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wipe out all life on the planet
I really would love to know where you guys hallucinate this shit
Party loyalty > actually knowing what you’re doing with nuclear power
They knew what they were doing, and thats why a worse catastrophe was prevented
Very famously the reactor melted because of competence. You are very smart. Rectors melt down because of smart people!
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You get your real life opinions from TV shows.
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Lmfao you are insane
My rent is 1.5% of my income. I’m good.
“I’ve got mine, fuck everyone else”
I didnt say to fuck everyone else. I consider myself super lucky and the housing market it totally fucked and needs fixing. I didnt mean it like that, that’s my bad.
You didn’t use those words but anyone with a functioning brain knows that is exactly what you meant
Mine is 0%.
Mortgage otoh is 15%. Dont feel good about that because of my tax rate
Oh yeah I should have accounted for taxes and utilities. I’m probably about the same at 15%. Dunno why I felt lead to talk out of my ass.
Rich kid or living under a bridge?
Basically a bridge. Super rural, middle of nowhere.
In the morning 10 comments. Now 110.
Let’s see who is the debatelord vibe basing facts against cowbee…
He has the patience of a saint. We should all aspire to ground our views as thoroughly as him and to be as charitable when explaining our reasoning to others.
Seeing Cowbee around after joining Lemmy has reinforced my belief that I’m doing the right thing by being ruthlessly patient and positive with others. That dude’s awesome, he recommended me, a total stranger, some introductory ML literature (and I haven’t had the time to read it yet…), which I’m sure he gets questions about very often.
(If you see this, Cowbee, thanks again! I’d love to chat some after I’m done reading what you’ve provided me. :) )
Go for it! And thanks for the warm words!
That face is real. No overtime pay for emotional damage.
And public transport was dirt cheap, a third of the population had summer houses. If we could replicate the capital distribution without the human rights infringement, that would be amazing. But recently the US is doing the opposite: replicate sky high prison population with skyrocketing inequalities
Human rights were also quite strong in the USSR, especially compared to capitalist countries. The soviets were nearly always at the forefront of social liberties.
Hold on there bud let’s not jump the shark. Yes there was advancements for women’s rights and they did have some laws against racism and colonialism although you can definitely argue they didn’t exactly respect that colonialism part. Fantastic workplace and education.
But there were a massive lack of human rights – religious freedoms, freedom of movement which is fucking huge you cannot even go where you wanna go, extreme lack of political freedom and above all being gay was completely illegal.
So not really quite strong and not really that far ahead of capitalist countries, maybe in some facets but saying it was just straight better is completely untrue. The only point it wasn’t illegal to engage in homosexual relationships was when they forgot to codify it into law basically but they fixed as soon as Stalin consolidated his power.
Both countries had their problems which was more reflective of global culture than anything. Across the globe women were handling more work, across the globe racism was growing as people started to integrate, and across the globe people still hated being queer. Countries you would argue are socialist or formally socialist today lag behind drastically compared to western countries, many repress it out right and ban anything about it, some criminalize it entirely. Today Russia is completely barbaric in how it handles same sex relationships so clearly the cultural shift didn’t happen and some of that progress was never made.
Yes there was advancement for women’s rights
I’m not trying to have a go at you personally, but this is something I see from anti-communists and it drives me up a wall. The way it’s just casually handwaved away that former socialist countries had significantly better rights for one half of the entire population, and it gets relegated to a footnote. It shows just how more work still needs to be done to respect women’s rights. Even if these counties accomplished nothing else, the fact that they actually successfully addressed the needs and rights of HALF the population is a monumental achievement. In the GDR a woman could divorce her husband on her initiative while at the same time in the FRG a woman needed her husband’s permission to work outside the home. This should not be waived off as “yeah yeah I guess women had rights but you couldn’t find a good pair of blue jeans”.
I’m reading Albert Szymanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union right now and they made massive changes. I would recommend it.
I’m not gonna be offended trust me. But it drives me equally up a wall when I read anything from .ml that acts this way. A huge tenet of socialist views is the idea of proletariat internationalism, the idea that the working class globally should be working together to fix the entire system everywhere. Instead there is a constant desire to frame east vs west, socialist vs capitalist, Russia vs the US. And that’s disingenuous and really just makes everyone dumb.
The West absolutely has a laundry list of the evil cruel awful terrible shit it has done, I rarely see that denied. What I do see is that same lens not applied the same to socialist/communist countries especially the USSR.
