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?
Riverside
joined 2 weeks ago
You can spread your anticommunist propaganda as much as you want, I gave you numbers and facts.
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.
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 if you compare it to comparably developed countries such as India
Currents aren't drawn incorrectly. Electrons do move backwards, but since their electric charge is negative, the current goes the correct way.
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).
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?
So, build the housing socially by legal mandate. Only in capitalism "housing is too cheap" can be a bad thing
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.
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?
And how exactly will they purchase a home in Ukraine if they're spending their income to pay your mortgage?