1/20/2026, 6:14 pm
This 1931 Scott Paper ad is a perfect early example of systemic analysis: Bolshevism is what happens when the washroom is unpleasant and the towels feel like sandpaper.
The part that never makes it into the pamphlets is that capitalism has an annoying habit of solving small, real-world problems quickly, cheaply, and without a firing squad. Every worker gets equal access to hygiene - and the revolution dies not with a bang, but with two-ply.
And yet, comrades, do not underestimate the revolutionary potential of a paper towel. Or toilet paper, for that matter. Because sixty years after this ad, the communist country where I lived had neither paper towels nor toilet paper in its washrooms - public or otherwise. And nothing says “communism” like the absence of hygiene products. One might say the USSR collapsed in the washroom.
On the flipside of this decadent bourgeois ad, communist washrooms were breeding capitalists.
