Well, that's just the point. Socialism would never have happened in the first place if it had advocated socializing the workers' toothbrushes.
[WS:] That is exactly the problem with "Robin-Hoodism" or redistributive approach to socialism. Taking away other people's property almost never worked. However, take a socialist or collectivist approach to the production of new wealth i.e. people producing and owning what they have produced collectively (e.g. in a cooperative) - the issue of redistribution never arises. There are also different mind sets that each approach produces: resentment perpetuated the redistributive approach and a sense of community created by the cooperative approach.
The redistributive vs. cooperative approach pretty much coincide with the rural vs. urban divide, and do so for a reason. The agrarian mode of production, especially pre-modern one, is pretty much a zero-sum game, because output is pretty much the function of land ownership. The more land you have, the more you can produce, and since the supply of land is finite, one person's gain is another person's loss. It is easy to see why this mode of production produced a redistributive mind set, especially when land was concentrated in few hands. This was true of the 19th century Russia and is still true of the 20th century Rwanda or Zimbabwe.
The history of land reform in Poland after WW2 can be illustrative here. Prior to WW2, Poland's agrarian sector was pretty much plantation-like, a few large scale landlords, and landless rural masses 9about 70% of the population). In 1945, the communist government redistributed the land in the more or less 10-hectare plots. The size of the lot was based on practical consideration - the area that could be efficiently cultivated by an individual household that owned little or no mechanized equipment. In the mid 1950s, the increased industrial output made mechanized farming equipment available on a large scale, however, the 10-hectare plots made the efficient use of that equipment difficult. Hence the push for "collectivization," or rather agrarian cooperatives, which the backward peasants fiercely resisted.
The artisan or industrial production in the urban areas, by contrast, is not a zero sum game. One does not need to take away another person's property to increase one's production. This environment is much more conducive to forming cooperatives and collective ownership of the means of production and wealth.
Wojtek