Goes to show just how fragile a high-trust society is. Theft and corruption can easily be normalized to such an extent that not participanting gets reframed as immoral.
If the factory is yours, then everything inside is yours ;)
But it's funny how low wages under the broken Soviet economic system turned such things into a semi-official, informal work perks, allowing people to make ends meet.
I wouldn't call it "funny" though. It ws quite sad and I'm glad it's over.
That said, the general unavailability of everything was caused by an incompetent government rather the the system itself but the system itself caused the government. My point is that it was a succession of demagogueries hiding personal interests that caused the recurring and unrecoverable tragedies of that state. Being controlled and misguided is not exclusive to any particular government or political system.
I don't think communism is a good form of government and I don't think the soviet union was marching the right way.
But the biggest blunts came from other much more serious mistakes caused by politicians ignoring science, like the big famine and many others, including the Chernobyl connerie
As for motivation, beyond the obvious one, people also stole because many items were not available in stores (having a guy who has a connect on toilet paper was a thing back then), and also, since Communism in Poland was actually a Russian dictatorship, the idea was that if you steal from communist factories you're fighting the system and making it fall faster.
I guess if it’s your moral obligation to steal from the workplace it reframes it somewhat.