Social stratification: the top end

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Social stratification the top end

• 21/02/07

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Readings

• Sampson, Steven L. 1994. Money Without Culture,
  Culture Without Money. Eastern Europe's Nouveaux
  Riches.
• Balzer, Harley 2003. Routinization of the New
  Russians?
• Varese, Federico 2001. The Mafia in Perm (Ch 6).
  In The Russian Mafia Private Protection in a New
  Market Economy. Oxford Oxford University Press.

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Discussion topics

• Communist elites
• New class (Djilas)?
• Nomenklatura
• Apparatchiks
• Postcommunist transition nomenklatura
  privatization?
• Postcommunist elites
• Anthropology of class
• Anthropology of consumption
• Culture ? money
• Mafia

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Communist societies

• Classless and egalitarian?
• Milovan Djilas (1911-97)
• Montenegrin politician / theorist
• Fellow partsan of Tito
• Vice president in Tito's government
• Mastermind of Yugoslavia's independent form of
  communism
• Critic of non-egalitarianism of communist regimes
• expelled from the CP in 1954

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Milovan Djilas

• The New Class An Analysis of the Communist
  System (1955)
• privileged party bureaucrats nomenklatura a
  new class
• simply supplanted the earlier capitalist elites
• political control of means of production
• Conscious of itself as a new class (1930s)
• Eventual economic decline
• collapse backwards towards capitalism
• social revolution towards real socialism
• The idea not new
• Bakunin (debates with Marx)
• Russian anarchists (Kropotkin and Makhno)
• Russian communists (Trotsky)
• Orwell

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Nomenklatura

• nomenclatura
• list of names (Latin)
• list of higher responsibility positions
• covered all kinds of jobs
• Since 1920s
• list of names of suitable personas
• confidential
• to be approved by the CPSU
• Figurative use
• people who effectively occupied these positions
• not necessarily CP members
• subject to permanent control by CP

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Nomenklatura

• Ideological loyalty vs expertise
• Eg. Science/technology
• vs editors of newspapers, rectors of
  universities, cultural elites
• Varying number of positions
• 750 000 positions in the USSR
• 13 000 in Poland
• 800 in Estonia
• Little mobility within nomenklatura
• virtually a privileged class
• Accumulation of social capital
• Alienated from the masses

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Apparatchiki

• Members of the CP apparatus
• full-time, professional functionaries
• Two different and overlapping hierarchies
• eg. state-owned factory
• nomenklatura top managers
• apparatchiki could be simple workers

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Communist elites

• Masses
• little control over their political elites
• Brezhnev era nomenklatura socialism
• Not dictatorship of the proletariat but
  dictatorship over proletariat

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Post-communist transition

• Anti-communist revolutions as elitist?
• Early 1990s nomenklatura capitalism
• Creation of capitalist class overnight
• Conversion/reproduction/circulation of old elites
• Esp. Komsomol leaders
• Political vs economic elites
• National differences
• Eg. Czech Republic / lustration
• nomenklatura privatization
• Esp. Russia
• 75 of elite former nomenklatura

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Shubkin elites in Altai territory (1993-94)
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Kryshtanovskaya Yeltsin era business and
political elites
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Post-communist elites

• Sampson
• 1) Parachutists
• social ? economic capital
• 2) Former players in second economy
• economic ? economic capital
• 3) Former professionals
• cultural ? economic capital
• --------------------------
• 4) Former wage workers
• Luck, unstainable
• 5) Traditional members of professional classes
• More sustainable

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Post-communist elites in Russia

• Zaslavaskaya Starikov
• speculative, not productive capital
• Gangocracy
• Tight links with the state (corruption)
• Anatoli Chubais (mastermind of Russian
  privatization)
• new business leaders steal and steal... They
  are stealing absolutely everything.... But let
  them steal and take their property. They will
  then become owners and decent administrators of
  their property.
• democracy will follow free market capitalism?

