The road to consumption

Abstract

The year 1989 was neither the triumph of “civil society” nor a decisive break with the past. Consumerist ambitions cultivated in these societies in the last period of Communist rule, and the growing dependence of these societies on the West made the change of system both logical and easy. People who cried adamantly for more freedom in fact dreamed about Western consumption. They received precisely what they had publicly demanded—Western institutions—not Western wealth. However, the developments in existing social and economic structures put the democratic gains of 1989–1991 in question. Post‐Communist societies became the new periphery of the capitalist world system. Capitalist relations there look barbaric when compared to those of the West, but that is natural for peripheral capitalism and cannot be otherwise. The nomenklatura has been bourgeoisified, but it has not become a fully‐fledged bourgeoisie. It has merged with the world capitalist system, accepting the rules of the system's game. Societies and economies have become demodernized, making new modernization necessary. To achieve it we must dare to challenge the existing elites and the whole model of peripheral capitalism.