Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
Yes. Different jobs paid different amounts, and people were paid for overtime. (With a bunch of malarkey about what exactly qualifies as overtime.) Some jobs had a harder time attracting workers, because of relatively poor conditions + poor pay, compared to others.
Most prices for essential goods (Basic food, housing) was set by the government to be very low. Many well-paid people had money, that they couldn't really spend in the official system.
> Was everyone given ration cards?
Yes. There were a large number of consumer goods (meat, vodka, butter) that were rationed. Other goods, of which there were no real shortages of (In the post-war period), were bought at regular stores. If you weren't a drinker, you would often trade your vodka ration to someone who was.
For yet other goods, of which there were shortages of (Fresh vegetables, for instance), the government encouraged private production of them. Some Russians had plots of personal land.
You could have a plot of personal land in one of two ways. You could either be a collectivized farmer, and, after you met your annual slave-like obligations to the collective, you could work on farming your small personal plots. Alternatively, you could be a well-off city resident, owning a datcha (A small summer home, often with a small plot of land.)
You could then grow produce on your personal plot of land, and sell it at farmer's markets. Due to shortages, and artificially low prices in the official system, food at farmer's markets cost many times what it would cost at a grocery.
> Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
Official government prices for food were very cheap, and if you weren't picky, there was no shortage of cheap calories that you could buy. So, people weren't starving to death, but if you wanted more then your 500g of sausage, and 90g of butter/month, you needed to spend money in the private markets.
Party members in good standing had access to party-only stores, which sold more limited items.
> I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
No. You see, the Soviet Union never actually reached communism - for its entire history, it claimed to be in a transitional period, from capitalism to communism. Once communism would be reached, there would be plenty for all, and money would, obviously, be irrelevant! (Or not. The powers that be weren't super-clear as to how exactly that would work, and none of the citizens really gave a shit, because it was clear to everyone with a room-temperature-or-higher IQ that communism would not ever be reached in their lifetimes, and that it's better for your mental and physical health to not ask too many questions about it.)
But, in the meantime, as people were working their way towards communism, money was still necessary as an incentive for good work. State-ran businesses did financial accounting, they would purchase raw goods from other state-ran businesses, would sell their products through state-ran stores. For consumer goods, there would be multiple competing brands, with different quality, and pricing.
The difference between the USSR and the USA, in this sense, is where the profits would go, and how much of the accounting was 'real'. The government would often place economic orders that it wouldn't need to pay for (If the army needs to move a 50 soldiers from Moscow to Vladivostok, it doesn't pay the transportation department the price of 50 train tickets.) It would also do financial malarkey with the profits of state enterprises (To subsidize things like staple foods, housing, education, medical care, etc, which were provided to the citizenry at below-cost prices.)
PS: Bonus point:
You may ask: Well, what did people who had extra money/vodka/etc do with it?
There were a few things you could spend it on - there were some non-essential consumer goods that had vastly inflated sticker prices. Luxury goods (Which you might buy second-hand from a party member, who bought theirs from an official, party-only store), and domestic appliances were one example. Cars, were another - they would cost multiple years of wages - and also came with a multi-year, sometimes decade-long waiting period.
Bribes were a third one - with a large bribe, you could often shave a few years off your waiting period for a car.
The black market was a fourth one - a lot of people in the Soviet Union stole from their workplaces. And I do mean a lot. There weren't department stores, you couldn't go into a Lowe's, and buy a bunch of new roof shingles for your datcha. Yet, everyone who cared about the roof of their datcha had new roof shingles. How was this possible?
The answer is, of course, elementary. What you would do, is get in touch with an alcoholic who works at the roof shingle factory, he will arrange for a pallet of shingles to fall off the back of the delivery truck, and you will arrange for him to get fifty rubles, and four bottles of vodka. He will be drunk for two days, the truck driver will buy a radio for his girlfriend, his workplace will do some accounting bullshit to try to avoid blame, the government construction site that expects these shingles will have to delay work for a week, and the Regional Minister of Construction Supplies will give a radio speech about how if we only worked really hard, to produce enough roof shingles, in a few decades, we will finally attain communism, and we might have department stores, where private citizens could go to, and purchase shingles for their datchas.
It's all insane, of course, but I've yet to live in a country which wasn't.
Only during the very tail end of it. But I have asked all of these questions to my parents, and all four of my grandparents.
Between all of us, we had two cars, one datcha, one relative who was an agricultural auditor (and, therefore, recipient of food-related bribes), one black and white television, one vacuum cleaner, a few people with the status of 'victims of political repression' (awarded post-1991), one four-room apartment with a solarium (for six people), and one three-room apartment (for five people).
