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…
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.
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.
Its no more individualism than playing the good landlord role. I dont live in China or anywhere with authoritative power that can be leveraged against class enemies. There is nothing maintaining non antagonistic contradictions. The idea that business will make our lives better can only be petty bourgeoisie sensibilities that will lead them to more wealth and more leverage over working people. You are not being realistic, you are just resigning yourself to liberal ideology.
It’s not an ideology, it’s material conditions. You’re confused. My material incentives are to get the money. That’s how society is organized. Ideologically speaking, I want to bring about an end to these incentives. But getting the money or not getting the money has no impact on whether or not the system is overturned. The only impact getting the money can have on me is that it could change my ideology, which I must remain self critical and vigilant about. But make no mistake that free money through extractive rents is a material reality and not a matter of ideology. Every musician seeking to make money on recordings is making money based on monopoly rents over IP. Every YouTuber making money is doing so by spreading propaganda for capitalists. Self-denial of revenue is not a revolutionary stance on its own.