>I am not the one who made up the quote - I heard about "we pretend we work" from people who had lived under communism.
>"they pretend to pay us" only gets 2 million hits on google, so maybe not that well known ;)

We abandoned the planned economy after only two 5-year plans. The self-managed socialism was very different from whatever you imagine. And then the tune was "they can't ever pay me as little as little I can work". Because the promise of workers' share in the profits was limited more and more and the incentive that self-management once was has greatly lost its attractiveness - once it became clear that the promise was proverbial (the proberb says "obećanje, ludom radovanje" - "a promise, a joy to the crazy").

Even so, the current capitalism has not, on the average, made people achieve the level of standard they had in 1989 (the last year before the final rise and fall). Sure, there are more cars in the streets, and their age is younger, but the number of poor, homeless, illiterate, criminal, addicted, ill of nearly forgotten diseases etc has risen even better than that. And the unemployment, the eternal problem of self-managed socialism, is solved by becoming normal, i.e. not a problem. I really don't know how people survive here.