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Rather, the USSR criminalized being homeless and not being engaged in socially-productive labor; people that were homeless ended up in prisons and were labelled as parasites.
Swap USSR with USA and the statement remains true. Though Im sure the degree of severity was much greater in the USSR.
That’s kind of true in some parts of the US, indirectly. Some places criminalize not being homeless but all the things that are the result of being homeless like sleeping outside or in public places. But there are a lot of places in the US that do provide for the homeless. New York City has a right to housing provision, for example.
That’s the problem with generalizing the United States. Every state has a different approach to the problem.
And it fucking shouldnt be the case. Ensuring basic humanity and human dignity should be a key matter of the federal government and not delegated to the whimps of states opinions on waht constitutes human rights.
Well, shelter is not a human right that our government recognizes.
If we set a national policy today and didn’t allow local governments to set their own policies, I’m pretty sure we’d have a national policy of no help for the homeless at all. Be happy the places that do have support are allowed to because of states’ rights.
If homeless people go to prison in this country, why have I never seen one arrested? Why are they … not in prison but rather sleeping on the street?
I’m not sure what you’re trying to claim here, as what you’re claiming is obviously false based on my day to day experience in the US
If homeless people go to prison in this country, why have I never seen one arrested?
this is selection bias, obviously
You have a very simplistic view of what it means for something to be criminalized.
Sure are a lot of homeless people not in prison for what you’re claiming.
I was homeless and police literally made up a reason to put me in jail and label me as a felon to make me be cheap labor when I plead guilty just to get out. No fair and speedy trial during COVID. I live in the US.
What the law tells you it’s doing and what they’re actually doing are very different. Don’t try to tell me different because I’m a first hand example. If you’re interested in the full story, let me know and I can do a Discord call or something.
Prison would be a step up for a lot of them. They receive other punishments, like having all their belongings confiscated wherever a cop or some bureaucrat decides they’re getting in the way too much.
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How many homeless people in the USA do you think can work but refuse to? Hint: a lot of them.
Oh yeah, it’s super easy to get a job that pays enough to afford rent and food when you don’t already have a permanent address. /s
A communist nation that can really provide all that is as realistic as capitalistic utopia.
Not a tankie, but the USSR had mostly solved this problem, despite all its other issues. There did exist some homelessness, but nowhere near the extent of current USA.
Sure, you could get a piece of land in Siberian tundra at any time, I would not call that housing.
Moving to a city was way more complicated than in capitalist US. You could not simply buy an apartment. You had to be allocated an apartment by the government. And you needed connections for that. Or bribes. Ideally both. If you think your local rabid Republicans do not care for little wage slave men, you never experienced USSR, it was like that but 100x worse.
If you got a new job in a different city, they gave you a new flat, at least in Romania
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Yup. And networking would inevitably involve vodka. All major decisions would eventually involve vodka in USSR.
One of Stalin’s failures almost any tankie won’t deny.
Vodka had been linked to the Russian economy under multiple Czars. I’m not sure that Stalin could have separated the two even if he had wanted to. Admittedly it doesn’t appear that he wanted to.
I’m pretty sure that the USSR was screwed the moment that Lenin returned from exile in Germany, or when Wilson was elected. Take your pick.
The Menchaviks would have been a better government.
The mechaviks literally wanted to continue ww1 and have a psuedo democracy where the bourgeoisie were literally guaranteed a majority of seats, wtf are you talking about?
I just find it ironic that Stalin was everything that the party worried about Trotsky becoming.
Well, I’m from a post-USSR country and a substantial part of this was the criminalization of homelessness. Can’t have homeless people, if you lock them up (be it in a prison or asylum).
Then again, just about anyone, who did not conform to the party’s message got locked up. Getting your place bugged at the slightest hint you might be up to something disagreeable and all that good stuff. The secret police could disappear and or beat you up without any real justification.
I hate late-stage capitalism as much as you, but coming from a country that’s been through this, I am extremely reluctant to give the rotten and frankly repugnant USSR regime any credit.
In what communist country was housing a problem?
This is a trick question, the real answer is that there weren’t real communist countries
That’s true.
No true communists
It’s the final refuge for tankies. That and the old “social democracy only works by exploiting the global south” canard.
“social democracy only works by exploiting the global south” canard.
Yeah, I could see finding this unconvincing if you haven’t read theory, history, or were just cool with benefiting from imperialism
I mean even in the case of USSR they had to wait for more than a decade to actually get a livable apartment, not to mention severe lack of infrastructure…
But of course, better than people just kicked out to the streets. But then again, less is not none. The housing situation definitely didn’t do USSR’s overall economic status any favor.
