T. Kowalik, ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF POSTCOMMUNIST SOCIETIES - THE INEFFICIENCY OF PRIMITIVE CAPITAL ACCUMULATION, International political science review, 17(3), 1996, pp. 289-296
In the post-communist countries (PCC) several phenomena reminiscent of
primitive capital accumulation (mass and permanent unemployment, impo
verishment of the majority of people, growing criminality) have emerge
d. The PCC have to ''tread the tortuous road'' of a primitive accumula
tion of capital, well known since eighteenth-century England and other
Western countries. Such a point of view has been expounded earlier by
Bauman in the IPSR. He based his view on two assumptions: that these
countries have backward, pre-industrial economies and that the transit
ion to a market economy must be correlated with growing income dispari
ties as a precondition of rapid economic growth. Hence, an impoverishm
ent or at least a delay in gratification of the large social groups is
inevitable. The argument in this article is that both assumptions are
false.