Chapotraphouse

The notorious "bread lines" also came as a result of Gorbachev's liberalization and the collapse of supply chains that went along with it. Like the primary dissent against the CPSU was that there weren't enough consumer treats for everyone to live like white American suburbanites, leading the liberal bloc of the CPSU to suggest that "idk what if we make companies buy stuff from each other, lol, lmao, that's probably magic and will fix everything because we earnestly do not know where all the cheap consumer goods and resources the privileged segments of American society consume come from as we have forgotten what 'imperialism' or 'the exploitation of a rural or racial underclass' are and so believe it is literally free market magic that makes consumer goods just spontaneously appear from nothing by doing freedom or something, lol, lmao" which obviously cratered consumer good production because they just fucking Sears-ed themselves and suddenly there weren't enough staple foods to go around and public trust in the CPSU collapsed (alongside an anti-communist propaganda campaign by the anti-communist extremist Gorbachev put in charge of the state media, and the local branches of the Communist Party being systematically isolated and hamstringed by Gorbachev's bloc).

Basically they’re trying to say “things got so bad due to mismanagement people had to line up and receive rations to stay fed.” Those that understand the concept and aren’t just convinced communism is when you literally form a line to get bread from a sneering commissar.

They’re saying communism sucks so bad it has to go into crisis mode, or is inherently in some kind of crisis mode just for being communist. Food security is a pretty salient vector for critically evaluating a state or system, so by focusing on food they give their pithy line some intellectual firmness. We must also remember that welfare is for poor people and communist countries have poor people so they have welfare and because individual poverty is individual choice the country must have made the wrong choice to be poor by being communist etc etc blah blah blah we all know their moral arguments.

Meanwhile you read this and look at the state of things with the and the and the and the besides rent, groceries, and everything else snowballing into the shit that stresses you out

And you might look at all of this and go “Well? Isn’t this some kind of crisis? When is this system going to go into crisis mode?”

Shit is clearly going some weird kinda way right now and some sort of system reaction addressing food security would be pretty cool!

having to ration it instead of having an excess that people can self-serve like the grocery shopping we're used to is kinda mid. waiting in line wastes a lot of time for a lot of people when maybe it could have been delivered instead.

one mitigating thing people probably don't think of is that (depending on the time period) the bread probably didn't have a fuckload of preservatives so it couldn't sit on the shelf in a bag for a month without spoiling.

And the thing to me too: all governments are prone to failures outside of their control. And any government policy can fuck up with genuinely good intentions and research. In the 20th century especially ecological issues because the science of understanding ecology was still catching up to the technology that could alter it imo (obviously not in every case, but when you rapidly industrialize and change you get unintended consequences).

Like it would be silly of me to blame the dust bowl (entirely; lot's of nuance regarding settler colonialism and the structure of agriculture markets but out of scope for the point I'm getting to imo) on capitalism: it's pretty obvious a bunch of farmers from rural areas in the early 1900's wouldn't really have a grasp on macro-scale soil errosion enough to understand the situation they were making.

But what I /can/ blame on capitalism is that there were limited levers to assist those people, limited power to monitor and correct the issue until FDR established it, and a derth of incentives for the government and power in the country to remain apathetic or become outright exploitative towards the suffering. We can draw lines to all of those things directly to how capitalism as a system molds a government.

I guess that's to say: yeah I think it's fair to judge by the response more than the cause (not entirely more but weighted diffy) in a lot of those allegories or pictures people use. Those mismanagements happened everywhere as the world industrialized. Socialist states had breadlines and stalinkovs. Capitalist states had hoovervilles, union busting murder cops bombing camps, and sometimes the occasional goodwill of a religious group or charity effort in cases where they didn't implement an ultimately socialist consession into the system. One of those systems had a more consistent response and a clear sense of altruism that the other doesn't. I'll take the breadline if it means more of my neighbors stay fed. I'll live.

I'm probably simplifying things a bit while simultaneously rambling too much but this topic is interesting!