Housing in Communist economies - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#15259286
Some people think that under Socialism, affordable housing would exist.

Well, here's something to consider: Under both the Soviet Union and Communist China, internal borders were put up within the country to control movement of people and where they could chose to live. This was a natural response to trying to dealing with the economic problem of scarcity.

If the Soviet Union had offered free housing to any of its citizens wherever they want to live, more than half the population would have wanted to live in Moscow. It would obviously be impossible to give away free housing wherever the recipient wanted to live.

Not only that, but in the Soviet Union, at one era of time there were long waiting lists for people trying to get housing. As a result, some people had to just build housing themselves, because they couldn't wait.
The housing planners initially built to high quality and used plenty of extra concrete in the designs because they were afraid if the quality did not meet specifications, Stalin might have them sent off to the gulag. But with the priority being put on quality, there was a trade-off with quantity. And perhaps one reason the early Soviet system seemed to function adequately was that the society's population had not long before been decimated by war and famine, which conveniently limited the need for new housing to be constructed. During the succeeding era of time, a larger number of apartment blocks were built but they were very poor in quality. The slope of the floors were often not even perfectly level. By the late 1960s in Moscow, the earlier crisis in housing was mostly over and the quality began to improve to reasonable levels, at least not terrible in quality.
The housing for families in cities often consisted of what today would be considered very small sized apartments, which an entire family would live in. These were well-designed apartments, however, with a very efficient layout.

The problem of insufficient housing was still very acute in mid-1950s when Nikita Khruschov became the Communist Party leader. His solution was to stop construction of the lavish "Stalin Empire style" houses (which are being valued to this day for their big rooms, high ceilings and beauty; they were expensive to build so the state couldn't build enough of them) and embrace standardized factory-style construction techniques (just a few "typical" projects for the whole country; prefabricated building blocks and panels) to make construction as quick and cheap as possible, so the housing problem could be solved quicker.
Indeed, this approach allowed to drastically improve living conditions of many families (Nonetheless, the Soviet Union never fully resolved the housing problem.)
As for the aesthetics, Khruschov declared "a war on architectural excesses", so all houses since that time lacked decoration, had very basic exteriors and were very similar.

People's access to housing was like their access to consumer goods in that it depended on their position in society and their place of work. Often, housing (the so-called "department housing") was provided by the workplace. Administrative control over housing and the movement of citizens was carried out by means of the residency permit.

Many people without housing, especially people from the rural areas, tried to get work as janitors so as to gain a room in the city.

In cities right up to the 1970s, most families lived in a single room in a communal apartment, where they suffered from overcrowding and had little hope of improving their situation. A comparative minority of people lived in "private" apartments or still lived in dormitories and barracks. Although as far back as the 1930s, a private apartment for each family was declared a goal of Soviet housing policy, large-scale construction was begun only at the end of the 1950s. Extensive construction of low-quality five-story concrete-block buildings, dubbed "Khrushchevki," (or "Khrushcheby," which rhymes with the Russian word "trushchoby", meaning slums), mitigated the situation to some degree. Nevertheless, the declared goal was not met, even in the 1980s when high-rise projects with private apartments became the main form of city housing. At that time, some cities, including Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), had almost a third of its citizens "on the housing list".

By the 1970s, the average waiting time to receive an apartment in the USSR was around six to seven years.

Beginning in the 1960s, people who could not count on joining the housing list because their present space exceeded the legal norm (they had more than five square meters per person, equivalent to 53.8 square feet) could contribute their personal funds to a cooperative construction project and receive what was called a "cooperative apartment." Only the better-off portion of the population could afford this, and here also the amount of living space a family already had could not exceed specific limits. For those who could join a cooperative, housing was comparatively affordable: the price per square meter in a cooperative apartment was about equivalent to an average monthly salary.

The limit of nine square meters per person held up to the early 1980s, after which it began to increase. In calculating square meters, the government took into account not only a family's primary living space, but also, if they had one, the dacha (a tiny summer cottage some families maintained on a small lot, to be able to get away from the crowded city and maintain a tiny garden).

