ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a preliminary exploration of the background to current struggles over economic ownership and control in post-communist systems. It argues that these struggles originate in the systemic dynamic and crisis-logic of the former system. Reform communism, illustrated largely through the Gorbachev period and its aftermath, represented attempts among the intellectual and political elite to initiate systemic adaptation to long-range structural problems, without undermining the existing mode of appropriation. A central feature of the Soviet system was bureaucratic control of the means of production, and a fusion between economic, political, and cultural imperatives. The collapse of state socialism was a crisis of a mode of regulation, which opened up the potential for a new system of domination, within which the former nomenklatura could convert bureaucratic power into capital. Nonetheless, the generation of acquiescence through bureaucratic corporatism involves rule through visible structures of political intervention, and carries a higher de-legitimation risk than rule through the invisible mechanisms of market.
