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Notes -
This is a real shower thought, but doesn’t the fact that the USSR was rival superpower to America prove without a doubt that communism actually does work? In fact, it works really well?
Thinking about it, it makes no sense to ever retort “well did it work for the USSR?” when someone brings up the prospect of communism. It worked so well that the communist USSR rivaled America and launched the first satellite. If it didn’t work well, the USSR could never have been a competitor to America. One could even argue that America cultural capital is what really led to American dominance later on, which is independent of political system and relies on America’s unique position as cultural crossroads, but that is beside the question.
The oft mocked cliché, "real communism has never been tried," is in a literal sense true. The USSR that defeated Nazi Germany and rivaled America had different wage levels for different jobs, and even higher wages for more productive employees with the same jobs.
Of course, the reason "real communism has never been tried," is that as soon as you have contact with ground-level economic reality, the idea of communism becomes absurd.
The history of wage stratification in the USSR is pretty interesting. It trended upwards but AFAIK also waxed and waned. That said, it was also probably the most equal major society, the top 10% had perhaps a 25% share of total income by 1991 according to most economists who study the USSR.
The neighborhoods for party elites in Moscow or East Berlin (or Warsaw or Prague etc) were like middle class American suburbs at best.
Interesting. Do you think that was intentional? As in, actually caused by some policy of the early communists. Or was there simply not enough of a pie to grab?
Makes me wonder—say we get to post-scarcity, but never unlimited resources. I would expect some number of people to continue striving (hoarding?) for philosophical (signaling?) reasons. But this suggests that such imbalance might be…curtailed.
There was an episode where someone went to Stalin and said something like 'this situation is absurd, there are coal miners being paid more than Politburo members like you and I' and Stalin said something like 'that's as it should be - there are vacancies in the coal mines but there's a long line of people who want to join the Politburo!'
Official vs unofficial wealth is also important to consider, as you can see from the above exchange.
Party elites had huge non-salary advantages like better apartments, dachas, access to rare imported goods, caviar, cars, and for the top of the elite there were drivers, domestic staff and so on. Still, their standard of life (while vastly better than the average USSR citizen) wasn’t close to as good as the average third world elite is today (or even at the time), even though this was the second most powerful nation on Earth.
The Wikipedia for the Waldsiedlung has pictures of the gated compound that the GDR elite lived in and it’s not that great. Even including the amenities, pool, tennis courts and decent restaurant, the average West German doctor or attorney lived a materially comparable or better life than the literal Politburo of East Germany.
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