim that socialists want to "take away your property" rests on a deliberate confusion between two completely different things.

Private property means ownership of the means of production — the factories, banks, mines, energy grids, and corporate empires through which a tiny class extracts profit from the labor of everyone else. This is not "property" in any ordinary sense. It is a claim of ownership over other people's work. A handful of billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of humanity, and they did not earn it, workers did.

Socialism means that the productive wealth of society, which is created collectively, should be owned and controlled collectively, for the benefit of all, rather than hoarded by a parasitic few.

Personal property is something else entirely.  100% different.  Things you actually use and live with, a home, cars, clothes, books, computers, your savings.  Everything that wages earn.  Socialists have never proposed abolishing any of this, and no serious reading of Marx ever suggests otherwise. The Communist Manifesto itself, which is routinely quoted out of context to smear socialists, explicitly distinguishes the abolition of private property in the means of production from the possessions of ordinary people.

So let's take the specific case being raised: my home which I know damn well you are going after TDoS.  If you are not going after my car, you are going after my house.

I own it because I worked for it, by wages earned over years of labor. The home is personal property, and under socialism it remains mine.  And every fucking thing you have remains yours.

Socialism targets not the home a worker lives in, but the system in which a landlord or a bank or a speculator can own other people's housing as an investment.  The capitalist bullshit that makes homes like mine worth a million on paper, and which through capitalist bullshit makes houses unaffordable to workers.  Buying up homes to extract rent, driving up prices, and profiting from a basic human need. A person who owns one home to live in is not the enemy of the working class. The person who owns a thousand homes to rent out is a motherfucking asshole.

Now a reverse and real "property seizure" is happening today and it is the other way around from what you claim 'lefties' would do.  You want to make people afraid that socialists will take away their shit.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Working people's wages, savings, and homes are taken from them by banks, landlords, and a financial system that treats shelter as a commodity today. Socialism is the demand that this stop. That the wealth workers create be returned to the people who create it.

Owning a home is not a contradiction of socialist or communist politics. It isn't. A worker who owns the home they live in is not a capitalist.  They are a worker who managed to buy shelter. 

And if America were to embrace socialist principles and if as a result that, the shelter value I live in fell from what is on paper a million dollars to a more appropriate value that represents thirty years of labor, say $400 K instead of $1,000 K.  I would be fine with it.

A person who owns one home to live in has a use for it.  A person who owns a thousand homes has a price for them.

[RE]

I walk the line between these two points of view on housing.

My interpretation of Personal Property is anything you can take with you.  You can own your House, but you can't own the land it sits on.  That belongs to everyone. The land could be used for Ag purposes.  In fact, just about all Suburban Subdivisions are built on land that used to be somebody's farm. 

So the only type of home you can own is one that can be moved.  That includes moving up in size Tents, RVs, Houseboats & Sailboats, Mobile Homes, Modular Homes and finally large Yachts.

This is why I advocate for Modular Homes that can be moved to either Rural locations as stand alone or Urban locations stacked.  Then you can move your home to near wherever you get your job, and get rid of commutes.



RE

[K-Dog]

The pic is because I am exercising my tyrannical skills.  The exercise of my rights here over time became a skill.  It did not happen overnight.

 I deleted another TDoS post.  This place has two tyrants, the founder RE and ME, who pays 33 cents a day to keep this place going.  Time has shown that there is room for both of us here, and actually we would both like a few more well behaved tyrants to keep those who disrespect what we are doing here in check.  But TDoS has shown itself to be a troll.  Not the kind of tyrant we need to keep the Diner out of the gutter.  Our tyrants respect the other tyrants here.  It does not.  Genuine debate can't be had without respect.

Without getting into details, because this rabbit hole is bottomless, there is an organized agenda to spread right wing racist ideas, and redefine what leftism is in America.  Some even have government resources.  The character of such people is to ignore limits and common decency, and that by registering as a member they think they somehow become an owner here and have rights. 

