Eh, I wouldn't sweat it too much. It sounds like you're a kid, you can't legally go off on your own, you don't really have control over that yet unfortunately. Even Mao was able to forgive members of Chinese royalty and let many of them lead normal working class lives after the revolution. The best thing you can do is just remember how growing up with that influence affects your thinking in other areas of life. We learn a lot more from our parents than we realize, just work on not passing that on. You'll probably only learn some of these after making mistakes that make you have to reckon with them tho
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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You're a good kid but you're still thinking in absolutes like an idealist. I get thet your parents are ideologically backwards, I get that they're indulging in exploitation, but if I'm reading it right they aren't professional landlords or anything. They're still labourers and have one extra flat they're renting out. That's very near the bare minimum they need to provide comfortable lives to themselves and their children.
Today it's near unavoidable to have some money and not engage in some petit bourgeois behaviour, to an extent that doesn't necessarily make someone petit bourgeois. Keeping your money in a rented flat or shares in companies (as it would be in those pension funds) is participating in exploitation, but what are your alternatives? Keep it in the bank and the interest they'll give you is less than inflation. Buy a flat and keep it empty, now you're participating in the housing market the same way as landlords refusing to lower the rent. I suppose you could buy gold and hoard it somewhere.
Your parents aren't bad people for participating in the society they live in and neither are you for "profiting" off that. As for their ideological inclinations, people don't leave liberalism by being convinced. They see the conreadictions of capitalism and have someone explain what it is they saw and how it fits into the bigger picture. Watch out for that and you may make comrades out of them yet.
This is a great response. Like yeah being a landlord sucks, but if you're only renting out one house, it's really nothing that extreme. It's not like your parents make enough that they could pay that second mortgage long term without being paid rent. We can criticize people for being the corrupt system as people, but I find it hard to criticize people who are just doing the most logical thing with their money. Land is and will always be the best thing to put your money into long term. Gold only has value because it's shiny, land is extremely finite and inherently valuable.
This is gonna be controversial here, but it's even possible to be a good landlord at a small scale. Had a landlord as a kid that had a solid 60 or so houses after doing it since the 70s, but was still his own basic handyman and lawn care person. His business model was to put all his money into real estate and continually reinvest and sell all the houses so he could retire. He didn't trust any other method to make enough money for him to retire comfortably if him or his wife lost any sort of independence, and honestly he was right. Dude started out as a plumber though. Him and his wife understood that rent was kind of a scam on its own, so they made a really big deal out of just being extremely caring. They sent out an email in 2007 about how times were starting to get tough, so there was officially a 6 month grace period on rent and I know they went long past that for many people because they didn't evict anybody until they got to 2 and a half years of non-payment. They would personally go out and salt every driveway in the neighborhood if it snowed, including the houses they didn't own. Mowed the lawns, would be to your house within 30 minutes to do something small like snaking a drain and would actually fix things on a good schedule. They didn't end up buying any more houses until 2012 because they took care of their tenants during the crash. Like yeah, being a landlord has issues that can't be eliminated, it is inherently exploitative. However I find it really hard to fault the old couple that just played their cards really right but made it a point to not absolutely fuck people in the process and actually made full time jobs out of it. That old guy and his wife had the option to do things they enjoyed (lawncare, house maintenance, always being greatest neighbors, the ones that cater the funerals or even holding the funerals for people who don't have families to hold them) and live comfortably by doing so, who wouldn't? He lives in a fucked up system and did his best to make it work for him and the people around him.
He ended up selling the houses once the pandemic economy was over and retiring at the age of 80 or so because his wife started suffering from Dementia. They still don't live in that good of a nursing home. Like they get taken care of, the food and atmosphere is different, it's not bad, but I expected way nicer for selling 60 houses. It would be one thing if he retired to the fucking moon, but they didn't because they didn't have the money for anything better than a fairly modest middle class nursing home. A plumber from 50-60 years ago with the foresight to know that real estate was the only way for him and his wife to have the money to have a little bit of dignity in their final years. Like I said, being a landlord sucks, but he saw something coming on the horizon and did the most logical thing to do to get out of it. There's only so much we can judge regular people for making the smartest decisions they can for themselves in the world we have.
Soo many ppl are landlords. Honestly as long as it's possible and encouraged, ppl will be landlords and it's hard to do anything about it. You cannot change the fact that ure profiteering off of it cuz it appears as though ure still quite young and thus bound to them. This may be a stretch but remember we in the west are all living off of the suffering of the global south. Just being ashamed won't do much. I guess the best one can do is better oneself as a person and a communist and also organize as to help move towards a future where the right to have a roof over ones head is considered a given. And at the end, I think it's commendable that you're even aware of your parent's wrongdoings. There's ppl i know who are the children of entrepreneurs and are just so oblivious. To them it's the most natural thing that they got everything handed on a silver tablet, on the backs of their worker's hard work.
Engels' family owned a factory and he went to work there in a professional managerial role after 1848, and he's still upheld as the cofounder of the Marxist tradition because of his own theoretical contributions and how he supported Marx. Coming from a more privileged background doesn't make you a bad socialist, it's what you do with it that matters.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. —Karl
Better your parents than some company or the government
Think about it pragmatically, if they didn't own the rental someone else would, best you can do is encourage them to keep the rent down and the property well maintained.