Women were still barred from any position of power through an invisible glass ceiling, they were still completely expected to work a full time job AND handle women’s works, feminist movements were pursued by a state and often crushed, the USSR denied spousal abuse even existed and offered no solution for abused women. Not to mention to overall economic limitations, at least in the west women could own real estate/invest in a stock market/run a business, that wasn’t really the same in the USSR where things were mostly state run or decided by the state which limited everyone’s freedom equally which I guess you could argue is better in some ways but that’s still completely against socialist sentiment.
So yeah I guess women had rights, but it wasn’t paradise and in ways it lacked in contrast to their contemporaries.
You just can’t have actual discussions here because everyone wants to defend the USSR and it is evident in the culture of former soviet countries how they fared and what the government pushed culturally. Spousal abuse is terrible in these parts of the world, racism runs amok, anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment is massive. People in this thread are literally arguing the USSR was better, yet somehow their culture has completely 180’d? Someone said how the west attributed homosexuality to pedophilia, so did the USSR and so does Russia today because no ground has been made in all those decades since. So what are people even talking about?
The two biggest gaps between communists and your views are that communists recognize the imperialist stage of capitalism as the dominant contradiction globally, which pits the imperialist countries like the US against the global south, as well as the insistence that we place our analysis within the specific historical context that it exists in. This latter process is part of Historical Materialism, which is one of the most significant advancements of Karl Marx.
And this all falls away when you accept every country does an imperialism if it has the ability to do so. The Aral Sea didn’t dry itself, people didn’t deport themselves, languages got erased by the state and cultural repression was a tenet of the USSR.
Imperialism is not an action to be committed on a whim, in the eyes of communists, but relevantly is a stage in capitalist development. As bank and industrial capital consolidate and monopolize, they form finance capital, which seeks to expand internationally and thus the economy shifts from focusing on commodity export to capital export. This is a material system, with definite material causes, not something to be engaged upon at a whim.
The idea that countries would simply be evil if they had the opportunity to is an idealist argument, not a materialist one, and thus is anti-scientific. This is closer to a religious look on life than a scientific one.
Further, as we are placing the Soviet Union in its actual, historical context, nationalities were protected, languages that were never written were alphabetized, and the right of secession was protected. Tremendous development happened, and ethnic minorities were culturally protected and celebrated. There were instances of population transfer, and this by modern standards would be considered barbaric. However, this practice was enormously common among capitalist peers like the UK and US, and neither of them had the same level of thought and care placed into respecting and uplifting various ethnicities.
The only conclusion here is that you either are entirely unfamiliar with the true severity of repressions committed by the west, and therefore the shift to the positive direction as compared to their peers, or are entirely unfamiliar with the sheer care and uplifting that did go on when it comes to ethnic minority rights in the USSR, despite failures like population transfer.
This is why we are pointing out that you do not take a scientific approach to history.
I have a Russian communist friend, he says that every young Communist he knows in Russia supports LGBT rights, and he worked in the current Russian Communist Party. I can’t help but wonder, if the USSR existed now, would it have better LGBT laws? After all, the youngest cadre is very supportive now.
Communists support LGBT rights, that’s why Stalin made it illegal. Mhm, smart.
Yes because we’re living in the 1930’s and not 2026, you are very intelligent. /s
Misogyny is massive. Half the population was liberated from lives of utter dependence on and vulnerability at the hands of the other. Allowed to do stuff like leave abusive marriages and testify against their husbands and shit but it’s “Yes yes they got some rights”.
It’s one of the most significant liberations in human history god damn it. My own grandmother’s life was transformed from one of illiterate servitude to one where she could keep her own apartment and do technical work (and get recognition and respect for doing so, not condemnation!).
She was just one among millions. millions!
The soviets absolutely respected their anti-colonial stance, not only did they free Russia’s colonies but they also contributed to anti-colonial movements. Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high. Atheism was pushed by the state, but protections on nationalities also protected right to religion. Political freedom was also much, much higher for the majority of society, who remain disenfranchised by capitalist systems.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries, and usually gay rights were at the forefront for capitalist countries. They were severely lacking compared to today, but compared to their peers, they were progressive.
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high.
You mean like straight up shooting priests, until Stalin did a 180 during the war? Interesting ‘freedom’ you got there.
Yeah man Joseph Stalin went around beheading baby protestor dissenter Uyghur priests and shoving them in his nuclear human shredder
nice, ableism with the r-word. Good to see how liberals are always the good guys huh
What on Earth are you talking about?
Don’t forget how the West rewarded Alan Turing for his contributions during WW2 by castrating him for being gay. Or how the west linked homosexuality with pedophilia.
How about Ronald Reagan letting AIDS run rampant in the LGBTQ+ community?
Yep, even with the homophobia of the early Soviet Union, they were generally at or near the top when it comes to queer rights in their peer countries. That’s both depressing to think about, and also indicative of their own progressive nature as they sit in their historical context.
