Bought and Sold

Abstract

Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, and from the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted a consumerist lifestyle. This book explores how Yugoslavia became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. The book shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer culture. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders. The book argues that consumerism was one of the critical factors that held the multi-ethnic society together during the years of the Yugoslav "Good Life" of the 1960s and 1970s. With the economic downturn of the 1980s, however, the reliance on expanding consumerism ultimately led to bitter disillusionment, stripping the unique Yugoslav model of its legitimacy and priming the populace for mutual resentment, ethnic conflict, and war.

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