2y ago

When Family becomes the Enemy

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…

30 comments

Thinking of people in terms of good and evil will only lead you to oversimplification and dehumanization of others. Your family is not the enemy. Your family is your family. And it sounds like they care about you.
Systemic issues are far more important than individual issues
- You’re right, I guess I was focused on the act being evil rather than my parents themselves I also tend to use hyperbolic language to express myself. I love my parents and they love me it’s just hard to grapple with the fact that they’d want to do that. But everyone’s responses are helping me come down from this anxiety attack.
  
  My parents are petty landlords too. They're also exploited workers as well. They simultaneously occupy both classes and it's a factor that prevents them from seeing things clearly. And worse, they don't actually make returns on their investments and havent since they started renting out property years ago. They should see how rigged things are by now but "temporary embarassed millionaires" and all that. I get your frustration.
  But also, realize how normalized and propagandized it is for everyone to be a landlord or entrepreneur now. In that sense your parents and my parents are victims of that. Like you said, they're just trying to have an easier life and aren't heady about this political stuff like we are.
  While there is an exploited class and an exploiting class, it's not necessarily indicative of where someone's ultimate interests lie. Plenty of petty bourgeois circumstancially have more in common with workers and plenty of labor aristocrats have an individual stake in preserving capitalism.
  Let ideology be a guide for you, but don't treat it like a cult. If you let it dictate who you love or who you're friends with, you're gonna be pretty miserable and ultimately you'll find yourself creating more divisions, not healing them.

Stop viewing the world in terms of good and evil. Being a landlord isn't evil, nor is it good, it is a deterministic emergent property of capitalism.
Remember, Fidel was born into money. Mao was born into money. There's no morality. Only interests. Betray your interests for the revolution. Do not betray the revolution for your interests.
- I completely forgot that Fidel was born into money. I guess I tend to spiral into anxiety easily so it’s hard to think clearly. Thank you for this, it’s helped immensely in giving me perspective.
- I think proletarian ethics is emergent from a combination of class interests and from revolutionary practice. OP can certainly disapprove, and even be repulsed by the actions of their family and their political interests can certainly be the foundations of this. Sure having petty bourgeoisie or wealthy parents doesn't mean much in terms of being communist, and there is no need for OP to get lost in identity crisis over that but that doesn't mean the situation can't be degrees of troubling. If our family is contributing to the problems of the masses, then the last thing we should be doing is justifying it, or sterilizing it by needlessly making it all entirely about macro processes. I don't see why family gets a special pass on these matters either.
  Landlords may be determined by capitalist relations but the reality this produces is not merely academic and it is far from harmless. It is not amoral, it is directly antagonistic to a proletarian normativity. We can explain the act of stabbing someone to death in terms of the physiology of the killer, or the sociology, to better understand, but at the end of the day someone was killed.
  I want to be clear that centering morality has major pitfalls, especially in our settler and/or bourgeoisie outrage cultures and the utility civil religion provides for bourgeoisie politics. Good and evil are usually liberal trademarks and so I do agree that this should not be our primary thought and oftentimes we should resist moralizing things until we have the means to do so properly. But I doubt denying it entirely will hold up forever, and it's removal can't be used to cover up crimes against working and subsisting people or to ease our minds illegitimately.
  All in all this case is small time and OP probably has nothing to worry about other than contextualizing themselves within dynamic class structures. They are not alone in having pety bourgeoisie characteristics and not in bad company either.
  
  Nearly every worker in the imperial core relies on the violent subjugation of the global majority. Nearly every worker in the imperial core owns shares of companies and they extract profit from these by virtue of their ownership in order to fund their retirement.
  You cannot compare landlordship to murder. Someone is going to own that building and rent it to a worker. There's no way to stop it. You can do it or someone else can do it. If you don't do it, you're going to take your money and invest it, which means extracting profits from the working class through usury. There is no way for OPs parents or anyone with their level of cash reserves to live under capitalism without extractive behaviors through ownership. This is in no way comparable to murdering someone.
  The landlord, like it or not, plays a specific role in capitalism that ensures people are housed to the degree that they are. Similarly, the business owner plays a specific role in ensuring that wages get paid. Under capitalism, without business owners and without landlords, proletarians don't get wages and they don't get housing. There's no way around this. It's not merely an abstract macro phenomenon, it's an intimate relationship.
  It is impossible to require that everyone who comes into a little bit of money immediately become an aesthetic and squander it all on small unsustainable acts of mutual aid. This "proletarian ethic" you posit is nothing more than individualism. The incentives exist, they will be followed. The revolutionary ethic is what matters for liberation, and the revolutionary ethic is capable of surviving a transition between proletariat and bourgeoisie. A revolutionary proletariat who comes into money can become a bourgeoisie and remain a revolutionary by being a class traitor. A bourgeoisie who is born into extraction and maintains that extraction as their source of personal income can be a class traitor through the revolutionary ethic. There is no ethical requirement to abandon all exploitation. If there was, the entire proletariat in the imperial core would need to take vows of poverty immediately to account for their extraction from the global majority.
  crimes against working and subsisting people or to ease our minds illegitimately
  Being a landlord in and of itself is not a crime against working and subsisting people. Evicting them in a pandemic is. Evicting them in the winter is. Evicting them to make more money is. But again, when a prole feeds another prole, that first prole still needs to make a margin in order to feed their own family and you're not calling that exchange a crime. It's the way the system works. Housing doesn't exist under capitalism without landlords. I wish it weren't so, but if I were a landlord, I would spend my time trying to get more housing options available for the proles while still collecting rent, because not only can I do more good by having more free time to fight in the halls of power than I can in the office jockeying paper, but also because as a capitalist subject asking me to deny my incentives for health, safety, and livelihood is never going to actually bring about a revolution.