People at least had somewhere to go
that’s just moving the goal post, isn’t it?
Soviet Union? It was uncommon for a family of 6 to live in a small apartment. You can even see it in old soviet movies where apartments would be separated by curtains (common comedy trope).
I’m sure there were extra houses after all those people that starved to death.
In Communist countries people starve to death because of famine, in Capitalist countries people also strave to death because of famine while still starving to death after famines are over because they cant afford groceries.
The real communist solution to homelessness was to put them in jails. True story.
From a Legislative Perspective, it is Illegal to be Homeless in Virtually Every State in the USA, Except for Two – Oregon and Wyoming I think you are confusing Communist countries with Capitalist ones. Lol, lmao even.
As someone who has been homeless before, I’ve never been arrested for it.
So what? America is a shithole, that’s nothing new.
Woohoo both systems suck. You can actually believe that just because one system is bad, what is considered the opposite is also bad. Marx was not some omniscient doctor manhattan. He had some ideas. Some were good critiques on capitalist culture. Others were fantasy that do not function in the real world.
Notice how the folks arguing in favor of Communism have sources and receipts, while the folks arguing against it have done nothing but regurgitated Capitalist propaganda. Also note folks who are opposed to Communism and Marx’s philosophy are always forced to admit that it only works on paper, because his logic is irrefutable if you address it with a modicum of intellectual honesty…
It’s funny how upset it makes people when you point out the elephant in the room.
Truely
You link stuff, but ignore the actual accounts of human beings who fucking lived it.
Bruh, almost every old person I’ve heard talk about Communism that lived under it talks about it fondly. Lmao
I have a whole fucking family, who lived through the USSR. Not a single one of them misses it. Being spied on every step you take, my grandma has the “you never know who’s watching” mentality to this day.
That’s not to say they don’t hate the current regime, but it’s nothing compared to the absolute atrocities of the USSR’s secret police.
Doubt that very much, liar
Love how all your sources are NATOpedia and all their sources are actual sources.
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Yeah but some guy I once met had a grandpa who lived in Europe for a year, he said Russia was great
The holodomor narrative surrounding the ussr wide famine of 32-33 was literal nazi propaganda from open nazi collaborators and was used as a justification for the mass murder of jews in Eastern Europe during the holocaust.
It was debunked in the literal 1930s in the US and now it re-emerges like a zombie during an era where fascism is on the rise. Even anticommunist academics like Applebaum, Davies, and Conquest say it wasn’t a genocide.
No one is going to deny that making perpetual motion device is good. How are you going to do that?
Do you have source and receipts for real life communism solving housing problem? Not being better than capitalism. Solving. Being better than capitalism is kinda low bar you know. There are plenty of other things that real life capitalism does better than real life communism, hence communism failure. No one is going to show up with receipts and sources because obvious.
You show us tents as a capitalist solution. That’s not a capitalist solution. That’s the problem itself. You’re misleading.
because his logic is irrefutable if you address it with a modicum of intellectual honesty…
Can you at least try to sound less douche about things?
The joke is that Capitalism DOES NOT have a solution to homelessness because there is zero profit motive to solve it. And facts dont care about your feelngs, you cant refute Marx’s philosophy while being intellectual honest. Capitalist Economists study Das Kapital because Marx was so fucking spot on.
Yes, that’s why there is no pure capitalist country anywhere.
you cant refute Marx’s philosophy while being intellectual honest.
Why are you keep doing this? I said I don’t disagree with Marx. It’d be nice if communism can happen. Facts don’t care about your feelings either and all the shitty attemps of communism failed due to human being shitty. If you have to kill off people to keep the ideology, only to fail after about few decades, it has some reality problems.
And again, I cannot stress this enough, can you please stop sounding like a 16 year old kid who just read few paragraphs of Marx going iamverysmart about it?
No need to refute Marx, reality has already proven time and time again that communism doesn’t work in practice.
Btw your argument only applies to “pure” capitalism, without any government interference. Homelessness is not really an issue in many European countries.
Typical projection 😂
Yeah that’s called late stage Communism, which we have never achieved as humanity. Late stage Capitalism is currently pushing more and more folks into dangerous housing situations like the bottom right quadrant of this meme. Capitalism and Utopia are oxymorons while Communism and Utopia are synonymous.