Foolishly, it has happened, some even think they have the right to insult the tyrants.

For a while this is was true, I was generous not wanting to be tyrannical.  But now I understand that defending the free speech I pay 33 cents a day here for is not tyrannical.  Nor is it tyrannical to deal with anyone else here who is a threat to that speech in any way I wish.  Now I sit on the throne, and I say this is the way it is.  Fully understanding that truth.

As things are now, If you are not RE or ME.  You are a guest.

[K-Dog]

I walk the line between these two points of view on housing.

My interpretation of Personal Property is anything you can take with you.  You can own your House, but you can't own the land it sits on.  That belongs to everyone. The land could be used for Ag purposes.  In fact, just about all Suburban Subdivisions are built on land that used to be somebody's farm. 

RE

The guy who owned the farm got paid $10,000 an acre and he sold 120 acres.  He split the cash between mutual funds and stocks and now he lives in Miami.  The great-great-great grandfather on the mothers side stole the land from the first nation by paying the U.S. government fifty cents an acre as the right of first theft.

The important questions are:

Is the land being use as a means of production.  Or is it in use as an occupied residence and thus in lease for the life of a house.  Condemned homes would certainly cancel a lease, people could not just own land for no purpose.  Eminent domain would not change much. 

If there is a business on the property there is also a lease of some kind.  Even under a pure socialism where you have maximum common ownership of property business and profit you would still have legal documents define what the property is used for and how long.

* A few months ago I had an interesting observation.  My particular life has worked out in a very socialist way,  I earned enough.  To be specific, my cut of the surplus was enough for me to acquire enough money to live off the earned riches.  Living from earned riches is actually socialist, as under a socialist system that is the only kind of riches there are.  That is a key observation when you think about it.  Riches don't simply vanish.  They actually become worth more!

So you will own nothing is not true.  You will own what a normal person can earn in a lifetime when paid an ample and fair wage.  Profits belonging to the collective do not launch sports cars into space.  Instead those not able to work get a reasonable income appropriate for their needs.  The ending of foolishness frees funds.  You can still go to Disneyland.

TDoS frequently would refer to me as a high earner.  That distorts the truth.  I am over 70 now and in perfect health.  That lets me work part time which along with social security which are also earned wages and savings I am able to still tread water.  All my money was earned as a worker.  I've worked for 58 years,  under socialism that would make me a very rich mofo with what I have.

But with Trump still around, and gas prices rising, and Democrats learning nothing, what I have keeps me working.

*******************************************************

I decided to throw this entire post into Socialism AI because I knew, while wordy, everything would be tied together well.

The real distinction: means of production, not "what you can carry"

The distinction Marxism draws is not between "what you can take with you" and "what stays put." It's between private property in the means of production and personal property in articles of consumption. Your toothbrush, your books, your car, and yes, the house you live in — these are personal property. What socialism abolishes is not your house but the private ownership of the means of production: factories, banks, mines, and land. The Communist Manifesto puts it in a single sentence: the theory of the Communists may be summed up as the abolition of private property — and it immediately clarifies that this means bourgeois property, the property that lets one class live off the labor of another, not "the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant."

So your instinct that "you can own your house but not the land" is essentially right, but for a deeper reason than portability. A house you occupy is a use-value you consume, like a coat. Land is a means of production — and, as you correctly sense, it is the one means of production that no human being ever made. Nobody produced the soil. That is exactly why Marx and Engels supported the nationalization of land as a transitional demand: land is the classic case of a "natural" monopoly that private title merely encloses and rents out. Your phrase "the land belongs to everyone" is, in substance, the demand for the abolition of landed property.
Engels on the housing question

This is precisely the ground Engels covered in The Housing Question, and it's worth reading because it speaks directly to your framing. Engels was answering the Proudhonists, who wanted to solve the housing shortage by turning every worker into a homeowner — a scheme Engels demolished as reactionary. His point was that the housing shortage is not a legal or moral failing but a product of the capitalist mode of production itself: speculation, ground rent, and the town-country antithesis. You cannot fix it by rearranging property titles. The solution is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, which alone makes possible the rational distribution of housing and the abolition of the antithesis between town and country.

