A Soap Bar and a Lesson Missed

I was browsing through L’Occitane one day, looking for a bar of soap. Among the many offerings, I noticed three lovely and fragrant bars which were labeled shampoo soap. The fragrance brought back memories of the factory in Nice, France, which I had visited years ago on a trip to Europe with my students.

Making conversation, always with a teacher’s purpose in mind, I told the young woman helping me that we used to wash our hair in my country with cheap soap made by the socialist centralized economy run by the Communist Party and their only soap available left a nasty whitish residue on the hair shaft, which no amount of rinsing could wash off, and the soap had a distinctive and unpleasant odor. We used the same soap to launder our clothes by hand as we did not have washers and dryers, nor could we have afforded them.

The young woman asked politely curious why we would wash hair with soap, why not use shampoo and conditioner?

When I replied that shampoo and conditioners did not exist in a centrally planned socialist economy, she looked at me in disbelief, as if I had just fallen off to Earth from an alien planet.

I knew shampoos existed back then because I saw foreign tourists using shampoo at the outdoor showers by the Black Sea and the wind carried the fragrance. They came in individual one wash use in red plastic squares, not bottles, quite convenient for travel.

Hotel room cleaners would get occasionally lucky when a foreign tourist would leave behind fragrant shampoo squares and partially used bars of soap. It was better than a monetary tip to take home such luxuries.  

I could see light bulbs trying to flicker in her brain but she could not comprehend such impoverished reality in her abundant and privileged capitalist lifestyle, and that the socialism I escaped from and she worshipped, could deprive people of simple things like shampoo and fragrant soap.

She would not understand the story of a Hungarian friend who visited family for the first time in 1970 in Budapest and could not find socks anywhere. Americans can go to any store and find a myriad of choices of socks to pick from. People living under oppressive socialist planned economies had to learn to knit their own socks, sweaters, gloves, shawls, make their own clothes, or do without. There were not many choices of anything in government-run communist stores.

It was pointless to explain to her that soap and shampoo were the least of our worries, that food and necessities, medicine, and other basics like toilet paper were nowhere to be found unless you stood in line every day in hopes of finding something to purchase that you needed.

Before the lockdown, I had given to one of my doctors a copy of my book, Echoes of Communism, and he did not make any commentary about it. On a return visit months later, when the lockdown was in full swing and the grocery stores were rather empty and imposing limits on many things, the same doctor commented that he finally understood the dearth of basics under communism when his wife went to their local Giant grocery store and could not find basics. He said, they became believers. But, as soon as the supply of food improved, they returned to their leftist worship of the socialist ideology.

The moral of the story is that, unless you suffer the lengthy deprivation and indignities of a socialist economy like Venezuela’s and Cuba’s, you are not going to believe that your abundant way of life that you have under a capitalist economy, will disappear rapidly under a socialist, centrally mis-planned economy, run by one party rule, whose leaders lie to you that everything they do is for the common good and it is the best.