Communism and your concept of utopia are synonymous. Communism and utopia are not synonymous.
Call me old fashion but no one living on the streets and having their basic needs met sounds pretty utopian to me.
They don’t call you old fashioned for that, they call you tankie. It’s because they’re mad that you don’t buy the bullshit they push. Look at all the claims they make about the USSR here while providing no evidence or context for the situations they claim people were living in.
They compare apples to oranges when it’s communism they are criticizing and stick their fingers in their ears while screaming when it comes to criticizing crapitalism.
There were still people that lived in the streets in the USSR. Also, the housing the USSR provided wasn’t really that… great… I watch a Russian YouTuber (NFKRZ) who has talked about Soviet architecture in not just Russia, but other former USSR countries and shows that yes it’s good they were built, they weren’t very well built.
The USSR had many problems, and bureaucracy was a big problem. I never understood why tankies love the USSR so much when the USSR didn’t truly get rid of class. Those in the government lived like kings compared to the common man, who yes lived better than they had before but still not that well due to the bloated and mismanagement of the government.
Idk, the fact that they even had a centralized government like that seems like… the opposite of communism to me.
I think what people don’t fully understand is that Marxism is meant to be scientific. That means that there will likely be many imperfect and failed attempts at building a socialist society before one comes along that is stable enough to outlast outside interference from capitalist states.
As such, most people I know who like the USSR are also it’s biggest critiques. Unfortunately, there is so much misinformation about the USSR that most discussions about it online are just about delineating truth from propaganda.
Ah yes because there was no one living on the streets, yes because a propaganda told me that it must be true.
I guess killing literal millions of your own citizens is better than being homeless, huh?
Yeah those soviets sure got rid of the homeless problem. Can’t be homeless when you were intentionally starved to death.
The USSR and communism are separate things
Slaps Table Thank You!!
Why is this shit always communist vs capitalist, like we’ve only got 2 answers avaliable. You fuckers never set foot in a communist country and worship this shit
Fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens? Don’t really think showing a picture of some buildings is enough to prove that they actually solved any issues. They may have solved those issues for some who were lucky enough to get an apartment, but don’t be a hexbear and pretend they housed everyone.
And no, I don’t want a response with a link about hurr duer capitalism bad, yeah I know, but I live in capitalism so I already know that.
This is capitalist solution to homelessness
I love the top one, because it’s the same way they deal with pigeons. They see poor people as just another pest.
Personally I’ve never seen the spikes or anything that horrific in Canada. But fuck do those stupid bench “armrests” ever piss me off
There are much more examples, search hostile architecture or hostile urbanism
The nicest
The original design of that bench is an art piece protesting the commercialization of life (although it may have been implemented seriously in some place where they missed the point).
Ironically, I’d expect a person living on the street to have actual coins capable of operating the bench more often than most people.
This has to be fake, an accident would happen within days of installing it and then the city is liable. Ask you city government if they enjoy liability.
At least i know i would be terrified the whole time i’m sitting on it and wouldn’t actually be rested at all
It is. Well, it’s an art installation anyway. But people are gullible, what can you do.
What even the fuck.
This was an art exhibit by Fabian Brunsing, not a real thing used in cities.
I have also found this out, although it describes the general idea of capitalism very well. The actual architecture and street furniture solutions are not much better either, as can be seen in the other images.
Don’t they want people to sit on the park bench? That looks uncomfortable as even just general seating.
Didn’t Canada just now passed a law legalizing assisted suicide for the homeless? THATs what I’d call their solution to homelessness/s
I believe Canada passed medically assisted death for those with terminal illness and other reasons. There is safeguards in place and steps that need to be taken it isn’t one doctor visit and you are done.
Except the concrete spikes under bridges are from China: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168175/Are-lethal-concrete-spikes-stop-beggars-sleeping-city-bridges-REALLY-Chinas-best-option-stop-homeless-problem.html
See, they even have a better resolution image that doesn’t conveniently make it impossible to distinguish the Chinese characters the ad on the wall has:
You can tell the capitalist solution by the desire to avoid lawsuits from injuries by sticking to the least potentially hazardous solutions, such as the bench. In some states they also have metal spikes that are rounded to avoid impalement and scrapes, and the density tends to be less to decrease the risk.
The communist solution is always right, so you must be the one that’s wrong, ergo no need to worry about lawsuits. Just select the cheapest option that can justify the city’s budget to the central government, since there’s no real checks and balances on it because hey, communist government, ergo right and already represents the community, so how can you beat perfection? Plus the punishments from the central government to the city authorities are so severe, that how could that encourage a culture of deceit and suppression among them!?