A case of Homosexuality. Feifer, George. Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, 1964. pp 207–8
To return to the cases behind closed doors: There is an article in the code that I would have thought unnecessary; it deals with homosexuality.* Muscovites are so strongly heterosexual—so little titillating talk, so much real activity. One never sees obvious homosexuals in public places, and I had assumed that I would never see them in court. Russians seemed too healthy for that. The exception proved the rule. Late one afternoon I came across it in a wretchedly damp, low-ceilinged basement room in the form of two elderly men, fifty-five and sixty-one, the first with a full eighteenth-century peasant beard, the other in high boots and a tunic. Insensibly drunk, they had exposed themselves on a bitter November day in a park and made some sort of contact with each other. They listened in deep embarrassment while the court found them guilty; but “considering their ages, their families, their honest confessions, and their promises of future good behavior,” it decided not to deprive them of freedom but merely to fine them 20 per cent of their salaries for a year. The men sputtered thanks to the judge and left separately without exchanging a glance. A once-very-pretty, fortyish woman who heard the sentence with me shook her head incredulously. “I just don’t believe it. You mean they . . .? The two of them? Good God, what for?”
* Article 121: Homosexuality.
Sexual relations of a man with a man (homosexuality) is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to five years. Homosexuality committed by means of application of physical force, threat, or in relation to a minor, or by taking advantage of a dependent position of the victim, is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to eight years.Yep, they weren’t great by any stretch, but the cartoonish idea that queer people were executed in the streets is horrendously false. Meanwhile, Turing was chemically castrated and driven to suicide despite being a hero, simply because he was gay.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe? They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia that still impact how those countries exist today. They even deported Tartars and Chechens. That’s some pretty colonial stances. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism so it kinda became a “which flavor of colonialism do you want” game. That’s literally what was the basis of the Cold War.
No religions were not protected. They nationalized most church property from the get-go, they abolished muslim schools and actively forced people to stop learning Arabic and Hebrew which was pretty necessary for them to engage in their religion.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries.
They were not progressive at all, 7 years in prison is nowhere near progressive. You can literally just look up Article 121 Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Union what are you talking about?
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Because it is reflective of the culture that was pushed. You’re basically saying being queer was free and everyone was cool with it, today the sentiment in post-soviet countries is extremely negative, some of the worst on the planet. You don’t get that shift overnight, that is a cultural standard that has been reinforced by a legal system for decades.
On the flip side, even though the US went through the lavender scare and the AIDs crisis it was far better. It still is far better because of the cultural impact of those experiences, there is massive queer support in the US because of events like the Stonewall Riots. A plethora of people famous and rich in the US are openly queer, I can see queer couples when I look out my window and pride flags on most streets.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe?
Weird way to describe liberation from maxi Germany this way.
Ah, wait, you bemoan the fact that those countries were not allowed to plunder Africa and Asia, don’t you?They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia
Suppressing NATO-backed nazis is good, actually. Not sure what you disagree with.
That’s some pretty colonial stances.
No, those are not. None of those things were enforcing relations of severely unequal exchange.
Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism
In what way was that colonialism when those actions actually had a decolonising effect?
Just wait until you find out about what the US was doing in East and Southeast Asia at the time. There isn’t a single criticism you can make of the USSR that the West wasn’t doing bigger and more savagely.
I 10000% agree and that is my entire point.
Is it? Because it’s the same point I made, yet you seem to be arguing against it.
The Soviet Union did not “occupy” the other countries in the socialist bloc or otherwise. They had favorable trade relations, but were not colonial. Ethnic deportations were wrong, and did happen, but their peers were worse, for example see how Churchill treated Bengal. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was tremendously freeing, it wasn’t a “parallel colonialism” but genuine anti-imperialism. You can only make this “parallel colonialism” argument if you ignore any and all hard evidence and numbers comparing interactions between western countries and their colonies, and the Soviet Union and formerly colonized countries.
Regarding Hungary and Czechoslovakia, both had counterrevolutionary uprisings that were dealt with as any country would. Far-right elements took up arms against the left wing states, and as such these were contested by the Warsaw Pact countries. This isn’t colonialism.
As for queer rights, I specifically said their penalties were often more lax than capitalist countries at the time. Alan Turing was castrated and pushed to suicide, homosexuality was strongly punished in the west. In the Soviet Union, the 5 year mark was a maximum sentence, one that was rarely carried out. Hence it was more lax, and in some socialist countries like the GDR eventually free gender affirming care began to be rolled out, far ahead of trans acceptance in the west.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism. This already throws out your point, but again, we were comparing the Soviet Union over its whole existence to their western peers over their whole existence, as peers. This is not a comparison of reactionary regimes, but socialist countries vs. their capitalist peers.
