Riverside
@Riverside@reddthat.com
- Comment on France is next 4 days ago:
Henry Morgenthau be like
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 4 days ago:
I’m aware, I personally use no shoes at home ever
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 5 days ago:
Spaniard here. “Shoes-on” is mostly for when you have guests over. You’ll wake up in the morning and use slippers, only put on shoes to go to outside, and when you come back home you’ll remove the shoes typically in your bedroom (unless wet or dirty). But when you have guests over, everyone wears shoes typically, even hosts.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
But why leave the building initiative in the hands of the market+tax instead of just collectively making political decisions about what gets built where?
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Why not remove the concept of landlords altogether then? Collectivizing the lands would be an even more complete version of land tax
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
If it wasn’t for that we would either be homeless or be all living in my grandparents’ house
Or you could become tenants from a wholesome small landlord! I wonder why that wasn’t in your possibilities?
Are we the assholes if we rent our house in order not to force my parents to work 200 hours a week since salaries here barely reach 800€ a month?
So the people renting your apartment will be the ones working 200 hours a week instead? The lifestyle of your parents depends on other people paying them rent and you still can’t understand why private rent is theft?
what we need is strong national regulation, not banning renting houses altogether
The “stronger national regulation” needed is the expropriation of rented housing to a collectively owned rent organization, and the masse-construction of affordable housing for social rent, and the rent of all of this housing stock at production+maintenance costs.
To be clear: most people would do what you’re doing in your situation. But the fact that your family is escaping overwork and poverty through renting one of their flats simply means that another poor person who can’t afford to buy a flat is subsidizing their lifestyle. It’s not that your family are intrinsically evil people, it’s that private rent is exploitative by its very nature.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
And how exactly will they purchase a home in Ukraine if they’re spending their income to pay your mortgage?
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
You can blabber all you want about the great leap forward, the fact still stands that Mao liberated China and Korea from Japanese occupation, removed the fascists of the Kuomintang, and doubled life expectancy. Mistakes happened, but his mandate was still overwhelmingly positive and material life prospects bloomed as a result. How many people died of starvation in China during Maoism, and how many in India in the corresponding period?
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
You can spread your anticommunist propaganda as much as you want, I gave you numbers and facts.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
the government would also have to pay for it. That means rising taxes
Not necessarily. The government literally prints the money with which workers can be paid, there’s no need to increase taxes to pay for such housing. Modern monetary theory is cool!
But at the moment, we are quite far from that. I’d already be pretty happy if the government would stop selling their governmental buildings
Yes, we’re far, but that doesn’t make reformist measures more likely, they’re impossible to carry out without huge worker organizing through unions and socialist parties.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
He didn’t starve tens of millions, millions of people starved yearly in China before Mao since it was a preindustrial country. Mao found a China with below 30 years of life expectancy, and left a China with 55+ years of life expectancy, Chinese communism literally saved tens of millions of lives in that era.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society
I’ve yet to find any serious study talking of “widespread corruption” in the USSR compared to countries of equal level of development. This is entirely vibes-based.
the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything
Income inequality was the lowest in the USSR in the history of the region, by a long shot. Again, you’re making stuff up:
housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant
Yes, but housing was primarily accessed through the work union. Housing near a factory went to the workers of said factory, people mainly got to live near where they worked.
You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone
Again, as if bribes don’t happen in capitalism. In capitalism, you don’t “bribe” someone to get a house, you’re just poor enough not to afford it and you rent for life instead. Waiting lists, while unpleasant, are the more egalitarian solution. How else do you propose distribution of limited housing in a rapidly industrializing country that’s moving tens of millions of people from the countryside to cities?
But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg
Care to share any of that wonderful data about housing prices in Soviet Leningrad or Moscow? Regardless: your analogy of “being a miner in Siberia” is dumb. Lifestyle in the countryside and in smaller cities was highly subsidized, but that’s a good thing. Now hospitals are closed, roads aren’t maintained, and schools are left underfunded everywhere outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, making life especially in non-Slavic regions of Russia much worse than it used to be. It’s not that people want to move to Moscow, it’s that there are no jobs or infrastructure outside three big cities, and that’s really bad for many people. I don’t see what you have against living in relatively minor cities like Murmansk, Ulan-Ude or Tomsk, provided there are jobs and infrastructure (which there were).
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism
Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don’t understand how a referendum can be illegal).
the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m
Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn’t need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
So, build the housing socially by legal mandate. Only in capitalism “housing is too cheap” can be a bad thing
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Why the fatphobia? No need to insult Mao based on his body.
