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SOCIAL THEORY AND POSTCOMMUNIST POLITICS
Venelin I. Ganev
Miami University of Ohio
Paper prepared for the conference “Wither Eastern Europe,” University of Florida, January 9-11,
2014
INTRODUCTION
At least so far the literature on postcommunist politics has been dominated by
comparative rather than social-theoretical questions. If tomorrow a malicious computer virus
somehow eliminates from this literature all writings devoted to the operationalization,
measurement and explanations of variations on dependent variables, there will be relatively little
left. Should anyone decide to rummage through this non-comparative residue, they will quickly
discover that it is dominated by the following theoretical insight: “Russia and Eastern Europe
offer resounding corroborations of Marxist theories of global capitalism.”1 Here, then, is one
interesting fact about the ongoing conversations regarding postcommunism: participants in these
conversations often take it for granted that it is only Marxists who have something theoretically
important to say about the transformative processes which engulfed the former “second” world
after 1989. The lesson which students of postcommunism can learn from social theory is
summed up by the authors of book entitled “Social Theory and Postcommunism” in the
following manner: “Marxism can turn its political defeat into a theoretical advantage, as it
reverts to the terrain on which it is most comfortable, the analysis of capitalism.”2
Thus the effort to apply social-theoretical insights to analyses of postcommunist politics
has been reduced to the trashing of something called “neoliberal capitalism.” What exactly this
thing is, and what exactly it has to do with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, has
Michael Burawoy, “Afterword,” in: Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition:
Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p.307.
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2
William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), p.8.
2
never been properly explained.3 But it is precisely the destructive power of neoliberalism that has
been the focal point not only of a myriad of scholarly writings that purport to evaluate
postcommunist transformations from a “theoretical perspective,” but also of depictions of
postcommunist realities in the mainstream press. The only op-ed which The New York Times
devoted to the 20th anniversary of 1989 was authored by Slavoj Zizek, a devout and unabashed
Marxist-Leninist, and its main point was that developments in Eastern Europe after 1989 only
brought into a sharper relief the simple truth that capitalism has to be “transcended.”4
It is the proposition that Marx is the only “classic of social theory” worth paying attention
to that I will dispute here. In my previous work I have demonstrated that the intuitions of
Thomas Hobbes are much more important for analyzing the weakness of postcommunist states
than the simplistic neo-Marxian assertion that after 1989 the state “withdrew” from society in
order to open room for “markets.”5 In what follows, I will try to show that the insights of two
other “classics” are also quite relevant. I contend that it is Joseph Schumpeter and not Marx that
may help us comprehend the fiscal problems experienced by postcommunist societies. And I will
argue that it is Max Weber rather than the author of the “Communist Manifesto” that should
serve as our theoretical companion if we want to fathom postcommunist capitalism. More
generally, my claim is that we need a much richer, more robust understanding of what it means
to explore postcommunism through the lenses of social theory than the currently prevalent notion
that the theoretical exploration of postcommunist realities should be reduced to critique of
neoliberal reforms.
See, for example. Jordan Gans-Morse and Taylor C. Boas, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to AntiLiberal Slogan,” Studies in Comparative International Development 44,2 (2009): 137-161, and Venelin I.
Ganev, “The “Triumph of Neo-Liberalism” Reconsidered: Critical Notes on Ideas-Centered Explanations of
Economic Change in Postcommunism,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol.19, No.3 (Summer 2005).
3
4
Slavoj Zizek, “20 Years of Collapse,” The New York Times, November 9, 2009.
“Understanding Leviathan’s Malaise: Stateness and the Crisis of Governability in Post-Communist Polities,” in:
Denisa Kostovicova and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, eds., Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009), pp.19-37.
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JOSEPH SCHUMPETER AND THE REMAKING OF POSTCOMMUNIST TAXPAYERS
AND MONEY
In an essay written in 1918, only months after the Bolshevik coup in Russia, Joseph
Schumpeter made the following prediction: “if socialism became a reality through the conquest
of the economy by the power of the state, the [tax] state would annul itself by its very
expansion.”6 Subsequent developments confirmed that he was right: if by “tax state” we mean a
political organization which sustains itself by maintaining special agencies empowered to extract
resources from a large private sector and to impose regularized levies on private incomes, then
the only possible conclusion we may draw based on the available facts is that such a thing did
not exist in Soviet-type regimes. Once such regimes aggressively “conquered” the economy, tax
collection became a minor, negligible function assigned to otherwise all-powerful administrative
structures whose primary prerogative was to design and monitor the fulfillment of 5-year plans;
the “private sector” was so radically reduced that it was never seriously considered as a
potentially significant “tax base;” and the government’s revenue came to depend almost entirely
on sources other than monetary flows from autonomous economic agents to the treasury’s
coffers. What that meant in practice was that one of the essential components of the tax state,
namely the taxpayer, was effectively destroyed, whereas another one, namely money, was
radically marginalized.
Taxpayers.
Taxpayers are the product of governmentality, or a mode of exercise of political power
which “has as its target populations, as its principal form of knowledge political economy,” and
Joseph Schumpeter, ‘The Crisis of the Tax State,’ in: Richard Swedberg, ed., Joseph Schumpeter on The
Economics and Sociology of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p.109. How exactly the
key term he uses, aufheben, should be rendered in English might be a matter of dispute – it has Hegelian
connotations and hence an argument could be made that what Schumpeter had in mind was a dialectical interplay of
both preserving and changing. Therefore “the tax state would be sublated” – as opposed to “the tax state would
annul itself” – might be a more accurate translation (here is the German original: “Hier würde, wenn der Sozialismus
im Wege der Eroberung der Wirtschaft durch die Staatsgewalt realisiert werden würde, der Staat durch seine eigene
Entfaltung sich selbst aufheben” Joseph A. Schumpeter, Aufsätze zur Soziologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1953),
p.21. On Hegel, aufheben and sublation, see Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992),
pp.283-285.
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as its “essential means” coercive apparatuses.7 The emergence of such social creatures reflects
the ambition of rulers to “engage with how “the governed” … regulate themselves,” to routinize
monetary flows from the citizenry to political authorities, and to stabilize such flows through the
cultivation of collective mentalities, individual expectations and institutionalized interactive
frameworks.8 The creation of taxpayers is thus one of the possible aims of the disciplinary
techniques deployed by modern governments. It bears emphasizing, though, that this was not an
aim Marxist state-builders chose to pursue as they strove to integrate socialist populations into
socialist economies. They focused instead on the creation of other cultural roles which better
suited the ultimate objectives of socialist governmentality.9 Notably, however, none of these
scripts included “paying taxes” as a specific obligation or instantiation of the undeniable link
between citizens and authorities. With very few exceptions – like concert artists or private tutors
in music or foreign languages – socialist subjects received their income from the same agent who
set and collected their taxes, and therefore “tax collection” was nothing more than one of many
invisible and unmonitored administrative operations that ultimately determined how much cash
will be paid to an employee on a monthly basis.
