Interesting. It sounds like communism is a better system for planning and building infrastructure while capitalism is a better system for using and living within infrastructure.
It's not about communism but the centralized absolute power. When government is the one and only player in the game, it makes all the calls and can fully control all the aspects and plan every detail of peoples lives, construction, organization of life. It's a good thing for urbanism and infrastructure planning, and not so good thing for pretty much everything else.
This. You can have good urban planning anywhere, if you agree on laws and enforce them.
The reason why urban planning is worse in Poland than it used to be is because there was no focus on zoning laws and planning was neglected for many years. Mind you, this is not accidental in any way: there was (and is) a concerted effort to prevent new zoning laws, or at least delay them as much as possible.
It's partially because communist economies aren't based off of currency but of labor. Forcing people to perform labor is a lot harder than forcing them to pay a 10% tax. So instead of having lotteries making people build many things over time, it was easier to enforce a "tax" on everyone at once for construction projects, essentially a system of corvée labor. The Chinese have done it for thousands of years, even with a complex currency system. Although the people exploited for it often get heavily abused, if not killed, the future generations hugely benefit.
Taxes are exchanges of labour just like any other; while it's true you aren't forced to work to pay taxes, even in modern societies you aren't provided with an allowance if you're not searching for a job (but you are if you have a disability).
Nevertheless, these "communist" economies were absolutely based off currency; the workers earned wages in money, which they could then accumulate or spend. The ruble was just as "money" as the U.S. dollar was. An economy based on labour (whatever that means) would likely not use money, but labour vouchers instead, which are non-trasnferrable and therefore cannot function as money-capital.
Depends on the period. I only remember the 80s in Poland, and money were almost useless. If you wanted to buy a car or a flat in big city - you signed onto a waiting list, paid part of the money, and waited for 5-20 years. No amount of money could speed that up.
If you bought a car, drove home, and sold it immediately - you would earn more than 100% on that transaction. But nobody did that, because everybody had money and only about half of the families had cars.
Each year you had the right to by 2 pairs of "winter shoes" shoes per person. You bought them no matter if it was the correct size of style, because you later bartered them for the stuff you need. Same with other "rare" stuff like coats or exotic fruits. Most people in Poland seen oranges and bananas once a year on christmas.
Lowest level manual workers earned half or 1/3rd of what a chairman of a big state company would earn. But the low level manual worker knew nobody important, so he waited for 20 years to buy a shitty socialist car, while the state company chairman got a western-made car after a few weeks of waiting.
It wasn't because of the price - it was because he knew people and could give them favors.
I have asthma, during communism my parents got the modern drugs for it mailed every few months from the family in Canada, because no amount of money could buy them in Poland in 80s. They only had outdated drugs for asthma that had awful side effects.
Fiat 126p (which was outdated in 70s in Italy) was produced in Poland till 2000. It took 26 seconds to accelerate to 100 km/h, and in case you had an accident in it going over 50 km/h everybody inside died. It was awful, awful car. But it was what was available, so people took it.
My parents build a house in 80s, and money weren't an issue. They took 30 years mortgage and paid it all off in 1991 thanks to my father going for 4 months to Austria to work on a farm. But the availaibility of materials in 80s was the real bottleneck. We had roof made from asbestos (it was called "eternit"), and while people knew it wasn't the best thing to use - nobody cared because that was what you could get. People stockpiled it on their backyards in case they will want to build a house for their children.
So yeah - the important currency wasn't the money, it was favors and coupons allowing you to buy stuff for your money.
If I had unlimited time I'd love to learn Polish. It just sounds like the pretties slavic language in my opinion. Russian is like spanish, whereas Polish is like French to me.
This was the exact concept I was sort of getting at. Although you have a personal experience and went into more detail, the end result is somewhat the same. Ultimately you could earn money, simply because it was worthless. Whats the point in money if there is no supply? So relationships and labor were what you needed to survive. The government for damned sure was aware of this and they realized taxing you your money was just as worthless as well. So they taxed your labor effort instead.
It's not factually correct to say that communist currency was "as good as US dollar" and you could freely "accumulate or spend" it.
Due to shortages many basic products were rationed and you simply couldn't buy them with cash. Having more money didn't make a difference unless you had the right rationing stamps (or connections to a high-ranking party official). This lead to a whole secondary market of people trading stamps with each other (e.g. cigarette stamps for meat stamps). When it comes to accumulation, periods of hyper-inflation and lack of investment opportunities made this much harder. Moreover, currency exchange rate was controlled by the government, which led to illegal underground currency trading.
This is based on experiences from Poland, but I'm sure many other communist countries had similar issues.
All of that may be true, but it doesn't detract from the fact that money is money, that workers are waged, and you could accumulate, even if it was extremely hard. It is currently very hard to accumulate money for large sections of the global population, but that doesn't mean that what they are trying to accumulate is money. The Polish state, like any other, traded on an international level with money. Stamps are more interesting, but they share the features of a currency: a general equivalent (albeit restricted in this case), accumulative, and transferable.
The fundamental character of money stayed the same, even if there were restrictions on it, as did the capitalist character of money paid through predominant wage labour. The state still collected taxes (perhaps at a different stage in the production process, though) in money. China also has currency controls, but the renmbini is just as much currency as the US dollar is.
Just as a crime exists in a country (albeit with practical restrictions, i.e. you get thrown in prison), money has existed in every modern country, even the so-called "socialist" ones, with some other restrictions.
Money is only as valuable as the people deem it to be. If everybody has a problem spending it and they willfully create secondary markets simply because there isn't even a reasonable amount of demand, it means the money is worthless and that your labor alone has FAR more value. Digging a ditch for someone for a day for a pair of shoes may not be ideal, but working in a factory that pays you in a currency that allows you to get on a waiting list of 6 months to buy shoes is even more less than ideal.
Money accumulation was easy. Spending money was the hard part. You had to know right people to get access to black markets or to know who to bribe to get stuff out the back door.
I'm not sure you know how money worked in communist countries.
The character wasn't the same, because money was not enough to buy you things. You needed special coupons to buy things, and coupons were distributed by the government using various systems.
So you could have enough savings to buy a new car/fuel/washing mashine or even meat, but unless you had a coupon the money gave you nothing.
For that reason for example used cars were sold for above their original price. You could buy a car for an amount, drive it for a few years, and sell it for a higher price than originally - but you wouldn't be able to buy a new one unless you had a coupon for a new one.
The same with fuel or meat. You could have a ton of savings, but unless you have a coupon, you wouldn't be able to buy meat or fuel to that car.
The coupons were distributed by the government through government companies.
I think I maybe was a bit too vague. I am aware that they aren't 100% labor or currency oriented both ways. I think what I was saying was it was more prominent. What I was getting at was these "labor vouchers" are essentially worthless if there isn't a supply for you to use it. So labor isn't exactly just what the state needs, but what you need. So instead of working for a wage, you work for yourself making something you'll need.