Tankies still to this day praise him for executing landlords
Rightfully so, too. Life expectancy in China doubled under Mao. If India had had its own socialist revolution, it wouldn’t be very different from China in terms of life outcomes, unfortunately for them they didn’t have one.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Source for the 7mn Khrushchevki? That number seems entirely too low. Maybe you’re not counting Brezhnevki? Because I remember figures of more than a million housing units being built yearly.
While “US becoming communist” is not achievable on the short term, “regulatory policy to improve rent under capitalism through reform” has even less of a background if you ask me. Like, housing is getting worse everywhere under capitalism, and better nowhere. What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
The USSR had such dorms for students and people in waiting lists for housing, idk if they were technically free but the fee was ridiculous if it existed. Rent, for example, was 3% of the monthly incomes. I do think we should have such social housing, both in flat-form and in dorm-form, for whoever wants to rent a very cheap housing unit.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
The post: “rent is a tax TO RICH PEOPLE[…]”. The problem is obviously private landlordism, not social housing in the form of rent
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
I edited my comment and added the second paragraph, not your fault you didn’t see it :)
Communism doesn’t actually say anything about wanting everyone’s income equal, I’ve only seen this claim by anticommunists before. Communists simply believe that people should earn according to their labor, and not according to the exploitation of others’ labor. For example, the Soviet Union had widespread use of work quotas which, when exceeded, granted workers a higher wage. As an example, the Stakhanovite movement did wide promotion of work effectiveness and of rewarding exemplary workers, both through monetary and through social incentives.
I personally don’t believe there’s much place for capitalism at all, but that’s a very deep ideological topic that’s far beyond the scope of this post. If you’re interested on discussing this, however, I’m very open to this topic!
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
a world without rent entirely is a really stupid idea that only ever seems uttered and promoted by Tankies
Meanwhile, in the USSR, nobody owned housing privately, most housing was accessed through the work union, and was rented at about 3% of monthly costs. You clearly, CLEARLY haven’t ever engaged with a Tankie (such as myself) on the topic of housing.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
fair
market value
Choose one
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage
Holy fuck, my sides. How can you be this BLIND to reality?
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
What’s “a fair price”? 1% over production + maintenance costs is already exploitative, in the sense that rich people who can afford to buy the flats will do so because they will get passive income from it, and poor people who can’t afford housing will be forced to rent at prices higher than otherwise.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Let’s translate yours: “I cannot conceive of a social housing system similar to that of social healthcare, in which people are guaranteed housing at affordable prices by law”
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Well, yes, I’m a communist, but seeing the housing in literally every western capitalist country suffering from the same issues, I have 0% of hope that the issue of housing will be solved within capitalism. Capitalists are in power and they’re the ones owning the housing, so they simply will prevent legislation from passing unless forced by worker organizing
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Then the government will need to purchase the houses / apartments from the current owners
Expropriation can be carried out without purchase, and it has been done in several countries to the great benefit of the workers. No need to pay for the housing of the landlords, we can just take it at gunpoint.
Then you’d still be paying rent, just to the government instead which will mostly go towards paying administrators that don’t care or do anything just like current landlords
Who says the housing has to be centrally administered? Housing could absolutely be organized by local collectives in charge of the maintenance of the buildings after its construction, likely in the form of democratically elected councils. As an example, most access to housing in the USSR was through the work’s union, not through the central government.
Unless you mean all social government owned housing should be free
No, people should pay costs to maintain it. For example, rent in the USSR was about 3% of the monthly income. Seems much better than what I pay now!
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
See there’s an issue you want a one size fits all that’s never going to happen
It’s happened historically in several countries, whereas georgism has happened in a total of 0.
Well through public ridicule or at gunpoint I’d imagine
Great. Now, who are the people organizing and agitating the workers to gather the numbers and strength to do this at gunpoint? Hint: again, not the Georgists
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
you will barely find anyone outside your family willing to lend you a home
Yes, that’s why housing ownership should primarily be socialized, and access to affordable rent should be a right guaranteed by the public administration as much as healthcare and education.
rent is close to or less than 4% of property value annually
That’s still a worthless metric, though, rent should be proportional to construction costs + maintenance, not subjected to markets.
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner’s profit.
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets…
- Comment on Rent is theft 1 week ago:
Nothing. Abolish all private rent and socialize it
