freagle

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.

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.

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.

The people in this story are not bourgeoisie. At best they are petit bourgeois but I haven’t seen any evidence of it. They are labor aristocracy, first-world white working class. And they came of age during the height of global wealth extraction by the US.

It sounds like you’re angry with this group of people, but the thing you should be angry about is that they lack class consciousness, not that they didn’t give their kid a down payment on a house. Whether or not they gave their kid a leg up has no bearing on the development of a socialist society. Whether or not they scrimped and saved so that they could live in some comfort has no bearing on the development of a socialist society.

I hear what you’re saying. I’m not ignoring it. I am saying it is the incorrect position for a revolutionary consciousness. Anger at the parents that made it to retirement with sufficient savings to leave their kids with maybe a house but probably less than that is misplaced anger. The anger should be with the bourgeoisie.

These people are not bourgeoisie. The anger your describing is far more about intraclass resentment than it is revolutionary fervor. The members of the working class, regardless of savings, are not our enemy. They are capitalist subjects just like you and me. Resentment between members of the working class is destructive.

https://lemmy.world/post/40238517

If you fundamentally believe that you are justified in harboring violent thoughts against working class capitalist subjects who have managed to become somewhat comfortable by spending 50 years of their lives working sacrificing community, connection, and respessing their own nature and desires, then I guess bye? My quarrel is with the owning class and the system they maintain.

Do you know what the rich call the people with $10M? The “comfortably poor”.

The comfortably poor and below are all in various positions of generational precarity. Yes, it feels absurd to say that $10M is poor when there are people living in squats. The reality is that the bourgeoisie are orders of magnitude richer than you imagine.

Don’t wish violence on people just because they are trying to escape generational poverty and have succeeded in managing a modicum of success at it.

Yeah, I wish my parents were better with money too. I don’t think it makes them bad people or that they made me poor or that they were being selfish.

The fact that you thought you made your family poor and you were to blame says a lot about the manifestations of trauma in your life. I didn’t feel that way with my parents, but I never knew their income or savings or retirement until they went through their divorce.

I’m sorry you went through what you went through OP. It sucks. And if it helps to blame your parents right now, I can’t stop you. I would say that the problem is the society and not your parents or you. Society impoverished you. Your parents are likely still true believers in liberal capitalism. They don’t understand the mechanisms. They are operating mostly ritualistically, and so are most of us, just kind of hoping a better life comes from the behaviors and emotions and beliefs that are drilled into us by our society and replicated by our extended family and social network.

The family that bought an investment property for their child have completely different relationships with money, completely different beliefs and emotions. My family was much closer to your family than your friend’s family.

That doesn’t make my parents shitty people or selfish or the root cause of my poverty. My parents were fucked by the same system that fucked me. They managed to get a step up on the ladder, it sounds like your parents did too. My dad’s only communicated financial thought during the divorce was “but how am I going to leave anything behind for my kids”. That’s his prime emotional directive and it informs everything.

If your parents cut you out of the will, then I would say they’re shitty. But I have a lot of empathy for the people in your story. Including you. You didn’t deserve whatever fucked you up so bad that you went through 2 years of depression feeling like you were to blame for financial troubles of your family. I am sure your parents had no emotional ability to understand what you were going through. I know it’s easy to think that they ought to have, but eventually we have give up the idea that our parents know what we’re going through and are aware of the causes and the solutions and realize that no one has that objective perspective and least of all our parents who are as much responsible for passing on the shit as they are deep in it themselves.

OK, so back to the topic at hand instead of trying to justify old people living in squats. You’re hard to keep track of.

The OP never asked for financial help. For me personally, I had never asked my parents for financial help and I had never received it. They also lived a life of credit cards and mortgages and saving for retirement. When I finally asked for financial help because my mental health made it difficult for me to keep working, it took months of emotional work on my end to get to the point of asking. And when I did, they gave me some money. But they didn’t volunteer it no matter how difficult my life was getting. I had to ask.

OP never asked.

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.

My family did take some family vacations, but we also got grief about money. And my parents have less money than OP’s parents. Granted, my parents aren’t as old, and my parents are still working, so maybe in 10 years they will be as rich as OP’s.

But I would not say that my parents impoverished me, or my siblings, some of whom are worse off than I am. They didn’t ask for money either. In fact, as siblings we find ways to loan each other some money to avoid having to ask our parents for money. Which is honestly really silly, since the prior generation has more money the current one does.

But no, OP’s parents did not impoverish OP with debt. OP didn’t ask for money and chose to tough it out. I did the same thing. I also blew shit tons of money on rent. I could have avoided that if I had asked for a down payment. But also, in 2014, my parents were still working through their lifetime of debt, so it probably wouldn’t have worked out for me if I had asked.

The reality is that his parents clearly have emotional trauma around money and OP will get an inheritance if the medical system doesn’t bleed his parents dry. His parents are totally out of touch with how the next generation is living financially, but that’s a mostly universal trait for people their age - they’re out of touch about how young people live along ANY dimension.

As for being selfish for living so comfortably, again, I’ll use my personal example. One of my siblings lives hand to mouth, massive debt, no strong employment prospects except bar tending, struggles with alcoholism and depression. Another of my siblings has saved 10s of thousands of dollars, but also has no strong employment prospects except front-of-house catering service. The first sibling lives in a rundown apartment, in a poor neighborhood, no vehicle, no family around, and very little comfort. The other sibling literally lives in our parents home, with their own vehicle.

They made their choices, they are content with their choices. My parents don’t get to decide how their kids choose to engage them. They would give the poorer sibling money if the sibling asked, but no ask is made. The second sibling chose differently and lives much more comfortably.