Soviet dachas could be owned, which made them one of the few substantial forms of private property available. The appalling conditions that most people endured in their city apartments made escape to the dacha seem attractive. In Stalin’s time, dachas were mainly a perk of the Party and cultural elites. By the 1980s, most all families who held the type of jobs requiring a university education had the ability to have one. A 1993-1994 survey of seven Russian cities showed that almost a quarter of all households owned one.


related thread: Some thoughts on China's Hukou system
viewtopic.php?f=114&t=181409
#15259293
"
"The easiest way was to get a job with an enterprise or organization that built housing for its employees. Then the waiting time could be just a couple of years. Public sector employees (teachers, doctors) could join a waiting list compiled by the local administration, but the waiting time on these could be more than 10 years. What’s more, applicants had no say over what type of apartment they would be given or where it would be located.

“After graduation, my parents, as young professionals, immediately received a room in a hall of residence, and when I was born, a one-room apartment not far from work,” writes Pyotr from the Krasnodar Territory. “When my sister was born, we were given a two-room apartment. Thus, just five years after graduation, the young doctors lived in an excellent two-room apartment."

Apartments were not given to people as their own private property, but rather were rented out for life in what was known as social rent. Tenants could register other people in their apartment, and they could swap their apartment with others (which, although not officially the case, sometimes involved additional cash payments). However, they could not sell, gift or bequeath their apartment to others.

“I received an apartment in 1979, a year after graduating from university when I was assigned a job in another city. Under the law, young professionals were entitled to an apartment within three years of employment,” recalls Galina from Kursk. “Having arrived in Dzhezkazgan (a regional center in Kazakhstan), I was given a place in a hall of residence and a year later, a one-room apartment. Having stayed in the job for the mandatory three years, I then returned to Kursk through an apartment swap."

The Soviet Union did not have a housing market per se, but housing cooperatives began to appear in the late 1950s, and these essentially allowed members to buy an apartment in installments. Prices varied from region to region, but not significantly. In the 1970s-1980s, a one-room apartment cost 5,500-6,000 rubles (around the same as a new Volga car), while a three-room apartment cost about 10,000 rubles. The average salary in the USSR at the time was 150-200 rubles. Thus not many families could afford a condominium apartment, and housing cooperatives accounted for not more than 10 percent of housing in the USSR.
"

https://www.rbth.com/history/333815-sov ... rtment-buy
#15259340
Puffer Fish wrote:



If the Soviet Union had offered free housing to any of its citizens wherever they want to live, more than half the population would have wanted to live in Moscow. It would obviously be impossible to give away free housing wherever the recipient wanted to live.

Not only that, but in the Soviet Union, at one era of time there were long waiting lists for people trying to get housing. As a result, some people had to just build housing themselves, because they couldn't wait.



Is this 'state socialism', or 'state *capitalism*' -- ?


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Beginning in the 1960s, people who could not count on joining the housing list because their present space exceeded the legal norm (they had more than five square meters per person, equivalent to 53.8 square feet) could contribute their personal funds to a cooperative construction project and receive what was called a "cooperative apartment." Only the better-off portion of the population could afford this, and here also the amount of living space a family already had could not exceed specific limits. For those who could join a cooperative, housing was comparatively affordable: the price per square meter in a cooperative apartment was about equivalent to an average monthly salary.



It's a valid critique -- that's 'party favoritism', and I happen to address it as a matter of situating a post-capitalist political economy:



If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.

If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.

And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.



https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338



Here's a rundown of Stalinism, almost side-by-side compared to Western *social democracy* and *its* system of getting-things-done, if-you-will.



For decades supporters of Stalin claimed he was Lenin’s heir, fulfilling the aspirations of 1917. It is a claim repeated, although with negative rather than positive connotations, by many supporters of Western capitalism today. Yet Stalin was careful to ensure the Bolsheviks of 1917 were the first to suffer in the terror of the mid-1930s. Only one in 14 of the Bolshevik Party members of 1917 and one in six of those of 1920 were still in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1939.173 Many of the rest had been executed or sent to the camps. As Leon Trotsky repeatedly emphasised, far from Stalinism being the simple continuation of Leninism, there was a river of blood between the two.

