Socialism and Capitalism Through the Russian Prism. Lineages of Concept Formation and the (Post-)Soviet Experience

Bibliographic Data

ID21116144
AuthorsSebastian Hoppe (0000-0003-0727-2095, corresponding author), Friedrich Asschenfeldt
Year2024
Volume76
Issue1
Pages1-9
Publication date2024-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEurope Asia Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0966-8136 • E-ISSN: 1465-3427
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09668136.2023.2297630
OpenAlexW4391363286
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited42

SOCIALISM REMAIN TWO FUNDAMENTALLY contested concepts in the social sciences.Few contexts provide a better illustration of this claim than the Russian one.Ever since the early Soviet era, analysts of Russia and Eurasia have vigorously, and sometimes vituperatively, debated the relevance of the concepts of capitalism and socialism to their field.Was the Soviet Union a living example of a socialist polity, as the Soviet leadership and many of its liberal and conservative opponents asserted (see, for example, Malia 1996)?Or had the revolution in the name of socialism degenerated into a 'state capitalist' system, as one left radical tradition claimed (Bettelheim & Chavance 1981;Trotsky 2004)?In a similar vein, the characterisation of post-Soviet Russia as capitalist, though less important to the legitimacy of the regime, has been fraught with political and conceptual ambiguities.After all, capitalism, classically associated with market relations, private property, and commodification, has shown itself to awkwardly fit the setting of post-Soviet Russia, given the pervasiveness of corruption, rent-seeking, and the precariousness of property claims (Shlapentokh & Woods 2007;Kordonsky 2016;Mart'yanov 2016).At the same time, critics of neoliberalism have pointed to Russia's post-Soviet transformation as testament to the disastrous effects of the Washington consensus (Ganev 2015; Morris 2021).These are vexing questions, in part because socialism and capitalism are at once categories of analysis and categories of practice, to use Pierre Bourdieu's (1977) distinction.In other words, capitalism and socialism have been invoked simultaneously to both critique and describe the social order in question.As a result, the analytical gains of trying to prove or disprove whether the Soviet Union was in fact a socialist society or if post-Soviet Russia ought to be called capitalist are often limited.Invariably, such attempts depend on ideal-type definitions

Capitalism · Communism · Economic system · Economics · Optics · Physics · Political science · Politics · Prism · Socialism · State socialism · Law · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition · Russia and Soviet political economy · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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