Cowbee

Sure, renting vs owning is fully accomodated by public and personal ownership. Private usury is a drain on social wealth.

Capitalist countries often have less freedom overall. When your needs are taken care of, and you have more control over how the economy is run, the average person has more freedom. There's nothing about capitalism that improves freedom for the average person, it's all used to justify maintaining imperialism and capitalist exploitation.

Different socialist systems have had different levels of development, policies, and social wealth, so there's no one comparison to a presumably western country. For starters, western countries have inflated social wealthy due to imperialism, which is not a benefit for socialist countries. Countries like the USSR had different systems from modern Cuba, the PRC, etc, but all have different houses, and different wages depending on jobs worked.

I don't have anything in-depth on hand, but surely you can see that eliminating usury from housing makes housing more affordable without needing to compromise on quality.

I said Marxists, not just leftists in general, though among anticapitalists the USSR is very popular. The overwhelming majority of Marxists support the Soviet Union.

Glad to hear things are looking up for you!

No, this thread got started when you tried to downplay the CIA's internal memo regarding Stalin's methods of leadership. Others denying that the photos were doctored by the USSR did come in, but after you made the initial comment. Your comment did one good thing though, it served as a nice springboard for me to address and contextualize.

To be fair, I don't doubt that the CIA may have embellished the extent to which photos were doctored as a part of its red scare tactics. Also, you still didn't answer my question about why shitting on Stalin is something you think MLs are supposed to do.

The utility of being able to borrow a use-value rather than needing to own it is a real thing, the form under capitalism is the problem, and is where exploitation and usury comes in. Better to have public transit, bikes included, at non-profit rates or even subsized to be free at point of service.

Then I'm confused at why you replied to my comment asking why you said it's okay to shit on Stalin on a Marxist-Leninist community. The implication is that MLs are anti-Stalin, but the general consensus hangs around the CPC's evaluation (given first by Mao) that Stalin was about 70% good, 30% bad.

That's awful, I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, a lot of trade union history is marred by racism and exclusionary rhetoric, even if the more unified and anti-bigotry organizations have had far more success historically.

I didn't say the USSR didn't doctor photographs to remove purged members. In my reply to your upper level comment, I explained why the purges were necessary and elaborated on their context. Nothing I said in that comment is counter to reality, I even brought sources.

What helped me most, from floating around various liberal viewpoints to coming to Marxism-Leninism, was actually working in an industrial environment.

I think we should make the same argument against banks, leasing, and other highly financialized capital.