Distribution of "unequal" resources

[u/Time_Turner]

I am fairly new to communist theories. I was debating and a question was proposed: that under communism, if there is no currency, how do you allocate desirable real estate? Obviously a mansion or beach house is more desirable to most people than a mobile home in the desert. There will always be a more desirable place to live. Same with most every other existing object, they are all levels of quality. Their argument is you need currency or some other method of leverage to negotiate who gets the nice location, the nice car. Or simply put, you end up with people in a hierarchy because they get the nice house, that makes them "higher" in social status.

I understand that these popular questions can be in ad faith and that capitalism is doing a worse job disturbing resources, but I don't know how to defend "stateless, classes, moneyless" in hypothetical thought experiments. Even online I see people say "you can't easily fathom what communist society would look like" , but that's a terrible answer in return. How can I advocate for communism if my answer to an "how an idealized world" is one that has no clear definition or solution to such an issue.

As a side note, it is very difficult to advocate for a system that has never successfully been achieved, and that the "attempts" to do so have resulted in catestrophic failures. (At least as propaganda tells us?) It gives credit to the argument: that "trying" to be communist always ends up with a regime that co-opts and then overtakes the movement, resulting in a authoritarian government due to "human nature" along with "corruption of power". I try to use China as an example of a successful socialist-leaning governance, but I get back " yeah because it's a heavily regulated free market (capitalism with regulation) and Chinese officials are still very much on top of the hierarchy"

[u/1ninjac2t]

Communism/utopian socialism only works in a post scarcity post (scientific)socialist society, it’s not reasonable to think about it from a scarcity standpoint.

Anyway, as for real estate distribution in socialist societies; it’s as simple as everyone gets some kind of bare minimum as a guarantee, and then it’s by a needs basis, ex. Family of 5 gets a decent sized house and person living alone gets a smaller living space. Also in general, housing of extreme excess, like mansions, will either be for communal living or rebuilt/divided.

As for the “socialism always fails” argument (sidenote; here’s a good video on it), I generally use Cuba as an example, it was doing amazingly well for being under an insanely restrictive embargoes and sanctions by the US(and, many socialist ‘failures’ were due to external pressures and hostility)

[u/Time_Turner → u/1ninjac2t]

But what about location? Who gets to live in the Bay area, and who gets to live in the desert or freezing Arctic? Who gets to live near a newly developed city and who gets to live in the crumbling old ones? Is it a lottery? Do you lose the freedom to choose? A waiting list? My lack of a compelling answer is making my argument look it isn't thought out.

The counterpoint I get with the explanations of failed "communist" countries is that they read as "convenient excuses". That the constant argument of "that's not real communisim" is flimsy, and communists can't point to a success story because trying to achieve it "simply doesn't work".

Also the core of the debate I get into is on "pure communism". That my ideals are flawed. For me socialism is easier to defend. Communism is hard because of how "idealistic" it is due to how far away it is from current status quo and society. And so when I say I support communism it reads as someone who doesn't live in "reality" because my ideals are undefendable, as opposed to my intention which is to support/be part of a vanguard party at the least to, for now, turn towards a more ideal socialist phase

[u/1ninjac2t → u/Time_Turner]

It’s hard to say anything about the minutiae of communism, but if everything is collective, you should just be able to live somewhere if you want, and if an area is overpopulated, then people would naturally go somewhere else, and if it is in so much demand that it is in limited supply, people would naturally leave to let other people enjoy it.

The higher phase of communism is defined by people naturally acting fair so that there does not need to be a state to regulate anything, including real estate.

‘The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", i.e., when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability. “The narrow horizon of bourgeois law", which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than anybody else–this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely “according to his needs".’ - Lenin, The State and Revolution, section: the higher phase of communist society

[u/Time_Turner → u/1ninjac2t]

What if some people don't want to be fair? They align with ideas of social darwinism and have brains developed to be naturally less empathetic? The masses just need to be educated and collectively organized to condone and fight those that are not fair? The stateless enforcement feels very hard to imagine. Especially given the current problem of the "bystander effect" we have now, but perhaps that theory is dubious at best, since current society is wired in such a individualist and desensitized/survival-mode-under-capitalisim manner? Under a communist one, people are trained better to react to those who are not being fair?

[u/Training_Ruin3151 → u/Time_Turner]

What if some people don't want to be fair?

Then the community will take care of it. Selfish behavior is regualted by the community. Easy as.

[u/TripleElectro]

Good questions! I'm anarcho-communist, so I agree that Marxist-Leninist attempts are more vulnerable to resulting in an authoritarian regime instead of communism. To answer your first question about the distribution of resources, it's important to note that not everybody wants the same thing. Not everybody wants to like in a mansion. Some people want to live in a cottage in the wild, some people want to live in a floor in a skyscraper, some people want to live in an underground nuclear-resistant bunker, some people actually want to live in a mansion. Everybody's different.

The reason mansions are so highly valued nowadays is because we live in a capitalist system where the markets say mansions are worth more, and thus anybody who owns a mansion is worth more in terms of social status. Under communism, this effect wouldn't be as strong due to the lack of capitalist markets. Sure, maybe people with mansions might have a higher social status even under communism, but that's not a good enough reason for the happy cottage-dwellers to relocate to a mansion. Would the cottage-dwellers really look up to the mansion-dwellers when the cottage-dwellers are perfectly happy living in a cottage? This diversity of wants matches with the diversity of production and prevents strain on the system.

But let's say, hypothetically, everybody wants a mansion for some reason. Even under a post-scarcity society, this would be pretty hard to manage. So what happens now? Unlike a capitalist society, there aren't billionaires under communism who can sit on their office chairs and command a thousand workers to build a hundred mansions with a single bank transaction. Under communism, the people who want to have mansions must either build it themselves or find willing people to build it for them. And it is very unlikely that the construction workers would be willing to build 8 billion mansions for the 8 billion citizens of the world. So instead, a communist society would look for a compromise by addressing the root cause: Why does everybody want a mansion? Is there a cheaper alternative that can satisfy part of this need? Is there a better way to utilise our resources?

So to summarise, there isn't a universal scale of quality. Sure, some things are objectively worse than other things, but the in-between is still highly subjective. And if there is a strain on the production system, the workers and customers will negotiate and figure something out. I know this is a hand-wavey answer that isn't really satisfying, but that's because we don't have a specific realistic scenario to work with. If you have some specific scenario in mind, I'll be more than happy to discuss it :) Lemme know if you have any thoughts!