Shortages of Consumer Goods in Stalinist Regimes

Stalin’s “theoretical contribution”

In the earlier instalments of this series, drawing on a range of testimonies, I sought to show how shortages of consumer goods, long queues, poor-quality goods, privileged channels of distribution, and the pervasive sense of deprivation surrounding everyday life were all systematic features of Stalinist regimes. I have left outside this framework, however, the episodes of acute undernourishment and the waves of famine that occurred at different times in some of these countries.

As I bring this short series to a close, I would like to touch on how the scarcity of consumer goods in the Stalinist system was sought to be legitimised at the “theoretical” level. The principal architect of this ideological intervention was, of course, Stalin himself. In the Political Report he delivered to the Sixteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) on 27 June 1930, Stalin made the following highly ambitious claim:

(…) here, in the U.S.S.R., the increase of mass consumption (purchasing power) continuously outstrips the growth of production and pushes it forward, whereas over there, in the capitalist countries, on the contrary, the increase of mass consumption (purchasing power) never keeps pace with the growth of production and continuously lags behind it, thus dooming industry to crises from time to time. (J. V. Stalin, Works - Vol: 12, April 1929 - June 1930, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, Moscow, p. 332)

In the same report, before arriving at this conclusion, Stalin also argued that the expansion of the socialised sector had improved the material conditions of the working class; that this, in turn, had increased the capacity of the domestic market and the demand for manufactured goods; and that the growth of the domestic market had outstripped that of industry, thereby forcing industry to expand continuously:

(…) the growth of the socialised sector, inasmuch as it leads to an improvement in the material conditions of the working class, signifies a progressive increase in the capacity of the home market, an increase in the demand for manufactured goods on the part of the workers and peasants. And this means that the growth of the home market will outstrip the growth of industry and push it forward towards continuous expansion. (ibid., pp. 299-300)

These formulations were repeated time and again over the decades by Stalinist bureaucrats and ideologues, naturally amid the customary torrents of extravagant praise lavished on Stalin.

Stalin with a group of delegates to the Sixteenth Congress. Moscow, 26 June 1930. One day after this photograph was taken, he would present his notorious “theoretical contribution” aimed at justifying the scarcity of consumer goods.

Stalin was, of course, seeking through these assertions to present the shortages, imbalances and failures of distribution produced and perpetuated by the regime as though they were healthy symptoms of “socialist development”. Endless queues were thus hailed not as evidence of a failed economic order but, on the contrary, as signs of the population’s purchasing power rising at great speed. In other words, the long lines outside shops, the empty shelves, and the difficulties in obtaining basic consumer goods were to be recast not as symptoms revealing the distortions of the system, but as indicators supposedly demonstrating the progressive character of the regime.

Stalin not only sought to justify the widespread shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet Union; he also adopted, at one and the same time and in the crudest form, an underconsumptionist approach to explaining the fundamental cause of the Great Depression, which was unfolding as he delivered his report. In his view, the cause of crises in capitalist economies lay in the purchasing power of the masses lagging behind production. This approach turns consumption and consumer demand into the principal driving force of the capitalist mode of production. Yet what Marx sought to analyse in Capital was that the point of departure of capitalist production is not consumption but the production of surplus value - that is, profit and the self-expansion of capital. In Marx’s own clear formulation, the aim of capitalist production is the self-expansion of capital; in other words, the production of surplus labour, surplus value and profit. By embracing a highly vulgar version of underconsumptionism, Stalin effectively abandons this framework.

Two unemployed men seeking work in the United States during the Great Depression.

Thus, what emerges is an almost mechanical picture, as though governed by the logic of a funicular. In the supposedly “socialist” economy, purchasing power rises rapidly, and production is pulled upwards in order to keep pace with it. In the capitalist economy, by contrast, consumption cannot keep up with production because the purchasing power of the masses is held down; the system moves downwards and descends into crisis.

This crude schema, which cynically recasts the everyday hardships endured by the Soviet people as historical progress, is anything but a historical-materialist analysis.

Concluded

The testimony of Gün Benderli

The testimony of Vera Tulyakova Hikmet

The testimony of Anatoly Chernyaev

The testimony of Anthony Barnett

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (2)

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (1)

Queue etiquette in Stalinist Albania