Working People and Consumption Under Really-Existing Socialism: Perspectives from the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

This essay aims to describe changes in socioeconomic conditions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that resulted, on the one hand, from a transformation of concepts about property and, on the other hand, as a result of the emergence of a consumer society under an avowedly socialist regime. This project turned out to be far more complicated than foreseen, so that this essay should be viewed as a sketch of work in progress. If I merely had subscribed to the canons of conventional communist sociology, such changes as occurred could be traced to the abolition of the old class structures.Kurt Lungwitz, Über die Klassenstruktur in der DDR. Eine sozialökonomisch-statistische Untersuchung (Berlin, GDR, 1962). However, by the 1970s and 1980s new processes of sociocultural differentiation cast doubt on this analysis even in the GDR.Manfred Lötzsch and Joachim Freitag, “Sozialstruktur und soziale Mobilität,” in Jahrbuch für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Berlin 1981); and Artur Meier, “Abschied von der sozialistischen Ständegesellschaft,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 16–17 (1990):3–14. Moreover, in recent analyses we are faced with contradictory assessments: Some treat the changing class structure as resulting in homogen-ization, equalization, or leveling; others see it as reproducing old social differences, albeit from a different type of socioeconomic base. Unlike the former bourgeois elite, which was formed in relationship to capital, the new socialist elite or nomenklatura was constituted by its access to political power through which it in turn obtained resources and privileges.