VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

58 CONSUMPTION AND CONSUMER IN NEW FREE MARKET ECONOMIES
this. The difference is a historical one and it can not be surpassed in a
decade or two with all economic and political measures that are already been
taken. And this is true, of course, when it we talk about prices as well. For
the Eastern European citizen the prices are often much more higher than for
his western counterpart and for this is also responsible the historical gap
between these two parts of the continent. This is obvious but we think that
another conclusion can be derived from this: it would be always possible that
peoples from the new free market economies from the Eastern Europe to
consider the capitalist society as a more unjust and cruel society than it
would be the case. This risk is indeed a very serious one because it could
not have only a negative impact upon the way in which the Eastern
European countries will be integrated in EU community at the economical
level but even at the cultural level as well.
Another major difference between Eastern European new type of
consumer and his counterpart from the West is referring to the basic
perspective which stands at the base of the consumption activity of general
goods and services from the market. If for a western consumer the everyday
consumption, based upon good quality merchandise and affordable prices
had become from a very long time ago something very natural for the new
consumer from the East part of Europe this is not the case. A significant part
of goods are still considered to be, for an Eastern European consumer, a
distinct type of luxury and this is happening because he was not accustomed
with welfare state for almost everyone. This situation is also a source of
psychological and maybe serious cultural difference between both of them
and it could of course affect the way in which Eastern European countries
would deal with their economic growth in the future and, most important, the
ways in which countries will function at the strict economic level together with
the capitalist countries from the West in a united Europe.
Consumption society in the Eastern Europe
after the collapse of communism – a new type of poverty
After drawing some short considerations about the general situation of
the consumer in the new free market economies from the Eastern Europe
after 1990 let us see now, in a very brief manner, of what consumption
society we can talk about in these countries. We do not want to enter in a
detailed conceptual frame but only to uncover the general status, from our
point of view, of these so called consumption societies. And we believe that
all can be reduced to this general observation: the new free market
economies from the Eastern Europe are just not having the fundamental
tools and resources to compete with the strong Western economies. We are
not thinking here to human or natural resources but to infrastructure of
economy and the capital. This is the fundamental reason why these Eastern
European economies had become in time, in a natural mode we might say,
nothing more than a huge place in which the West is coming to sale its