Abstract

"The Shift toward a Culture of Choice and the Erasure of Employment in Communist Eastern Europe: How Enterprise Leaders and Managers Ended Up Downplaying Labor as They Promoted Consumption "

Patrick Patterson, University of California, San Diego (patrickpatterson@ucsd.edu)

Drawing on a wide collection of primary sources from communist Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and East Germany, this presentation analyzes the causes, workings, and implications of the socialist commercial establishment’s embrace of what I identify as a transnational culture of consumer choice. From the 1960s onward, enterprise managers, planners, and specialists eagerly moved to adopt many (not all) of the new, “international” business forms, techniques, and styles of consumer engagement that they had seen to be so successful (and so fashionable) in the free-market West. Their work, I conclude, ended up (as under capitalism) elevating a powerful set of priorities, commitments, and identities arising from consumption, while obscuring the hard work required to deliver pleasure and satisfaction to consumers.

I examine on-the-ground activities in key domains of consumer engagement, along with a rich specialist and administrative/governmental literature in those fields. Modern, “progressive,” self-service retail models, notably supermarkets and department stores, made shopkeeping and sales work much more impersonal and much less salient to shoppers, just as in-store experiences drove home the message that consumers' leisure was to be prized, free time maximized, and unnecessary work avoided. Compounding these dynamics, advertising, branding, and promotional packaging practices emphasized what the consumer would receive when making a purchase, seldom acknowledging the long chain of production processes — and the workers — required to make all this happen. Meanwhile, growing interest in marketing as an all-encompassing management philosophy opened the door (to varying degrees depending on regime orthodoxy) to new views that made demand the starting point for all decisions about what would be produced, importing an economic logic that makes labor, along with laborers and the jobs they hold, an outgrowth of consumer desire. In all this commercial work, reliance on models imported from Western practice mattered immensely — and carried real potential to subvert socialist norms.