They are both despicable solutions, but since OP and commenter decided to make the false comparison … Maybe I should link the videos of the collapsing buildings, since these have been built upon the same principle in China.
Same solutions are also in a lot of other countries, apart, yes, China is called Communist, but really it’s not, only one party and one leader, not selected by the people and more capitalist as other things. Hostile architecture is the solution by a failed government or system, to keep the streets ‘clean’ of the signs of its failure, simply this, and it is a global problem
- https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/designing-for-typologies/a2564-15-examples-of-hostile-architecture-around-the-world/
- https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/28/world/gallery/hostile-architecture/index.html
- https://interestingengineering.com/culture/15-examples-of-anti-homeless-hostile-architecture-that-you-probably-never-noticed-before
- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2018/aug/21/hostile-architecture-an-uncomfortable-urban-art-in-pictures
- https://www.arrelsfundacio.org/en/hostil-architecture/
etc…
It’s funny how you can tell how able citizens are able to hold the governments of those countries accountable and how much they value life by the degree of a potential health hazard their hostile architecture is. It really doesn’t indicate a failed government just having them, just one that has failing social nets for the homeless.
A failed social system is always the consequence of a lack of social policies, either due to ineptitude or disinterest, inherent to neo-liberalism, when percentages in the stock market are more important than the well-being of the population. This is where poor and homeless people are produced, instead of preventing them from reaching this condition. Having a fixed home is a vital and basic condition for social reintegration, since without an address it is impossible to get a job or to even have a bank account and with this it is also impossible to get a home. A vicious circle that you enter once you are on the street. But there are other possibilities as shown in Finland, how to reduce Homelesness and with an inversion initial, above saving money in social costs.
Better as spikes in benches and under bridges.
Well, yeah, it’s a failing social system, not necessarily a failed government. I don’t disagree with you, but the reason that there’s no housing available is because it isn’t just the government, which in Finland is also a representative democracy, nor the economy, which in Finland is as capitalist as any euro.
It’s due to things like societies, cultures, and banking systems that create and foster housing and property bubbles. It’s due to things like the power dynamics between the socioeconomic disparity and the difference between the wealth of the governments entities in charge of these social systems versus the influence from business, private, and banking interests from the outside. Then there’s the laws where actually trying to help can make you more liable if you don’t provide enough aid or are held responsible for the condition of those you are helping, a fear particularly present to many people in the US and China alike.
Finland has a small socioeconomic gap between its extreme while being one of the richest per capita in the EU, but it also has much more control over who can become citizens, prioritizing wealthy neighbors over the rest of its migrants and trying to reduce it to keep it from saturating its social systems. Not every country can adopt the same solution without massive reforms and geographical shifts. It doesn’t mean that spikes in benches and under bridges are the solution.
The whole western World have a Capitalist system, but there are differences in different countries, depending on whether the left or the right governs, which is directly expressed in social rights and social support.
European capitalism is not nearly the same as that of the United States, a country where homeless people are manufactured en masse due to the total lack of social investment and labor rights. This as a final result costs the state much more money than investments in social projects and laws.
It is clear that the construction of social housing is a large investment, but it is profitable as a result, apart from creating jobs and increasing people’s general purchasing power, new income in public coffers by people who have managed to rebuild their lives. with a home, impossible when they were on the street, depending entirely on state aid without being able to contribute anything in exchange.
In Spain there are projects in this direction with the left gov, but not so much in the rest of Europe, mostly with governments on the right. The only thing missing for this is political will, nothing else.
These discussions on communism vs capitalism that devolve into comparing the US with the USSR are like discussing feudalism vs liberalism in 1825, when the only perceptible legacies of the French Revolution were the Reign of Terror and Napoleon’s degeneration into monarchy.
If you’re sensibly anticapitalist, for the love of Marx do not argue in favor of states that rejected all pretension of wanting to let the economy be democratically managed, ultimately turning into party-controlled hierarchies rather than socialism. If you’re a liberal in 1825 and rather than arguing in favor of ending serfdom and enfranchising everyone you keep going on about how Robespierre wasn’t really that bad, you’re politically useless.
I’m always confused at how people think communism and democracy are opposites. The indoctrination is crazy. They’re not even the same category of thing. Communism is an economic model where democracy is just about how leadership is decided. They can exist in the same country at the same time.