The Soviet Union even did trans state funded surgeries in Riga in iirc the 1970s. The Baltics and Leningrad were seen as the most progressive LGBT wise, and it wasn’t likely to be tried for those crimes in any of those areas.
I didn’t know that, that’s awesome! It only furthers the idea that had socialism continued, they would have continued to develop socially, rather than see the reactionary backslide alongside their dissolution.
were worse,
You’re just not gonna budge it doesn’t matter believe what you want. Thousands of queers were imprisoned. Millions lost their cultural and religious identity. The Soviet Union did not have favorable trade deals, they had full scale occupations. We can sit here all day and say who was worse but the bigger thing is NOBODY WAS SAFE so it’s completely irrelevant it isn’t even a light slap vs a death penalty, it is straight up government-funded harassment campaigns everywhere. There is no “lax” when it comes to government repression dude.
And then you look at today and the West has absolutely come out far ahead for the LGBTQIA+ community by a long shot because it actually was better in the West.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism.
I don’t have to because fortunately human rights don’t apply directly to those structures, they’re different across each nation that embraces those ideals. Socialists governments want to pretend they champion for human rights but they don’t if anyone is oppressed, they’re just choosing which demographics to support which is exactly how the rest of the world does it too. You’re being completely disingenuous trying to frame it as a this or that argument, there are not two sides to human rights.
But you’re not interested in being fair, you just want the soviet union to be some rainbow paradise or something when it was not. It constricted so hard on the queer community that the identity was completely shadowed and still to this day is goes largely unidentified and unrecorded except for a few like Gennady Trifonov who barely managed to get his story out. Whatever man.
It feels like you are struggling to understand historical events and entities as parts of historical processes. Yes the USSR did stuff we look back at and go, wow that was fucked up huh. That’s to be expected as we have historically progressed from the point they were at. The USSR wasn’t gonna undo centuries of social conditioning in a decade, that was not feasible. You can’t thanos snap homophobia from existence by royal decree. I would have loved if the Soviet Union spawned into existence with all the values I have today but it didn’t. It was birthed with all the prejudices of working people in Czarist Russia and had to eat away at them over time. Not only this, it came about in a world of prejudices and was consistently surrounded by them. They weren’t going to have an ideological epiphany that severely broke from their tradition and world culture for no reason.
You’re doing historical anachronism
The claim I gave was that the Soviet Union was historically progressive compared to peer capitalist countries. I never said they were progressive compared to modern western countries when it comes to queer rights, and when it comes to women’s rights, worker’s rights, and more, the Soviet Union was more progressive than the US is today. You are shifting the goalpost to the idea that I said the Soviet Union was flawless even by modern standards, which I never said.
Further, you again try to draw a direct line from a socialist federation of countries to the horrendously reactionary states that replaced them. There is no material basis for this, otherwise the Tsarist system would have continued culturally into the Soviet system. They clearly did not, the Soviet Union was enormously progressive compared to the Tsarist system, just like the modern reactionary states are far more reactionary than the Soviet Union was.
You have no leg to stand on.
Five years.
- Religious freedom is an oxymoron. Religions must be suppressed
- Your assertion regarding homosexuality in USSR is wrong, they knowingly decriminalised homosexuality before but stalin recriminalized it - which is his fault
- Today russia is hyper conservative because thats what liberals wanted - to dissolve the USSR they needed a strong nationalist movement which they got.
stalin recriminalized it - which is his fault
This seems like Great Man theory. Was he really single-handedly imposing this? Or where there more to it?
I am blaming the collective leadership but took stalins name coz he was at the top
As a communist myself, point number was proven to be incorrect by the USSR. Suppressing all religious expression was the wrong move and created a massive reactionary backlash that could not be managed. Religions must be allowed to wither away and repression only employed when the religion is being used as a cover for counter-revolutionary organizing.
Agreed, this is a lesson from the USSR we must take to heart (and to be fair, a lesson the USSR itself seemed to learn over time).
Religion is synonymous with culture to some groups. I have seen the sentiment of how Indigenous Americans were treated to be genocide, which I agree with. For largely the exact same reasons and metrics as religious prosecution in the Soviet Union, destroying a national identity, forceful integration, language erasure, basically indoctrination.
They didn’t support it, they wanted to abolish the entire concept of marriage. Which included same-sex relationships. Saying they supported it is disingenuous.
Russia is hyper conservative because of a ton of reasons, a lot of those cultural. Which the Soviet Union reinforced in many ways and didn’t push against in many other ways. Saying the entire culture flipped because liberals is just not true, c’mon.
religious freedoms
I.e. the most powerful pedophilic cults that worship slaver gods were not given power.
freedom of movement
How much freedom of movement did the people colonised by the European powers enjoy?