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Post-communist elites in Russia

• Russia
• 88,000 dollar millionaires
• Forbes top lists
• 5 in top 100
• 17 in top 400
• Moscow
• 33 billionaires
• more than any other city in the world
• a third of Russias estimated millionaires
• 70 of foreign capital in Moscow
• 100 km golden circle around Moscow

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Oligarchs

• A small number of richest businessmen
• Originally seven barons
• Manipulated their political connections
• Most - former apparatchiks, members of
  nomeklatura
• Some - outsiders of the Soviet system
• Controlled an estimated 70 of the economy by
  late 1990s

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Oligarchs

• Oligarchs under Yeltsin
• Natural resource companies initially not
  privatized
• 1995, Kremlin auctions off shares of companies to
  domestic banks (in return for credit to the
  state)
• companies transferred to oligarchs for
  peanuts
• Sibneft auctioned for 196 m, value 11 b
• Lukoil 700 m, 18 b
• Norilsk Nickel 333 m, 11.5 b
• Oligarchs under Putin
• under pressure

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Class

• Marxist approach
• Based on property ownership
• on how money is earned
• 2 classes
• Owners vs labourers
• There is no "middle class"
• How money is earned
• Main determinant of collective identity

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Class

• Income-based approach
• Based on how much money is earned
• Tripartite
• 20th c
• Managerial class
• Knowledge as resources
• lower / middle / upper
• More complex models
• Eg. 3 classes with 2 subclasses in each

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Class

• Symbolic approach
• Based on on what money is spent
• i.e. consumption pattern
• Three forms of capital (Pierre Bourdieu)
• Economic capital
• Material wealth
• Social capital
• Networks
• Cultural capital
• Education
• Values, etc

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Bourdieu conversion of capital

• Economic capital
• (wealth)
• Cultural capital Social capital
• (knowledge) (connections)

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Anthropology of consumption

• Consumption of goods and services
• Conventional approach
• Economic / utilitarian
• opposite of production
• maximization of utility within the budgetary
  constraints
• satisfaction of needs
• emphasis on use value

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Anthropology of consumption

• Consumption of goods and services
• Contemporary (symbolic) approach
• Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
• Consumption has cultural, social, symbolic
  dimension
• Consumption as identity/self building/construction
  
• You are what you consume
• Consumption as communication
• identity, taste, lifestyle

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Jean Baudrillard

• People consume brands not products
• Consumption is a system of signs
• In capitalist societies consumption should be
  understood as a process in which only the signs
  attached to goods are actually consumed, and
  hence that commodities are not valued for their
  use but understood as possessing a meaning that
  is determined by their position in a
  self-referential system of signifiers.

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Pierre Bourdieu

• Distinction A Social Critique of the Judgment of
  Taste (1984)
• Different classes / social groups consume in
  distinctive ways
• Consumption pattern
• main determinant of social differentiation
• Consumption acts of
• distinguishing oneself from other classes
• marking and expressing social relations and
  status

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Anthropology of consumption

• since late 1970s
• Sahlins
• Culture and Practical Reason (1976)
• critique of materialist and rationalist
  explanations
• centrality of symbols in human affairs
• Douglas and Isherwood
• The World of Goods Towards an Anthropology of
  Consumption (1978)
• Early anhropological critique of neo-classical
  economics
• Anthropologist economist
• Goods as means of communicating
• Cultural and social dimensions of consumption

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Money ? culture

• Sampson
• Money without culture vs culture without money
• Strategies
• Invention
• Tradition, symbols, etc.
• Coats of arms, nobility, aristocratic pedigrees,
  etc.
• Imitation
• Euroamerican lifestyle, architecture, etc
• Eg. Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye
• Routinization? (Balzer)

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Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye

• http//www.rublyovo-arkhangelskoye.ru/eng/index1.h
  tml
• 3bn town for 30,000 residents
• a uniquely European feel"
• combination of architectural styles of old
  European cities like Prague, Amsterdam and Munich

