Today is the day I ran out of socks. But not because I am lazy and didn't do my laundry, or because I am messy and lost them all. Today is the day on which I fully experienced consequences of socialism. 12 years of being part of a socialist-zionist youth movement, with which I am now on a gap year in Israel all the long discussions about political science could not make me realize the difficulties of common property. Though all it needed was a communa of 17 people to run out of socks.
Socks in general tend to be these magical garments that, after a while, mysteriously disappear and are never found again. It is only natural that 5 months into our program, most of the people only had a few single socks left. That was when sock-anarchy started: some people had bought a few new pairs socks, which where immediately stolen by the other people, who had none. If someone had a fresh pair of socks, they tried to hide them, but eventually every hiding place is found in a small communa house. The most vulnerable were the people, who had just washed their socks and had to hang them up to dry. After each laundry, about half of the socks had disappeared.
When the distress of trying to get a peek at other people's feet in order to know if they were sock-robbers became unbearable, we followed classical communa protocol, sat all together in a round and tried to come up with ideas to stop the sock-war. Two parties emerged from the discussion: First there were the sock-socialists, who proposed to establish communal socks. There would be two boxes standing in our corridor, one for clean and one for dirty socks. Whenever someone in the communa would need a new pair of socks, that person would just take one from the clean sock box, and throw them in the dirty sock box later. They argued that since were all out of socks anyway we might as well take an ideological step forward and have an equal amount of sock-poverty.
In opposition to the socialist sock party a group of sock-capitalists formed. These were the people who had bought new pairs of socks but had had them all stolen from them, and wanted them back without switching to communal socks. It was clear to them that they would be worse off in a socialist sock system because they had more socks to loose. They also argued that if the whole communa ran out of socks, they would have none even though they would be taking care of their own socks.
After weeks of discussions at the dinner table, while remaining in a state of sock-anarchy, the socialist sock-party had managed to override the sock-capitalists, and soon the day arrived on which we threw all our socks into one box, decorated with a hammer-and-sickle symbol, with the hammer replaced by a sock. With the communal money we had even bought a few extra pairs, and everyone, even the defeated sock-capitalists seemed very satisfied at first. The fact that the system was working made us all very proud, since we were actually realizing our socialist ideals.
Today is the day we all ran out of socks. The clean sock box is empty except for a single worn-off sock with many holes in it, and the dirty sock box bursting with stinky socks in different colors, sizes and vapors and no one has volunteered to wash them so far. Now we are all truly experiencing what happens to communal property, even in a house of 17 people who define themselves as socialists. Tomorrow the house will probably reek of smelly foot odor and it will take a few more quarrels to have someone do the communal laundry, but it doesn't really matter. At least we are all in it together.
