Consumer Socialism

Consumer Socialism is the second thematic section in a Replika series that explores the emerging interdisciplinary field of consumption studies. In this issue, four articles investigate the politics of consumption in East European state-socialist societies. In the first essay, “Way of Life, Ideology, and Household Economy”, Miklós Vörös analyzes some characteristic findings of Hungarian economic and sociological research on consumption practices in the seventies and eighties, the period of late-socialism. In the historical context of the failure of the state-socialist countries to catch up with the consumption level prevalent in the capitalist societies, conducting empirical research on consumption and social stratification gains political significance. The paper also identifies several research topics within the field of consumption studies that so far have been neglected by Hungarian sociologists and economists. In the second article, entitled “The Specter of Consumption”, Ferenc Hammer and Tibor Dessewffy investigates the effects of a political compromise between the Kádár regime and the majority of the population in Hungary. After suppressing the 1956 uprising, the new government bought political legitimacy in exchange for allowing Hungarian people to accumulate consumer goods. In order to maintain the level of consumption they had got used to, people began to invent creative techniques of consumption to multiply the selection of goods even in the shortage economy of the seventies. The next contribution is entitled “Consumption and the Culture of Inhabitation in Hungary in the 1970’s”. In this paper, Katalin S. Nagy analyzes the cultural aspects of interior decorating and living space management and argues that the typical apartment in Hungary could be characterized by its “dysfunctional density”. The fourth article, “The Road to the Consumer Society”, invites us to explore the emerging Wunderwirtschaft of the German Democratic Republic in the 1960’s. Ina Merkel discusses the spread of modern consumerism in East Germany and examines how the the Communist party sought to control this process by fighting against “consumer ideology” and emphasizing the importance of planning consumption. Merkel shows how the consumption policies of the Communist party led to contradictory outcomes: shortage and waste, uniformization and stratification.