The terror of having needs met!
Some people were so terrified of having apartments that they made up a guy and then got really mad that their made-up guy died.
It is scary, to capitalists.
The racism with the russian doll tops it off too.
It was terrible! Hordes of rampaging communists everywhere, leaving a trail of schools and hospitals in their wake.
It’s just anti-communist propaganda.
Anti-commiism is pro-fascism. There is no middle ground.
There is always something in the middle. These extremes are dividing people
What’s in the middle is just fascism with extra steps. You’re either on the side of people or you’re on the side of wealth. There isn’t a third option.
People are already divided into the exploiting and the exploited class. They can only choose which one of them they side with.
I am trembling and quaking in my boots every day waking up in this place I live in, knowing that the evil filthy authoritarian oppressive communism built it. I do not have the freedom of forking over thousands to a private landlord!
What if they build buildings so fast that they construct their way over the border in the middle of the night and come over here and grief me?
Is one those tourist trap museums like the Bansky one that are in every city in Europe?
is the museum being sarcastic ?
not really, czechia has even banned communism in some sort, they are heavily anti communist country.
If you want to see how free housing could be terrifying, read Manna by the late great Marshall Brain.
Or maybe you could just tell me the thrust of your point instead of instructing me to read an entire book?
But for the lazy:
spoiler
The novel explores the effects of mass automation on society. And unlike some sci fi novel set in a far distant future, it’s set in the present. This isn’t the Bulterian Jihad a thousand years in the future. It’s set in the here and now in our world.
In Manna, the machines don’t rise up and take over the world. Paperclip maximizers don’t run out of control and kill everyone. AI alignment isn’t even a problem considered in the novel. The novel explores the societal effects of the tech working completely as designed.
Automation gets deployed more and more. What jobs remain become increasingly dehumanized. Increasingly jobs are just literally being a meat robot for the computer. When working at a place like McDonalds, you put on a headset. The restaurant’s computer system tracks you through the day, micromanaging your time down to the second. It tracks every minor work action you perform. This starts in restaurants and customer service, but ultimately grows out from there to nearly all wage and salary jobs. This novel was written in the 2000s, but it predicted a lot of the algorithmic debasement we’ve seen with companies like Uber, Lyft, and Amazon and the slopification of jobs such as programming. Jobs also become more and more scarce, and the credit rating system becomes ever more onerous and interconnected. Pretty soon almost every employer is sharing the same employment records. If you get fired too many times, the central system blackballs you and you become unemployable.
This mass automation results in the vast majority of the population of the US being rendered destitute. Either to avoid rebellion or out of some limited sense of morals, the ownership class comes up with a solution. We don’t get UBI. We get fully automated
luxurycommunism.The same automation that impoverished the populace also makes it very cheap to construct mass-produced buildings. The federal government scoops up vast swathes of empty land in places like Western Kansas and the Nevada desert. This is where the surplus population is warehoused. The government uses automated construction to build giant high rise complexes hundreds of miles from any work opportunities or population centers. They’re basically giant dorms in the middle of nowhere. You have a simple space with a bed, desk, and entertainment. You live with a roommate. You eat in a communal cafeteria. The buildings are maintained, the interiors cleaned, and the food all prepared through automated systems. These aren’t prisons per say. The people in them aren’t being punished. They’re simply being stored somewhere where they won’t bother the wealthy. Imagine a vast building the size of a city’s downtown and many stories tall. A single building capable of housing millions in a vast windowless labyrinth. This is the reality for most of the population. You get a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, a nutritionally sufficient diet and unlimited access to tv, video games, etc. Bread and circuses on a mass scale.
And moving to one of these facilities is not voluntary. If you lose your job, you have a short window to find another, demonstrate some other source of income or independent wealth, or be ticketed and arrested for vagrancy. The old vagrancy laws are brought back in force, and the vast majority of the population ends up being dumped into these facilities.
Once there, escape is nearly impossible. There are no walls or armed guards. But the only real way out is to have someone on the outside come and sign paperwork saying they’re willing to support you financially. You’re allowed to walk out the door and meander the trails around the buildings. But if you wander too far, a sentry robot comes up and starts giving you vague warnings about it being dangerous to go further. Keep going and you’ll find yourself knocked out by a tranquilizer dart and wake up back in your dorm room. And there’s no real way to apply for work. The few people with jobs on offer aren’t looking for people trapped in these facilities. Unless you have some caring financially independent relative willing to take you in, you’re trapped in the government dorms forever.
The novel describes how this was a deliberate choice to manage the excess population. The characters mention that the facilities are built tightly enough and isolated enough that if the destitute in these complexes ever rose up in rebellion, the government could just drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on them. They could completely eliminate the excess population in an hour with no collateral damage to anything else. Individual dorms are sex-segregated, and those couples that do still manage to form report that any attempts at having children are unsuccessful. They conclude that birth control drugs must be in the food or water.