The specific choice of governmental techniques in Sovietized polities – namely the
ideologically grounded decision to manage populations through means other than the
transformation of the citizenry into taxpayers – has important cultural, institutional and political
consequences. To begin with, the annulment of the taxpayer led to the radical detachment of the
act of paying taxes from prevalent ideas regarding civic-mindedness. Disagreements about how
“socialist consciousness” should be defined and what it meant to be a “a good member of the
socialist collective” are, of course, perfectly legitimate. But whatever diverging views are
advanced in that regard, one thing is clear: “paying taxes” will not be a virtue that will figure in
Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality,’ in: Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault
Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.102.
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8
On the production of taxpayers through governmentality, see Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule on
Modern Society (London: Sage Publications, 1999), p.12.
To mention just a few, there was the ideologically defined role “builder of socialism” who is expected to make
contributions and sacrifices in the struggle for a better future; the politically defined role of a member of mass
organizations who was expected to be an active participant in the mobilization campaign du jour as defined by the
latest congress of the communist party; and the administratively defined role of a state employee expected to carry
out her daily tasks and thus contribute to the fulfillment of “the plan.” On communist governmental techniques, see
Oleg Kharkohrdin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: The University of
California Press, 1999.
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such definitions and interpretations. Neither the moral nor the social standing of individuals
living in a Soviet-type regime was contingent upon the dutiful and regular discharge of monetary
obligations towards the state. To invoke Schumpeter’s image, the annulment of the tax state does
not mean that the population is in some sense relieved of its obligation to contribute to the
maintenance of the public domain; but it does entail the permanent cancellation of the wellknown spectacle featuring individuals who present themselves as autonomous agents to public
authority and communicate financial information pertaining to their personal domain. With the
arrival of communism, “paying taxes” ceased to be an important cultural ritual that derived its
meaning and justification from a set of values and beliefs about how an upright citizen is
expected to behave.
Money.
Under Soviet-type regimes money continued to exist: communist governments paid their
populations salaries in cash; communist populations in turn used money to purchase whatever
was available in government-owned stores; all centrally distributed products had prices; and each
East European country maintained its own currency. Nonetheless, the annulment of the tax state
necessarily entailed an assault on money as a medium of exchange and its displacement by
alternative methods for allocating resources.
This assault was part and parcel of the grand Marxist project of abolishing capitalism and
creating an alternative, more progressive version of modernity. As Jonathan R. Zatlin argued in a
fascinating study, “like many on the left the Bolsheviks and their Eastern European heirs viewed
money as a metonymy for capitalism, a dubious part standing for the damnable whole.”10 To be
sure, this hostility never reached the point where monetary transactions were suppressed in the
forceful manner in which “private property over means of production” or “kulaks” were. But the
deep aversion to money continued to permeate the policies of East European Marxist regimes
almost until the very end. In the words of Gregory Grossman money remained “the Cinderella of
Soviet economics – an unrespected relation of sorts, a mistrusted servant, yet necessary for
10
Jonathan R. Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.14.
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sweeping up the ashes under the noble flame of Soviet socialism.”11 Even when put up with, it
was treated merely as one of many tools which power-holders could manipulate at will as they
strove to pursue their political and ideological objectives.12
The partial and effective suppression of money had numerous palpable consequences. In
my view two are particularly important for understanding the essential characteristics of the
annulled tax state, one affecting ordinary citizens and the other elite groups.
Firstly, money was rarely an integral part of the practices in which ordinary citizens
engaged in order to cope with chronic shortages. Such practices – like blat – were structured
around reciprocal favors grounded in enduring relationships based on trust.13 Notably, cash
payments were subjectively understood to be dissonant with the normative principles which
legitimated the exchange of favors, and were therefore scrupulously avoided. Measured against
the possibilities which the use of personal relations opened up, the opportunities afforded by the
impersonal money-based transactions paled into insignificance. It was the ties connecting friends
and relatives on which socialist subjects relied in their on-going effort to maintain a decent
standard of living.
Secondly, money played absolutely no role in the distribution and balance of power
amongst communist cadres and party cliques. Under communism, those who occupied positions
of power did not need money in order to get what they needed; they could – and did – obtain it
directly by “distributing” it to themselves. In contrast, those with money – and there were very,
very few of those! – could purchase some of the things they coveted, but a position in the Central
Committee or Politburo was not among them. Money was therefore a non-factor in the political
calculus of elites vying for power in communist states.
In sum, if at the bottom of the pyramid of power in the annulled tax state the “have-nots”
judged money quite deficient as a means for procuring scarce resources, at its top the “haves”
found it to be essentially irrelevant as a means for wielding influence.
11
Gregory Grossman, ‘Gold and the Sword: Money in the Soviet Command Economy,’ in: Henry Rosovsky, ed.,
Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron (New York: John Wiley Inc., 1966),
pp.205-206.
12
For a comprehensive treatment of the question of money under communism, see Janos Kornai, The Socialist
System, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Chapter 8.
Perhaps the best known study of blat is Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and
Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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Schumpeter’s observations regarding the annulment of the tax state under communism
might serve as the analytical armature of an interesting research program that revolves around
the following two questions: how was the cultural role of taxpayer reconstituted after 1989, and
how was money restored as a central pillar of socio-economic life? One might, of course, think
of very simple answers to these questions. Taxpayers reemerged because this is what parliaments
and governments decreed – once democratically elected elites enacted new tax laws and fiscal
regulations ordinary citizens and newfangled entrepreneurs began to behave as conscientious
members of the community ready to pay their share. Likewise, the rise of money may be
explained with reference to the inevitable internal logic of market-based economies: once the
formerly communist countries were infected with the virus of capitalism, the monetization of all
social, economic and political relationships took place automatically.
