The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed [Hardcover]

The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creeddiscusses 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 socialisms 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, Gy?rgy P?teri 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.Gy?rgy P?teriis professor emeritus at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

From the late 1950s onwards, Eastern Europe and the USSR witnessed a consumer boom. Focused on the booms main beneficiaries, Party functionaries, and combining inside knowledge with dispassionate analysis, Gy?rgy P?teris exemplary case study of the Hungarian political elite brings to life policy debates, commentaries by experts, changing social practices, and the modulations of material culture to produce an authoritative and engló#