Context:
- I just found out that the student loans I’ve been saddled with for the past 19 years were completely avoidable because my parents are wealthier than they ever let on
- Something is wrong with my boomer parents—I don’t understand their relationship with money (or life in general). I think they may be seriously mentally ill
What happened
In 2014, my girlfriend and I moved into a rental home in a big city for about $1,500/month.
She later lost her job and it became unaffordable. The stress ended our relationship.
I struggled to stay in my home for the next seven years, until I finally declared bankruptcy and moved out in 2020.
I spent at least $120,000 on my rental home through those years. All down the drain. I liquidated all $30,000 of my retirement savings to try and stay afloat.
What could have been
2014 was a low point in the housing market. There were HUNDREDS of houses available in the ~$150k range, many of them nicer than the one I rented. All I needed was ~$10k for a down payment, and I could have been paying $800 for a mortgage instead of $1,500 on rent, and all of that money spent would be retained in the form of equity even if I still had to move out. It probably would have saved my relationship too (my parents complain about not having any grandkids, BTW).
What my parents say
When I mentioned this to my parents recently, they just said “we had no idea you wanted to buy a house”. NO, I JUST LOVED PAYING MONEY TO A LAND LEECH! I never even thought to ask for help with a down payment, because we were “broke”. My dad gave us grief over every dollar we spent. We never ONCE took a family vacation.
The truth
Today, my parents have $2 million in retirement savings, and no mortgage or car payments. They live in a rural area with a rock bottom cost-of-living. In 2003, they had HALF A MILLION dollars in cash, entirely separate from their retirement plans.
You’re not fucking listening. You’re just doing liberal civility tut tuting. This is precisely why the poor fucking hate you and you find yourself completely alienated from them.
You are not in touch with the impoverished. You’ve spent this entire conversation trying your damndest not to listen and to keep yourself out of touch. You literally only want to be in favour with the fucking millionaires in this conversation. Any attempt to point out why this fucking disgusts the impoverished is met by you with tut tut and talking down like you’re standing on some moral fucking high ground while these people are being ground to a pulp by the system.
You need to shut the fuck up and listen. Come out of the wine cave.
I am listening. I’ve been through this debate with myself many times over the years and with others. What matters is revolutionary solidarity, not virtue signaling. The reality is that a 78-year old man who managed to save 2 million over 50 years is still a member of the working class and not a member of the bourgeoisie. They wouldn’t technically qualify as a member of the petit bourgeois either except under some very specific circumstances, but those don’t seem to hold in this case.
There is always going to be a comfort spectrum under capitalism. We cannot adopt a position to be driven by resentment for anyone higher up on that comfort spectrum because there will always be someone lower down on the spectrum. The dividing line needs to be around the class war, not some arbitrary amount of savings.
Should millionaires be dispossesed of their wealth? Absolutely. As part of a revolutionary program. Not as an individual moral requirement. Again, this is the system we all live in. These are the incentives we all have. We are all working class capitalist subjects in this story. Resentment doesn’t serve us, solidarity does.
Let me try a different angle with you on this. Who exactly will be fighting in the revolution and what rough age and income range can we expect the fighters to be?
When you’ve grasped this question, the next question to ask yourself is what alienates you from agitating those people.
Ok. Good luck telling that frank the stoner with two criminal convictions who currently works in the local car factory and lives in a 1 room bedsit.
The revolution will not be fought by educated communists. The revolution will be fought by the working class agitated and led into performing it by a vanguard of communists. You will never, ever be able to create a working class of educated communists that understands this position. The more you shout it, the more you piss them off and alienate yourself from them. They only see the simplified version. They only see the simple economic unfairnesses. It is necessary to be simple in calling economic unfairness out for what it is, and not to hedge or caveat or play down any of it just to coddle the boomers for having been brought up under different conditions. The boomers are never ever going to be your fighters, you do not need to coddle them, and the fact that you do only serves to alienate from those that will be fighters.