Many students of postcommunist politics will undoubtedly find these explanations quite
persuasive and will then move on to comparative analyses of tax policies, rates of economic
growth and the relative stability of local currencies. But are the two answers considered above
really satisfactory? Isn’t it true, for example, that voluntary compliance is remarkably hard to
cultivate, and even when cultivated, it is “always tenuous,” liable to fluctuations and “extremely
difficult to reconstitute”?14 And if it is, shouldn’t we then approach the question of taxpayers’
reemergence not through policy analysis but by means of sociological inquiries which explore
the “embedding of actors in a set of rules, values and relationships which create a culture that
makes the decision to pay taxes far more likely”?15 As far as I can tell, theoretically engrossing
and empirically sophisticated explorations of the complex “embedding” that made possible the
reconstitution of taxpayer as a cultural role are nowhere to be found in the literature on
postcommunism politics.16
14
Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1988), pp.69-70.
Steven Friedman, “Sending Them a Message: Culture, Tax Collection and Governance in South Africa,” Policy:
Issues and Actors, Vol.16, No.3 (June 2003), p.3.
15
16
Which, of course, does not mean that there are no interesting or informative studies of postcommunist fiscal
policies. See, for example, Pauline Jones Luong and Erika Weinthal, Resource Wealth and Institutional Change:
The Political Economy of Tax Reform in Russia, Leitner Working Paper 2002-08; Gerald Easter, ‘Politics of
Revenue Extraction in Postcommunist States: Poland and Russia Compared,’ Politics and Society, 30, No.4 (2002),
pp.599-627; Hilary Appel, ‘International Imperatives and Tax Reform: Lessons from Postcommunist Europe,’
Comparative Politics, 39, No.1 (2006), pp.43-62; Lucan A. Way, ‘The Dilemmas of Reform in Weak States: The
8
Likewise, one might argue that there was nothing automatic and inexorable about the
consolidation of monetary regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and that consequently there is
much more to be explained about East European transformations than how the irresistible genie
of capitalism was let out of communism’s broken bottle. Specifically, I would contend that the
analytical depiction of Soviet-type regimes provided above – as annulled tax states where cashcentered transactions played a minor role in vitally important interactive patterns permeating
everyday life, and where dominant forms of elite power was radically detached from money as a
steering mechanism – should serve as a launching pad for meaningful discussions of the
rebuilding of tax states in Eastern Europe. Whatever else they purport to explain, at the very
minimum analyses of postcommunism should help us make sense of 1/ the enhancement of
popular trust in money as a preferred medium of exchange, and 2/ the elite struggles that marked
the shift from a money-less to a money-centred configuration of power.
The body of work devoted to the sociology of money is a source of important insights
which such analyses should built upon. For example, for scholars interested in how the centrality
of money was restored in the former second world, the point of departure should be Georg
Simmel’s observation that “the feeling of personal security that the possession of money gives is
perhaps the most concentrated and pointed form and manifestation of confidence in the sociopolitical organization and order.”17 In other words, students of postcommunist monetization
should squarely confront the question of trust: trust in governments, trust in fellow citizens, trust
in impersonal media of exchange. According to Simmel, without such trust money would have
never regained its status of a universally accepted institution – and yet there is massive evidence
that in the immediate aftermath of 1989 trust was a scarce commodity.18 It is therefore warranted
to conclude that the rapid metamorphosis of local currencies – as opposed to traditionally
Case of Post-Soviet Fiscal Decentralization,’ Politics and Society, 30, No.4 (2002), pp.579-598; Gerard Turley,
Transition, Taxation and the State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Scott Gehlbach, Representation Through Taxation:
Revenue, Politics and Development in Postcommunist States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
17
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1990), p.179.
For a stimulating analysis of various key aspects of the problem of “trust” in Eastern European countries after
1989 see Richard Rose, ‘Postcommunism and the Problem of Trust,’ Journal of Democracy, 5, No.3 (1994), pp.1830, Stephen Holmes, ‘Cultural Legacies or State Collapse: Probing the Postcommunist Dilemma,’ in: Michael
Mandelbaum, ed., Postcommunism: Four Perspectives (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), pp.22-76,
and Marc Morje Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
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trustworthy convertible, or “hard” currencies like the US dollar and particularly the German
Mark – into an indispensable pillar undergirding everyday transactions, social exchanges with
collaborators and strangers, and medium- and long-term planning became possible because at
least some modicum of trust was somehow restored. The story of how and why that happened
should be interwoven in narratives about the changing role of money in the lives of
postcommunist subjects – and of taxes in the functioning of postcommunist states.
That the circulation of money depends on trust is thus one of the themes from fiscal
sociology which those who study postcommunism should not disregard. Another such theme is
that the consolidation of monetary mediums and of fiscal regimes should be construed as the
outcome of elite struggles. As Nigel Dodd argued in his sociology of money, monetary
transactions crucially depend on “the rise of network of social relationships integral to
[monetary] types of exchange.” Hence the prevalence of money is not simply a manifestation of
its inherent functional superiority and abstract usefulness – it also reflects the rising influence of
“the networks on which the transaction of [monetary] instruments depends.”19 What that means
is that parallel to the strengthening of money as a social institution processes of elite
segmentations and confrontations also unfolded – and these processes affected the reconstruction
of Schumpeterian tax states after 1989.
Lamentably, informative accounts of such elite rivalries are largely absent from the
discourse on postcommunism. A remarkable exception is David Woodruff’s study Money
Unmade where the nexus linking elite rivalries to the rise of money is brilliantly demonstrated.
What Woodruff made clear is that both monetization and the institutionalization of new
mechanisms for revenue collection came about as a result conflicts over issues such as “in which
political arenas are the critical decisions made, who has the capacity to enforce them, and to what
extent legal regulations structure interactions in the economy.”20 He also suggested empirically
sound strategies for identifying the relevant networks of actors. In the case of Russia, one such
network coalesced around forces with “nationwide interests” – such as Gazprom and bank-led
industrial groups – which stood to benefit if their customers paid their debts not in kind, and not
in surrogate monies, but in rubbles. Adversary coalitions, in contrast, sought to exploit
19
20
Nigel Dodd, The Sociology of Money (New York: Continuum, 1994), p.xxiii.
David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1999), p.7.
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opportunities which were locally and not nationally defined. In a sustained effort to augment
their power, such coalitions tried to entrench alternative forms of transacting (such as barter), to
multiply and disconnect the arenas where decisions about “the appropriate role and meaning of
money in economic life” were made, and to diminish the effectiveness of legal regulations in
structuring economic interactions.21 In sum, Woodruff convincingly demonstrates that the free
circulation of money was the outcome of elite struggles that not only institutionalized access to
strategic positions of influence, but also redefined the very meaning of power.