Communist theory explicitly tries to dispel the idea that political and economic structures are separate things. As such, communists intend to create democratic structures that can distribute resources in place of undemocratic market relationships which empower owners of capital.
Liberalism on the other hand believe that market relationships are inherently democratic. Therefore they may think that any attempt to replace them with a planned economy are undemocratic regardless of how such planning would be decided upon.
Ahhh right, but that’s not to say that the types of underlying structures aren’t interchangeable. Are you saying that communism is necessarily democratic?
Yes, most communists and especially Marxists believe communism must necessarily be fully democratic. It’s certainly true though that there is much debate about what types of democratic structures to use. Although most communists would probably agree that it would require a lot of trial and error to find an ideal system.
That said, communists generally seek to disenfranchise owners of capital from the decision making process up until the point they no longer exist as a class. Therefore in the transition to communism, full democracy may not be realized. This is the given reason for why Marxist Leninist countries generally suppress opposition parties but may allow for political affinity organizations around identity groups that suffer under capitalism, ie worker, youth, women’s organizations, etc.
So is the idea that the dictator scene is supposed to be an in between step?
Well Marx used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to describe how a transition would work in opposition to what he saw as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
However, if you’re talking about people like Stalin or Mao, you’ll find self proclaimed communists with a wide variety of opinions on the subject. That’s in part because gets difficult to sort propaganda from the truth of the matter. I also mean both western and communist propaganda. To have a guy going by “Joe Steel” as the leader of your republic of socialist workers councils isn’t exactly a subtle attempt to get buy in from working class people.
I think a lot of Marxists take sympathy with Lenin, and Lenin’s vision, they don’t necessarily like what the USSR became under Stalin. The principles of Soviet Democracy, for example, are appealing to many Lefitsts. “All power to the Soviets!”
That being said, ultimately the USSR serves as a great example of why Vanguardism can be good in overthrowing a bad system, but must be held far more accountable, or even dissolve after revolution. I know many MLs would probably shit on me for saying that, citing the CIA paper saying Stalin wasn’t a dictator, but I still think ultimately the form of government under Stalin and those who came after him is very dependent on who is in power. A more decentralized system would have checks against such issues.
My 2 cents as a leftist that isn’t an ML, but has spent time reading about the various leftist tendencies.
I’ll conclude it by saying I would have loved it if Lenin continued to live and stay in power, I wonder what the USSR would have looked like, maybe even today.
Lenin’s State and Revolution is great and set the foundations for the Bolshevik discourse that led to them being capable of leading a movement large enough to gain power over Russia, the problem is that not even Lenin himself was consistent with the principles he proposed. The idea that you can legitimately sustain some sort of pretension of achieving worker democracy when the Bolsheviks consistently ended up repressing all other leftist factions wasn’t coherent, to the point that Stalin wasn’t a sad degeneration of Leninist practice, but a necessary consequence.
We unfortunately see the same result in almost all countries that followed the ML model, where a party elite ends up monopolizing power and divorcing itself from the rest of society, ultimately instituting themselves as a separate class that sees no ideological issue with bringing back capitalism, as they find it to be more consistent with the really existent power dynamics in the country.
Literally most of the work people cite from Lenin is just him defending his own hypocrisy. It really says a lot that people will be all “dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t mean dictatorship” and then go on to cite Lenin glibly saying that civil war is good because it teaches the peasants how to shoot. It’s simply not a well thought out framework for statecraft.
And all of this is summarized quite nicely in Animal Farm
Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.
It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”
https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/
I’ll also throw in Asimov’s review of 1984 while I’m ranting about this creep
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
framework for statecraft
I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It’s sort of an “I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls” shibboleth.
I liked Homage to Catalonia
you mean his complaining about having to do something besides being a colonial cop?
Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis
Anyone who has actually studied political science has nothing but contempt for what Lenin did with his opportunity. At this point if you are ignoring all the hindsight of the 20th century, you are campist, not a communist. Which is what describes most of the lemmy communists.
your argument gives proof you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about
But have you considered, it sounds nice to people who don’t know history or theory?
This is a golden take. We seriously need to communicate it to the Left.
most on the left already agree
People tend to argue that commie blocks look depressing and dystopian but you can actually make very pretty neighborhoods with them.
This is where I live. It’s called Oyak Sitesi in Turkey/Antalya and it’s a beautiful place with an actual community. Very affordable too. We just did a stability test and they were also very durable to earthquakes.
Just because you’re making blocks doesnt also mean that they have to be 20 stories tall either. Here is my old house.
