Remembering socialism: On desire, consumption and surveillance

Among the strongest individual memories of life in state socialism was the lack of desired goods, the culture of shortages, and the ‘dictatorship over needs’. This article analyzes the social experience of a culture of shortages, the symbolic value and public meaning of goods, and different practices in the acquisition of material artifacts.As a backdrop to a general discussion of consumption, material culture and desire in socialism, the focus is on the formal properties of the cultural and communicative practices of ‘going shopping to Italy’ in 1950s and 1960s Yugoslavia and draws on personal memories of former shoppers. It explores the system of interaction between border officials and shoppers/smugglers, the traumatic border-crossing experiences of facing customs officers as personalized power, gender divisions, ethnic and class differentiation involved in the shopping expedition, and feelings of foreignness, shame and inadequacy when faced with the ‘West’ in Trieste.