Manufacturing Mass Consumption in the GDR: Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism

Abstract

Eli Rubin records the history of the East German "welfare dictatorship" (Konrad H. Jarausch) by tracing the rise of plastics. Rubin argues that state coercion and Stasi surveillance cannot fully explain the GDR's political and social cohesion. He suggests instead that over the decades East German society developed a genuine self-understanding whose nature can be grasped by analyzing its everyday material culture. Rubin's thesis is as follows: from the moment in 1958 when "the main economic task of the GDR" was defined as "overtaking West Germany in per capita consumption" instead of excelling in the sector of heavy industry, plastics of all sorts became the material which, in the official rhetoric, embodied the envisioned authority of the state. The book explains how the state, through the production and promotion of synthetics, positively addressed questions of mass consumption, individual prosperity in socialism, and political consent.