What if, and hear me out on this one, the problem isn’t which “-ism” is prevalent. The real problem is that ANY form of power or society needs checks and balances. If those are missing or not enforced, then everything goes to shit. It’s a balancing act, not just a matter of black or white.
Why a lot of people on Lemmy like communist so much? As a person who grow up in a country which is almost destroyed by the communist party in the past I don’t know what to say just why?, capitalist or not it’s depends on your own country’s government, at least you still can talking shit about them without getting arrested and torture to death, have we not learn from the past or other communist country, why don’t you live in North Korea or China and see how’ve you like it
Please, not this again… Personally, I am a lot in favour of communism. But some people, especially US Americans, have a fundamentally wrong idea about the housing shown in the upper picture.
This is often neither cheap, nor does it reduce homelessness. And it’s also not the goal of that kind of rental homes to reduce homelessness.
That is just normal homes of average people in many places.
It’s not “cheap housing for everyone”.
Those houses were built by state-backed actors to support growing urbanization and create a housing surplus for that urbanization to give the workers more power since they no longer have to deal with aggressively rent-seeking private landlords.
Wait, isn’t that communism?
No they weren’t built to give “the workers more power”. You still have landlords and sometimes hefty prices on these apartments. Depending on the country/city.
Excess housing supply doesn’t commoditize housing and give working-class people more choice? Hmm…
No, that’s a welfare state
Welfare state would be if the state took over half the rent payments, for example. Building more houses, that are not owned by the government is examplatory of a planned economy and the aspect of doing it to give more negotiating power to the average worker is a communistic idea.
This is often neither cheap, nor does it reduce homelessness.
If we are talking about cities, humant colonies are cheapest housing. Buuut kinda crap.
And it’s also not the goal of that kind of rental homes to reduce homelessness.
Don’t look like rental homes to me.
Why doesn’t it look like rental homes? I think it does. We had a lot of buildings built here in Northern Europe where I’m at that they built between 1965-1975 in the suburbs of our capital city when they built a large number of apartments during those years to alleviate the shortage of available homes.
People still live in them today, they are not beautiful but they are functional, and it’s all rentals pretty much.
They aren’t rental in Russia. And likely in most if not all ex-Soviet states.
How do they not look like rental homes? We have similar building in Germany. They are mostly build by companies and smaller versions of these homes are even build by private people. Because like this you can maximize profit on your property.
Or build affordable housing, if goal is not maximizing profit. They at least aren’t rental where I live.
There is a reason why cringe tankie bullshit is the worst enemy of actual leftist policy.
In the 2000s and onwards yes. Because often these were sold to private investors in the capitalization of former communist/socialist countries.
At the time when they were built they did provide a great improvement in housing, especially as most of eastern Europe has been terrible destroyed by the Nazis.
that kind of rental homes
The top picture isn’t capitalism; there are no landlords.
What are you talking about? Of course these type of buildings have landlords.
Why do you have to bother me with an inbox notification if you can’t even follow what the conversation is about?
This is not communist solution, this is half-socialism humant colony solution.
Real communist solutions look like this:
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Yeah!
At least until autmn when trees become so sad, that they cry with all their leaves and fill you with their sadness.
But spring and summer totally worth it. And even during winter there are beautiful sights sometimes.
Autumn’s beautiful though. It’s just that shorter days and the reason can make it a bit depressing.
Pretty sure thats Pripyat.
Shit still looks better than a tent under a bridge you know.
There is a thing called “homeless shelter” and Im pretty sure its more than just a tent
More and worse. Been there. Done that. Got stalked in the shower by a mentally ill guy and they did fuck all about it.
Do you think they let you live there permanently?
In pretty much every country other than the US they do, these images are always very strange because they’re so focused on the US.
If they can live there permanently, they’re not homeless, are they? And that sounds surprisingly anti-capitalistic, almost like what this meme is talking about.
Getting these people help makes sense from a capitalist perspective too, help them and they can work again and probably do a full life of that. It really isn’t anti-capitalist.
Yeah they do, actually. At least in most countries…
Then they’re not homeless. If you have a place where you can live as long as you like, you have a home.
A shelter is not a residence
Why is it not a residence if you can stay there indefinitely? That sounds like a residence to me. The Internet tells me that ‘residence’ means ‘the place in which one lives; a dwelling.’ If they don’t ever have to leave, they live there.
So homeless people dont exist then? Because where I live, everybody could go to a shelter for as long as they like.
