Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Acceptance of affluence must not be confused with blind optimism or market euphoria. Rather, it involved a more balanced attitude to things. No one illustrated this new-found equilibrium better than Jean Saint-Geours in his book Vive la société de consommation (1971). Saint-Geours was establishment pure. With a socialist background, he had served as chargé de mission under Pierre Mendès France in 1954–5, before becoming inspector-general of finances, a top-ranking civil servant. At the time of writing, he was director general of the bank Crédit Lyonnais. As a founding member of the Club of Rome, he recognized the dangers of pollution, poverty and urban sprawl. Growth needed to be slowed down and managed. Still, he argued, it was foolish to think any progress could be made by forsaking consumption. The world of goods had brought collective as well as individual freedoms. People found genuine satisfaction in the use of things, something an older ‘sacralization of labour’ had denied them. Rather than leading to alienation, as the Marxists Lefebvre and Marcuse had it, consumer society lifted individuals out of ignorance and their dependence on Church and elites. Spending on books had tripled in the 1950s. Repression had given way to greater sexual freedom.

  Saint-Geours’ was a distinctly French way of making peace with affluence. Consumer society was not a social disease. It had not killed culture, he wrote. It had merely democratized it. The creative spirit was alive and well; Saint-Geours was one of the first to imagine a ‘post-industrial society’ where the pleasure and freedom to consume would revolve around new experiences. He could see what Galbraith, fifteen years earlier, could not. Affluent societies were spending more and more on health and education: in the early 1960s, public expenditure was 36 per cent of GDP in France (33 per cent in the UK; 35 per cent in West Germany); by the late 1970s it had reached 46 per cent in all three. This was no coincidence, according to Saint-Geours. L’homme de consommation was more than a private hedonist. Abundance allowed individuals to concern themselves with collective needs such as better healthcare and a cleaner environment. Private consumption and social progress were tied. To want pace-makers but not cars was impossible. Saint-Geours used his own life to illustrate how things were ‘complicit’ in who we were. He was on intimate terms with his car, even feeling a certain ‘fraternity’ with those who made it. Yes, the car polluted, but it was also liberating, giving access to the countryside and a whole world of sensations. Its curves gave him ‘pure pleasure’. With the automobile, the dreams of man had produced a truly enchanted object. Beautifully designed cars reminded him of ‘fish and fowl’.170 Consumer goods were on par with nature.

  SELLING OUT

  For all the anxieties of priests and philosophers, Western societies managed to absorb the challenge of affluence. No regime collapsed under the weight of goods. It was in socialist Eastern Europe that material desires played a more destructive role. To switch to the Soviet Bloc after discussing affluence deserves some justification. Shortages, after all, were legendary, and choice limited or non-existent. It would be a mistake, however, to write a triumphant Whiggish history of consumer culture as if it were synonymous with the rise of market liberalism. Socialism was its own kind of consumer society, and people in it developed a hunger for things out of proportion to what was available in the shops. Today, it is tempting to think of materialism as a disease of capitalist societies with their spendthrift consumers, ubiquitous advertising and department stores filled to bursting. The socialist experiment suggests an inverse relation was also possible: finding it hard to get hold of goods could make them more, not less attractive. Lack of choice, moreover, did not mean people had no things. From the vantage point of any society before the twentieth century, these were enormously well-endowed societies. The 1960s–’70s were years of spectacular growth. In the USSR, consumer durables grew at a rate of 8 per cent a year. By 1976, virtually every family in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union had a TV, a radio and a fridge, although Bulgaria and Romania lagged behind. Leisure and tourism shot up as well. Deprivation, like affluence, is a relative experience. In the affluent West, poor consumers also suffered social exclusion. The problem for socialist societies was that aspirations were measured against the higher, rising watermark of the West.

  In May 1960, in a speech to the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev pledged that in the ‘immediate future’ the Soviet Union would reach the consumption level of the United States: after that ‘we will enter the open sea in which no comparisons with capitalism will anchor us.’171 Two years later, the Hungarian government promised its people 610,000 TVs, 600,000 washing machines and 128,000 fridges within the next three years. ‘Frigidaire-socialism’ was born.

