A SOCIOHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE FOR EAST EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENTS

Central to capitalism is not private ownership or entrepreneurship but the separation between control and operation of the means of production. Soviet and other East European economies until recently were state-capitalist command systems. However, a transition to private market capitalism does not automatically introduce democracy . The latter is a political means for restraining capitalism, but is itself a type of authoritarianism. Its variants differ not in the total amount of power exercise but in its distribution. In democratic systems, economic, political and other powers are disjoined and countervailing. Accordingly, they are exercised less over powerless individuals who, therefore, have greater freedom. East European dissidents were concerned more with controlling capitalism politically than with changing its type. Frustration of these democratic aspirations might eventuate in the replacement of authoritarianism by totalitarianism, probably fascist.