If they don’t live in a shelter indefinitely, yes. They are homeless.
Not sure what the difference is. They are both pictures of high density buildings.
Height and what surrounds them.
That’s a framing difference for the photo.
And age…
Ugh, living in a forest like that sounds idyllic
There is no such thing as half socialism. There is only the oligarchy deigning to not be complete assholes, as long as you agree to beg.
I’m pretty sure that’s an issue with maintenance, not communism. And I’d still rather live there than in a tent.
So the same but more run down because the Capitalist regime that replaced communism doesn’t maintain them?
Is the point supposed to be that they haven’t been cleaned in a while?
Otherwise they don’t look that bad. 🤷
No one realizes what this is a picture of huh?
And it failed miserable, at that.
I live in north-east Germany in one of these Blocks (it was firmly renovated tho). It’s actually not bad. Most of them are build in Horseshoe shape so you have small parks inside. But it’s nearly impossible to hang anything to the wall without proper power tools. EDIT: typos
Yes, but since the wall isn’t paper you can hang really heavy stuff on your walls. I have a massive ghettoblaster sitting on a wooden board over my desk 🥰
Want to drill a hole? SDS plus and a good drill (more like two) is a bare minimum.
But you can hear your neighbors snoring.
Not just snoring 😅 👌
Sturdy walls, so good.
Brought to you by capitalism. Look at pictures of what those places looked like under communism.
Huh? I just wanted to say these blocks are not bad to live in. I belive in social market economy. Capitalism is a consuming flame, let’s put it in a furnace made out of rules and regulations and put it to work.
Capitalism has a solution to the tent problem though
UK - The home secretary is proposing new laws to restrict the use of tents by homeless people, arguing that many of them see it as a “lifestyle choice”.
Those were not built for homeless people.
They were built for the Prolitariat, which homeless folks are quite literally a part of.
No duh, they were built to be very affordable so you wouldn’t have as many homeless people. It’s incredible that you thought that answer was somehow insightful
And yet they still would affect the rate of homelessness.
So they affect shit volume produced on a toilet.
Not in the UK. Our government is looking to ban the tents next. That’ll fix the homeless issue 😕
Communism’s solution to homelessness is mass starvation.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
do you believe Iraq had WMDs too?
I’d say that I’m rather anti communistic but one thing that has never happened in used-to-be communist country i have experience with is starvation.
Actually they solved starvation, built fcking appartments for everyone to live in and gave them to people for free. They also made sure every forgotten village had drinakble water, electricity , gas, shop, train station and bus stop.Reason why people overthrown them was humans rights repression like taking away people’s businesses to make them state companies. It was not poor the living conditions (for the time).
Capitalism’s solution to homelessness is mass starvation… in underdeveloped countries. With a side of bombs. All in the name of democracy
The USSR and China were pretty developed at the time of their mass starvations.
US. Samesies. Forced starvation during the trail of tears.
We can play the 'Whataboutthis" game if you want.
That was an intentional genocide. Do you think that is somehow exclusive to capitalism?
Nearly all famines are cause by war, natural disasters, or intentional ethnic cleansing.
There are only a handful of examples in which famine was caused by poor economic decisions and nearly all of the modern examples were by communist governments trying to dictate the price of food.
I’m not even advocating for capitalism. But I’m also not going to sit here and ignore history. China, even today, is dependent on food imports from capitalist countries.
And also just homelessness. It’s pretty amusing that people believe there are no homeless people in Russia or China. China in particular is amusing because they have massive empty apartment blocks, but they still have homeless people because the hukou caste system means they aren’t allowed to live outside their birth city.
Its pretty amusing that people still believe Russia and China are communist. Next your going to tell me the Nazi’s were socialist and North Korea is a Democratic Republic, just because it’s in their name.
Ah, the classic “THOSE ARENT REAL COMMUNISTS” arguments. And Jeff Bezos isn’t a real capitalist.
If its a response that is “classic” why don’t you have a rebuttal?
Typing it all in caps doesn’t make it not true. Words have meanings, Russia and China both have private corporations run for profit. They do have some socialist policies, but they certainly do not have economic systems characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
If you keep having people tell you “those aren’t real communists”, then just maybe you should reevaluate your definition of Communism.
And if you need to incorporate market economics everytime you try to form a utopia, maybe you should reevaluate your definition of Communism.
Next you’re gonna tell me Trump actually won the election. By your logic it must be true, people keep repeating it after all.
