Moralities of Consumption in Poland across the Short Twentieth Century

Abstract

Participating in the broader history of consumer mobilization for egalitarian regimes of consumption, this article unpacks the shifting meanings of egalitarian moralities of consumption in the specific case of Poland across the twentieth century. It reveals how important the role of social justice would become in attempts to impose state-centered social welfare over profit-oriented self-welfare between the interwar period and the demise of Communism. During this time, the meaning of profiteering changed significantly. While food conflicts during the interwar period and World War II were organized predominantly along ethnic lines, by the beginning of the postwar era, the notion of the profit-oriented middleman relied on the category of class as well as ethnicity to support a vision of Poland as a Communist, ethnically homogenized nation-state. In the 1950s and the 1960s, anti-profiteering rhetoric became increasingly gendered, as the food conflicts moved from an ideological crusade against private trade to everyday confrontations between the consumers and female shop assistants. When the Soviet Bloc ran into deep crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, self-welfare and family-centered resourcefulness resurfaced as legitimate norms of distributive justice, which contributed to dismantling the Socialist welfare state altogether.