Working Class Identities in Postcommunist Culture

Public discourse in the West about the postcommunist economies of East Central Europe centres on the pace of privatisation, the adoption of capitalist financial institutions, and foreign investment in industries ranging from automotive to nuclear power (Clash 1996, Kraar 1996). The inevitability and desirability of capitalism are assumed, and the central focus is on macro-economic indicators of progress. Little attention is given to the material consequences of, and responses to, economic upheaval among those who are experiencing its costs, including rising unemployment and a growing disparity between rich and poor. Instead, human experience is reduced to questions of preference for the old system versus the new, and responses are reported in aggregates that gloss over distinctions based on class, education, or other significant factors. For example, The Economist reports that “a steadily rising number of East Europeans are happy to live under the rigors of the free market,” and that outside the former Soviet republics, “nearly two-thirds are broadly chirpy about their new system” (“Feeling Perkier” 1996, 48-49). To the extent that class ever enters into the dominant discourse of post-communist transition, it is typically articulated to the emergence of a nouveau riche entrepreneurial class (“Boris on Bond Street” 1995). In addition to masking issues of class, these examples also reveal a logical inconsistency. As Stjepan Meštroviæ (1993, 1994) has pointed out, Western experts treat capitalism as if it were a rootless, self-sustaining abstraction, severed from history and culture. But at the same time, those “who proclaim the unequivocal moral virtues of capitalism are hardly able to disguise the underlying, ethnocentric assumption that it will be the American brand of BEVERLY JAMES