Systemic Transformation and the Salience of Class Structure in East Central Europe
Systemic Transformation and the Salience of Class Structure in East Central Europe

Summary/Abstract: In the span of fifty years, the societies of Eastern Europe have experienced two periods of radical change in their political and economic order: adaptation to communism and withdrawal from it. In each case of systemic transformation, the problem of class has raised a number of theoretical and empirical questions. With regard to the first upheaval, at the crux of the debate about class is whether the destruction of semicapitalist systems and the consolidation of single party communist rule and state socialism resulted in the creation of "classless societies . " Could classes as such exist i n the absence of private ownership of the means of production, central planning, and concerted efforts by the party-state to eradicate potentially conflictual social divisions ? If East European societies were not classless, then what form did their class structure take and what impact did it have on social inequality and individuals' orientations and behavior? [...]

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