Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia

8. Needing It

294 With each passing day, life is getting better. —Croatian public opinion survey respondent, 1964 —Daddy...what does “happy end” mean in English? —Happy end? —Yeah. —That’s something that doesn’t exist in real life, son. —What do you mean, it doesn’t exist? —That sort of nice, happy ending doesn’t exist! —And “biznis,” what does that mean? —Drop it! I have to get ready—you see that I’m in a hurry! —from the final episode of the Yugoslav television series Vruć vetar, 1980 In socialist Yugoslavia, consumerism created a new New Class. Contrary to Marxian models and the stated goals of Yugoslav socialist policy , which imputed class identities based on a person’s role in a system of production, membership in this New Class was predicated, in essence, upon participation in a modern style of mass consumption, a complex of behaviors , tastes, and attitudes that in many respects resembled those seen in the classic Western sites of contemporary consumer society. As the case presented throughout this volume demonstrates, its emergence was triggered by the government’s acknowledgment of a perceived need to satisfy consumer desires as a central goal of economic policy, then further encouraged by the self-management system’s nod toward the values of the market. Once the idea of consumer sovereignty had gained some rhetorical foothold in the country’s dominant ideology, the nascent industries of commercial promotion steadily advanced that concept as a legitimate and necessary premise 8 NeedingIt The Eclipse of the Dream, the Collapse of Socialism, and the Death of Yugoslavia Sources for the epigraphs: Ljiljana Baćević et al., Jugoslovensko javno mnenje o aktuelnim političkim i društvenim pitanjima, volume 3, in Jugoslovensko javno mnenje, Series A: Izveštaji o rezultatima anketnih istraživanja (Belgrade: Institut društvenih nauka, Centar za Istraživanje Javnog Mnenja, 1964), 81; Vruć vetar, episode 10. Needing It 冷 295 for the conduct of virtually all Yugoslav business. A remarkable expansion of advertising, marketing, and retailing followed, working in tandem with deep-seated popular yearnings and government policy (or at least sufficient governmental inaction) to produce decades of consumption and consumerism so ardent and unreserved that Yugoslavia became, in the end, quite unlike any other communist country. Paired with the market culture cultivated by the new business elites, a vital popular consumer culture also became a defining feature of Yugoslav daily life. In the wake of these transformations, however, the sharp slump in the country’s economic fortunes that began in the late 1970s left businesses with a pool of potential customers eager to buy and more open than ever to promises of consumer abundance, but without the financial wherewithal to satisfy their desires. In the 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavs learned to dream big. Later, they could not hope to make their dreams come true. The nature of the consumerist New Class and its implications for this final stage of downturn and disillusionment are the subjects of the analysis in this concluding chapter. The ordinary Yugoslavs who made up the new New Class had not only habituated to the abundance that had become the familiar surroundings of everyday life; they had developed a profound reliance on it as well. They had, in other words, come to need it. Just as much, they needed realistic prospects that it would continue. Failing that, one of the most important foundations of social solidarity, and system legitimacy, was stripped away. Yugoslavia flourished because of its embrace of consumption, and, in the end, consumption helped destroy it. Yet for all that significance, the Yugoslav experience reveals more than just the meaning of consumer culture and market culture in this single specific locale. In questioning the particulars of what happened in Yugoslavia, we should be sensitive to how it may also extend our understanding of the deeper significance of consumption in socialist societies as a wider category. Here we encounter a critical testing ground for what contemporary consumption scholarship has customarily analyzed as the global spread of cultural forms produced by specifically capitalist economic relations. Yugoslavia’s experience gives us a much richer picture of the causes, conditions, and consequences of those processes of diffusion—as well as their possible limits. It helps us see what in these new cultural patterns and cross-border transfers was (and was not) “capitalist,” and it sheds new light on the power of business practices to structure social relations, politics, and culture. Beyond that, and on a still more expansive conceptual plane, the case...