What matters here is not being technically correct in the communist form of petty technicalities. What matters is what serves to push the needle towards revolution and what does not.
These people ARE selfish and it is OKAY to be angry at them for how far out of touch they are with today’s conditions. It is OKAY to be angry at them for further perpetuating economic misery when they could have prevented it. Tut tutting people for being angry at them will alienate you from the working class that will be your fighters. It also just generally stinks of liberal high horse shit, which makes it worse and even more alienating because they already hate that.
It sounds like you’re rationalizing resentment at the wrong target by calling the working class too stupid to tell the difference between working class with savings and oil barons. That hasn’t historically been true. Lenin was from a middle class family that had annual summer vacations and could afford university degrees.
Lenin did not build his campaign saying that people who managed to acquire some means of comfort for their retirement were deserving of our anger and resentment for being out of touch.
It is not a hard concept to understand that there are classes, there is a class war, and there are unconscious reactionaries working against their own interests. Not a difficult thing to communicate either.
The US has such a wealth disparity that we could disposses everyone with a net worth of $2M and make not even a dent in the class war. In fact, the bourgeoisie would love nothing more than for the working class to direct itself at the “1%” because the bourgeoisie are easily capable of hiding when the working class can’t tell the difference between a grandmother who has just enough money to live on her own for 20 years before dying with dignity and the actual oppressors of society. This is why liberals are totally fine with the 1% rhetoric, because it obscures the class war and creates the conditions for sheepdogging revolutionary energy.
Anyway. I disagree that people who have retirement savings are selfish in ways that you and I are not selfish. I disagree with the idea that people being selfish is sufficient for violent thoughts about them. The bourgeoisie are not bad because they are selfish, they are bad because they maintain a national and global system of violence and oppression. The solution is not and never has been a vow of poverty, nor is it cultivating resentment within the class for those people who got some comfort.
Lenin also wasn’t idiotic enough to stand there and tut tut at any of the working class calling out other parts of the working class for their out of touch selfishness and ladder pulling.
I fucking hate this “but lenin” shit anyway. It’s fucking book worship. Go OUTSIDE and do this with impoverished working people and see where it gets you. You don’t do that. Or if you do, your entire fucking world is built around these kinds of people.
The only thing you’re in-touch with is the mindset of the people living gated communities. If you go outside and put any of what you’re spewing into practice you will rapidly come to blows with reality and realise it does not work. You must adapt.
I didn’t summon the spirit of Lenin for book worship. Gosh you’re really holding on to your position so tightly. Listen, you said that we would not be able to build a revolution if it required the working class to differentiate between moderately comfortable people and the bourgeoisie and I summoned Lenin as the quintessential example of someone who led a revolution as someone with a moderate level of comfort and he didn’t do it by personally selling off whatever assets he had and funding other people buying homes or food or whatever. And that’s because the level of wealth required for a single family to be moderately comfortable is immaterial to revolutionary change.
What Lenin did was work towards and succeed at the abolition of private property, not the individual dispossession of people in his income bracket by resentful mobs. He also did not inspire movements by saying that all pensioners (which is what US retirement accounts are functional equivalents of) are selfish and greedy and perpetuate impoverishment of the masses.
And what ladder pulling are you talking about? OPs parents did not engage in ladder pulling. Like most boomers, they likely have a very clear picture in their mind that whatever they manage to save by the end of their life will be inherited by their kids. At best you could say they ladder pulled their specific kid. But it’s not like they personally lobbied for regulations to prevent new entrants to a market or that they personally organized and engineered zoning regulations in their community to pump their property value at the expense of the next generation.
You are individualizing something that is inherently class-centric. That’s vulgar Marxism. And yes, I am saying that to you and wouldn’t use those words with people less versed in the literature. To say it more accessibly, you’re targeting the wrong people. Those people are not our enemy. Those people and we share the same enemy. They may not know it, and based on OPs story they most assuredly do not know it, but it remains true.