Working in the tracks of state socialism

His remonstrations were enjoined by Robert Merton, who reproached me for the false imputation that mistakes capitalism for industrialism. He was criticising an essay I had written in 1982 about the industrial sociology of his recently deceased student Alvin Gouldner. I claimed that Gouldner’s classic text, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, missed the specifically capitalist character of industrial bureaucracy. His mock bureaucracy and his punishmentcentered bureaucracy were both shaped by the exigencies of wage labour and the competitive pursuit of profit, while his representative bureaucracy was simply unrealisable in capitalism. Merton responded by saying that I had not demonstrated my claims, which would require comparisons of industrial bureaucracy both within and between capitalist and non-capitalist societies (Goulder, 1954; Burawoy, 1982). To atone for my sins of false comparison and false imputation, I resolved to take actually existing socialism far more seriously. I decided against the easy road of Western Marxism that dismissed the Soviet Union and its satellites as a form of statism or state capitalism, unrelated to the socialist project. Instead, I began a twenty-year journey into the hidden abode of actually existing socialism, the last ten years of which were unexpectedly devoted to following the painful Soviet transition to capitalism. Ironically, in evaluating this Soviet leap into capitalism – the experiments of shock therapy and big bang – I now turned the tables on the avatars of market freedoms. I accused them of false comparisons as they damned the realities of socialism with an idealisation of capitalism, and of false imputations as they assumed that the pathologies of Soviet societies would evaporate if its socialist character were destroyed. They forgot the transition costs, all the higher in a global order dominated by capitalism, as well as capitalism’s very own pathologies. The economists thought they were shopping in a supermarket and could just grab whatever combination of institutions they wanted, then walk out without even paying. Indeed, the Russian transition proved to be looting on a grand scale. Having been under the heel of state socialism, the population at large colluded in this unrestrained expropriation to their own detriment. To be sure, they never saw themselves as being in a supermarket but in a prison. They had been there all their lives, so they assumed that life on the outside could only be better. It turned out to be another sort of prison. The life-and-death costs of a capitalist transition, guided and justified by such false comparisons and false imputations, were no less horrific than those born of similar errors during the period of agriculture’s collectivisation and the planned economy. Just as 34 Capital & Class 98