One Way or Multiple Paths: For a Comparative Sociology of East European Capitalism

While we were writing our book, Postsocialist Pathways, during the mid- 1990s, a friend in Budapest told us about a board game he had played as a child during the socialist period. Prior to the Second World War, Hungarians had played Monopoly, which they knew as Kapitaly. But the competitive game of capitalism was banned by communist authorities, who substituted another board game, Gazda´lkodj Okosan! or “Economize Wisely.” In this goulash communist version of political correctness the goal was to get a job, open a savings account, and acquire and furnish an apartment. Our friend was too young to have had a Kapitaly board, but his older cousins from another part of the country knew the banned game and taught him the basic rules. You did not need to be a nine-yearold dissident to see that Monopoly was the more exciting game. And so they turned over the socialist board game, drew out the Kapitaly playing field from Start to Boardwalk on the reverse side, and began to play Monopoly—using the cards and pieces from Economize Wisely. But with the rules only intermittently regulated by the older cousins, the bricolaged game developed its own dynamics, stimulated by the cards and pieces from the “other side.” Why, for example, be satisfied with simple houses and hotels when you could have furniture as well? And under what configurations of play would a Prize of Socialist Labor be grounds for releasing you from or sending you to jail? The notion of playing capitalism with noncapitalist pieces strikes us as an apt metaphor for the postsocialist condition. The political upheavals of 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in Russia turned the world upside down. Assuming that they were “starting from scratch,”Western advisors from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and university-based institutes issued instructions for new “rules of the game.” But the ruins of communism were not a tabula rasa, and so the new hybrid game was played with institutions cobbled together partly from remnants of the past that, by limiting some moves and facilitating other strategies, gave rise to a bricolage of multiple social logics. If from these coexisting and overlapping principles they are building a distinctively postsocialist capitalism, they share with all modern societies a common feature that the social fabric is woven with multiple, discrepant systems of value.