Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?

[Red Square]

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.

[Komissar al-Blogunov]

I have a brother in law whose relatives lived on the other side of the curtain.  When they had opportunity to visit him in the US, they packed up their people's toilet paper since they were told it wasn't available in the West.  Like many Eastern Europeans of the day, they were absolutely gobsmacked by the goods and services available here.  They returned with suitcases of Charmin, and I forgot to ask if it got past customs in the home country.