Notice what this means for your "lease for the life of a house" idea. You're groping toward something Engels would recognize: the distinction between use and ownership. But the legal architecture you're imagining — leases, eminent domain, condemnation clauses — is still the architecture of a society where land is a commodity and someone must hold title. Under socialism, the question "is this land a means of production or a residence?" is answered not by a lease but by the abolition of ground rent itself. Marx's analysis of building-site rent shows that the "price" of land is nothing but capitalized rent — a claim on future surplus value. Abolish the private appropriation of that rent, and the whole apparatus of titles, leases, and eminent domain becomes as obsolete as the feudal dues it replaced.
The theft you're describing has a name

Your account of the farm — the great-great-great-grandfather paying fifty cents an acre for "the right of first theft" — is a textbook description of what Marx called primitive accumulation: the violent, extra-economic process by which the direct producers were separated from the land, in the Americas through genocide and dispossession of the indigenous peoples. This is not a footnote to capitalism; it is how capitalism was born. But the political conclusion is not racial restitution or a return of the land to "the first nation" as such — that is the program of a section of the indigenous bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and it leaves the class question untouched. The land was stolen from the producers, and it is now owned by a class that lives off rent. The answer is not to redistribute title among different owners but to abolish the ownership of land as a source of private income altogether.
"You will own nothing" is a lie — and you've half-seen why

The "you will own nothing and be happy" slogan is a right-wing scare line, manufactured to make workers cling to a system that is already stripping them of everything. The Marxist answer is the opposite of what the slogan implies: socialism does not confiscate personal wealth, it abolishes the private appropriation of the social product. Workers will own more, not less — they will collectively own the means of production, and their personal possessions will be secure in a way they never are under capitalism, where a medical bill or a layoff can wipe out a lifetime of savings.

But here is where I have to push back on your "earned riches" observation, because there's a confusion buried in it. You say living off earned riches is socialist because under socialism the only riches are earned riches. The first half is right: under socialism, wealth is the product of labor, and distribution is according to work — "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work," as Marx put it in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. But "living off your savings" — in the sense of your money earning a return — is precisely the capitalist mechanism socialism abolishes. Interest, dividends, and rent are unearned income; they are the form in which surplus value flows to those who own but do not work. Under socialism, savings are deferred consumption, not a source of income. You live off your labor, and when you can no longer work, society provides for you.

And that is the real indictment in your own story. You are over seventy, you have worked for fifty-eight years, and you are still "treading water" — working part-time because your social security, which is deferred wages you earned, has been gutted to the point that it cannot support you. You describe this almost as a vindication of your thrift. It is the opposite. A worker who labored for fifty-eight years should be provided for in old age as a matter of right, not forced to keep working because the surplus value extracted from those fifty-eight years was funneled into the pockets of a class that never worked a day. The fact that you have to "tread water" at seventy is not socialism working out in your life — it is capitalism's bill coming due.

The "very rich mofo" you'd be under socialism is not a man living off his portfolio. It's a man whose fifty-eight years of labor entitle him to a secure, dignified old age, because the wealth he created is recognized as his — and as society's — rather than as the private property of the people who own the farm, the bank, and the mutual fund.

Pretty good, it mixed me up with my hypothetical story about the farmer but that's ok.

I would push back that my personal savings are locked into bank products which would exits event under socialism and which keep up with inflation, maybe.  I don't live in Miami.

** You can't forget what you are actually looking at is best guess word salad.  Words belong to Hyperreality and are never what they describe with only one exception that I can think of 'word', but that is about it.