In the USSR one could, in fact, do both tourism travel and move to other places.extreme lack of political freedom
I.e. nazis were not given power.
Not sure why you are even claiming that the USSR was behind in this area, considering that states in general do not give opposing opposing movements power.being gay was completely illegal.
Also a feature of NATO.
Going to mention, though, that the early USSR decriminalised that, and some of the socialist republics - like the GDR - were better in this regard.
There was all good,just the government was always right. So,if person kept low profile,lived his life,didn’t spoke against the president, he could live life working and nit bothering about tomorrow. Roof over head, some food always available. Free med care,education, ect. It was very suitable for normies, lazy people were made work, and the smart ones… eh,those suffered in Russia…
In my experience with “smart” people from former Eastern Bloc countries now living in the West, what they “suffered” from was the idea that they didn’t get to live a life of significantly higher material comforts than “normal” workers in their country, similar to how things were in the West.
But isn’t it funny how nowadays working normals in USA struggling with same, didn’t you noticed that ? Or they are living dream life on edge of bankruptcy. Dave Ramsey speaks OnLive with many regular working class Americans about this "suffering " and proposing ussr lifestyle 🤣🤣 Omg, the point is to see ALL this capitalism/socializm as brokoli and carrots swimming in same soup and people arguing till blood to prove that one is poison and another is antidote while eating the soup. People are played around, fooled to involve them in debating and spending their time and energy on this , while Teo fights, tge third wins… P.s. been on both sides of world , lived both regimes, now living peacefully and just enjoying shitshows here in comments…
damn you are super enlightened
I don’t like the implication that workers are unintelligent, lazy, “Normie’s,” while rentiers, capitalists, etc. are “smart people.”
Your comprehension of text is outstanding, but please, try to read again and point were I said that normies were lazy or not intelligent? Where I am saying that capitalist are smart? If not minding , I will ask you personal question- what is your direct experience with Russia?
Considering the conversation is about the USSR and not Russia (in its modern form) then everyone on this site likely has the same personal anecdotal experience of roughly 0 and is instead working off data and stories they’ve been told. (Apologies if any senior citizens happen to be lurking Lemmy I just don’t think it’s likely).
Under the soviet union, the large majority of those who benefited were the working classes, while those who lost out were the formerly owning classes. You don’t directly reference them by their classes, you indirectly do by describing those who won and those who lost accordingly.
Ah yes, the “smart” ones.
Stable geniuses, and very high IQ, always having had a very high IQ, according to many people.
And with very strong instincts, more important than any degree in a university.
Always known how to make the right moves in business.
Typical .ml bait but I’ll bite.
You can get similar conditions for a fairly similar price right now. Current monthly rent of 2 bedroom apt in regional slav city (1m population) is about €200. Any .ml users wanna move in? USSR ideation of very very welcome there
i’d do anything to get the fuck out of america. i can be a software engineer and firefighter anywhere. my wife can paint anywhere. but i’m disgusted at my country’s behavior on the world stage, and locally, and how The Jungle is a god damned documentary.
And what’s the income in these cities? How much is said 200 of the average inhabitants income?
State sources claim 760€(on 03.26 by rosstat). But it’s a good point to start asking more questions when the claim looks too good to be true – just as it is with the OP’s meme
The official average salary is a half-truth (hence a russian saying: if my boss eats meat and I eat cabbage, on average we eat golubtsi), most people in the regions are living on 30000 RUB a month or so. It may still be better than the US because you get public transit and thus don’t really need a car but it’s still not good. Capitalism ruins everything.
China is a more enticing proposition but it’s very difficult/impossible for a foreigner to get a permanent residence permit.
China is a more enticing proposition but it’s very difficult/impossible for a foreigner to get a permanent residence permit.
There is apparently a trick, you can apply for permanent residence in Taiwan. Since Taiwan is considered part of China, the mainland also will support Taiwan’s permanent residency rules and will give you permanent residency on the mainland (in tier 1 cities only afaik).
But it’s a good point to start asking more questions when the claim looks too good to be true – just as it is with the OP’s meme
The only question you asked was, “does anyone want to move in to a living situation completely dissimilar to the one described in the OP (which effectively no longer exists, contrary to the point I was trying to make)? Didn’t think so 😏”
Bruh, the meme is a frame of western modern movie with western actors glamorizing the past, palatable version of which never actually existed. It is a propagandist solution for the global housing crisis
It’s “Make X Great Again” from the other end of the horseshoe
Idk how to engage with this populist twisted media in direct good faith argument. At the very least, my joke gives more information to those struggling with housing to seek out better opportunities
Yeah man verifiable data that happens to be relected in one movie is exactly the same as nostalgia for a coke commercial 1950s America that never existed. Everything anyone believes in is equally stupid regardless of what it is, there is no alternative to omnicidal liberalism.
