State Consumerism in the Service Sector

Chapter 5 reinterprets the CCP’s policies toward retail and distribution to show how the party’s control over retailing not only fulfilled the socialist ideological goal of eliminating a class of people who profited through trade rather than labor (private merchants) but also helped the state better control consumption. Despite the state’s efforts, the definition and practices of “socialist commerce” changed in response to the current economic and political contingencies—particularly the need to accumulate faster. While the CCP attempted to find ways to improve distribution and consumption and adopted and aborted socialistic experiments, it never abandoned its overriding goal of using the country’s limited resources to rapidly industrialize. The state wanted socialistic experiments related to retailing and distribution to maximize control over labor and eliminate the siphoning of profits from the state, rather than to “build socialism” and create an ideal socialist marketplace.