Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Iván Szelényi
Yale University
Eleanor Townsley
Mount Holyoke College
1
Direct correspondence to Gil Eyal, Department of Sociology, University of California,
410 Barrows Hall, 1980, Berkeley, California 94720-1980.
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was more complex. Socialism, especially in its later years, was disrupted
by periodic attempts at class formation by the intelligentsia and began to
develop into a “dual stratification order” based on rank and class prin-
ciples. In this context, the central dynamic leading to the fall of socialism
was not interclass struggle, but intraclass struggle over the making of a
new dominant class.
Of course, socialism’s breakdown was a complex process, triggered in
part by global changes such as the technological revolution and a new
wave of military competition. The story of internal crisis, however, is one
in which resistance from below played a relatively small part. Socialism
was not brought down by the “working class.” Rather, the old bureaucracy
was toppled by an alliance of reform-communist technocrats and the
liberal intelligentsia. In making this argument, we disagree strenuously
with Burawoy’s claim that “socialism did not have a chance—for world
historic reasons rather than internal limits—to refashion itself before it
was overrun.” For 70 years socialists experimented with various schemes
from Stalinism and Maoism to reform communism and Yugoslavian self-
management. Socialism was not “overrun”; it disintegrated because of
internal contradictions, loss of legitimacy, and economic inefficiency.
The transition from state socialism to market capitalism was one of the
most traumatic events in recent human history, but despite the suffering
and degradation that attended it, society has remained silent. Workers
and peasants engage in ingenious individual coping strategies, but they
rarely act collectively. There is not a single instance in the decade-long
history of postcommunism when the working class pursued collective
action for a noncapitalist alternative. Burawoy misses this astonishing
historical fact entirely. We think it is the great puzzle of the postcommunist
transformation, and our book attempts to solve it.
Our thesis is that a domestic, propertied bourgeoisie has been slow to
develop in postcommunist Eastern Europe, and in its absence, the intel-
ligentsia has constituted itself as a cultural bourgeoisie and undertaken
the building of market capitalism. Hence our title: Making Capitalism
without Capitalists. The emerging social system is one in which the main
source of power and privilege is neither property nor political capital but
cultural capital. This proposition challenges the received wisdom that
former nomenklatura members converted their privileges into economic
resources and became a new propertied bourgeoisie. In fact, we present
evidence to suggest that a large part of the former nomenklatura has been
downwardly mobile. It is the middle ranks of the former managerial elite
who have adopted the most successful strategy. Instead of stealing debt-
ridden, unprofitable state property, middle-level managers broker deals
to sell this property to foreign investors and are appointed as managers
in multinational firms at the same time; this is the strategy of the “com-
pradore intelligentsia.”
Our thesis also explains how the working class has been demobilized
in postcommunism. In a social order dominated by cultural capital, when
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and Durkheim and classical sociology’s central concern with the historical
process of transition to capitalism. Why does capitalism emerge? What
forces propel or obstruct the transition to capitalism? What kind of a
society is created by the transition? These were the big questions of clas-
sical sociology, and we think we should return to them. The difference
between our agenda and that of the classical sociologists, however, is that
they tended to see capitalism as a unitary system—as a single (and for
some, final) destination toward which all societies were converging. This
cannot be true for neoclassical sociologists at the dawn of the 21st century.
The idea of a single capitalist logic does not provide any leverage to
analyze the diverse world we now confront. Except for Cuba and North
Korea, the world is capitalist, and therefore, we argue, neoclassical so-
ciology must engage an agenda of “comparative capitalisms.”
Precisely for this reason (and despite what Burawoy says) neoclassical
sociology is not akin to neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics
(like Burawoy himself) does operate with the notion of a single capitalist
logic, while neoclassical sociology formulates a wide-ranging comparative
empirical agenda. In this, we admit, our proposal for neoclassical sociology
is not radically original. Institutionalist economic sociology has explored
a similar research program for some time. The term “comparative capi-
talisms” comes from Neil Fligstein, and Bruszt and Stark’s book derives
from this tradition of economic sociology, as do the works of Andrew
Walder and Victor Nee, who analyze the unique capitalist forms emerging
in China. “Comparative capitalisms” also encompasses research on welfare
state regimes by scholars like Gösta Esping-Anderson and Bruce Western,
the story of Japan’s particular capitalist development in research by Chal-
mers Johnson and Ronald Dore, work on Latin America by Peter Evans,
Juan Linz, and Phillippe Schmitter, the burgeoning empirical literature
on globalization by analysts such as Arjun Appadurai and Neil Fligstein,
and many more examples that we have no space to mention. Of course,
Max Weber was the first to research capitalism comparatively, even
though he concluded (classically) that ancient capitalism and Prussian
capitalism were nonviable dead ends. In light of this collective work, then,
we should curb our immodesty and claim only that our contribution to
the idea of neoclassical sociology is to recommend a broader research
program, which considers not only economic organization but culture,
ideology, and, in particular, class structure.
Burawoy offers two criticisms of this program. First, he suggests that
a single iron logic of capitalism rules across the globe. “Russia and Hun-
gary may diverge in remarkable ways but that divergence is . . . a product
. . . of their insertion into what is a singular world capitalist system.” In
other words, Burawoy contends, the diversity of destinations we purport
to study are only the difference between core and periphery. We disagree
profoundly. Ours is a globalizing world, but not a single global capitalist
system. How homogenizing globalization is—how diverse national, re-
gional, and organizational responses to its challenges are—is an empirical
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