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Russian mafia

• All-pervasive
• Russia Wild East abroad
• 3 million people involved in organized crime (UN)
• Controls
• 40 of private businesses
• 60 of state-owned companies
• 80 of banks
• Russian mafia a misnomer
• Within Russia
• Often blamed on ethnic minorities
• Chechens (Obshchina), Georgians, Armenians,
  Azeris
• Abroad
• Russian Jews (up to 90?)
• Easier to get foreign passports

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Russian mafia

• Relations with the state
• 50 of criminal groups have ties
• Profitable for the state
• Chechen vs Russian mafia
• Zhirinovsky (LPDR) 1999
• We would like to see members of the shadow
  economy among us because they represent the real
  and powerful economy.
• Relations with the church
• Generous donations by mafia
• Use mafia to extract money from parishes
• Religious funerals

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Krysha

• Cold War
• Cover-up for intelligence officers in a foreign
  country
• Now
• Roof or umbrella of protection
• From phone number to body guards
• In exchange for money
• 10-60 of profits
• Voluntary or imposed
• Various actors
• public sector law enforcement agencies
• criminalization
• private-sector guard services
• organized criminals

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Mafia

• Mafia ? state / mafia state
• both dealing with protection and collecting
  taxes
• Gambetta The Sicilian Mafia The Business of
  Private Protection  (1993)
• Mafia
• a "commercial activity" that supplies "private
  protection"
• a protection industry
• (in a society where trust is in short supply)

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Mafia

• Mafia as functional
• Provision of various services
• Protection (krysha roof)
• against other racketeers (reket)
• against corrupt law enforcement
• against tax police
• Debt collection
• Assistance with customs clearances
• Banking privileges at criminal-controlled banks
• Selling of law (zakon) in the conditions of
  lawlessness
• Enforcement of certain rules

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Federico Varese

• Is Sicily the Future of Russia? Private
  Protection and the Emergence of the Russian Mafia
  (1994)
• The Russian Mafia Private Protection in a New
  Market Economy (2001)
• Post-Soviet spread of private property
• but
• lack of property rights legislation
• state ill-equipped to enforce rules
• reduction of trust in the state
• demand for protection
• Rise of mafia rational choice of the users of
  protection rackets

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Studies of Russian mafia

• Vadim Volkov
• Violent Entrepreneurs The Use of Force in the
  Making of Russian Capitalism (2002)
• disintegration of the state
• loss of monopoly over use of violence and
  taxation
• rise of mafia
• non-state enforcer of rules
• more efficient reduction of transaction costs

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Studies of Russian mafia

• Arkady Vaksberg
• The Soviet Mafia (1991)
• Roots in the Soviet era (criminal network in
  Communist party)
• Caroline Humphrey
• The Unmaking of Soviet Life (2002)
• Roots in the pre-Soviet era (pre-revolutionary
  criminal arteli)

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Mafia as culture

• Distinct organizational culture
• Strictly defined group boundaries
• rituals of entry
• Norms, rules and punishments
• Shared identity and language
• Nicknames
• Named or chosen (vori)
• Loyalty and trust
• Obshchak common treasury
• Salaries, pensions, bail-outs, etc
• Hierarchical structure
• Rituals of promotion
• Eg. Crowning of a vor (thief)

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Vori v zakone

• Thieves-with-a-code-of-honour / thieves-in-law
• brotherhood (bratva)
• Vori
• 266 in 1993
• 740 in 1994
• 387 in 1999
• Conditions
• lengthy prison sentence (GULAG)
• 1980s, early 1990s - money
• 1995 initiation fee 150 000 USD
• Tyumen foreign cars ( potlatch)

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Mafia as culture

• Tattoos
• Distinctive symbols of group/rank/individual
• Voluntary or forced
• Eg. Initiation tattoos on the chest
• Common also elsewhere
• British
• ACAB (All Coppers Are Bastards)
• Japanese
• Irezumi
• North American
• "mi vida loca"
• teardrop tattoo by the eye