So, all-in all, we were quite well-to do. (Thanks to my grandparents, who were factory workers. My parents, who were physics professors, were not making very much.)
My earliest memories include standing in bread lines during the transition period in the early 90s, reading through textbooks with pro-communist pages crossed out, and listening to TV news announce a higher and higher dollar to ruble exchange rate on a day-over-day basis.
It depends who you're talking to. If you're talking about what the founders of modern Communist theory thought Communism is then you're incorrect; Marx sets out in Capital specifically what he considers to be wrong with money and wage labour in general - its genesis in commodity exchange, as Engels said, money is contained "in embryo" in the fact of commodity exchange.
The USSR, as a matter of fact, operated under mostly capitalist conditions, capitalism distinguished by:
* The predominance of wage labour in the economy
* The goal of economic activity as the accumulation of capital
* Private ownership of means of production (this is the "mostly" part - the USSR did not have much private ownership, which sets it apart from other capitalisms, but Marx was careful to point out that even under simple "public ownership", society becomes a "general capitalist")
In short: if there is wage labour, it is most definitely not "Communist". Money in its function as money in the circuit of capital, that is, C-M-C', remains money, not merely a symbolic "voucher". Socialists have proposed the idea of non-exchangable labour vouchers, but this is a far cry from real money which was what the USSR had. The ruble was just as much money as the dollar.
Nit - the goal of economic activity in the USSR was not entirely the accumulation of capital - it was production of what were considered necessary goods. Televisions, automobiles, bombs, tanks, that sort of thing.
This is, in some ways different from economic activity for the purpose of making more money (Which, in addition to producing things like television, automobiles, bombs, and tanks, also ends up producing things like advertising.)
That's a good point, but according to my knowledge this was a matter of degree rather than quality - almost all countries have or have had such production in whole or in part, implemented through subsidies and especially during wartime or other hardships. It's also to be expected when production is at least nominally democratic and central, it's not all about simple appearances. But what distinguishes a socialist society from any other is that goods would no longer be produced as commodities - i.e they are not imbued with the form of labour which tailors for exchange over use. Capital tends to totalize all labour into that which works for exchange over use, e.g. it has subsumed artwork and non-tangible goods from things of use into things with exchange value and a use-value. But exchange value tends to prevail and even changes the concrete form of labour, e.g. advertising as you suggested, and also, for instance, music sold on platforms like Spotify to maximize revenue, such as shorter, highly-replayable and segmented songs. Capital exists no less for the state, which will tend to share the same motivations as other capitalists, especially since it must buy and sell to other states or private individuals abroad.
Ruble wasn't quite as much money as a dollar -- it's value, both relative to other currencies, and relative to goods, was completely artificial.
Also, that value was different for different people. I.e., if you were an average citizen, you could spend on bread, maybe meat, and vodka. Once a year you might get a "zakaz" (literally, it means an order, as in mail-order, but in practice a way of distributing some scarce goods to people deemed worthy; you'd still have to pay for it, of course) with maybe a piece of imported salami or a can of pineapple. If you were, say, a driver for Central Committee member, you could get into a different store, which at least had all the staples all the time. And if you were a Central Committee member, you would just shop in a store that had some pretty nice stuff, at a prices that werre set in 1930s and haven't changed since then. Obviously, your ruble would go much further in that case.
That obviously depends on the communist you ask. I don't think many would support privately owned real estate – that is, land you own but don't use it yourself but rent it out or use wage labor to do something with it. Personal property – property you use yourself like a house you live in – is a different matter.
A transition state towards communism. That's what the government officially called it. The country spent 74 years in that 'transition' state.
It had little in common with the socialist democracies of Europe, nothing in common with the communist proscriptions of Marx, and some in common with the much maligned state capitalism of today's China.
When Ivan was a boy, he asked a Party Man, "How will we know when true communism has been acheived?"
The Party Man thought for a little bit, and said, "The shops will be full of goods, and there will be no money."
Decades later, in the early 1990s, Ivan is now an old man. He looks through the windows of the department stores, and sticks his hands in pickets. He smiles to himself, and whispers, "At last, true communism!"
My grandfather visited Moscow after chernobyl on invitation by some radiation chemistry prof he knew. You had to stand in line to buy a weight quantity of bread and other basic necessitys like cheese, butter oder meat. There was only one type of bread. They ate their eveninglunch in a park. I can not tell how the food was for official delegations but this was what a privat dinner with a relative well off friend looked like.
I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?