Most people living under socialism had little understanding of capitalism in practice. Workers interviewed in Poland believed that if their factory were to be closed down in the transition to the free market, "the state will find us some other work" {New Yorker, 11/13/89). They thought they would have it both ways. In the Soviet Union, many who argued for privatization also expected the government to continue providing them with collective benefits and subsidies. One skeptical farmer got it right: "Some people want to be capitalists for themselves, but expect socialism to keep serving them" ( Guardian, 10/23/91). Reality sometimes hit home. In 1990, during the glasnost period, when the Soviet government announced that the price of newsprint would be raised 300 percent to make it commensurate with its actual cost, the new procapitalist publications complained bitterly. They were angry that state socialism would no longer subsidize their denunciations of state socialism. They were being subjected to the same free-market realities they so enthusiastically advocated for everyone else, and they did not like it. Not everyone romanticized capitalism. Many of the Soviet and Eastern European émigrés who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country's poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history. They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doctor when they fell ill on the job, that they were subject to severe reprimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford medical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unemployment at any time.

-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds

This always makes me wonder though, how can we keep reminding people how fucking awful capitalism is after a generation is born that has never known it? Are going to have to make some "Free capitalism" zones as museums or something to remind people to never fucking take us back there?