but people born in socialism want (balanced, not late stage) capitalism

False. A majority of people who lived in the Eastern Block (except for a few countries like Baltics or Poland) say that life was better during socialism, every poll that comes out confirms this. The people who are so afraid of socialism are the 90s kids who have been indoctrinated in the “horrors of gommunism” while completely ignoring the very real horrors of capitalism.

The house is given to you wherever the government wants you to work

Again lying. Work mobility was very much a thing in the Eastern Block except during exceptional times such as WW2. Housing in the USSR was actually primarily accessed through your work union, not through the government, so it was up to you where you wanted to work and therefore live. Nowadays people don’t have that luxury, and instead of living near our workplaces, we’re segregated by income. I literally cannot afford to live in my hometown where I grew up because it got gentrified, it is actually capitalism not letting people live where they desire. I’ve also lived in a smaller village, and many people are forced out of there by the economic situation of not being able to find any job because capitalism moves all jobs to the big city. Are you purposefully lying, or just misinformed?

Like China, Half of capitalistic EU, and North Korea?

So, like a socialist country, a bunch of countries imitating socialist urban design, and another socialist country? Nothing to do with political spectrum? If you think urban sprawl is not political, I suggest you research on why it was racism and segregation by skin colour that led to dystopian sprawl in American cities. Or is that not ideological to you?

Well, just because there is a one country that managed to screw it up, does not mean it cannot be part of capitalism. See: Rest of the world

What rest of the world? How’s the quality of universal healthcare and education in India, in Phillipines, in Morocco or in Ecuador? I’m a Spaniard, and I can guarantee you that, for the entirety of my adult life, the only policy I’ve seen towards healthcare and education is austerity and defunding through neoliberalism. This is the case in the entirety of Europe, and when some party comes with intentions of changing that, either it’s internally demolished (state apparatus fabrications of corruption and funding by Venezuela and Iran in the case of Podemos, Spain), not allowed into government by the establishment (LFI, France), or directly shutdown under theat of explusion of the Euro (Syriza, Greece). What a wonderful paradise of healthcare and education.

Depends on how you look at it. I’m sure there is zero unemployment rates in concentration camps too

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Again, most people who lived in the Eastern Block socialism say that life was better then. Why are you so hurt by people having a right to retirement pensions, worker rights, extremely high unionization rates, and guaranteed employment?

Turns on US news

What’s your point? That Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin? I wish for that alternate reality too, especially one without the USA existing.

Saying this two days after Michael Parenti’s death is really something

Straight avenue is not necessarily a bad thing though, if they’re high-density, walkable, full of services and green spaces, and interconnected with public transit, as they were.

The police in your country are fascist pigs too. They routinely beat up pro-palestinian protestors without consequence, it’s just that your state outsources the violence to Israel by supporting the genocide of Palestinians. The German regime is currently suggesting compulsory military service, funding literal Nazi arms manufacturers like Rheinmetall, and actively silencing dissenting journalists by removing their bank accounts and prosecuting anyone who hires them or donates money to them. Moreover, there is rampant far-right activity and nothing is done about it. I used to live in Germany up to a few years ago, and one time I celebrated my birthday at home and my friends couldn’t make it in time because a Nazi parade was blocking the trams.

How about we talk of the regime actively suppressing the people’s democratic will, like when people have a referendum to cap rents in Berlin but the supreme court rejects it (Mietendeckel)? How about the same happening with the referendum to expropriate housing that passed in 2021 and nothing has come of it yet?

Well, the Soviets and China never stopped building socially affordable housing. Turns out it’s a quirk of capitalist regimes leaving people to spend half their income in housing!

If you visit the communism museum in Prague, you’ll learn all about the horrors of being under the thumb of the USSR

Where is the Prague museum of the pre-communist horrors? What was the life expectancy in Czechia before Bolshevism? Do you have a museum of the Great Depression too? Of the Austro-Hungarian repression of Czech people? Of the unequal development in Czechia and Slovakia during the Czechoslovak republic? Do you have a museum of the industrialization during the USSR and the corresponding rise in living standards?Nah, you just have anticommunist propaganda because the point is to prevent socialism, not to actually make historical analysis of the living conditions of the people.

