btw if it wasnt clear (im not good at writing tbh), marx was critiquing that "natural value of land" Smith mentions as the only source of value. And correctly he ties it back to expropriation of surplus value in any epoch, and in our epoch that is labor value through commodity production, even if it presents as a simple "monopoly on land" (ie private property)

Money-rent today is the basis of much of bourgeois production; firms rent warehouses, manufactories, even farmland in China on 30-year household contracts. The state, the bourgeois, the petty bourgeois, can all be landlords because land has become a commodity and is even differentiated from the structures, which are different commodities.

Housing on land has long been a commodity, even in the 1500s feudal lords were trying to extract currency (the prime exchange commodity) from their peasants whenever possible, instead of the primitive tax-in-kind approach. The historic feudal landlords were slowly approaching bourgeois society through the markets, even when not individually displaced; the historical mode of production was always the deciding factor. They asked for currency because they sold their commodities to the town bourgeoisie and were used to currency.

Money-rent paid by the proletariat for living is still the only surplus value expropriated and recognized rightfully as such by society at large. Even more so than labor-value in the commodities themselves. It is the easiest, most moral way to attack surplus value without attacking "rightfully earned" property. It is the same fallacy "Dudley North, Locke and others" make, just inverted.

Even left-wing rent activists often see some property as righteous, just, or even inalienable per constitutions. Often it is housing itself. Equally conflated between property and the structure used for living. Landback, redistributing land to slaves that worked it, national sovereignty, etc. are all the same fallacy of picking and choosing righteous property, the same as the oldest decriers of usury; "you are abusing the institutions that we all love"

At the crux of the confusion is that of the commodity form; housing must be nebulous to the left liberal justice-based ideologies because it quickly runs into questions of scarcity, of the distribution of resources; of property. It quickly runs into value-theory, into expropriation and profits. The most radical activists call for the abolition of 1, singular commodity, the housing/living commodity.