Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe > Status Update

It is ironic that after the fall of state socialism, the anti-state post-communist government bureaucracy continues to grow, often in the shape of 'privatisation' bureaucracies - cf. Bokros

"[The new bourgeoisie] are about as far as they could be from the ideal Schumpeterian entrepreneur. their main creative activity is to find loopholes, to find patrons or to mobilize clients" - harsh, but fair?

in terms of class relations, these are societies with small, weak domestic propertied bourgeoisies but large intelligentsias, which have resisted historical pressures to professionalize - Maybe their big mistake.

The historical role of cultural capital is often revolutionary, and it seems unable to institutionalize itself as the dominant logic of a stable system - So much for Plato's philosopher kings.

the fact is privatisation produced disinvestment...Some of this could probably be called 'creative destruction' ... Some of this ... however, was simply a siphoning off of resources from large firms, often into private pockets...

If the Chinese technocracy did manage to oust the bureaucracy, China might very well adopt the policy of systematic privatisation.

It is difficult not to attribute China's extraordinary economic achievement to its strategy of building capitalism from below.

But if we are to understand why [socialist managers] opted for capitalism from above, it is impossible from above, it is impossible to separate analytically or empirically their self-interest from their commitment to professional ethics.

Civil society was the theory that gradually de-socialized intellectuals from a socialist, communitarian value system and reeducated them in capitalist individualistic virtues.

"For all these reasons, we believe that the struggle between the technocratic-managerial elite of the corporate sector and the new entrepreneurs who started from scratch is far from over." - it seems to be now, but the victors were not the technocrats, but the Fideszniks.