Since the Soviet Union pretended that homelessness didn’t exist

Ugh… Anticommunist propaganda. Vagrancy was considered illegal, and “homeless” people had access to free dorms. Your figures are entirely made up

The Soviet Union did not collapse in the 90s, it was illegally dissolved against the democratic will of the people. The country was doing absolutely golden until perestroika (look at any GDP graph if you don’t believe me), they had some economic issues due to it between 1985 and 1990 but nothing horrible. What was horrifying was the transition to capitalism. Alcohol abuse, crime, homelessness, unemployment, suicide and drugs became the norm when the entire welfare system was dismantled and the state industry was auctioned to the most corrupt bidder.

Social issues spawned in the 90s during capitalism and do not represent the life in the USSR.

Believe it or not, guaranteed housing at an average rent of 3% of the monthly income is an extremely leftist policy.

and cut down all the greenery

After visiting Russia some time ago and comparing old pictures, a lot of the trees were cut simply to make parking spots. Most people didn’t own a car in the USSR because public transit and walk ability were prioritized, and so these areas weren’t designed with parking in mind. When the Soviet Union was antidemocratically dissolved, public transit was gutted and cars were heavily publicized, so most families who could afford it ended up buying some old car, and they needed parking spots.

Those tend to be areas where women have little education

By the 1960s, the USSR had more women engineers than the rest of the planet combined, and some 45% of the PhDs in chemistry in the 1970s were awarded to women. Mistakes were made in the USSR, for sure, but equal access to education between women and men was not one of them.

because it’s ugly and depressing

Speak for yourself, this is much more beautiful and less depressing to me than cookie-mold single-family sprawling housing in the US. You’re just cherrypicking a bad picture in winter with dead trees.

the poor end up having to live there and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas

This did NOT happen in the eastern block. Housing was guaranteed but so was work. Crime is mostly a consequence of lack of job prospects enforced on marginalized people, and when you give everyone an education and a fair chance, the vast majority of people gladly accept that. There were no “criminal ghettos” in the Eastern Block. You’re just applying the capitalist logic to countries that weren’t capitalist. When you don’t segregate people by wealth (rich vs poor neighborhood) you eliminate the possibility for ghettos to exist.

So eventually only the poor and desperate moved into the neighborhood. And the neighborhood turned into a rundown ghetto

Sounds like the problem is wealth inequality and poverty, not housing itself. There were no ghettos in the eastern block, period.

Well, those have been built in a highly industrialized and rich country, not in a developing economy. Social housing in China nowadays looks more like your pictures than the one in the post, let’s keep in mind that that kind of housing is at this point over 50 years old.

Guaranteed housing, human-centered urban planning organized around moving on foot and in public transit, universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, the abolition of unemployment and the defeat of Nazism aren’t left wing enough for you?

Architecture is political. The architectural styles of the Eastern Block had their reason of being. The usage of prefab and panels in construction was an ideological idea, because the intention was to house as many people in cities as possible during the extremely rapid industrialization that took place.

I meant medical physicians, not particularly researchers. My point is we could apply the healthcare model, i.e. a body of highly trained professionals working on exchange for a wage without the need for constant evaluation of metrics, relying on social value of medicine instead of grants as motivation.

I’m not in the US, but I’m already militant in such organizations in my home country.

Your brain jerks to “look at these evil Muslims” when something obviously western happens in the west. Militarized police terrorizing minorities is literally as USA/European as it gets.

My thought process is that measuring repression using “le evil regime from another culture” is at its core a racist thing to do.

Medicine is already this better way (in countries with social healthcare systems). A body of highly trained specialists who constantly update their knowledge through research, conferences and reading the last scientific advancements, and don’t necessarily earn extremely high salaries but have a comfortable life and a stable employment. We could expand this model to all sciences.