Abstract
This essay discusses the use of class in Czech sociology. Czech social stratification research has used the concept of class as part of its standard vocabulary. The approach to class was distinctively shaped by postcommunist legacies. As an analytical concept, socio-economic status was preferred over class, particularly in the 1990s. The middle class played a prominent role as a subject of research and also a rallying cry. An important legacy that shaped the approach was the intellectual formation of Czech sociologists through the critique of the social stratification system in state socialism. This specific form of anticommunism shaped the type of questions typically asked in the stratification research and its subject matter. Moreover, the anticommunist legacy shaped interpretations of the broader implications of the stratification mechanisms and class effects, giving rise to an overly functionalist approach to the class system.
Czech popular discourse may give the impression that the only class that has consolidated after the end of state socialism is the “middle class.” Its plight has received considerable attention. Readers have been regularly informed about the caprices of middle-class consumption preferences and the dilemmas the class has faced in pursuing its reproduction strategies (e.g., sending children to universities). They have also often been alerted about policies that are deemed harmful to the cherished class. The concept of “class”—the “working class” and the “capitalist class” in particular— had obviously held a prominent role in the discourse of the communist regime. It is thus no surprise that class fell from favor after 1989. A concept that suggests antagonisms between social interests and invites critical analysis did not fit easily into the prevailing media discourse. Anticommunist attitudes delegitimizing anything that could be easily linked to the past were actively nourished and, with different degrees of success, reproduced throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Today, an uncritical media discourse, periodically seized by anticommunist mobilization, remains dominant, but not unchallenged. For instance, a thesis by a journalist of American origin on five families that control the Czech economy and polity enjoyed wide coverage recently. 1 Class is no longer taboo among a new generation of left-wing intellectuals, who use it to point to social antagonisms and conflicts that are typically ignored in mainstream coverage of Czech politics. 2
This essay discusses the use of class in Czech sociology, which long employed the concept of class as a part of its standard vocabulary. When Czech sociology was re-established in 1989, after being disbanded in 1969, the first scholarly discussions of class were attempts to plug into Czech society stratification variables that had become popular in the West. In this way, the concept of class became a part of the Czech sociological mainstream. Czech sociologists thus applied the standard measurements and concepts of social stratification research developed in the West, including that of class and class structure. They were also well integrated into international academic networks and often worked on collaborative projects on social survey mobility. In 1990–2009, thirty surveys including variables measuring class positions of respondents were conducted by various institutes in Czechia, often as a part of international comparative projects. 3 The analysis conducted in that period employed different variants of the EGP class scheme that defines the social class by the market and work situation. 4 The more up-to-date ESeC (European Socio-economic Classification) class scheme, based on the same principle, started to be employed recently. 5
At the same time, however, the approach to class was distinctively shaped by postcommunist legacies. As an analytical concept, socio-economic status was preferred over class, particularly in the 1990s. The question of capitalist-class formation was not a part of the agenda among Czech sociologists, who typically subscribed to an elite perspective, disregarding socio-economic context. The middle class played a prominent role in the sociological discourse – not just as a subject of research, but also as a rallying cry. But probably the most important legacy that shaped the approach of Czech sociologists stemmed from their intellectual formation through the critique of the social stratification system in state socialism. This specific form of anticommunism shaped the type of questions typically asked in the stratification research and thus its subject matter. Transition research, for instance, was preoccupied with tracing biographies of the communist nomenklatura while neglecting the actual social processes through which capitalism was created. Moreover, and perhaps most distinctively, the anticommunist legacy shaped the interpretations of the broader implications of the stratification mechanisms and class effects, giving rise to an overly functionalist approach to the class system. Class inequalities were thus seen as something natural and normal, a part of the package of returning to the social and economic order as understood to be functioning in the West. The class system was thus often presented—in contrast to the common understanding in Western social sciences and economics—as a functional complement of a market economy and an efficient labor market. 6
Understanding Czechoslovak Society during the Communist Years
A large survey-based research conducted in 1967 by a team of sociologists led by Pavel Machonin produced unique insights on Czechoslovak society of the 1960s—insights that shaped the agenda of Czech stratification research when it was reestablished after 1989. The results were presented in the 1969 book Czechoslovak Society, 7 which highlighted the gap between the official egalitarian ideology and a society that, despite a very flat income distribution, was characterized by social differentiation and inequality. Machonin pointed to a multiplicity of stratifying mechanisms, with education and “work complexity” being key in determining income and shaping lifestyles and consumption patterns. He spoke of sharp inequalities in the access to political decision making, with the so-called “nomenklatura” group granted sole access. The book identified the stratifying role of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” of the 1950s that lifted worker leaders and organizers into decision-making and managerial positions, annihilated the small bourgeoisie, and reduced the social role (and relative income) of the intelligentsia. This was also linked to the privileged treatment of workers in heavy industry and mining. 8
The contradictory mix of stratifying mechanisms gave rise to so-called “status inconsistency,” or the lack of correspondence between education, “work situation” (including occupation and “work complexity”), and income. A status-consistent society was said to be one where education, work situation (or complexity), and income were perfectly correlated. Status-inconsistent groups consisted of workers who earned less or more than would be predicted by their education and “work situation.”