So 25%
Also:
The average rent in the USSR around 1970 was 2–3% of the average urban family budget.
Albert, Szymanski. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. Zed Books. 1984. Chapter 5
Your preoccupation with material resources makes you look anti-revolution and maybe even capitalist, comrade. For people like you, glorious fatherhood has special completely free of charge housing facilities!
Oh I see, you’re doing the lib thing of pretending to be a Red Alert character and confusing it for biting satire.
Man, I actually wanted to go visit DPRK but it’s seems like an unpopular (hence expensive) destination. A couple of friends went there and said it is like asian Belarus. Which is ehhh idk kinda underwhelming… But maybe one day!
Work hard and keep your head down and you too may one day have a good enough FICO score to purchase a plane ticket, citizen.
Your preoccupation with incomes and percentages makes you look anti-revolution and maybe even capitalist
Math is capitalist now? Since when???
.ml account with 5k comments asking about kulaks
Oh no, bro, I don’t have as much free time as you do
The Tankies have nothing but free time, they don’t work. Unless they paid to post here, which I doubt.
They have to ban people who call them out otherwise they have nothing else to do but circlejerking all day about how they’ll do the revolution. Just don’t expect them to leave their armchairs.
You were the one who claimed that most people reliably live with 5% or less of their income going to housing expenses.
(Hint, more than 5% and often these regional cities dont exactly have great employment prospects due to shock therapy nuking whatever industry the city was built around)
“Oh, you like communism? Well how about paying almost nothing in rent, huh? Living in some hell where people think socialism is a good idea? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
That would be so nice. A single bedroom apartment where I live is like $700 in the city, $600 out of the city. For context, that is 50% of my salary and I work full time in a job that requires a college degree. And it is applied.
I have a friend in China that pays around 3500rmb a year (incl electric, heating, ac, internet) for a place in a mid tier Chinese city. It’s a 10 minute walk from a metro, fairly new, and she prepaid two years of rent working a gig job at minimum wage for 2 months. Her girlfriend also works minimum wage and they said they aren’t even employed right now and they saved some money up from their sporadic gig jobs and are now taking a 2 year vacation because they just wanted to chill, I guess. They send me cute lesbian pictures of them on the beach somewhat regularly. They say no one bothers them about being queer, though their families are still in a somewhat hilarious feud over who should take on whose name
I’m sure everyone here has it cheaper! 🤡 China is a capitalist nightmare don’t you know?
I got permission to talk about the feud! Traditionally in this region, the wife of a husband would go live in the husband’s family’s house and basically help take care of the house and his family, usually indefinitely. Nowadays, everyone can afford a cheap apartment so usually a certain time each year (usually Chinese New Year and a couple of other holidays) wives go live in the husband’s family’s house during the celebrations and are a part of the husband’s clan, then they go back to their apartment afterward. Basically, both extended families of this lesbian couple are really salty and wanna double dip on having their kid and the wife stay in their house so they can have two extra women around to gossip and clean with lol. They really don’t want to share! They’ve floated a lot of ideas but have come to a stalemate on the matter, I’m really curious how it’ll resolve when they get “married” (as much as you can be legally in China rn, anyways).
mid tier Chinese city
Which one?
3500rmb a year
That seems insanely cheap, did you miss a zero in there? I’ve seen nice apartments for 2-3K rmb/mo in T2 cities, per year seems crazy.
I’ll ask if I can mention the location, I didn’t say specifically for privacy reasons. Its possible the specific region she is in subsidizes the housing for low income people, idk the specific logistics of how she came to that price. She did mention they don’t live in a city center but it didn’t matter because it had train access.
That part of who should take whose name is amusing. Great post.
People online, and especially newspapers, always act like China is having a gig nightmare, and that everyone is stuck in unemployment hell. But they obviously don’t see the totality of the economy, they are just looking at one number or another. A large number of unemployed people can be good because that can be a long period of personal, consensual downtime from work.
This sort of life being possible in China makes me desire immigration to non-major city areas over there. I only have concerns of freedom of information and access to the greater internet- censorship on a national firewall level is something I’m simply not able to tolerate.
IMPORTANT: I am an American with a public education, and have no real knowledge of what life’s like there in terms of freedoms. I’ve just heard things.
Would you mind going into a bit of detail about how accessing the greater internet works over there? That is, if you know anything. I think I am correct in assuming you are not currently residing there. Would love another’s take on this.
