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What has happened to incomes, inequality and satisfaction with living standards in the first stage of transition from a communist command economy to a market economy in East Germany? This paper tests six hypotheses about the transition to capitalism. Contrary to expectations, real incomes went up not down, net income inequality scarcely increased, and those who were previously advantaged did not become better off at the expense of the previously disadvantaged. A major reason for the last two results was that the Federal Republic's taxes and benefits, which were more progressive than the Communist regime's, had the effect of counteracting the increasing inequality of household gross incomes. It is also reported that, although real net incomes increased, satisfaction with living standards declined, probably because East Germans increasingly compared themselves with western counterparts. Optimism about the future declined in 1991-92 after reaching very high levels in 1990 immediately after the revolution. This paper is based on the first three waves of the East German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) conducted in June 1990 (N=4453 individuals in 2179 households), March-April 1991 and March-April 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that insights from Tocqueville help us to understand post-communism. Tocqueville is initially helpful in helping us appreciate the extraordinary vacuum that has followed the fall of state socialism. Vacuums tend to be filled, however, and the first part of the paper accordingly concerns itself with nationalism. But not every country suffers from nationalism, and the second part of the paper argues -- against currently dominant theory -- that instant democratization is not likely to stymie economic reform. The third part of the paper notes that the absence of a civil society is, in the long run, much more of a problem than a solution: the chances of successfully consolidating democracy depend upon destroying venal and cumbersome states and in creating leaner and more efficient replacements. The conclusion notes that a variety of regimes is likely to characterize the region once the initial period of vacuum has come to an end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments critically on certain assertions about the relationship between racism and nationalism made by recent Marxist contributions to the debate about the nature and origins of nationalism. The ideas of 'race' and 'nation', and the ideologies of racism and nationalism, are shown to have certain common features which create the potential for their articulation rather than opposition. Thereafter, taking the particular example of England, it is argued that the ideology of racism can be used to define and sustain nationalism. 'These racial elements impose their modes of existence on nations circumscribing them within limits from which, like blind slaves, they do not even wish to escape, although they would not even have the strength to do so. They dictate their laws, inspire their wishes, control their sympathies and stir up their hatreds and contempts.'(n2) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that Marxist analyses in general, and those underpinned by a rationalist philosophy of science in particular, evince great difficulty in accounting lot the relationship between individuals and the social systemic constraints which influence their behaviour and consciousness. This is because of the assumption that such an account would necessarily be reductionist and empiricist. This paper argues that this is not the case and that a theorization of this relationship is a necessary correlate of a true science of the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nations of the industrialized capitalist world are characterized by a tendency to reduce the length of time employees normally spend at work. Through capitalism's long history mercantilists, classicalists, Marxists and marginalists have devoted a great deal of effort to attempting to explain why it is that standard times should tend to change. This paper overviews the major contributions to the debate. Various theories are examined and their emergence and fates placed in an historical context. Marginalism's preference argument which presently dominates the debate is challenged by showing that within Marxism there exists an alternative explanation for this phenomenon which is not based on income but on the innate limitations of human beings. Until the 1950s, it is argued, the human limits approach dominated the whole issue of worktime and the essence of this contribution has never been refuted but has been simply deleted from the discussion. Consequently the whole contemporary debate is being conducted on the basis of unjustified assumptions and this is rendering discussion increasingly sterile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the role of language in historical class formation in light of the recent developments in postmodern social theory and historiography. Revisionists from within this perspective have questioned if not abandoned E. P. Thompson's class struggle analysis, arguing that he fails to account for the constitutive character of language in the construction of collective identities. They oppose his account of the making of the English working class with alternative histories emphasizing populist and other non-class identities. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle of literary studies, and returning to Thompson's own writings, I argue that we can incorporate language into class struggle analysis as a critical mediating force. I maintain that class struggle occurs largely within a hegemonic discursive formation, and that class consciousness and identity thus in part are formed through counter-hegemonic strategies of resistance to ideological domination. To illustrate this theory I analyse the role of language in the class struggles of the silk weavers of the Spitalfields district in London in the 1820s. I analyse how the silk weavers articulated a class consciousness through their counter-hegemonic struggles with the large capitalists and the language of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a systematic introduction to the major themes of Jürgen Habermas' formulation of critical social theory. A discussion of his views on knowledge, cognitive interests, and scientific method is followed by an account of his social theory and his attempt to combine Marxism with mainstream sociology. In criticism it is argued that Habermas has not yet solved all the problems of a ‘realist’ approach to sociology and that his synthesis is incomplete. It is argued that sociology can progress through a critical dialogue with Habermas' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coinciding with the popularity of postmodern theory, the fall of communism appeared to offer further evidence of the exhaustion of modernity. Such analysis is grounded in a view that the Soviet system was the epitome of modernity. An alternative approach regards post-communism as opening new terrains of struggle for modernity. Thus Habermas and others suggest that post-communist societies are rejoining the trajectory of western modernity whose problems they now recapitulate. This alternative view implies that Soviet systems were something other than `modern', although their nature is not always clearly defined. However, even if post-communist societies do encounter problems of modernity, they do so in new circumstances where modernist notions of social development have become problematic. This article argues that, contrary to those who regard modernization or postmodernization as irresistible trends, core post-communist societies are likely to develop along an alternative path to that of western modernity. This is tentatively described as `neo-mercantilist'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the changing political philosophy of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis since the publication of Schooling in Capitalist America and Democracy and Capitalism. Bowles and Gintis did not start Left criticisms of schooling, their achievement was to focus attention directly on the capitalist economy per se. In so doing, they tended in Schooling in Capitalist America to represent the economic base as having a series of social levels one of which is schooling, stacked on top. Understandably, the book attracted a considerable amount of criticism from neo-Marxists, sympathetic to its commitment, but critical of its economic determinism. Writing as Gintis and Bowles, their response was the formulation, in their article Contradiction and Reproduction in Educational Theory, of a theory of sites and practices. Site they define as a cohesive area of social life characterized by a specified set of characteristic social relations or structures. By practice they mean individual, group or class intervention to transform some aspects of social reality. The theory pinpoints three distinct sites--state, family and capitalist production--all of which they argue are fundamental to the dynamics of advanced capitalism. Thus they move out of economic determinism and also encompass an increased awareness of gender--the patriarchal nuclear family. Bowles and Gintis not only reject the determining effect of the economy but argue that social change is the product of the collision of personal and property rights rather than the result of the internal contradictions of the system of capitalist accumulation. A rejection of Marxism is also apparent in their theory of the state. In Democracy and Capitalism their theoretical position on the state is less easy to discern. They do describe it as scrupulously liberal yet now suggest that it has the monopoly of the means or coercion.