In Manna, automation finally forces the US to build a proper welfare state. But automation also makes it possible to do so cheaply. And the US has never been known for its compassionate treatment of the destitute. The government doesn’t leave everyone to starve. It just warehouses everyone, keeps them from reproducing, and lets the problem solve itself in time. You never have to fear physical deprivation. You will not starve or die of exposure. But you lose absolutely any bit of control or agency over your own life. The government isn’t supporting you. It’s storing you somewhere out of the way where you can’t cause any trouble.
It’s called making an allusion or reference. Summaries are easy enough to look up if you don’t want to put in the time to read the whole thing. But honestly, it’s something anyone should read. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that I can truly describe as prophetic.
I don’t need a lecture, apparently you’re not aware that when you recommend something to somebody, you should at least give them a vague idea of what the subject matter is and why they should be reading it.
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For the people who these houses were built for, absolute poverty, devastation, and squalor preceded mass-produced housing. World War II was incredibly devastating in Europe, leaving millions without a home at all. The communists took on the enormous task of meeting this monumental need, and did so enormously well.
For the unhoused, a solid apartment with basic necessities and the ability to keep out the rain and cold is enormous.
I think broadly, the life-saving and pro-human efforts are simultaneously so important to our cause as communists but also difficult to articulate. A death statistic is easy; you just count the bodies. A life statistic is harder. There’s rising life expectancies and lowered child mortality, but fundamentally it’s really difficult to find people and point them out and say “in the alternate timeline where communists weren’t there, this person would be dead.”
One example that’s really clear, for instance, is communism’s opposition to fascism. Without this opposition, Eastern Europe, China, and likely the rest of the world would have been enslaved/genocide by the nazis and imperial Japan, at least for an extended period. The USSR’s opposition to nazism was so life-saving that Western Europe almost went communist, if not for the Marshall Plan. But this one is very transparent. Pointing out the importance of having an apartment vs being homeless from war and poverty, as you have highlighted, are all much subtler.
Yep! Like you said, the death statistics are, even if often manipulated, fairly easy to see. What’s far more difficult to elaborate on is the impact of housing, of free healthcare. There’s also the quality of life improvements, like free education and mass literacy programs. Literate people take literacy for granted, the sheer way life opens up with the written word is not to be made light of, and sometimes literacy rates multiplied by as much as ten times in some regions of the USSR.
Show much freedom thanks to Reagan… 🙄
we have neocons on lemmy now?
Nazi.world at it again
Okay how this account is no banned yet?
I don’t think people got Your sarcasm.
I thought it was obvious sarcasm as well until I read their followup comments
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are you talking about USA and ICE? but they dont have free housing there
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Do you think good and evil are meaningful explanations for the outcomes of societies, or do you think the underlying mode of production and distribution is a better indicator of who prospers and who suffers in a given society?
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That doesn’t answer my question. What decides who prospers and who suffers? Good and evil, or the way a society produces and distributes?
In the socialist bloc, the lives of the working classes, the industrial workers and peasants, were enormously uplifted. Like the example above, housing was a high priority for socialist states, who used a mass housing campaign on a scale unprecedented in history. Life expectancy in Russia doubled in the span of a couple decades from the low 30s. Literacy rates also skyrocketed to 99.9%, when in some regions native languages weren’t even alphabetized. All of these are examples of the gains of socialism.
If the workers generally won out, who suffered as compared to before? The aristocracy, nobility, landlords, and capitalists did. On an unprecedented scale, their prior places of privledge were ruthlessly attacked, their armies killed, and those who resisted were rather mercilessly gunned down. Their property was appropriated for the new ruling class, the working class.
My point here is that societies are not good or evil. What determines who benefits most in society is largely what class dominates society and runs it in their own interest. The socialist countries are exceptional not because they are morally just, but because the ruling class for the first time in history was also the majority of society, rather than a tiny minority.
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I am not arguing from a position of a supernatural good and evil, but from the simple basis that I support the working classes, who form the broad majority. The Czech Republic, with the rest of the socialist bloc, represented the working classes, while the US supports a tiny number of imperialist capitalists above all else.
As for copy-paste, I did no such thing. I’ll own up to it being propaganda, in that I am nakedly a communist trying to convince people of the necessity to move on to socialism, but that doesn’t mean what I said is incorrect. You can read, I also believe you can answer my questions.
It’s you who are deciding what’s happening now in the USA is evil and what happened in the Czech Republic was good.
Firstly, the only way that you can claim that what was going on in Czechoslovakia was worse than what is going on now, is it you think that people in Czechoslovakia were treated worse than the people that NATO holds under colonial subjugation, invades, and genocides.
Secondly, let’s be honest, people in Czechoslovakia had some of the highest living standards on the planet. If you disagree, do please explain how much worse their lives were than, for example, those of the people forced to live in bantustans.oh god, another englightened centrist who’s actually just a fucking nazi. where do these breed?
Not being allowed to plunder Africa and Asia is not suffering.
good and evil is a childs way to infer the world.
And yeah communists mostly killed reactionaries, landlords, nazis, etc
Do you think concocting a cartoonish strawman is very convincing for the people who are increasingly sympathetic to socialism and communism?
The problem is that it worked in the US for many decades. It’s the ghost of the capitalist powers fear mongering away to prevent citizens from taking control of their own labor.
Yep, which is why we have to organize!