Stalin’s logic was the same as that of any capitalist who faces competitive pressure from a bigger rival—to tell his workers to make every conceivable ‘sacrifice’ in order to compete. For Stalin the way to ‘catch up with the West’ was to copy all the methods of ‘primitive accumulation’ employed elsewhere. The British industrial revolution had been based on driving the peasants from the land through enclosures and clearances; Stalin smashed peasant control of the land through ‘collectivisation’ which forced millions to migrate to the cities. British capitalism had accumulated wealth through slavery in the Caribbean and North America; Stalin herded millions of people into the slave camps of the gulag. Britain had pillaged Ireland, India and Africa; Stalin took away the rights of the non-Russian republics of the USSR and deported entire peoples thousands of miles. The British industrial revolution had involved denying workers the most elementary rights and making men, women and children work 14 or 16 hours a day; Stalin followed suit, abolishing the independence of the unions and shooting down strikers. The only significant difference was that while Western capitalism took hundreds of years to complete its primitive accumulation, Stalin sought to achieve Russia’s in two decades. Therefore the brutality and barbarity was more concentrated.

The Stalinist bureaucracy could not ‘catch up’ by copying the small-scale ‘market’ capitalism of England during the industrial revolution. It could only succeed militarily if its industries were similar in size to those of the West. But there was no time to wait for private firms to grow as they gobbled each other up. The state had to intervene to bring about the necessary scale of production. State capitalist monopolies, not small private firms, were necessary, and the state had to coordinate the whole economy, subordinating the production of everything else to accumulation.

Most people saw the resulting system as socialist, and many still do. For Stalinism did break the backbone of private capitalism in Russia, and later did the same in Eastern Europe and China. But its methods were very similar to those of the war economies of the West. It planned, as they planned, so as to hold down the consumption of the masses while building heavy industry and arms production.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 477-478



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The euphemistic-political verbiage used reminds me of the doublespeak used by English elitist 'public' schools -- since they're *not* actually public.

The point of either 'state-socialism' or 'state-capitalism' remains that neither is *egalitarian*, obviously -- housing can be considered to be a societal *benchmark*, like how a given society does care for the young and elderly.

Note that even in the so-called 'socialist' country *capital* still equaled privilege and elitist access.

*Any* 'administration' equals 'not-commodity-producing', and also means that any and all such government / administrative *personnel*, in all branches *of* the government, are *consuming* from society's total production, necessitating *that amount* of production to be done 'off-the-top', using labor-power / labor exploitation from its working class.


Social Production Worldview

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#15259491
ckaihatsu wrote:Is this 'state socialism', or 'state *capitalism*' -- ?]

What ever you call it, its the system that Lenin and Trotsky created. Its the only system that Marxists have ever created. its estimated that you murdered between 5 and 8 million people during the collectivisation of the peasantry. In your war against the Kulaks. i hear the same evasion of responsibility when it ocmes to Pol Pot. People, not just Marxists but also their fellow Liberal fellow traveller friends say Pol Pot wasn't a Marxist. He didn't really understand Marxism. Well what in God's name was he doing leading a Marxist workers party? Anti Marxists had no part in selecting him as leader.

Trotskyists and Anarchists hare responsibility for the horrors of Communism. You played a vital part in bringing these systems to power. In Trotsky's case he even organised the October insurrection.
#15259499
Rich wrote:
What ever you call it, its the system that Lenin and Trotsky created. Its the only system that Marxists have ever created. its estimated that you murdered between 5 and 8 million people during the collectivisation of the peasantry. In your war against the Kulaks. i hear the same evasion of responsibility when it ocmes to Pol Pot. People, not just Marxists but also their fellow Liberal fellow traveller friends say Pol Pot wasn't a Marxist. He didn't really understand Marxism. Well what in God's name was he doing leading a Marxist workers party? Anti Marxists had no part in selecting him as leader.

Trotskyists and Anarchists hare responsibility for the horrors of Communism. You played a vital part in bringing these systems to power. In Trotsky's case he even organised the October insurrection.



And what was that all *about*, Rich, historically -- ?


History, Macro-Micro -- Political (Cognitive) Dissonance

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