Today I learned that my stepfather is planning on becoming a landlord. I’m absolutely devastated.

My mom visited me today and as we were talking I told her how I planned to move out of the province I live in, as at this point it’s a lost cause. She agreed with me and told me she planned to move back to the Azores with my stepdad, of course. She then mentioned how they’d be financially well off due to my stepfather wanting to set up businesses. I didn’t know what this business was until she told me how they wanted to make money off of renting properties out.

She told me this in relation to how when she and him are gone (dead) their house and the one I live in will be mine to do with as I please. Because the house I live in is a property they own she made reference to other properties they would invest in in the future.

I don’t think my mom really understands this whole ordeal but my stepfather definitely does and it breaks my heart that he would resort to doing something so evil. I’m incredibly lucky that my parents were more than willing to help me move out of a horrible living situation by paying the down payment for a home while I pay the mortgage. Most people can afford mortgages, it’s the down payment that stops anyone from being able to afford to buy. So I’m lucky and incredibly privileged. I feel like I don’t have the right to be angry at them since they’ve done so much for me but at the same time it hurts to know they want to exploit people for profit.

I didn’t know what to say to her. Was I supposed to lecture her on the nature of landlording? I don’t think she deserves that since she’s never been savvy with this stuff. Do I lecture my stepfather? Maybe, but he’d fight me hard on that and it might screw me over. My stepdad has always been a hyper individualist and has little to no hope in the world improving, anytime I’ve talking about dense housing and better public transit he treats it like a childish daydream. He also hates unions so there’s that. It makes sense why he’d want to be a landlord but I don’t want to be tied to such a deplorable act.

But I look over this whole thing and ask: Does it make me a hypocrite?

As a communist, but I’m living in a house bought by my parents. I’ll have landlords as parents too. What then? Am I disqualified? I’m in genuine distress over this whole thing. I’m scared and confused and I don’t know what to do but cry.

Does anyone have any advice? Anything at all? I feel so alone…

  • redtea
    11·
    1 year ago

    Not a hypocrite. There’s nothing about Marxism that says you should impoverish yourself. Nor is there anything saying that only the poorest can be revolutionary. The point is to enrich the whole working class and you don’t do that by stripping yourself of (one of) your support network(s). One of our tasks is building community strength, not alienating ourselves from or weakening it.

    When it comes to educating that community, don’t start with topics that are too personal. People struggle to think rationally about such issues. Build common ground with safe topics first.

    You can’t opt out of the degradation of capitalism. Almost everyone in the global north benefits from actions attached to worse horrors than are caused by small western landlords. You wouldn’t throw away your phone or clothes, or stop eating food, but the chances are high that children working in terrible conditions suffered producing them. Your parents can be the last people on your list that you express displeasure at, only after you’ve tried to deal with the real shits of this world.

    Please don’t fall out with your family over this. Nobody is perfect and we can’t expect ideological purity from ourselves, never mind others who don’t share all our views. Don’t feel bad that they helped you; let your emotions motivate you to contribute to the creation of a system in which everyone can receive such help. If you dislike their politics, just avoid certain topics. Do not lecture them. You risk doing something that you may regret forever. If we were on the cusp of a revolution and you had to pick a side, that might be different. But falling out, even arguing, over this will serve nobody. Except, perhaps the bourgeois.

    Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, chapter 1 (bold and numbers in square brackets added for emphasis and clarity):

    Less than one-hundredth [1%] of the total number of enterprises utilise more than three-fourths [3/4] of the total amount of steam and electric power! Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand [2,970,000] small enterprises (employing up to five workers), constituting 91 per cent of the total, utilise only 7 per cent of the total amount of steam and electric power! Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.

    In 1907, there were in Germany 586 establishments employing one thousand [1,000] and more workers, nearly one-tenth (1,380,000) of the total number of workers employed in industry, and they consumed almost one-third (32 per cent) of the total amount of steam and electric power.[1] As we shall see, money capital and the banks make this superiority of a handful of the largest enterprises still more overwhelming, in the most literal sense of the word, i.e., millions of small, medium and even some big “proprietors” are in fact in complete subjection to some hundreds of millionaire financiers.

    In another advanced country of modern capitalism, the United States of America, the growth of the concentration of production is still greater. … Almost half the total production of all the enterprises of the country was carried on by one-hundredth part [1%] of these enterprises! These 3,000 giant enterprises embrace 258 branches of industry. From this it can be seen that at a certain stage of its development concentration itself, as it were, leads straight to monopoly, for a score [20] or so of giant enterprises can easily arrive at an agreement, and on the other hand, the hindrance to competition, the tendency towards monopoly, arises from the huge size of the enterprises. This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important—if not the most important—phenomena of modern capitalist economy, and we must deal with it in greater detail. But first we must clear up one possible misunderstanding.

    I don’t say this to excuse landlords. Only to highlight what Lenin said about the struggle against the monopoly landlords/banks. If you disagree with private property and landlordism, organise and try to do something where it will count. If you have somewhere safe to live, use that power to support a tenants’ union for people who are at risk of eviction, etc, just as one example.

    Work towards creating a world where someone else’s parents don’t have to consider being landlords to live comfortably. In the imperial core, if it’s possible, that means keeping the petite bourgeois, professional/managerial classes, and labour aristocracy on board. Not by appeasement. But by not attacking them while letting the real culprits get away with their atrocities. We have the same enemy, after all: a handful of billionaires.

    It’s okay to love your family even when they do things that you don’t fully approve of.

    Edit: fixed link.