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Turned red after finding out that
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Ex soviet block kid here, even got CCCP stamp in an old passport.
This might be true, but it might be worth considering that by late 70 it would not really matter that much. You could hardly get anything with the money left, basic food products included.
Buying meat in a store would be a thing of a chance or you got nasty scraps, and there was really little other options beyond popatos and a few other very basic foods. In my country most of 80s people would que for most of the day to buy toilet paper, and one your run around the city based on rumor on where something could be gotten. This created a massive black market, but there prices would make an average pay worthless. And also any western foreign currency would be worth much more than local, as they were key for smugglers, anyone looking to escape to the other side and tightly controlled (if you were even given a passport and were allowed to travel abroad you could buy a very small amount of currency, much below what would be needed to sustain oneself). Anyways stuff like this, institutional inertia and stiffness, plus repression of any attempts at change created a feedback loop of a massive shadow economy and corruption that chocked the system and created a deeply pathological culture that has been an issue in the region since.
You understand your whole post is because capitalist systems have always fought to deny resources to communist-leaning systems, right?
So for example, the problems Cuba is facing right now aren't problems with communism but a problem with the fascist dictatorship next door working to deny it resources.
When you're being starved by a kidnapper, your own personal finances aren't your primary problem.
So the USSR was denied resources but not the other way around?
What does this mean?
The experiences of my family (in the USSR) were not as you describe. Things were cheap and necessities were available. Getting some things was more difficult for non-price reasons. That also seems to align with studies like what the CIA conducted about access to nutrition in the USSR.
Overall, that was a significant improvement over what came before, as well as over what came after.
Where did they work, and did they live in Moscow? Some regions or particular stores by key plants were much better supplied, but honestly I'm not sure if you could find one family in USSR that would claim stores were well supplied in the 80s.
Also I come from one of the satellite state. Food was taken out from the country, while there were protests over look of food in the stores. Kinda hard to claim it did not happen. There were rail carts welded to tracks to by workers trying to stop it...
And yeah, Russia was an absolutne shitshow both before and after, no question about it. I'm just addressing oversimplified vision of what money meant in state capitalism.
Ignoring the fact that this conversation has been steered towards an explicitly liberal/market economics/consumerist framing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_for_the_Soviet_Union
And that is even ignoring various other economic indicators that showed worsened living conditions after the fall.
Asking people, sadly, is not the reality check it should be. Trump was voted after all.
What does this even mean
I mean 2 things:
The liberal when presented with the prospect of democracy: "Actually no the masses are too stupid to make their own decisions."
Not in Moscow. Not in any administrative centers.
"Well-supplied" compared to what? Would you say that stores in most of the capitalist world were well-supplied?
Movement of food between the republics doesn't seem to be hard to believe, but also does not seem to be malicious.
It's rather silly to call planned economy "state capitalism". For most of its existence, there wasn't even the capitalist class - i.e. a class of people that owned the means of production as private property and used other people's labour to extract profit from said means of production.
I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the USSR ended on a low note.
Decades of economic isolation by western powers, constant conflict with the usa, loss of faith in the government through some of the destalinisation measures and liberalisation of the economy all took their toll.
If history had gone a bit differently and revolutions elsewhere hadn't been stamped out paving the way for the rise of the Nazis and the ascension of the USA on the back of nuclear horror things might've gone a lot better.
Cool story