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. It explores ways of making sense of certain tendencies in the dynamics of exclusion in the post-communist world, with reference to transitions from status to class power. Most illustrative material has been drawn from Russia, partly to avoid over-burdening the account with the complexity of being in several countries at once, although many of the general tendencies identified here, especially nomenklatura-privatization, can be identified elsewhere in the post-communist world. 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.
