What specifically? It did not seem like to me that communist countries were very focused on increasing consumer consumption at all. And if they had been, that

What specifically? It did not seem like to me that communist countries were very focused on increasing consumer consumption at all. And if they had been, that would not exactly been a bad thing, given how much shortage there was of basic consumer goods in communist countries. I think it seems considerably more absurd in modern rich western countries today, that we are still pushing for ever high consumption. For all its flaws, the communist countries at least seem to focus more on items being more easy to reuse and repair. Western society is getting deeper and deeper into really short product cycles with products which are next to impossible to repair. We are essentially pushed to an artificially high consumption level.