It was in the economic sphere that the situation pertaining in Czechoslovakia most resembled Kabyle society. The institution of profit was taboo in both societies. As amongst the Kabyles, economic subjects pretended that the endeavour to enrich themselves was alien to them. I am not an economist and will therefore refrain from going into details. However, the deep decline in the level of contractual guarantees of these transactions, coupled with a drop in the weight of the institution of law and state, a change in the proportion of economic and non-economic coercion linked to the relativisation of the power of money, a sovereignty stripped of the institution of individual, transparent, legally guaranteed (private) ownership, which had lost the support of the state… historians of political economy still have a lot of work to do if they are to explain how it all worked. However, even at first sight it is clear that in many ways – and I cannot help but feel in the most fundamental ways –our market resembled more an archaic than a modern market.
When comparing the economic and sociological perspective on human behaviour, James Coleman (1988) shows that sociologists understand it above all as the outcome of socialisation and focus on explaining on how it is shaped, constrained and directed by its
monopoly of legitimate violence, political action proper can be exercised only by the effect of officialization and thus presupposes the competence (in the sense of a capacity socially recognized in a public authority) required in order to manipulate the collective definition of the situation in such a way as to bring it closer to the official definition of the situation and thereby to win the means of mobilizing the largest possible group, the opposite strategy tending to reduce the same situation to a merely private affair. To possess the capital of authority necessary to impose a definition of the situation, especially in the moments of crisis when the collective judgement falters, is to be able to mobilize the group by solemnizing, officializing, and thus uiniversalizing a private incident… It is also to be able to demobilize it, by disowning the person directly concerned, who, failing to identify his particular interest with the ‘general interest’, is reduced to the status of a mere individual, condemned to appear unreasonable in seeking to impose his private reason – idiotes in Greek and amahbul in Kabyle… It is natural that politics should be the privileged arena for the dialectic of the official and the useful: in their efforts to draw the group’s delegation upon themselves and withdraw it from their rivals, the agents in competition for political power are limited to ritual strategies and strategic rituals, products of the collectivizing of private interests and the symbolic appropriation of official interests.” [Bourdieu 1977: 41]
social context. The weakness of their position resides in the fact that they fail to answer the question of what the basic impulse is, i.e. the engine, the driving force of such behaviour. This can lead to a situation in which it appears that humans are acting merely on the basis of impulses received from their surroundings, i.e. they are merely reacting.
Economists offer the following explanation. In the background of all human behaviour is an endeavour to maximise the benefit of the actor themself, or to maximise the benefit of their group or organisation (and by extension their own), in which case we use the term corporate utility. On the other hand, the weakness of many economic theories is that they often gloss over the fact that this behaviour always takes place within the context of social norms, i.e. social networks of mutual trust or mistrust in the environment of social organisations and institutions, which are able to modify it substantially. Some social norms and pressures may cause an individual to act against the maximisation of their own benefit.
However, this objection affects only a limited segment of human behaviour. It is clear even to the most ardent social determinist that a person under the pressure of social norms renounces their own benefit with great reluctance, comports themself in this way only temporarily, and seeks to organise things in such a way that they return to the maximisation of individual rewards as soon as possible.
In the original formulation of the objectives of the new social order, the maximisation of individual rewards was more or less to be sacrificed in favour of the common weal. This objective was built on the premise that the “national interest” was syncretic, and that individual interests in the maximisation of benefit would not only be amassed, but saved and accrue interest. This in turn would lead to a “continuous rise in the standard of living of all people”, as the vision of the public weal eventually materialised.
However, in order to be able to amass individual interests in this way, it was necessary to assume their commonality or uniformity.
Conflicting interests cannot be combined, but are mutually paralysed and cancel each other out. In order to maintain the assumption of commonality, those whose interests were incompatible with the new system (for instance, because they had lost all of their assets with its arrival) had to be excluded from the notional corpus that was supposed to participate in monitored corporate utility, for which the common good was intended.
Everyone was to participate in it, with the exception of some who did not deserve to. From the very start, the principle of exclusion or expulsion was built into the logic of the system.41 It was originally conceived of as temporary, and after an initial period of consolidation, was to be abandoned. However, as time passed, it became clear that there was not enough room to implement the original plan to build a classless society, and the basis of the common good both clearly and covertly contracted step by step. After the capitalists had been excluded, it was the turn of their children, while the shadow of inherited sin extended ad infinitum, as the families of the establishment closed themselves into an ever more exclusive group. The time for recruitment into the Communist Party and the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union (ČSM) was over, and it was no longer the case that “anyone can join”.42 On the contrary, a regular cycle of vetting and purging began. The sources from which the common good was drawn were not growing as fast as anticipated, and eventually stopped growing altogether. They began to contract. The system was caught in a negative feedback loop: with every newly excluded
41 An analysis of the mechanisms of exclusion in Czechoslovak society is offered by Petrusek [1988].
42 This relative “openness” was how Vaculík described the difference between the capitalist and socialist ruling class back in 1967 in a speech delivered at the 4th Congress of Czech Writers. He was shown the errors of his ways very simply. He was expelled from the party and dismissed from his employment, above all because his speech implied the attitude of “not minding the fact that he was on the side of the exploiters.” Even then, demand outstripped supply and elite power had already sealed itself off hermetically so as to prevent the crumbling of the inheritance for its next generation. This need, too, lay behind the call for fraternal assistance.