  What drove socialist consumer culture? One view is to see it as a Western import. True, Western jazz, jeans and rock exercised enormous pull – in the late 1960s, hippies went to the Latvian Academy of Sciences library to consult copies of Vogue. Socialist advertising, such as it was, took its lead from Western agencies. Yet the Eastern Bloc also had its own dynamics. As in the case of Americanization, stimuli travelled from the periphery as well as the centre. The USSR took its mass-production furniture from Czechoslovakia. Socialist brotherlands held joint fashion and music festivals.172

  A second reading is more cynical and sees consumerism as a strategy of rule. Socialist leaders, in this view, bought domestic peace with goods. The lesson taken from the uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 was that factories needed to produce things that people wanted. The Prague uprising in 1968 and conflict in Poland in 1970 were followed by promises of more goods and greater openness to youth culture. While there is some truth to this, it tells us little about how goods were changing daily life in these societies. Socialist consumption was a product of internal tensions as well as external stimuli.

  American goods turned the Iron Curtain into a net curtain. Before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it was easy for East Germans to visit exhibitions or watch American movies in one of the border cinemas in the Western zone, helped by a subsidized exchange rate. In June 1956, Polish workers used the Poznan´ international trade fair, which in addition to the ubiquitous modern fitted kitchen had a packed American fashion show, for anti-Soviet protests.173

  The problem for socialist regimes was lack of vision as much as poor economics. One after the other, they entered the material race on terms set by the West, unable to develop an alternative, ‘simpler’ lifestyle less dependent on things. Emulation was most intense in the eye of the storm: the two Germanies. In 1953, the East German regime launched its ‘new course’ with a greater emphasis on consumer goods.174 As in 1930s Stalinist Russia, there were attempts to develop a more cheerful, attractive sales culture.

  When it came to gadgets, socialists were not to be beaten. The 1956 Purimix was an ingenious contraption. It did the vacuuming and, with the right attachments, chopped vegetables and ground coffee. The East German Fashion Institute, which opened its doors the following year, looked to Paris, not Moscow. Heinz Bormann, the ‘Red Dior’, was mimicking the newest Western designs.175 In 1958, food rationing ended in East Germany and Party chief Walter Ulbricht announced that in three years the GDR would have ‘overtaken’ its capitalist neighbour in consumer goods and per capita income.176 By now, there was a socialist mail-order catalogue and a push for self-service shops. Instalment plans allowed socialist shoppers to buy on credit for up to 20 per cent of their annual income; furniture and radios were the most popular items.

  All these initiatives ran into the same difficulty. There was an institutional reason why socialist regimes neglected light consumer goods in favour of heavy industry: big, centralized industry was the source of political power. In addition, the barter regime of the Soviet bloc placed a premium on food and raw materials at the expense of technological innovation. The more developed members such as the GDR and Czechoslovakia were punished twice over. They had to trade their undervalued industrial products for overvalued food and raw materials.177 The law of comparative advantage was turned on its hea
d. Incapable of delivering on big white goods, the GDR in 1959 shifted its focus to the ‘thousand little things needed in daily life’ like screws, sewing needles and spare parts. Delegations travelled to Sweden and West Berlin to study dry cleaning and DIY.178 If socialist consumers wanted things, they would need to learn to repair them.

  The material race, then, was already in full swing when vice-president Nixon sparred with Khrushchev in the famous kitchen debate at the international exhibition in Moscow on 24 July 1959. The fully equipped six-room ranch house cost $14,000. Any American worker could afford that, Nixon challenged Khrushchev. The Soviets had sent Sputnik into space two years earlier and the Soviet leader was not easily shaken: in the Soviet Union all new houses had this kind of equipment, he hit back. Variety was overrated: why have different models if one machine did just fine? The Soviet media, as if making Galbraith’s point, showed images of American slums and garbage dumps. Almost 3 million visited the American pavilion in Sokolniki Park, three times the number who went to the Soviet exhibits (see Plate 43). The model kitchen prepared 16,000lbs of frozen foods for visitors amazed at the appearance of French fries or mash within minutes. Some Muscovites shook their heads at gadgets such as the toaster: why toast bread that had been cooked already? Consumer goods were an irresistible magnet. American models were mobbed by visitors who wanted to know how they lived, the price of their dresses, and whether false eyelashes needed to be removed at night. The American pavilion came fourth in the official competition; the Czechoslovakian one won. Presumably, the people who had carried away dirty Pepsi cups as souvenirs felt differently.179

