Definitely not a politically motivated decision, totally nothing to do with Tiktok’s role as the only non-US-based mass social network, absolutely not because of pro-Palestinian views on TikTok! Europe is totally free and there’s no censorship :D

EU for the past 40 years: “yeah let’s destroy all our industry, degrade and defund welfare, and rely on external countries for our energy needs, that will surely work wonderfully!”

Britain industrialized first in history precisely because of its wide colonies. Exploitation of the global south is not a precondition for industrialization (see China, USSR), but it was one of the key factors that kickstarted the industrial revolution.

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?

Why not remove the concept of landlords altogether then? Collectivizing the lands would be an even more complete version of land tax

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.

And how exactly will they purchase a home in Ukraine if they’re spending their income to pay your mortgage?

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?

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

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?

Not that imaginary: Bezos sold $5.7bn worth of stock in 2025.

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.

The post: “rent is a tax that poor people pay TO RICH PEOPLE[…]”. The problem is obviously private landlordism, not social housing in the form of rent

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!