The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class

György Péteri

doi:10.5771/9781666923971

Summary

The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2023
ISBN-Print: 978-1-6669-2396-4
ISBN-Online: 978-1-6669-2397-1
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 216
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. 1. Confessional No access
  2. Notes No access
3. Acknowledgments No access
4. Acronyms No access
1. The Consumer Citizen of State Socialism No access
2. Consumers for Export? No access
3. Critical Sociology and the Acquisitive Society No access
4. Notes No access
1. Notes No access
1. In the Mirror of Party Disciplinary Procedures No access
2. Kádár’s Social Contract and the Advent of Acquisitive Society No access
3. The Functionary and the Rest: The Message of the Feature Film “Don’t Waste the Gas!” No access
4. “DON’T WASTE THE GAS! GREAT HUNGARIAN DISSUADING FILM”19 No access
5. Notes No access
1. Ruling Classes Rubbing Shoulders: The Budapest Hunting Expo of 1971 No access
2. By now the reader must have grown curious: “Communists and hunting? Really?!” No access
3. 1. 1. Multiple Club Memberships and Networks of Reciprocity No access
4. 1. 1. Hierarchies and Social Distinction No access
    2. What Was, Then, In It, for Them? No access
5. Notes No access
1. Preludium: New Sobriety and the End of It No access
2. The Challenge to and Struggle over Acquired Privileges No access
3. The Reform Planned, Resolved, and Never Implemented No access
4. Notes No access
1. “Irresponsible Love of Comfort,” Sneaking Privatization, and Attempts at their Containment No access
2. Containment by Yielding: Legitimate Private Appropriation from Bonus in Kind to Salary in Cash No access
3. Who Is Afraid of Car-Sharing? No access
4. Who Is Afraid of Collective Transport? No access
5. 1. Chauffeurless Driving No access
  2. Private Cars “in the Party’s Service” No access
6. Notes No access
1. Notes No access
1. 1. National Archives of Hungary (MOL) No access
  2. Budapest Capital City Archives (BFL) No access
  3. Open Society Archives, Budapest (OSA) No access
  4. Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA LT) No access
  5. Mezőgazdasági Múzeum [Museum of Agrictulture, Budapest – MMB] No access
  6. Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár (Archives of Political History and the Trade Unions, Budapest – SZKL) No access
2. INTERVIEWS No access
3. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINTED SOURCES No access
Index No access Pages 209 - 214
About the Author No access Pages 215 - 216