It is time now to recapitulate. Scholars interested in the impact of money on modern life
may find good reasons to treat what happened in Eastern Europe in the 1990s as evidence that, to
quote one of the main protagonists in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, “money … is
the surest control of society, a means as tough and precise as the guillotine.”22 How exactly
money became part of the established order of things, however, is far from self-evident. The
main argument defended here is that explanatory frames which conjure up the inexorable
advance of market reforms obscure rather than illuminate the analytically relevant and
intellectually intriguing aspects of postcommunist change. Indisputably, monetary consolidation
did occur, and the tax state was rebuilt – but it is worth remembering that such developments
“can never and nowhere be a lonely triumph of the technocratic political will.”23 The capacity of
modern states to tax does not just grow spontaneously as society responds to the imperatives of
economic development, and neither is it simply “hardwired” into state bureaucracies by smart
and dedicated local politicians or knowledgeable foreign experts. Hence interpretative accounts
of the rise of postcommunist tax states should not be reduced to analyses of tax policies,
administrative reforms and fiscal measures, because such analyses implicitly presuppose that the
mechanisms of taxation are already in place. What we need instead is a comprehensive answer to
the following question: if it is determined that in a particular socio-economic context a functional
infrastructure of revenue-collection does not exist, then what are the kinds of changes that may
lead to its establishment? And it seems to me that the answer to this question will elude us unless
we pay due heed to the insight of social theorists – classical as well as contemporary.
21
Ibid, pp.217, 108, 7.
22
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Volume I (New York: Vintage International, 1996), p.421.
23
Woodruff, p.5.
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MAX WEBER AND POSTCOMMUNIST POLITICAL CAPITALISM
“Political capitalism” is a term frequently deployed in analyses of the economic systems
that emerged in the former Soviet bloc after the implosion of communist autocracy – and,
indeed, that there is something “political” about the way the idiosyncratic postcommunist
economies functioned throughout the 1990s is an observation whose veracity cannot be disputed
in good faith. At the same time, when used to convey that postcommunist economies are
constantly abused by self-serving political entrepreneurs, the term “political capitalism” is little
more than a confusingly broad, largely content-less and distinctly a-contextual description. The
adjective “political” does create the impression that postcommunist capitalism differs from the
Western paragon, but it does not go much beyond the vague assertion that the imitation falls
short of the original. If, indeed, political capitalism means that markets are manipulated by
power-holders, that politically well-connected entrepreneurs enjoy serious advantages over their
competitors, and that the allocation of resources is decisively affected by political decisions,
then, we might feel entitled to ask, in what sense exactly is Russia different from France?24 In
other words, frequently the claim that a particular type of capitalism is “political” is an outwardly
attractive but also blind alley. How to fill the term “political capitalism” with analytical content,
place it in a comprehensive conceptual setting, and use it as an analytical tool for a comparative
understanding of postcommunism – this is the challenge that I will try to tackle here.
My basic contention is straightforward: the notion of “political capitalism” may add
heuristic value to the scholarly discourse on postcommunism – but only if it is grounded into
Max Weber’s economic sociology. The project thus necessitates the integration of two distinct
venues of research: a conceptual inquiry into what Max Weber had to say about political
capitalism, and an argument about the analytical potential of a Weberian notion of political
capitalism for the study of postcommunism. Insofar as what follows is a “Weberian study,” it
advances one key claim: a historically specific account of modern political capitalism may be
On the network linkages connecting politics and markets in France, Pierre Birnbaum’s The Idea of France (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2001), Chapter 6.
24
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distilled from Weber’s oeuvre if the somewhat tiresome and yet indispensable textual exegesis of
Economy and Society is supplemented by a survey of the ideas and insights scattered throughout
his political writings. Insofar as this paper also furnishes “a glance at early postcommunism,” my
purpose is to show how the notion of political capitalism, properly Weberianized, may help us
depict analytically the overlapping dynamics of economic change and the restructuring of the
organizational basis of stateness in the former “second world.”
Weber on political capitalism
An obvious way to begin the analysis of a Weberian concept is to look at particular
passages in his writings where the notion is explicitly introduced and defined. And a careful look
at the systematic location of the brief paragraphs on political capitalism in Economy and Society
unambiguously suggests that, for Weber, the construction of this concept is part and parcel of his
grand effort to delineate analytically the key characteristics of Occidental capitalism. The thrust
of his argument is that “rational acquisition of profits” and “political capitalism” should be cast
as contrasting analytical categories encompassing profoundly different empirical phenomena.
In a section entitled “The Principal Modes of Capitalist Orientation to Profit-Making” Weber
asserts that Western capitalism is characterized by “continuous buying and selling on the
market” and “speculations of various sorts.” These “orientations to profit-making” did not play a
major role on pre-modern times and are associated with the rise of Europe. In the same section,
Weber introduces three other types of profit-making, “orientation to opportunities for predatory
profit from political organizations or persons connected to politics,” “continuous business
activities that arise by virtue of domination by force – colonial profits and fiscal profits realized
through farming of taxes and offices,” and “orientation to profit opportunities in unusual
transactions with political bodies.” These capitalist orientations, he points out, “have been
common all over the world for thousands of years.” He then proceeds to subsume all three under
a separate category which he dubs “politically oriented capitalism.” For anyone interested in
articulating a Weberian notion of political capitalism, this conceptual exposition must constitute
the starting point.25
25
Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. I (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978), p.164-165.
13
In his historical analyses, Weber links political capitalism to pre-modern times and
places, for example tax farming in China, financing of wars in India, and the misuse of official
positions in Caesar’s Rome.26 If and when Weber explored modern Europe, however, he was
reluctant to talk about political capitalism – a reluctance no doubt reflecting misgivings about the
analytical value of the concept in such contexts. The discussion of mercantilism is quite
revealing in that regard. Weber described mercantilism as “a league between the state and
capitalist interest,” and depicted it as a historical episode when “the state was handled as if it
consisted exclusively of capitalist entrepreneurs.”27 Notably, however, Weber never called
mercantilism “political capitalism.”
