Comradeship // Freechat

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.

I really admire that you are here despite your parents. I can relate with my family encouraging me to buy a place just to rent it before I even own a place of my own. I have friends who do the same to subsidize their rent. When people find a convenient and socially acceptable way to siphon wealth for thenselves, you can bet that they will defend it ideologically tooth-and-nail.

Trying to convince someone to reconsider their lifestyle at their own expense seldom goes well. I think the biggest gains you could make without alienating them is arguing for compassion when it comes to evictions. Consider arguing to them about the damage that eviction will incur on those families versus your own.

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

I made a post similar to this a while back and the comments there helped me a lot. If you’d like I can link to it so you can read through the responses.

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.

When Christmas come take the video games your parents gave you , sell them and give the money to the renters

Better your parents than some company or the government