  Socialist leaders had been reared on Marx’s vision of a future where the divisions between work and leisure, private and public, would be overcome. Under communism, people would no longer seek refuge in leisure and private comfort as an escape from work. With work no longer coercive, leisure would complete a rounded socialist man. As we have seen, in the 1930s fine clothes and consumer goods were used to reward productive workers. During the Cold War, leisure became a central battleground between socialism and ‘capitalist imperialism’. Rock’n’roll, jeans and TV romances were weapons of ‘ideological diversion’ by which the class enemy tried to distract attention from building socialism.180 They were a breeding ground of ‘false needs’.

  In truth, these pressures were home-grown as much as imported. Long before East Germany lifted its official ban on watching Western television, socialist regimes had been complicit in the creation of a more privatized lifestyle. In some ways, this paralleled the Nazis’ predicament: it was difficult to control the living room, notwithstanding attempts to recruit children to denounce their parents. With the Thaw, from the mid-1950s, privatization accelerated. Self-service shops and supermarkets sprang up across the Eastern Bloc. Krushchev had championed a socialist norm of consumption, but variety and a private taste for little luxuries had little room in it. Consumer goods industries continued to be starved for the benefit of heavy industry. From 1964, under Leonid Brezhnev, Krushchev’s successor, the Soviet Union changed direction. Factories had to establish direct links with shops to ensure that more of the goods they manufactured were actually wanted. Spies studied markets and conferences discussed how to improve distribution. Between 1966 and 1970, the output of consumer goods grew by half. Conveniently, the oil crisis raised the demand for Soviet crude and made it possible to import more goods at lower prices. The streets of Moscow became more consumer friendly, with more alteration and self-service shops. By 1972, two hundred shops in Moscow had their own cafés. Pravda, the party newspaper, printed a new truth with articles saying that ‘the consumer is always right!’ and calling for ‘commodities – to the people’.181

  From the outside, miles of brutalist housing blocks signalled drab uniformity. On the inside, a rush was under way to personalize one’s flat. In 1960, a Polish magazine started a series called ‘My Hobby is My Flat’, with examples of how to blend new and old furniture, decor and belongings into a personal style.182 Official designers preached functional modernity, but their despair at the resurgence of knick-knacks and ‘bourgeois’ furniture tells its own tale. The Soviet Union made ten times as many furniture sets in 1975 as it had ten years earlier. The home exercised an enormous pull in socialist societies and inspired a hot pursuit of novelty, fashion and updating. In the late 1960s and 1970s in Russia, the craze was for crystalware and tableware, often bought in the GDR. In East Germany, wall-to-wall carpets and all-round wallpapering were entering homes at record speeds. The regime’s market researchers found that a third no longer bought sofas and living-room furniture to last for life but had replaced them in the last ten years.183 When researchers asked teenagers in 1979 about their desires, ‘to furnish a pretty flat’ came out top for boys and girls alike, well ahead of ‘going on holiday every year’, ‘dressing fashionably’ or saving for a record player or car.184

  The hybrid nature of socialist economies bred both desires and disappointments. Basic goods such as housing, education, electricity and food in schools and factories were provided by the state at heavily subsidized prices. Conversely, consumer goods came with a hefty price tag and long waiting lists. A large shadow economy emerged; in Poland, around a quarter of private income was spent in the black market in the early 1980s.185