Why was Weber unwilling to subsume modern political practices such as mercantilism
under the rubric “political capitalism”? I submit that this reluctance is linked to a broader truth
about Weber: he embraced in principle the idea that the political leadership of a modern nation
should possess the power to shape the outcome of market interactions, and throughout his life he
defended and demanded what today we might call “political interventions in the workings of free
markets.” For him the “free interplay of market forces” was a politically contingent phenomenon
closely linked to the organizational supremcacy of modern nation-states. Therefore he believed
that the tutelage of the state is a sine qua non for the success of any form of modern rule,
including forms of exercise of power that promote and sustain the hegemony of capitalist
markets. The systematic political interference in the economic system is a characteristic feature
of modern rule tout court – it cannot be summarily dismissed as a syndrome of political
capitalism. From a Weberian point of view, then, the fact that various individuals and groups are
allowed to make profits under the stewardship of the state has a lot to do with politics and
capitalism – but not necessarily with political capitalism.
Given that the intertwining of government and economics is one of the markers of
modernity, should we conclude that the notion of political capitalism is completely irrelevant to
Weberian analyses of modern contexts? I am convinced that such a conclusion would be
erroneous. I will demonstrate that a theoretically engrossing and conceptually sharp depiction of
26
See, for example, Max Weber, General Economic History (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1981), 334.
27
Ibid, p.347.
14
political capitalism may be gleaned from the polemical pamphlets and political essays Weber
published during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. It is in these essays that Weber
offers intriguing ways of distinguishing between political capitalism and other forms of
governmental involvement in economic processes – and comprehending what it is that sets
“predatory profits” apart from deliberate state sponsorship of strategic constituencies, “unusual
transactions with political bodies” from carefully planned policies designed to enhance a
country’s might (Macht), the “normal” striving to manage a nation’s resources from the
“abnormal” ascent of political capitalism. The overarching argument I will defend is that a
usable Weberian interpretation of political capitalism must explain how this capitalism is
embedded in patterns of governance. Such an interpretation should conjure up the main
characteristics of modern rationalized rule: the functioning of bureaucracies, the behavior of
administrators, the implementation of policies – in short, the workings of a modern state.
Political capitalism as a Konjunktur
In a polemical passage written in December 1917 Weber attacked the German pundits
who saw no difference between “the war profits of the Krupp concern and those of some little
black-marketeer in malt.” Weber’s main argument against those who all too readily subsumed
both Krupp and “the little black-marketeer in malt” under the category “war profiteers” was that,
incapacitated by their “blissful ignorance,” such commentators
have not the faintest idea of the gulf of difference separating the kind of
capitalism which lives from some momentary, purely political conjuncture – from
government contracts, financing wars, black-market profiteering, from all the
opportunities for profit and robbery, the gains and risks involved in adventurism,
all of which increased enormously during the war – and the calculation of
profitability that is characteristic of the bourgeois rational conduct of business in
peacetime.28
I think that it is precisely this “other kind of capitalism” that Weber refers to which can
be characterized as “political capitalism.” The distinct characteristic of this “other capitalism” is
Weber, “Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,” in: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994) p.89, italics mine; hereafter “Suffrage.”
28
15
that prevalent strategies for profit-making are designed in reaction to, and capitalize on, what
Weber calls rein politische Konjunktur – an expression that would perhaps be better translated as
“purely political circumstances” rather than “purely political conjuncture.”29 For Weber, then,
political capitalism emerged from the social and institutional disarray that hampers the more or
less automatic reproduction of institutionalized political and economic practices. “Unusual”
opportunities for profit-making emerge when patterns of rational individual behavior are
shattered and the established routines and enforceable norms that constitute bureaucratic
apparatuses implode. War is a paradigmatic example of such an accidental and momentous
development – but there is no reason to believe that it is the only one. Other scenarios featuring
the disruption of the rationality embedded in governing organizations and the rise of political
capitalism may also be envisaged – for example, the sudden collapse of an all-encompassing
authoritarian regime and the disintegration of established forms of control over economic
resources.
De-Bureaucratization and the Spirit of Political Capitalism
Weber witnessed during the war a shocking transformation of “the spirit of the times” and
deterioration of prevalent ethical standards. One change in particular that deeply disturbed him
was the eclipse of traditional economic ethics by unrestrained greed. “Behind the curtain of our
communal wartime economy,” Weber asserted, the following spectacle is unfolding: “A wild
dance around the Golden Calf, gamblers grabbing at every chance opportunity escaping through
the pores of the bureaucratic system, the loss of every standard for any kind of business-ethical
distinctions and inhibitions, and an iron compulsion forcing everybody, including even the most
conscientious businessman, either to join in and howl with the hyenas on this unique Golgotha of
all economic ethics—or else be punished with economic destruction.”30
What is particularly important in this vivid description of “political profit-making” in the
declining German Reich is the reference to “the pores of the bureaucratic system.” That “chance
opportunities” escape from “the pores of the state” indicates that the decline of “economic
29
Cf. Max Weber, Gesammelte politische Schiften (Tubingen: J.C.b.Mohr, 1988), p.253.
30
Weber, “Suffrage and Democracy,” 90–91 (original emphasis).
16
ethics” has an elective affinity with particular modes of functioning of the state, and specifically
with the mundane fact that corruption becomes rampant. Simply put, an important trait of
political capitalism is that the civil service behaves as an uncoordinated multitude of selfinterested agents pursuing immediate financial gratification. It should be made clear that, far
from being sensationalist hyperbole, Max Weber’s remarks were provoked by widely known
facts about German realities circa 1917. Originally introduced to depict the fact that German
civil servants are underpaid and increasingly restless, by late 1917 the term “crisis of the civil
service” simply meant that various forms of illicit behavior among German bureaucrats were
widespread. This development prompted the Bavarian minister of cultural affairs to complain
that the German Beamtenstand was “getting close to being corrupted in all its parts.”31 It was the
spirit of corruption, then, that rapidly reshaped the inner workings of bureaucracies in Weber’s
native country.
The passages on “the other capitalism”—on what I think we might call “political
capitalism”—are replete with diatribes that make Weber sound like a modern-day Cicero
bemoaning the loss of ethical grounds during times of ugly public mores. However, I think that
such passages contain something more than exhortations and lamentations. Specifically, Weber’s
attempt to depict “the wild dance around the Golden Calf” can be construed as a diagnosis of a
phenomenon that might be called “de-bureaucratization of the state.” Weber’s insight is that
changing circumstances and evolving opportunity structures may create strong incentives for
bureaucrats to behave in ways that deviate from the model of rational administration. Compelled
to facilitate “unusual transactions with political bodies,” civil servants will quickly unlearn how
to “behave according to calculable rules without regard to persons.” Subjected to arbitrary
pressure from “persons connected to politics,” they will have a limited personal interest in “the
objective discharge of administrative tasks.” And, being daily witnesses to various schemes
whereby “political organizations” are used “to generate predatory profits,” they may be easily
motivated to forfeit their “duty of obedience.”32A modern state may continue to employ hordes
of bureaucrats, enact countless regulations, and maintain a highly visible and obtrusive presence
31
Cf. Andreas Kunz, Civil Servants and the Politics of Inflation in Germany, 1914–1924 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1986), 130.
