happybadger [he/him]

Thanks to the strides made by the developed socialist economy, it recently became possible to launch the construction of houses by industrial methods. Let us see now how available housing has increased in the Soviet Union. The young Soviet state inherited from the tsarist regime altogether 180 million sq m of useful floor space in towns. This figure has by now been exceeded ten times, mounting to 1,860 million sq m. In the last decade alone, 34 million flats were constructed, which means that more than half the population and nearly three-quarters of the urban population live in new flats or houses. Since some people move into new flats and houses, those who remain in the old dwellings are less crowded, so the majority of working people have had their living conditions improved.

Houses are built in the Soviet Union at an increasing rate. Whereas in forty-odd years, 1917-1959, only about 500 million sq m of floor space in state-owned houses could be built, 545-550 million sq m of floor space will be put into operation during the current five-year period alone (1976-1980). Such is one side of the problem, which is that at the current stage the Soviet state really can provide its citizens with comfortable dwellings.

The other side of the problem is no less important. Rent in the Soviet Union is the lowest in the world, although it is paid for the use of modern dwellings with all conveniences. Soviet citizens are astonished to hear foreign visitors complain that rent consumes more than a third of their earnings. In the Soviet Union, rent comes on average to 5-6 per cent of earnings. Since there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union, and labour is in great demand, usually several members of a family have jobs and on this basis rent accounts at most for 2-3 per cent of the aggregate income of an average Soviet family. In many countries, as is known, apartment houses or tenements constitute a profitable industry.

The Soviet state, however, has never regarded rent as an item of revenue. Both in the past and at the present time rent in the Soviet Union is expended on the maintenance and preservation of houses. The great material possibilities for the construction of new houses and the social measures taken to ensure fair distribution of floor space at low rent thus make a real guarantee of the right of Soviet citizens to housing.

• ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism- https://ia801800.us.archive.org/8/items/ABCDialecticalHistoricalMaterialism_cleaned/ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism.pdf

Rent being 5-6% of your income and going to building maintenance is what I use to shut down this line of anticommunism. The commie blocs in Bucharest were so nice that they made me an urbanist.

I’m not them. I’m just a Marxist calling it out as self-defeating Orthodox Marxism.

Marx was also writing based on observing specific conditions in specific places 150 years ago. The point of Marxism is that it’s a way to coherently frame the things you’re currently observing as intersectionally as possible and test them against prior studies while checking your own personal biases. Most of my organising as a Marxist is in anarchist or democratic socialist orgs because they’re easier to start in the surveillance state that developed after Marx said this. They just don’t scale up as easily as an ML org like PSL, which maintains the same message with discipline in cities across the US. That higher level of organisation is equally important to anarchism’s ease with local organisation, more secure and more able to centralise and use resources.

two paths to the same outcome, two distinct levels of organisation that complement each other where the other falls short

All of the local signs were immediately taken down when Trump was reelected, but I searched for like 4 years for a single one that had an economic argument. Just one line on one sign that mentioned socioeconomics. Not once. It was pure Catholic indulgence for freaks in $500k+ homes. One of them said “in this house we believe water is a human right” and their mansion was on a private lake.

Hey gamers, I know where to find free top-tier RAM and GPUs. And you get to pretend you’re in a spy game.

Iran military defeated? In the Strait of Hormuz? At this stage of the war? May I see it?

I love when people plant them in outdoor seating areas and next to luxury apartments. It punishes people for bad horticulture.

What a perfect recipe. I kept thinking of ways I’d insult Israel more than what he was currently doing and it was just the next thing he did, down to throwing the whole dish in the trash.

If I had my way they’d be doing anything else with their lives and have a free education to achieve it because we aren’t funding the military. Trump had his way and they were blown up to do insider trading and distract from his paedophilia.

RIP In piss

“I’m not political”, but your boss and landlord are very political.

“I’m apolitical” - a political what?

Someone’s already taking care of your spouses back home. Embrace Annata and become pure.

It’s the cure for Romanovs so I consider it more legitimate medicine

Counterpoint: Rasputin is the Imperial Russian RFK Jr.

I once dated a UX developer. Their entire identity revolved around the fact that they made $120k per year, a duke in the labour aristocracy, and how much they loved the creative challenge of making a user-friendly interface. Their company? It designs smartlocks for luxury prepper bunkers. They told me that there was no backdoor built into the keypads they were programming 12 hours a day. They literally designed the thing that will kill them when they flee to the mountains next to them. It was a fun creative challenge to make locking them out of a tech CEO’s bunker more user-friendly.

It’s such a particular kind of Engineer Brain derangement. Motherfucker you live in the Andor Prison. You build the death star gear to bomb your own planet. You cannot be proud that you earned flavour in your slop ration that shift.

:cyber-warrior:

It’s Baby’s First Thought Terminating Cliche. I can’t hear it without remembering that perennial tweet about someone’s grandfather being the most steadfast anticommunist they know because he’s illiterate and communist propaganda could never reach him.

>/u/basketballfan7 has replied to your comment in /r/mycology- “wow thanks kind stranger! this is very helpful advice. I like foraging for mushrooms too and can’t wait to visit there.”

>click profile

>[everything else they post is Horny Mein Kampf]

I hate this version of it. Kicking the first Nazi out of the bar is so critical because they infect the non-political subforums. Every hobby, regional, and news aggregation subreddit immediately fills with fascists while the non-fascists don’t want to drink in the Nazi bar. Then all of a sudden you’re acting as Yelp for people who don’t think you’re a human and want to kill you, funneling them to your favourite spots and inviting them to your meetups. Reddit always felt like playing Russian roulette with posting. The feds and Nazis here are segregated to the Nazi bars that everyone can easily identify as such.

I’m just as much a socialist as you, but all of my positions conveniently line up with the US State Department’s and the only through line is violently enforcing white supremacy. Stand back while I use the word “tankie”