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Chapter 13 Making Markets Marxist? The East European Grocery Store from Rationing to Rationality to Rationalizations Patrick Hyder Patterson As revealed in the new historiography of modern business and agricultural production, the food chains that linked farms, factories, stores, and shoppers in Western Europe and North America became increasingly intricate during the twentieth century: farming was industrialized, commodities optimized, processing Taylorized, products specialized, distribution rationalized, advertising customized, retailing standardized. In addition, with the growing movement of capital, corporations, commodities, and technologies across state borders, the system as a whole was, at least in some respects, globalized. Plenty of local variety remained, to be sure, as such innovations were introduced to different degrees at different times and in different places. Despite their widening reach, these systematized features of the modern food trade have been linked in both the popular and the historical imagination with businesses in the classic sites of market economics, and especially with the United States, an association that has fueled numerous controversies about the costs of Americanization. The linkage has been so strong and so definitive, in fact, that such organizational practices are often taken to constitute the “free-market” food system, and vice versa.1 All this encourages us to think of what has happened to the production and consumption of food over the course of the past hundred years or so as a consummate product of liberal economics. So far, so capitalist. But the association is deceptively incomplete. In fact, there were little-noticed socialist analogues to these developments, as systems of food provisioning in the socialist societies of Eastern Europe underwent a spectacular transition during the period from 1945 to 1975. After an initial phase of extreme scarcity and persistent rationing following World War II, the governments of the new communist states were able to achieve, albeit with dif- ficulty and with many setbacks, what must be acknowledged as a dramatic transformation in living standards, agricultural production, food distribution, and commercial practice. By the 1970s some of the more prosperous East European countries had created systems of retail food distribution that (at least in larger urban areas) emphasized the establishment of inviting, consumeroriented , and well-stocked supermarkets and large self-service grocery stores. The new theories, styles, and practices of grocery sales thus bore more than a passing resemblance to the confidently and enthusiastically “modern” systems that had come to characterize the Affluent Society of the postwar West.2 This outcome was, in some respects, quite surprising. In their effort to distinguish socialist society from its ideological competitors in the capitalist world, communist party officials and government administrators routinely articulated the idea that they were pioneering a new, distinctive form of “socialist commerce .” Grocery retailing was a key part of that enterprise. Despite its seemingly banal and quotidian nature—or more accurately, I argue, precisely because of that everyday significance—grocery sales implicated critical aspects of economic policy at the highest levels: socialism had shifted ultimate responsibility for provisioning to the state, and the ongoing (and not always successful ) effort to keep food and other necessities on the shelves was a government activity that connected most directly and most frequently with the lived experience of ordinary citizens. What was happening in the stores can thus tell us a great deal about what happened to communism: its initial fixation on the dif- ficult task of securing even a bare subsistence standard, its frustrated attempts to move beyond that modest level to match or even outpace the Good Life of the postwar West, its occasional dalliances with the pleasures of Western-style “consumer society,” and its eventual collapse in the face of ongoing difficulties in the economic contest with capitalism. The historical record of Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the German Democratic Republic, countries that led the way toward a more consumer-friendly socialism , shows that the architects of socialist commerce and food policy welcomed the new forms of self-service shopping, and later the supermarket, as a way of constructing what they saw from a Marxist-Leninist perspective as a highly rational , modern, and efficient food distribution network, one appealingly amenable to technocratic management and planning.3 What was called rationalization or modernization in state-socialist parlance often meant, in fact, Westernization, as the methods of capitalist retailing were studied, analyzed, and imported. Given the power of U.S. business models, this in turn often implied no small degree of Americanization. Not at issue here, however, is globalization in its strictest...

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