The truth is there’s no instruction manual for fixing societies that have been made decrepit through communism. There is no obvious set of policies for devolving nationalized enterprises into private hands in a just way. Those with ambition and ability have been recruited and corrupted by the party already. The tendency for power and industry to coalesce in free market nations, becomes in communism the vehicle for a much more explicit kind of conspiracy. The shock doctrine in Russia meant that apparatchiks who had state-facilitated power under the USSR could amass power and obscene wealth through the same old allies. For those at the top, the system may look the same.
It could also look that way from the bottom. For decades, Cuba has had a maximum wage. It endures a police presence that harasses citizens for possessing suspicious-looking food items. Single-party rule makes cronyism more intense and official. In many ex-communist countries, entrepreneurial verve is associated at the popular level with a grasping and corrupt willingness to deal with monsters and oppressors. Balzac’s adage that behind every great fortune there is a great crime is transferred down to even the most minor fortunes and strokes of luck. Who did you have to rat out to get that license? So-and-so has a bodega now — he’s probably informing on the customers.
Law and order can make markets appear. But it is civil society and a culture of social trust that make free markets tolerable. And it is precisely this social trust that communism so effectively destroys. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” became a de facto motto for the late Soviet Union.
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