Post-Socialism and materialism

Via Eurozine, Elena Trubina makes the following criticism of post-Socialist societies in Eastern Europe:

Places one lived and the things one used or cherished were objects of enjoyment and pride. One's very own house or flat promised a site of control in which it was possible to discern the traces of one's family history, preferences, and tastes. One's plot of land with one's very own apple tree and bed of strawberries worked as a vehicle of individualization much more successfully than volumes written on liberalism. Surely, in the twentieth century, the growing importance of one's private life as opposed to an alienated social existence was something that united the worlds across the Berlin wall?

[...] The modern self, argues American philosopher Amelie Rorty, is essentially defined by its property. The basis of the story of one's life and self-fulfilment is one's individual capacity to accumulate goods. Thus, one's personal capital is comprised of one's skills and talents and one's property. One can cleverly invest this or let it slip from one's hands, but the grammar of selfhood is based on the possessive adjective. Property and the means of gaining it comprise the focus of a person's rights; a forceful alienation of one's property jeopardizes a person's integrity.
[...]Things not only hold a person together, but also society. Could it be that our troubled relationship with property and things in the past simply serves as additional proof of this idea? One's efforts to get what one wanted, one's care about what one had, one's family stories about one's grandparents' luck and resourcefulness, one's own amateurish entrepreneurship could all this have prepared people for change and ensured the continuity of their experiences? The things people owned and came to own kept their life stories together. For one, people were able to buy the state apartments in which they lived, although their quality remains in many cases truly questionable. In the 1990s, millions became homeowners simply by signing a few papers. The fact that I own my place, by the way, always makes me feeling slightly embarrassed when friends from Vienna or Berlin tell me of their relationships with landlords and constantly rising rents. Do I really expect to find in them grateful listeners to stories about my former "material" dreams? By virtue of their location on the left of the political spectrum (whatever that means these days), they are more interested in hearing about the reasons for many Russian intellectuals' unwillingness to become politically active.