I feel for OP, having struggled with spending my retirement money as well, and currently staring down the potential for bankruptcy myself. But my parents are not to blame and they are not selfish for living a more comfortable life than me. I have agency in this whole thing. So does OP.

We all wish the trauma wasn’t passed down. The response to acknowledging that it was is grief. Anger is one of the stages. Acceptance and adaptation are the final stages.

I would not wish my grandmother, after raising multiple families and working until she was 70 to have to live in a squat. If you think that’s out of touch, perhaps consider how many people in America live in squats.

Then consider that the OP and the family in question are not people who lived in squats their whole lives but rather a family who worked to establish a middle class lifestyle which means sacrificing all of their time to make profit for the owning class. When you have spent your life doing that, you do that for a specific reason - to be able to retire and enjoy a few years of your health without being ground into dust by the machine.

That is literally what people who have been working for the past 40 years and those who came before them in the liberal world-order were striving for. They are trying to avoid being homeless and living in squats. Your argument that people living in squats don’t need 80k/year is useless in this context because living in squats in the US and Europe is not considered, by the vast majority of people, to be a healthy and enjoyable life.

Poverty is not a virtue. It does not have moral standing except in that it should be eradicated through a revolutionary movement. Just because others suffer from poverty does not mean that the entirety of the Western world isn’t individually striving for a better life.

I really don’t know why you think this worthy of debate. I wish apartments cost less than 5% of my income like they did the USSR. I wish we have and 90+% home ownership rate like they do in China and Cuba. I wish there a social safety net for the elderly like there is/was in parts of Europe.

That’s not the economy we live in here in the US. In the US you need money. And living below the poverty line is in no way. shape, or form what people are striving for when they work for 50 years straight without any real time to develop themselves as people outside of as capitalist subjects.

Again, you have to understand that these people are in their 70s. Saying that either they can live an impoverished lifestyle or they are living luxuriously is ludicrous and shows an ignorance about household finances.

Could they live on less? Absolutely! My grandparents did. And my parents are. And they have decent lives. But my grandmother is in constant pain and lives in a tiny apartment and cannot afford the mobility equipment she needs to get around so she wastes away in the darkness. Can people survive on that? Yes. Should they? I don’t think so.

We don’t live in a society where we have community housing and walkable cities and public services. The elderly have to fend for themselves and the only way to do that is with middle class salaries and no obligation to work. Some will work, but we are such fragile animals that an obligation to work or live in poverty and squalor is not a way to live.

Stop arguing that people should live mean hurried commodities lives and then die early or suffer for decades. Expect dignity for people as we age. It’s a shame what elders go through.

Well, I just found out that he’s 78 and still only has $2M in the account. So my guess is that he’s been working under financial anxiety for literally his whole life and has no chance of ever breaking free from the psychology of it.

Again, $2M is enough for a couple to retire on at 65. If you’re lucky, the medical system won’t bleed your parents dry and you’ll have a modest inheritance.

It’s been well documented for a while now that $72K/year in the US is the number at which people’s primary motivation for job hunting begins to shift from financial survival to living their life. And that was before COVID.

$80k/year is not unreasonable as a baseline expectation for a couple that worked their entire lives and wish to finally retire in peace.

Grandma should not be working retail at Macy’s or waiting tables at Denny’s.

Still working at 78 and only have $2M in the retirement account means that they have never been financially secure and just achieved it around 70.

Are his parents still working?

$2M divided by 13 is $155k/year. That’s gross. They pay income tax on that. So they net something less.

But consider costs go up, particular for medical care but also for comfort - aging is not easy.

Then also consider that couples that scrimp and save their whole lives actually want to enjoy their retirement, so they can spend a little money each year on vacations instead of living like Spartans.

And then of course there’s planning funerals and burials.

But then. That 78 years is also inaccurate.

The peak year of death for women is 88. The peak year of death for men is 87.

Those averages include men dying in their 40s and 50s.

So now instead of $2M being $155k/year gross, it’s actually somewhere between $100K/year and $80k/year.

But they also aren’t going to spread it out totally evenly because they aren’t going to let actuarial tables drive their life enjoyment. So they’ll commit to under spending their first year but by the time they get to the end of the year they’ll realize there’s just too much life to experience while they still have their health and they’ll have a nice vacation, not Bezos nice, but nice. Maybe a whole month in France!

Yeah, $2M is the minimum for a decent life in old age and there won’t be a penny left for inheritance.

$2M is literally the minimum they need as a couple to retire at 65 and ALL of that money will be spent by the time they die.

They are not rich by ANY stretch of the imagination. In fact, they have just hit the bare minimum threshold to not die in cockroach ridden apartment while not being able to afford food.

Now, if your parents are 40, then you’re in luck! That means that for the next 25 years every dollar they earn is mostly discretionary (unless they have debts of course, like someone’s student loans).

If your parents are 50, maybe you’ll get a little bit of financial help.

But if your parents are 60, whelp, they can give you a few nice birthday gifts but that’s about it.

Firefox, uBlock Origin

There will always be people who don’t vote. Some because they are legally barred from doing so. Some because they are illegally barred from doing so. Some because they are unethically burdened in ways that make it very difficult to do so. Some because they are unethically misinformed in ways that make it difficult to do so.

Then there’s the people who are consistently harmed by both parties like people who self-medicate, people who grew up as descendants of slaves or of destitute indigenous families, criminals who haven’t been barred from voting (those who have are included above).

Only after you get through all these layers can you find the people that choose not to vote because they didn’t care or they didn’t think it would matter or did so out of protest.

And within that group you will find legitimate reasons to protest vote, like genocide.

In short, when we say that only x% of Americans vote, we don’t really mean all those people simply had the option to easily vote and just didn’t want to.

There’s a difference between electoral engagement (voting) and spending your organizing time in service of another organization that doesn’t have your interests in mind