Europe should have then heavily invested in EVs, clean energy and forced manufacturers to switch. Now China has the technological edge and consumers are to pay the price if we stay with our shitty expensive oversized EVs. The fact that European capitals aren’t crammed full of micro-EVs like the Wuling Hongguang is actually sinful.

Oh we will change plenty, a lot of change like this has been achieved, much more than through individualist means. China uplifted a billion+ people from poverty, the USSR 300-400 million, and plenty of land and housing collectivization was carried out. Just wait for it ;)

That’s one way to look at it, but not how the accounts are drawn

The accounts ideologically being drawn otherwise is purely political, and the fact that neoliberalism propagates lies about the way taxes work is a tool to serve the powerful. If people realize we could just create money to make state-funded job guarantees with low risk of inflation, capital is fucked.

it’s part of a complex system that balances resource availability, and promotes productivity

Austerity policy has kept Europe at essentially 0 net growth on average since 2008. That doesn’t look too productive to me

In most western countries (EU aside), governments have central banks capable of literally minting an unlimited amount of currency. The US government can create an unlimited amount of US Dollars, Canada with Canadian, UK with Pounds, Japan with Yen. If the government can, by definition and at a keyboard stroke, create as much currency as it wants, it becomes self-evident that the purpose of taxation cannot be the funding of the state, because the state can get an unlimited amount of funding without recurring to taxes.

Taxes are a form of money destruction, i.e., removal from the private sector. This serves anti-inflation purposes, but also can be used to redistribute wealth (by destroying more currency from individuals with more wealth than others), to discourage behaviors (destroy currency when consuming unhealthy products such as sugar of tobacco through specific taxes), and also importantly, to enforce the usage of your currency (if people are compulsorily and regularly taxed in one currency, they need to earn that currency, and if they don’t they’ll be subjected to penalties).

But communism isn’t very successful really. Most places that tried it are dirt poor and don’t have enough housing and what they do have is pretty

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union was building over two million housing units per year, more than any other developed economy in the world.

China is the big example here and Cuba is another

China literally executes corrupt politicians, what the fuck are you talking about

The problem isn’t with the amount of work they had to do to buy the housing, the problem is with the dynamics the relation between a private landlord and a tenant create.

For a landlord, the primary interest when renting a flat is obtaining profit. This immediately implies that, by default, rent caps are against the interest of landlords, creation of public affordable housing is against the interests of landlords, and laws difficulting or eliminating evictions are against the interests of landlords. All of these measures would be massively beneficial to tenants, which most working class people are, and they’re not implemented in order to maintain the profit of a select minority of owners that extract wealth monthly from them without providing any service.

The solution is collective ownership of housing. Housing is a right, as much as healthcare or education, and centralizing and socializing housing would ensure affordable access for everyone, as it has historically.

Housing could be owned by unions, by local councils, by the central government or by all of the above, and then rented at maintenance costs to tenants under no threat of eviction. This was the case in the Soviet Union for example, and led to the total elimination of homelessness and to the average rent costing 3% of the average monthly income.

You can do both, I don’t see the problem with doing anticapitalist propaganda on the internet, it’s probably what pushed me most towards organizing

I don’t know why you keep bringing up the word “ideal”. Marxists are opposed to idealism, we’re staunch materialists. Saying that “things change over time and place” doesn’t automatically negate historical examples , and following those historical examples doesn’t imply not achieving progressive victories over time.

You claim to follow the path that works, but that’s what the western left has been following for the past 50 years and look where that led us.

I’m glad you’re a human with empathy and good intentions, but tenants shouldn’t be in a position that their housing (one of the most fundamental rights of people) relies on the good will of whatever landlord they happen to be stuck with.

Why not though? The experiments done in housing nationalization have been extremely successful in abolishing homelessness and guaranteeing access to affordable housing. In Cuba, if you study in (completely free) public university, the state assigns you a flat at no cost. In the Soviet Union, housing used to cost 3% of monthly incomes back in the 1970s.

Imagine the possibilities that we could get with 50+ years of technological and industrial development if we nationalized housing in the west…

It’s not a utopia, housing has been nationalized successfully in several countries, with the result of the abolition of homelessness, extremely affordable rent (think 3% of monthly incomes), and evictions essentially not existing.

I’m all for revising zoning laws, enacting rent caps, and other transitional measures, but the end goal should be the collectivization of housing, which would eliminate the parasitism altogether.

I’m genuinely happy for you getting a good landlord, but access to housing shouldn’t be conditioned by being lucky to get a decent and altruistic landlord (a minority in people’s experience, hence the massive upvotes of the post).

Marxist here. The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right, whereas rental of a car isn’t and neither of a hotel room. It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.

You are right in that landlords offer a commodity in demand for a fee, but it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work: it’s purely an unnecessary wealth transfer from wealth-less individuals who can’t afford a home to wealthy individuals who could afford (or more likely inherited) one. We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.

As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income. We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant

It’s only a parasitic financial relationship when the rented property is on the hands of a private owner. We could totally have collectively/publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs, which would 100% remove the exploitation and parasitism

Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart

Your comparison is valid, but it works against your interests. Your local grocer, as a business owner, is every bit against rising minimum wage as Walmart is: both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased, so the class relations between them and their workers make them support anti-worker-rights policy.

In the same manner, your local landlord has every reason to be as opposed to measures such as rent caps or rent freezes as BlackRock.

Yes, rent should exist as an alternative to home ownership, but the housing for rent should be publicly owned and rented at maintenance-cost prices as has been done successfully in many socialist countries before which managed to abolish homelessness. As an example, by the 1970s rent in the Soviet Union costed about 3% of the monthly average income. Can’t we do better than that 55 years of technological progress later?

I’m saying each community bans something different. I agree with banning fascist discourse, I dont agree with banning communist discourse. .world thinks otherwise and that’s why it’s shit IMO.

You were responding to a comment quoting Anna Louise Strong on the USSR, that’s why I brought it up.

Communists are almost universally against UBI. As much as the right wing wants to portray us as lazy non working people, communists believe that everyone should contribute to society to the extent of their capabilities and should receive at least enough to have their needs covered. Or, as Marx put it, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.

UBI is a patch to capitalism. The idea behind it presupposes the existence of unemployment, which communists are fundamentally against. There is no need for unemployment, it’s a fairly new invention (no unemployment in most societies before the industrial revolution), and many nations overcame it (there was no unemployment in the USSR and AFAIK there’s none in Cuba either). Communists want to guarantee to everyone capable of working a decent job, and to people without the physical capabilities to work (due to heavy disabilities, age, or whatever reason) there would be specific aid.

You’re not doing materialist analysis of reality. If the USSR had been ruled by a selfish cadre of self-selected bureaucrats, it wouldn’t have continuously reduced wealth inequality to the point of being the most equal country on earth. It wouldn’t have universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed affordable housing or guaranteed jobs. It wouldn’t have had walkable urban planning in the mikroraion system, affordable good quality public transit, affordable and subsidized basic foodstuffs, and it wouldn’t have been the case that by the 1960s there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined.

For an example of the results of something closer to what you call a dictatorship, you can look at the social and economic results in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of workers are immigrants whose passports are taken away and work for misery wages in what effectively is an apartheid state.