On the Transformation of Post-communist Societies: The Inefficiency of Primitive Capital Accumulation

Abstract

In the post-communist countries (PCC) several phenomena reminiscent of primitive capital accumulation (mass and permanent unemployment, impoverishment of the majority of people, growing criminality) have emerged. The PCC have to “tread the tortuous road” of a primitive accumulation of capital, well known since eighteenth-century England and other Western countries. Such a point of view has been expounded earlier by Bauman in the IPSR. He based his view on two assumptions: that these countries have backward, pre-industrial economies and that the transition to a market economy must be correlated with growing income disparities as a precondition of rapid economic growth. Hence, an impoverishment or at least a delay in gratification of the large social groups is inevitable. The argument in this article is that both assumptions are false.