It used to be 100% free. When the country had less money than it does today. Oh and the railways we publicly owned. And the post office. And significantly more of the NHS. And the gas and water. And the rest. All at the same time. With less money.
I would not call it “amazing”. And you’re completely delusional if you think that the existence of student loans makes university accessible. Many people can not afford living expenses to make it work without familial support, which I’m glad you had but it’s not what many people have. It’s privileged.
I don’t know what you have to do to be classed as middle class because it’s not an easier defined term. It’s also not a term really used by marxism. They use the term petite bourgeois if my understanding is correct. I guess you could call my parents that as they were landlords. But at the same time they had to work full time at a normal job and all houses were mortgaged. So you could also say they are the proletariat. This is why the marixst class model dosen’t actually hold up always in real life. Real life is too complex as people can be in multiple classes at once.
Lol landlords are petite-bourgeoisie, not proles. The petite-bourgeoisie are in between workers and the bourgeoisie in that they both exploit and do some work because they are not yet exploiting enough to completely cease function as a worker. They’re also the biggest parasites on the planet.
It’s also completely natural for some people to be paid more than others based on their labour. The Soviet Union had this exact policy for jobs that required more education or more physical work. That’s exactly how it should be outside of a post- scarcity society.
I don’t know where you’ve got the impression that I think everyone should be paid equally. In my personal opinion wages should be based on how necessary to society they are. Essential workers would be paid vastly more while the vast quantity of bullshit jobs(read theory) would be paid the bullshit rates they deserve.
It’s good that rent was that low in the Soviet Union but you also have more needs than housing. Food comes to mind where many people starved due to collectivisation efforts in the Soviet Union at the start. I understand they rectified this later but it is probable that the early stages of a socialist society will have problems like this.
The region was prone to famines every 10 years for a thousand years. The soviets ended that permanently. Unfortunately mistakes were made with not having a secondary level of oversight, they over-trusted the reported numbers of grain given by the kulaks who were hording it for profit and it caused a famine that could have been avoided and later was once secondary checks were implemented.
Things are likely to get worse in the beginning - not better.
Things will get worse before the revolution, not after it. Revolutions do not happen without a cause. Things get considerably better after them. What you’re missing is that things are getting worse NOW, they have been getting worse since 2008, they are continuing to get worse, there is absolutely nothing on the horizon that will make them better. Things are going to get worse. We will continue down this path until the conditions get bad enough for things to get very interesting. We are working to build renters union orgs up like Acorn that we believe will be fundamental to the future resistance as renters will outnumber homeowners in the near future, on top of the usual trade unionism, and the other stuff you simply can’t discuss online.