as I would have to pay hefty taxes. Letting it stand empty does not make sense.

You can always rent it for a while and think better about your situation. Just selling it and putting the money in the bank just means the bank will be using your money to possibly cause way more damage than you could anyway. Buying shares, at least if you don’t even work in the company is bad too, so holding on to the apartment is not the worst thing you could do and if you sold it it’s possible the new owner would just rent it too.

If you rent you could always see if the person living there would like to buy it from you and so you can even give them a discount based on how long they lived there if you think it’s better too.

and I’m planning to sell it in about 5 years when we’re gonna be looking for a new place with my parents.

If you already know when you need the money you can alway do the math and see what is the best option for you. Let the money stay in the bank, keep the apartment until them… And also check the risks, as in my country, as an example, the goverment has taken peoples savings about thirty years ago when the inflation was bad so who knows if they will do it again. So if you were in my country puting the money in savings would have an extra risk, while perhaps there might be countries where the goverment has made housing cheaper before and could do so again, meaning holding on to the house might not be the best idea either.

Becoming a landlord isn’t really that different from becoming an investor, for example, as to become one you need a certain ammount of capital and under capitalism no matter where you put that capital you will be exploiting others. And as we live in a system full of crises unless you have “a few million” very diversified anyone could be losing everything in the next crises or when a new goverment comes around, specially if through a coup, and changes the rules. So it’s kinda hard to ask people to give their safety net away when the vast majority are at most a few problems away of losing it all.

So I would say your question makes more sense if we are talking about how much capital a person has, rather than what they do with it (unless they are doing some even worse things with it). So someone with a second house can be a communist no problem, but someone with ten should at the very least be using some of that money to further the cause, not only by giving it to a communist party and the like but also by giving free housing to some who need it, if they consider themselves communists. If they could sell a few houses and use the money to further the cause that’s fine too, although in some countries even that many houses might not be enough to pay for something like a cancer treatment, so it’s hard to say exactly.

The same would be valid if the person had shares or companies or whatever, although if the person directly owns companies the person should definitely give everyone a good salary and let the worker unionize and try to spread it to more people too.

Probably not so much because of what they would do to Cuba but because many of the refugees would be trying to get to the US and all the problems that would lead to in the US would be clearly seen as the governments fault.

And perhaps compare a leader doing it in your own country to what Stalin and ask if people would think highly of such a leader.

At least if you think such a leader would be well seen in your country.

It’s good to see that even bourgeois dictatorships gave up on joining the imperialist boys club and recognise that they are better off joining the China-led world of fairer trading

I wouldn’t say they recognised the best path but that even if they gave half of their country away they still wouldn’t be allowed in the imperailists’ club. So they literally had no choice but taking the path they took.

Hopefully they get better from it, but considering how long they stuck to the idea of joining the west, and the possibility that they might still want to, a lot still needs to happen for them to get better.

The problem is if the bourgeoisie can get a fully automated army, from logistics to robot production to the war bots themselves.

So we probably still have a couple decades until that, but starting now there can be a lot more propaganda and high effectivity targeted action by using AIs already, which could make our advancement to communism harder depending on how much the AIs can help people the people too.

If it was as easy and complete to change sex/gender as it is in The Culture novel series I might change at least once just to see, but as things are right now such changes would be too much work and the result might leave a lot to be desired if I don’t already have a “desire”/“instinct” (not sure about the right word to use) to do such a thing, specially with current technologies.

If China can sell more cobalt ore of higher quality and cheaper than “artisanal miners” while not paying taxes, as an example, they could lead to the reduction of “artisanal miners”, that is, people who got their sustenance from mining, without actually improving anything or leading to less money getting to people and less money staying in the coutnry. So that reduction by itself doesn’t lookt like any evidence of “good” things as it could just as easily be reached by “bad” things.

This can be good but more information would be necessary to properly contextualize this I think.

As to prostitution and pornography, those are of course without a doubt commodification of the female body and form and cannot exist under communism.

Not sure I agree with the pornography part, depending on how you’re defining pornography. That might be the case for paid pornography but I bet even under communism there will be people wanting to show themselves in sexual acts, and perhaps even more so than now as losing their jobs because people saw them online and things like that wouldn’t be a problem, unless it was outright made illegal of course.

Also with extra freedoms under communism more and bigger and more inclusive communities about these things could come to exist, perhaps even involving money but not to “pay for people” but to produce content that people want to produce/consume.

I’m not sure if it should be called Utopian as there are enemies outside and at the same time their conditions are due to materialism, specially the super intelligent AIs controling infrastructure and production on the background and talking to everyone to help them realize their dreams, for example, while also keeping an eye on anyone that tries to disturb the peace, be they external or internal, and so on.