The quotes are from the chapter on bureaucracy in Economy and Society, II, 956, 973, 975. The quote on “the
duty to obey” is from “Parliament and Governance,” 204.
32
17
in the daily lives of its citizens, and yet be fundamentally de-bureaucratized if the spiritual
intangibles that cement modern officialdom evaporate. Weber himself pointed out, “An
organization exists so far as there is a probability that certain persons will act in such a way as to
carry out the order governing the organization.”33 Keeping this definition in mind, an alternative
way to depict the metastasizing of the spirit of political capitalism is to say that more and more
officials behave in ways that de facto negate the validity (die Geltung) of “the order governing
the state.”34 In the absence of such order the institutional basis of effective and legitimate
authority will erode.
To conclude, Weber clearly envisaged the possibility that accidental, uncontrolled events
might create a milieu in which politically oriented modes of profit making could flourish. He
sought to understand how such events might trigger institutional changes affecting the
organizational basis of the state, such as the obliteration of the boundaries between public and
private domains, the privatization of decision-making mechanisms, and the corruption of the
civil service. As already mentioned, Weber defined political capitalism in terms of “predatory
profits from persons connected with politics” and “unusual transactions with political bodies,”
but he did not give any examples or explain what “unusual” might mean. The “unusualness,” I
would claim, stems not from any inherent characteristics of the transactions, but rather from the
single invariant component of such structured relationships, namely that one of the parties
involved is a fragment of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. It is this feature that brings into relief the
idiosyncrasies of the intertwining of capitalism and governance in political capitalism. Such
transactions presuppose the existence of both a state and self-interested entrepreneurship, and yet
they undermine the organizational capacity of the former and the rational underpinnings of the
latter. Political capitalism does involve redistribution of resources, but, unlike “normal”
redistributions, such patterns of political action follow no politically articulated blueprint and are
accompanied by a massive hemorrhage of institutional capacity. The “other” capitalism is
therefore a modern phenomenon energized by, and contributing to, crises of stateness.
33
34
Weber, Economy and Society, I, 49 (my emphasis).
On the notion of “validity,” or Geltung, see Economy and Society, I, 31.
18
Political capitalism after communism
The phrase “political capitalism” enjoyed brisk circulation in the literature on
postcommunism. To take one representative example, Jadwiga Staniszkis argued that political
capitalism emerged with the forging of “new linkages between power and capital.” Her analysis
also demonstrates that “the power” in question is possessed by former party cadres, and that “the
capital” is captured in the process of “making owners of the nomenklatura.”35 Along the same
lines, numerous observers have construed the concept of political capitalism to epitomize the
power of neo-communist elites to exercise control over the domains previously policed by the
party-state.36 And it is usually scholars who belabor the fact that the selection of “economic
winners” in early postcommunism was a politically driven process that refer to Weber and his
views on political capitalism. For example, Helmuth Berking, in his analysis of how the
workings of democratic institutions are implicated in the creation of “a class in possession of the
means of production,” mentions Weber and insists that what transpired in postcommunism is “a
configuration of political capitalism” under which “market and democracy appear fated to
obstruct each other.”37 Lawrence P. King argues that what was absent in Russia in the 1990s was
“the relative separation of the economy from politics” which, according to Weber “distinguished
modern rational capitalism,” and that, as a result, there emerged “political capitalism”
characterized by “political distribution of property” and modes of “accumulation” driven by
“political rather than economic logic.”38 Ivan Szelenyi and his collaborators also refer explicitly
35
Jadwiga Staniszkis, The Dynamic of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe, Berkeley: The University of California
Press, 1991, pp.32,26,38,46).
See Kazimierz Poznanski, “The Crisis of Transition as a State Crisis,” in: Frank Bonker, Klaus Muller and
Andreas Pickel, eds., Postcommunist Transformation and the Social Sciences (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
2003), pp.55-76; Harald Wydra, Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2000); Lawrence P. King and Ivan Szelenyi, “Post-Communist Economic Systems,” in: Richard Swedberg and Neil
Smelser, eds., Handbook of Economic Sociology, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), second edition,
pp.205-229; Akos Róna-Tas, “Path Dependence and Capital Theory: Sociology of the Post-Communist Economic
Transformation” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1998), pp.107-131, and Georgi
Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p.275
36
Helmuth Berking, “Experiencing Unification: An East German Village After the Fall of the Wall,” in: Lloyd I.
Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, eds., Experiencing the State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.146.
37
Lawrence P. King, “Postcommunist Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of the Transition to Capitalism in
Poland and Russia,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol.37, No.3 (Fall 2002), p.15-16, p.27.
38
19
to Weber and political capitalism in their fine study of class formation in Central Europe. Having
asserted that “Central European capitalism … might look like the political capitalism Weber
wrote about,” they then summarized Weber’s views as follows: “Political capitalism is
capitalism in the sense that it is oriented towards the rational acquisition of profits, but it is
political because this happens under the tutelage of the state and/or under the conditions of
systematic political interference in the economic system.”39 Thus the consensus among those
who acknowledge their debt to Weber is that postcommunist political capitalism is a
transformative episode unfolding in accordance with an overarching statist logic and is propelled
by systematically applied policies subservient to a Weberian Zwekrationalität, or rational
calculus intended to ensure the accomplishment of certain economic ends through political
means.
As my previous analysis suggests, such interpretations of Weber’s position are
demonstrably erroneous: for him phenomena like “tutelage of the state,” “systematic political
interference in the economic system,” and politically guided “rational acquisition of profits”
could transpire under modern capitalism – but would never materialize under political
capitalism. Seemingly commonsensical narratives about how politics influence economic
processes thus fail to identify the specific ways in which economic and political processes in
early postcommunism intermesh. In what follows, therefore, I will offer an alternative Weberian
interpretation of postcommunist political capitalism, an interpretation attached to the analytical
armature erected in the previous section.