  Cheap public services are sometimes invoked as a positive counterweight to the many failures in private consumption. This misses the way in which defects in one aggravated problems in the other. One reason East Germans poured their money and souls into the interior was that this was the one aspect of housing they had control over. The housing stock itself was a disaster. In 1971 in East Germany, the average home was sixty years old. Two thirds were without bath or toilet; 29 per cent did not even have running water. According to an internal survey, 1.2 million flats or 20 per cent of the housing stock were in an ‘entirely unacceptable’ condition.186 Sweden and West Germany were building new flats at more than twice the speed. The problem was not only the number of flats but their small size. The average flat (53 square metres) had one or two rooms. In the West, with its more spacious 79 square metres, it was three or four. Even after Honecker’s house-building programme in the 1970s, in a place like Saßnitz, for example, a seaside town with 10,000 souls, 944 married couples were on a waiting list for their first flat, while 128 divorced couples were still forced to co-habit. Other areas of public consumption suffered from similar shortages, including the much-praised childcare system; in Zwickau, home of the Trabant car, which, with its two-stroke engine and hard plastic shell, came to symbolize life under socialism, more than half the children were waiting for a nursery place.187 Socialism was hugely wasteful. Housing was so cheap that once a family had secured a large flat there was no reason to give it up once the children had moved out. At parties, hosts used to cool beer under (free) running water in the bathtub. Socialism was a recipe for private austerity and public squalor.

  And cheap public goods encouraged private wants and social stratification. For socialist leaders, who bore the scars of austerity from their own upbringing, there was a simple moral logic why rent should be virtually free while a TV cost a monthly salary of 1,500 marks or more. The first was a ‘basic need’, the latter a ‘luxury’. Luxury taxes and sumptuary legislation were nothing new, of course, but historically these had sought to shore up hierarchies, not to break them down. It was a counterproductive mix. The regime was effectively subsidizing a new class of consumers. Cheap housing left better-earning professionals and the intelligentsia with a vast unspent income. The result was a consumerist pressure cooker, as high-income groups competed for everything, from cars to fridges and showerheads. In the 1950s, collectivization, education reform (and bourgeois flight) had advanced social equality in East Germany. In the 1960s, social stratification returned in earnest in the sphere of consumption.

  It is possible to follow this process fairly clearly, because the GDR was a dictatorship, and a very German one at that. It set up its own Institut
e of Market Research and kept immaculate records. In the ‘workers and peasants’ state’, it was the intelligentsia, managers and clerks who owned washing machines, soaked in a hot bath and topped the waiting lists for cars. Most appliances were found in households with two earners. Single mothers were left behind. Pensioners were lucky to have a ‘dry toilet’. Some of these divides narrowed as televisions and other new technologies diffused, only for new ones to open up. The introduction of the five-day working week in 1967 and freer travel within the Eastern Bloc sparked a tourism and camping boom. How you spent your weekend, whether you went on holiday at all, and whether you could relax on an air-mattress, became new status markers. White-collar workers were more likely to go on holiday than industrial workers. Camping equipment belonged disproportionately to the intelligentsia. The rich had hobbies; the poor did not.188

  Additional divides cut across gender and generation. Human fulfilment through leisure was one of the core goals of socialism. Female labour participation rose dramatically in socialist regimes, but in a scarcity economy this only left women more pressured, as they were the ones who did the shopping. The real beneficiaries of a shorter working week were their husbands. East German time-use data shows that men’s free time shot up from 37 to 48 hours a week between 1965 and 1971, while women gained only a single hour (26 to 27 hours). At a time when the temporal gulf between the sexes was narrowing in the West, it was wider than ever before in the East; women did 80 per cent of the shopping, cleaning and cooking in 1965, 79 per cent in 1970.189 A good chunk of time was taken up by sewing, knitting and mending. Half of women’s skirts and dresses were home-made because shops did not have the desired size, colour or pattern. Even among top earners, every third woman regularly sat at the sewing machine. Consumption involved a large share of self-provisioning, gifting, recycling and passing on, especially when it came to children’s clothing. As late as 1980, in spite of various plans to improve quantity and variety, half the boys and girls were wearing hand-me-downs.190 The regime tried to respond in the late 1960s by extending shop opening hours. Perversely, this only added to the frustration, as women spent their Saturdays roaming across neighbouring districts in the hunt for a dress, mostly in vain.191