The big issue with immigrating directly to China is that you will only be allowed to stay in their higher tier cities, this is because of the Hukou system which treats every region of China like its own country with visa restrictions, essentially. Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot. So its unlikely that you could take advantage of the collective lands rules as a foreigner unless you married into a family in an area with collective lands. You can obviously visit any region of China but visas/hukou do have limits if you try to go for residency.
There are some loopholes to getting Chinese citizenship, you can move to for example Taiwan or Hong Kong, get residency / citizenship in those places, and then the mainland would consider you a citizen by proxy. But usually if you’re moving from one region to another you can only live in the higher tier cities. You can read a little more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Thanks a lot! This is invaluable to know and look into before I ever begin to seriously considering uprooting my life. I wouldn’t mind going through the paces to attain a life I find desirable, but it depends on how prohibitive things are if the time comes to make decisions like this.
Also are you in USA? Afaik there are new rules for Canada that are more lenient
Yep, USA. Part of my potential plans were to go to Canada first, though, for their better relationship with other countries!
Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot.
Possibly but that wasn’t the intent of the Hukou system. It’s goal was the prevention of massive slums forming on the borders of the majority cities during rapid modernisation (which in turn leads to rapid urbanisation). There is currently massive hukou reform ongoing such as restrictions effectively being lifted for cities under 3 million population.
I see something in the commentary I can’t exactly define. It’s probably bigger than a single word can encompass. Regardless of how revolutionary and forward thinking the leaders of a polity are they are still leading groups and individuals who have their own cultural beliefs, of which their positions would be inherently antithetical towards revolutionary ideas–if they were not the revolution would have occurred earlier. There’s a cultural threshold that must be passed before revolutionary activities can occur, but that threshold may be with a minority of people who can enable those activities to start. They will still be leading a majority who simply do not care intellectually. Most people do not give a thought towards the economic system they live under.
A white-class who materially benefits from a black-class’ oppression will be racist towards that class regardless of what the leading mouthpieces say, especially if that benefit has been enforced throughout many generations. “Equality feels like suppression to the privileged.” When a strong revolutionary polity enters a territory they–by definition–are fought against. It’s intellectually lazy to call this push-back the “suppression” of religion–ethnicity, sexuality or any other category–by the revolutionaries.
Revolutionaries were on the correct lines. One cannot attack the revolution’s failings on the actions of uninterested participants or more accurately: counter-revolutionary actors. The communists were more socially progressive than the capitalists. That’s a fact not up for debate. Communists are more socially progressive than capitalists.
Rents should be abolished. It’s a tax and I do wonder why taxes are still in use by national-governments today. They’re inefficient and create absolutely needless friction and dissent amongst payers. Money has long left the bounds of reality. Of a nation state to issue money, but then tack back a small fraction due to cultural-legacy, should it not be ridiculed? Likewise the ill effects of landlords has been well documented economically: their patronage is solely for the oppressive effects on you–the worker.
Here we go again
The labels should be swapped.
It is overwhelmingly the western 12 year-olds that complain about praise for communism/communist revolutions.Also, let’s not pretend as if Eastern Europeans were oppressed by the Warsaw Pact, unlike how NATO treats the vast majority of the world.
Meanwhile people who lived in eastern europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF0JdAim6Pc
Examples?
.ml, hexbear, etc.
I’m almost 40
sorry, I meant give examples on how bad communism was :)
Which eastern Europeans? Certainly not the ones that saw their life metrics shoot up immediately. Or did you mean the deposed petty aristocrats and Holocaust partcipants?
The majority of those who lived in socialism regret its fall. This is consistently documented, to the point that liberal academics attempt to explain this by calling it “nostalgia.”
Why did the USSR allow rent? Isn’t that stealing from the workers with a Landlord who didn’t earn it?
Mao had the right idea of Landlords.
Because buildings don’t maintain themselves?
You’re being facetious. Rent is not capital harboured for the maintenance of lands or buildings. From Wiktionary:
I want to make this point absolutely clear: landlords in Australia have been a cohort that’s been cultivated by the capitalists as a bulwark against labour domestically. In law and in economic-systems privileges have been carved out solely for them, to the detriment of the industrial-capacity of Australia to produce tangible goods.
Australia has a housing crisis–which is not a state that is unique to Australia. Housing is a human right. Australia’s government acknowledged this and promised to act on it. It has failed in every domain–deliberately!
The right to housing is clearly supported by international law, indeed at the very foundation of the international human rights system in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This Declaration, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, establishes an internationally recognised set of standards for all persons without qualification. Article 25 of the Declaration provides, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing”.
—Chris Sidoti, Human Rights Commissioner, 4th of September, 1996.
Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Australia is a party, recognises the right of all people to adequate housing and commits state parties to take appropriate steps to ensure the realisation of that right. Article 11 recognises, “… the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing…” and that “States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right”.
I do encourage readers to read the linked document (especially Australians). It will help shed light on why the privileged children of Western-democracies are looking back at the USSR as an ideal to work towards whilst they face worsening material conditions with the political classes unanimously declaring: it will get worse; deal with it. Users such as [email protected] are being, I think, disingenuous.
The children of Australia are aware that the adults (that are in privileged positions now, shaping Australia’s future political- and economic-landscapes) were the recipients of public-housing, cheap private-housing and free tertiary-education, whilst ending those same programs for them. This injustice is further inflamed with the deliberate inflation of asset-classes, of which housing has become an overwhelming salient sore-point in the Australian context.
Rents in Australia do not go towards the maintenance of the property. They overwhelmingly go towards the financing of new mortgages. A rental-property is a political-license to freely create private misery for your tenant as you attempt to extract unjust amounts of capital to finance a mountain of new mortgages in an attempt to join the politically protected class: landlords.
I pay $300.00 AUD a week to rent a room, with no access to laundry or cooking facilities. Meanwhile the property fails Australia’s national-standards for housing. There are no smoke-detectors in the bedrooms. A glass-panel in one of the windows has a hole in it. The bathroom’s exhaust fan does not work. Mold is a never-ending issue. These conditions are illegal, but good luck getting the landlord to meet his legal-obligations! If you live in Australia you know tenants are treated as an underclass.
Tenants are supposed to maintain the building and the land, not the rent. That’s the expectation and the reality here. It is certainly different to what I’ve read of European-tenancy expectations. I can only defend Australia by saying it’s a young, naive nation led by lazy and entitled morons.
In Australia homelessness is increasing. Asset-classes are over inflated. Rents are crippling. Wages are insufficient. The leading thought of the domestic political-class is that A.I. will increase productivity, leading to higher wages which will erode that asset inflation, leading to a nice, comfortable equilibrium. Of course this ignores the fact that the historical gains of increased productivity have gone towards profits, not wages. Somehow the future gains will be different! Everyone knows that’s a lie, which means the current cohort of leaders are promising nothing. No change. We will continue this course of destructive neoliberalism.
What the USSR accomplished was remarkable. What the Chinese have accomplished is astonishing. All under the frame-work of socialism, working towards communism. Meanwhile the Western-democratic nations seem to be in endless internal-squabbles, external-wars and domestic degradation.
Presumably the rent went to the government, which was considered as a stand in for the people, right?
In modern China they have landlords, but it actually makes rent cheaper because the managerial cost is offloaded and the government has driven rent prices to the floor by creating a massive oversupply of housing production. It’s very fascinating that there are landlords at all, it almost feels like a trap. I’d kill to talk to one, I wonder how the numbers work
It wasn’t private rent. More like a housing cooperative where the members are pitching in for common maintenance.
I highly recommend the recent Deprogram podcast (ep #248) where they go into a discussion of the daily life experiences of people in socialist countries. Hakim’s father lived in the USSR and Yugo, living in a the former Yugoslavia, has a ton of anecdotal experiences from family and friends.
Thank you for sharing, this seems interesting
“Is there anything more depressing than communist architecture?”
“Mass homelessness.”
5% of nothing is what now again?
Is it too scary?
Oh you’re someone who thinks communists work for free or something lol
The fact that you seriously think that people were not paid in the USSR is extremely silly.
Cartoon person with cartoon opinions
It’s not like authoritarian governments ever lied with their official statistics to prove a point or anything…
Authoritarianism is a meaningless word created by an actual anti-semite as a way to minimise the Holocaust by claiming the Soviet Union and the Nazis where the same because they both used state power to do things. Every state is authoritarian, all it is is a word to describe enemy-countries, like saying “regime” instead of government
It’s always very funny to me when people react to socialist accomplishments with literal disbelief. Because when I show you a scientific paper backing up the claim in the meme, you’re now in the position of either trying to rapidly backtrack and pretend that the thing you considered so good it was literally unbelievable is actually not that impressive, or doubling down and accusing Western sources of being compromised by some insidious communist conspiracy, that somehow survived the collapse of the USSR.
So which one is it gonna be?
Saved, this is a really good thing to have on hand. Thanks for posting.
Do you know anything about the data behind this paper? Why was there a spike in rent costs in 1928?
I don’t know too much about that year in particular.
No the soviets didnt. Hope this helps
Can you name a non-authoritarian government?
Unironically I love logging on and seeing which meme (it’s always a meme) is to become a battleground for the next three days
some of the arguing is legit entertaining