Early postcommunism as a Weberian Konjunktur
The events of 1989-1991 unleashed radical political and institutional changes which
transformed the former Soviet Empire. To be sure, scholars who wish, a la Tocqueville, to
demonstrate continuities between what transpired “before” and “after” the spectacular
revolutionary moment would usually find their objective easy to accomplish. Still, it cannot be
denied that the implosion of communist systems was accompanied by political upheavals,
institutional dislocations and unexpected reconfigurations of networks of power. To use Yoshiko
Herrera’s felicitous term, the end of Marxist dictatorships was marked by “ras-stroika,” or “de39
Ivan Szelenyi, Gil Eyal and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite
Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London: Verso, 1998), p.172.
20
structuring” which led to “haphazard shifting and muddling of the boundaries of political and
economic organization” and “a clash of alternative political and economic organizational
structures.” 40 There is little doubt, then, that the immediate aftermath of 1989 fits the description
of a Weberian Konjunktur where unforeseen tectonic shifts affecting institutional and
organizational landscapes were as significant as social conflicts, class antagonisms or collisions
of incompatible rationalities underpinning different modes of economic agency.
What is important to grasp is that among the most salient traits of this Konjunktur one
should count diminished levels of state capacity and heightened dysfunctionality of the
organizational framework of governance. Under the political circumstances of “ras-stroika” the
general directionality of institutional change was towards weakening of the state. By the mid1990s astute explorers of the postcommunist political condition could assert with confidence that
“the universal problem in postcommunism, which cuts across the enormous variety of countries
involved, is the crisis of governability.”41 To be sure, in many respects – the magnitude of the
economic downturn; the consolidation of democratic institutions; the consequential
manifestations of nationalism – the experiences of various countries in the former Soviet world
differed. However, a survey of context-sensitive studies of specific postcommunist places easily
corroborates the contention that the crisis of governability was a cross-regional phenomenon.
De-bureaucratization and the embeddedness of the postcommunist state
That throughout the 1990s corruption was endemic, thorough and persistent is a view
which no informed observer of postcommunist politics will reject. To be sure, there are various
aspects of postcommunist corruption that are hotly debated. The literature on the subject is
enlivened by theoretical controversies (what is the best way to define corruption?), cultural
explorations (how is the framing of corruption as an issue grounded in cultural regional
40
Yoshiko Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), pp.99-100.
41
Stephen Holmes, “Cultural Legacies or State Collapse? Probing the Postcommunist Dilemma,” in: Michael
Mandelbaum, ed., Postcommunism: Four Perspectives (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), p.50; italics in
the original.
21
peculiarities and specific historical legacies?), conceptual disputes (what is the most useful
typology of corrupt practices?), methodological debates (what are the pitfalls of extrapolating
actual levels of corruption from data about perceptions of corruption?) and disagreements about
policy recommendations (what is the best way to contain and combat corruption?).42 Still,
against the general contention that postcommunist societies were afflicted by the syndrome of
the de-bureaucratized state – in the Weberian sense specified above – no serious objections can
be raised.
While the fact that levels of corruption were high was readily recognized, however, the
full ramifications of this situation for the type of emerging capitalism in the former second world
have sometimes been overlooked. In this section, I would like to advance a specific claim about
the relationship between corrupt practices and postcommunist political capitalism: such practices
did not simply demoralize social constituencies and make policy implementation more costly,
they effectively shrank the domain of governance and rendered various forms of benevolent state
interventions impossible. In light of the analysis of the redistribution of de facto power of control
presented above, we should think about postcommunist de-bureaucratization not simply in terms
of corruption but also as a dynamic “embedding” of the postcommunist state. According to Peter
Evans’ well known definition, “embeddedness” is “the concrete set of connections that link the
state intimately and aggressively to particular social groups with whom the state shares a joint
project of transformation.”43 The “particular social groups” that Evans himself studied were
involved in various kinds of entrepreneurial activities, and “the joint projects” that he refers to
were designed to spur economic and technological development. In postcommunism, these
groups are comprised of officials whose “project” is the looting of the public domain.44 Corrupt
42
On the theoretical controversies, see Stephen Kotkin and Andras Sajo, eds., Political Corruption in Transition: A
Skeptic’s Handbook (Budapest: CEU Press, 2002); on cultural explorations, see Georgy Ganev, “Where Has
Marxism Gone?” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 19, No.3 (Summer 2005), pp.443-462; on conceptual
disputes, see Rasma Karklins, The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (New York:
M.E. Sharpe, 2005); on methodological debates, see Ivan Krastev, Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics
of Anti-Corruption (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004); on policy recommendations, see the essays
in Part II of Susan Rose-Ackerman and Janos Kornai, eds., Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist
Transitions (London: Palgrave, 2004).
43
Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), p.59.
For an analytical discussion of predatory projects in postcommunism, see Venelin I. Ganev, “Post-Communism as
an Episode of State-Building: A Reversed Tillyan Perspective,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.38,
No.4 (December 2005), pp.425-445.
44
22
practices are not a style of governing – they are an assault on the infrastructure of governance.
This is the core analytical insight behind Steven Solnick’s brilliant remark that once communist
and neo-communist state agents began to cash in on their privileged position, “these officials
were not merely stealing from the state, they were stealing the state itself.”45 Given how
dominant elites were positioned advantageously within the unitary bureaucracy, their illicit
behavior depleted the state’s ability to shape in a consistent and sustainable manner its
institutional environment. Arguably the most important empirical finding about postcommunist
political capitalism was reported by M. Steven Fish who concludes his study of various
trajectories of political and economic change with the observation that not a single example
exists of an East European country where “agents of the state straightened out institutions –
organized civil service, got the property-right laws right, rebuilt the agencies of law-enforcement
– and then proceed with prudent, incremental economic reform.”46
I would argue that postcommunist political capitalism has an important characteristic: it
is a privilege-centered, not a rights-centered polity. The reference is to a distinction that Weber
introduced in Economy and Society, which in my view is a useful analytical tool for dissecting
the intertwining of economic and organizational change in early postcommunism: the distinction
between rights and privileges. From a sociological perspective, Weber maintained, “The
statement that someone has a right by virtue of the legal order of the state … means that he has a
chance … of invoking in favor of his ideal of material interests the aid of a ‘coercive apparatus’
which is in special readiness for this purpose.… Such guaranty … does not depend upon
questions of expediency, discretion, grace, or arbitrary pleasure.”47 Privilege, on the other hand,
is a rather different arrangement for the protection of interests—it rests on the particular
expectation that “one may himself engage, or fail to engage, in certain conduct without
interference from a third party,” and this “third party” is usually the ruler who can deploy
violence in order to enforce deals.48 In other words, privileges rest on ad hoc arrangements
45
Steven Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998), p.7.
46
M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.169.
