I cannot wrap my head around a communist country having wages and paying for things. I asked one of my friends who grew up in the USSR and I just don’t get it. Please help.
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Basically, they had wages and pay for things just like we do in capitalist countries. But the wages and prices were set by the central government. There were no private companies completing on wages (driving them up, ideally) nor competing on prices (driving them down, again, ideally. You might notice basically neither of those are really happening right now in capitalist countries).
So like if you were say…a cashier you would just make like 100 rubles a month (I’m making up all these numbers after this btw) doesn’t matter what company you work for that’s just the amount that cashiers get paid. You can’t quit your job and work for a different company that pays cashiers more money. If you were an engineer you might make 200 rubles a month. And yes that’s one of the features of the USSR and communism more broadly. Everyone is supposed to make a living wage but that also meant that the disparity between a skilled worker and a non-skilled worker is nowhere near as massive as it is in capitalist countries.
At the same time, you can’t really shop around to “save money” on something. Like if you wanted a loaf of bread well that was 1 ruble. Everywhere and there was just…bread. There wouldn’t be a ton of different brands either.
In addition to that housing was generally really *really* cheap. Like people in the USSR would spend sometimes less than 10% of their wages on housing. But in turn, just about everything else was more much expensive than in the west. And stuff like even owning a phone or TV was really quite rare well into the 80s.
Whether this is because communism sucks or because Russia was literally a peasant country that hadn’t even really industrialized and where less than 20% of the population could read when the communists took over in the *1920s* in a more open question than people in the west want it to be.
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