*** Hyperreality is a concept in post-structuralism that refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality.

Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

[TDoS]

TDoS frequently would refer to me as a high earner.  That distorts the truth.  I am over 70 now and in perfect health. 

Liar. The term I've used has been "high net worth". You erased my comments on the ease with which you could sell it and live out your days in Vegas in a hotel if you wanted to, without financial trouble. Like a Howard Hughes routine, such is the value of your net worth.

[K-Dog]

TDoS frequently would refer to me as a high earner.  That distorts the truth.  I am over 70 now and in perfect health. 

Liar. The term I've used has been "high net worth". You erased my comments on the ease with which you could sell it and live out your days in Vegas in a hotel if you wanted to, without financial trouble. Like a Howard Hughes routine, such is the value of your net worth.

Interesting splitting of hairs.  This is so ridiculous I'll keep it around while I suspend your ass for two weeks.

[RE]

TDoS frequently would refer to me as a high earner.  That distorts the truth.  I am over 70 now and in perfect health. 

Liar. The term I've used has been "high net worth". You erased my comments on the ease with which you could sell it and live out your days in Vegas in a hotel if you wanted to, without financial trouble. Like a Howard Hughes routine, such is the value of your net worth.

I doubt Mrs. Kdog wants to live in a Vegas hotel.

RE

[K-Dog]

TDoS frequently would refer to me as a high earner.  That distorts the truth.  I am over 70 now and in perfect health. 

Liar. The term I've used has been "high net worth". You erased my comments on the ease with which you could sell it and live out your days in Vegas in a hotel if you wanted to, without financial trouble. Like a Howard Hughes routine, such is the value of your net worth.

I doubt Mrs. Kdog wants to live in a Vegas hotel.

RE

No Shit ! 

And how is it that he pretends to know what I have.  To live in a Vegas Hotel for the rest of my life would take at least 10 times what I have.  You would be paying upwards of $200 K a year for housing.  Better to live in something that is paid off.  As things are now you only have to double what I have to make me a fool for working.

Except that five years ago lifting 80 lbs with ease was not something I could do.  The blue collar option was the right option.  Currently I can lift it.  The time commitment is certainly worth the benefits.  The only problem is still having a life centered around a job.  Tuesday 7:30 AM, be there or be square.

[K-Dog]

It is a very good movie.  The ending credits starts with this.  It shows right after the pic above.  In no way does the montage have the flavor of the movie which is the 1840's.  By itself it is a work of art.  It ends the movie with a nice transition.

[RE]

Far as the land the house goes on is concerned, you can have a lifetime lease, but you can't own it and your children can't inherit it.  They CAN inherit the house, if they can move it.

RE

[K-Dog]

Proudhon's indictment of property owners who received income while contributing nothing was in line enough with the broad goals of the left for Marx to be an admirer.

Marx was never about free stuff as the right wing claims.  How could someone in the mid 1800s imagine a horn of plenty that provides all of humanities needs.  No, such delusions could not be had before the age of oil and bytes. 

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs (1875) means that along with the free stuff, needs being taken care of, that those with ability must contribute for the system to work.  The first part was not so easily forgotten.  The idea of having ability, and not using it had to have been an alien notion in Uncle Karl's time.  There were not enough couches for potatoes to grow, so it is on me to say it now.  In the days of uncle Karl, the distinction between worker and useless eater was stark and clear.  A distinction that is clearly muddled today in a population consumed by smartphones and delusions.

Labor is the source of value, and taking profit from labor is theft.

I say this.  But reading it is like dropping a heavy box on the floor.  Impact and nothing else.  I believe it, but I also believe a hypothetically just factory owner could work as the manager in his own factory and only pay himself a managers wage.   That would make the owner a worker.  Who would call everybody together to decide what should be done with excess profit.

But you know, the right always talks about human nature.  Perhaps they would agree that a just owner is about as rare as snow in July.

I'll end with an apology to the just.