47
Weber, Economy and Society I, 315.
48
Weber, Economy and Society, II, 667–68.
23
involving identifiable personalities (some acting as economic entrepreneurs and some acting as
rule-enforcers) rather than on general legal rules and impersonal enforcement mechanisms that
guarantee property rights under the conditions of modern statehood. In an organizational
environment where the state’s will had been blocked by a unitary bureaucracy it was
expectations related to privileges, not to rights, that were sociologically meaningful in a
Weberian sense, namely in the sense that “the aid of a coercive apparatus” could be summoned
for their defense.
One of the key organizational characteristics of postcommunist political capitalism,
therefore, was the dis-embedding of claims over assets from existing public institutions. Since the
enforcement of general rules and principles was entrusted to the same networks that stood to
benefit if such rules and principles are selectively and erratically enforced, “unusual
transactions” that involved the activation of cadre capital were much more important that
reliance on impersonal rules articulated by the state.
The “political” component of postcommunist political capitalism is thus emphatically not
that the workings of domains allegedly beyond the reach of state bureaucracies—like markets—
in fact function in accordance with the wishes of bureaucratic elites. To the contrary, the key
political fact about this form of capitalism is that even bureaucratic domains that are supposedly
run in accordance with principles other than self-interest de facto operate as “the neo-utilitarian
nightmare of a state in which all incumbents are out for themselves.”49 Interactions between state
agents and their non-state cronies do indeed lie at the intersection of political-institutional and
socioeconomic change. But to the extent that “politics” determined the parameters of
postcommunist political capitalism, it manifested itself as a validation of de facto privileges and
not legal rights. And to the extent that the functioning of the state as an organization was related
to socioeconomic change, it revolved around the private exploitation of nominally communal
assets through discretionary shifts that occurred within the domain that had already been
demarcated as “public.” A state that amounts to much less than the sum of its parts: this is the
key institutional characteristic of postcommunist political capitalism.
I have argued that the notion of political capitalism makes eminent sense when applied to
postcommunism. In contrast to mainstream usages of this concept – usages that emphasize the
49
Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformations (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), 45.
24
prevalence of a political logic running through an array of political measures, the tutelage of the
state, and the coherence of a political process that confers property rights to the privileged few –
I have emphasized the rupturing of administrative routines, the fracturing of the organizational
context in which the state is embedded, and the emergence of ad-hoc arrangements that do not
coalesce into an overall stable property-rights regime. Here is, then, my analytical re-description
of postcommunist political capitalism: what surfaced in the aftermath of 1989 is a privilegecentered polity where de facto control over assets is asserted by means of fragmented and
personalized enforcement mechanisms, the boundaries of the state are porous and liable to be
transgressed by social predators, and the de-bureaucratization of the public domain resulted in
diminished levels of stateness.
CONCLUSION
At least so far the most important feature of scholarly writings that purport to link social
theory and the study of postcommunist politics is that such writings are permeated by what might
be called mono-causal mono-diabolism. This analytical stance revolves around two simple
propositions: 1/the launching of the so called “neoliberal reforms” is the only truly important
causal factor that shaped these transformations, and therefore interpretative accounts of
postcommunist change should begin with analyses of such reforms; 2/ neo-liberal reforms are the
deeper source of all malaises that afflicted postcommunist societies, from poverty, social
dislocation and environmental degradation to gender discrimination, ethnic tensions and the rise
of organized crime, and hence explanations of such malaises should end with their ritual
condemnation. As should be obvious by now, I dispute the empirical validity and the heuristic
value of these propositions. My attempt to introduce Schumpeterian and Weberian themes into
the field of postcommunist studies is driven by the ambition to demonstrate that there are better
ways of approaching postcommunist realities from a social-theoretical perspective.
Admittedly, what I offer here is not an original explanation of what transpired after 1989
but an alternative analytical description – a novel way of capturing the interrelatedness of
political, economic and organizational change in a specific historical context. What is the value
25
added of this operation? Here is my answer: a better grasp of what it would mean to cast
postcommunist “transitions” as “success stories.” To bring the significance of this point into a
sharper relief, let me venture the following proposition: in the near future Eastern European
“transitions” will be recognized as an appealing success story and as a source of policy
prescriptions for other nations contemplating multiple reforms. Of course, for a whole generation
of scholars trained in the 1990s the suggestion that these “transitions” have been successful will
be shocking, perhaps even scandalous. After all, exposing the “teleological assumptions,”
“failures,” “illusions,” “unintended consequences,” “simplistic premises,” and “utopian
expectations” that clouded the restructuring of the former Soviet world was de rigueur during the
first dozen years of postcommunist studies. In discussions of postcommunist reforms, every
mention of a “success” was followed by a “yes, but…” and a long list of claims bringing home
the point that Eastern Europe had fallen short of Western models. In the future a different pattern
may transpire; every mention of reform failures will be followed by a “yes, but…” and a list of
countries where transformative processes generated results demonstrably worse than those in
Eastern Europe. It is very important therefore to not bury topics such as the re-emergence of
taxpayers and money after 1989 and the evolution of postcommunist political capitalism into a
grand narrative of how societies naturally progress and attain higher stages of development.
As the foregoing analysis suggests, I am convinced that this story should revolve around
themes suggested by the classics of social theory, themes that lie at the intersection of political
change, economic transformation, and state reconfiguration. Simply put, some postcommunist
societies built stable democracies and regained their economic viability because they could repair
their states. If this is not a sufficient condition—and admittedly states may be rebuilt by wouldbe dictators and used to suppress democracy and markets—it is certainly a necessary one. The
following questions might guide our thinking about this issue: How are logistical resources, once
hijacked from the state, re-channeled into the state domain? What are the sources of cohesion of
bureaucratic apparatuses in developed societies? What are the political and organizational
preconditions for the stabilization of rules demarcating the state domain? What factors determine
the supply and demand of administrative efficiency? What are the social and institutional
dynamics that might transform a privilege-centered polity into a rights-centered one? Perhaps the
quest for such answers will eventually lead us to a few master independent variables that shaped
the course of postcommunist transformative processes. It is imperative, however, that we also
26
focus on the more general structural, institutional, social and cultural cross-regional
characteristics, or on what the former Soviet satellites shared in common. And for those who
take this task seriously, the insights of the classics of social theory are indispensable. Hence the
main message of this paper may be formulated in the following way: re-reading the classics
should remain an intellectual priority for students of postcommunist politics who wish to
contribute to on-going conversations about governance in the contemporary world.