Saying “maybe you should reevaluate” =/= “must be true”. People did reevaluate if Trump won the 2020 election (a bit too many times frankly), and every time it came up to be a false claim. As is the case with your definition of Communism.
Furthermore, I did not try to setup a Utopia, nor did I call Russia, China, or Communism in general a Utopia. So I’m kinda confused about why you even brought that up… Regardless, even if Russia and China did add market economies, that wouldn’t change the definition of Communism, just the type of economies those countries have.
I think what you meant to say was “If countries that have tried to implement Communism consistently add Market Economics, then perhaps Communism is not a self-sufficient system, and as such it is not a comprehensive solution to the ills of Capitalism”. Which again wouldn’t change the definition of Communism, but would at least be a coherent argument.
Perhaps you need to change your definition of re-evaluate, and of… definition.
P.S. Just curious, do you ever get tired of misrepresenting the positions you are arguing against?
People keep denying it, trying to bury it, but it’s historical fact.
If any bad thing that happens under a nominally communist system is the fault of communism, then any bad thing that happens in a nominally capitalist system must be the fault of capitalism, right? Capitalism has an awful lot of slavery, genocide, apartheid, coloialism, wars of choice, and other evils to answer for, then.
Yes. Concentration of power is bad no matter the economic system.
Yes, all of the evils of capitalism are constantly commented on. This isn’t the CNN comments section.
All typed on a device and shared over a network designed and facilitated by capitalism.
It would be a whole lot easier for me to take you seriously if you actually lived what you preach.
You are very intelligent.
Thank you. I was educated in government run schools. Yay communism!
The internet wasn’t designed by Capitalism. It was a government funded program. It would be a lot easier for me to take you seriously of you didn’t make shit up to prop up an ideology.
So the undersea cables, radio towers, satellites that are the very lifeblood of the Internet were the result of communism? Cause last I checked telecommunication networks and infrastructure are one of the most glaring examples of capitalism doing what it does best. The resources and will were all motivated by capitalism. If not for capitalism the Internet would have stayed a niche government program and not gained worldwide adoption.
First off, just because something is developed in the public sector does not make it Communist. If you don’t know what words mean, don’t use them please. I don’t have time to go over definitions.
Secondly, the ground work for undersea cables, radio towers and satellites were indeed a direct result of work and funding from the public sector. The private sector wanted nothing to do with the internet until the mid 90’s when enough work had been done that it was deemed “profitable”.
A better example of what Capitalism does best would be adding advertisements to the internet, or the fact that Americans pay more per megabit than any European country on average.
What? The early Internet underseas cables were laid down for phones, mostly by private companies.
And it was improved at an incredible pace by private industry.
This is not a valid argument ecause everything surrounding us is designed and facilitated by capitalism, and certainly all our electronics, there’s no such thing as computers independent from capitalism. There weren’t even in the soviet union. So it’s not possible for this anon to actually live what they preach unless they went full anarcho-primitivism.
Not that it would matter anyway, because you’re allowed to criticize a system that you participate in.
So you’re saying capitalism isn’t the pure evil it’s portrayed as here?
Nothing here is portraying capitalism as pure evil, it’s highlighting a problem that we currently have as a society. I find it really weird how eager you are to argue while not really having a point to make.
Completely false. The implication of this post (and most posts here) is capitalism=bad and communism=good. Capitalism certainly has its faults, but comparing it to communism and portraying communism as the shining beacon on the hill is just laughable. Someone else here said it better than I ever could, “Communism’s solution to homelessness is mass starvation”. I just find it ridiculous that the very system which allows people the resources to sit around wasting time online is the system they constantly rail against.
Answer me this, if this post ISN’T portraying capitalism as pure evil, but is instead simply highlighting a problem we have as a society, then why do I never see similar posts highlighting problems communist societies face? I only ever see communism being defended and/or held up as THE standard by which we should all strive.
What a convenient way for you to deflect any opinion you disagree with, “you criticize society yet you participate in it”
It is a historical fact that communist countries typically go through one last famine on their way to ending periodic famines in the country forever, and sometimes they’re worse than normal due to the kinks being ironed out and social unrest.
How is that not a valid critique? I despise Apple as a company. As a result I refuse to purchase any of their products or use any of their services. To this day I have never purchased a single Apple product. I do this because I have conviction and standards.
1st world communists like to denigrate capitalism, yet live comfortable lives because of it. That shows zero conviction or standards.
That’s the fascist solution to this problem. Don’t worry, capitalism is considering it.