There is nothing wrong with living in a house one owns.
Landlording is a systemic practice of using government contracts to take money from people without doing labor. Which we as communists seek to abolish.
Is there a party to support? Then support your local party, or build something useful for the revolution. That is what matters more than your parents means of income. You can't have agency over other people. You can try to convince them but that's about it.
Even then, I would not chastise you even if you started landlording or being a petite bourgeoisie business owner. Sure other people might find it harder to take you seriously, but we are in a war of position to convince people. We are not in a war of maneuver where your life is on the line at the moment so don't worry.
Separate these 2 things: 1 the things you have now because of your past and things given to you, 2 the things you can do later. What you have gives you power to act in some ways that others can't. If you have privlidge, don't dwell on guilt for what you don't have control over. Think of what was given to you as tools to help you do more for the communist movement. Use that steady security brought to you to help the working class out in what ways you are able.
- This has helped tremendously and has given me a clear mind. I always knew that I had the privilege to go to university and I’d use that to help the movement, but in this moment I lost that perspective as I unfortunately let my anxiety take over and spiralled from there. But your comment and everyone else has helped ground me and I appreciate it more than you know.

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.

my mom and stepdad thought they were going to be landlords at one point too.. they had no idea what they were doing, bought land in a floodplain unknowingly, ended up unable to build anything and sold for less money than they bought for
they also tried to breed our little shihtzu but he wasn't into it, he liked his stuffed monkey more
- This actually made me laugh so thank you. My fears are being quelled and I appreciate it very much.

To pay my 5€ into the Phrasenschwein/overused phrase piggy:
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism"
As Marxists we're not opposed to the individual bourgeois and landlord on a personal emotional basis but we oppose the bourgeois class and its system on the basis of class struggle and from the perspective that only the proletariat can abolish capitalism.
So it's not a question of who's "a real Worker" or who lives an ascetic life but what you're doing and who you're supporting.
Marx, Engels, Lenin and other great theorists of Marxism were born into wealthy/non-working class families. It's only natural to a point since it's easier to develop theory if you're not working in a factory the whole day.
Try to utilize the extra time to organize/read theory etc.
- Marx, Engels, Lenin and other great theorists of Marxism were born into wealthy/non-working class families. It’s only natural to a point since it’s easier to develop theory if you’re not working in a factory the whole day.
  This reminds me of Lenin talking about the influence of the bourgeois intelligentsia (Marx, Engels) on working class consciousness What is to be Done?
  
  Yeah, that's what I had roughly in mind when I wrote the comment. Though it has already been a while since I read What is to be Done? I should reread it sometime soon. Always a treat to read Lenin.

Land-Parasite* He ain't lord of shit.

As others have said, your family sounds nice. Maybe when you inherit those properties, you can keep one unit and give the rest to the residents to form a co-op.

You getting yourself in a bad way with your family isn't really going to solve any problems. I am in a similar boat. My sister is well off thanks to her first husband. Her and her new husband used that money to become landlords and it's gross. I really hate the situation. Am not fond of them, but I go to family meetings and play nice because what would alienating myself form them and my parents do? And it would alienate me from my parents whom I still live with. Her family has all the grandkids afterall. They go to the same church etc etc. We have to pick our battles when it comes to these things. Keep yourself in the best conditions you can and keep trying to spread the ideals. I have personally turned a few of my friend into hardcore commies. I could never have done that if I wasn't where I am now. And at least if I stay on good terms then when political discussions happen my words will carry more weight. I spent a lot of time building up my reputation in the family as the "smart one."

30 comments