Comment by dmos62
7 hours ago
> the workers stole from the factory, all the time, at every level.
I think the context is important. These were people in poverty, in an extremely mismanaged society. You could get very little from actual shops. Most things would have to be bartered for. Stealing from the state accounted for a very important part of peoples' sustenance. My grandfather would try to explain it like this: even if you had money, there wasn't anything to buy. In that sense, even the factory managers were poor. Sarah C. M. Paine says that, in terms of buying power, the First Secretary of USSR's wife was poorer than an average American middle-class wife.
Yes. Hence the stories of people (Brezhnev?) being astonished and baffled at simply walking into an American supermarket.
Of course, one reason why there wasn't much on the shelves was it had been already stolen by other people closer to the source ...
(something of a generic problem of low trust societies, not specific to Communism. I think we sometimes don't appreciate how valuable a high trust society is to us in the West, which is why people trying to destroy it by looting from the top are particularly dangerous: the rot spreads from the top)
> Yes. Hence the stories of people (Brezhnev?) being astonished and baffled at simply walking into an American supermarket.
Way later even; It was Yeltsin who wandered (it was unplanned) into a grocery store in Texas [1].
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day-0
Does the stealing come from the low-trust society, or does the societal situation drive people to theft, which we then label ‘low-trust’?
If there are extremely poor, high-trust societies, then trust is its own variable. If not, then it's a post-hoc explanation.
And still people on this very site and especially on Reddit and TikTok want communism.
Do they? I've not seen that.