“Status inconsistency” applied to about a third of the population in the 1960s, most notably to unskilled and skilled workers in heavy manufacturing (5.0–9.0 percent and 2.5–4.6 percent of the population, respectively), both of whom earned more than corresponded to their education and complexity of work. At the same time, the lifestyle of heavy-manufacturing workers did not correspond to their high incomes, meaning that they were not able to use their additional income to finance a higher-quality lifestyle. The relative losers were the group of non-manual workers with secondary education (4.5–9.3 percent of the population) whose incomes resembled those of the lower strata of the unskilled.
The Machonin team considered status inconsistency to be the key feature of Czechoslovak society. Even though their book described the social structure of Czechoslovak society by identifying a number of groups characterized by similar lifestyle, education level, work situation, and income, they argued against employing class analysis, as they saw it unable to comprehend status inconsistency. Indeed, for Machonin, a class system was defined by a high degree of status consistency, which was not what he observed in Czechoslovakia. 9
Following the publication of Czechoslovak Society in 1969, Machonin’s team was dissolved and Machonin himself faced political persecution and a ban from academic work. This spelled the end of research on social stratification in communist-era Czechoslovakia.
The Anticommunist Critique and Its Legacies
The re-launched sociological research in the early 1990s followed up, with Machonin’s active participation, the key topics of the 1969 book. This included the specificity of social differentiation under state socialism 10 and the role of the “state mechanism” in producing stratification outcomes. 11 The analysis was framed as a critique of state socialism, pointing to the injustice of political discrimination and what was seen as undeserved privileges enjoyed by the nomenklatura and other groups that were preferred by the distributional mechanisms of the old regime. The sociological approach was thus understood as an unmasking of the ruling ideology. The aim was to reveal the contradiction of interest between the nomenklatura and the rest of society. The critique argued that not just political discrimination and the lack of absolute returns on education for some status-inconsistent groups, but also income “leveling,” 12 or the narrow dispersion of income, and relatively low education premiums contributed to labor market inefficiencies.
The question of status inconsistency thus continued to be a key concern—not just as a critique of the injustice and inefficiency of the past but also as a major forward-looking concern. The new regime was put to a status-consistency test. The key question for the new order was thus the extent to which the individual dimensions of the socioeconomic status would come into line with one another, as was expected from a normal and functional stratification order. Income and education finally became the main stratification principle. 13 Income inequality increased, but still remained relatively low, with Gini coefficients reaching levels known from Germany and Austria. 14 This was driven by a polarization between a small group with very high incomes and a larger group of poor, consisting of the unemployed, families with many children, and some unskilled workers and pensioners. 15 Many of those who experienced upward or downward mobility during the state-socialist regime, altogether around a quarter of the population, experienced a return to the social class in which they were born, 16 although the upward mobility of skilled workers was found disappointing. 17 By the end of the 1990s, 35 percent of the economically active still had lower incomes relative to their education, leaving them with less pay than less skilled workers typically received. This applied chiefly to female workers with secondary education, as well as to many with university degrees. 18
Czech sociologists did not displace the concept of class from its vocabulary, as was the case in public discourse. In general, however, there was a tendency to discuss vertical social differentiation in terms of strata rather than classes. The usage of class in the stratification research was restricted to the descriptive analysis of structural change in the labor market, typically through the lenses of the EGP scheme. The consistent observation was that of a shrinkage of the working class, expansion of the service sector, and an increase in small entrepreneurs. 19
There was thus little discussion in the 1990s of class effects on life chances and lifestyle, as in the Weberian tradition. The role of class interest in the formation of voting preferences has, however, received considerable attention. 20 This research has shown that a class conflict has institutionalized in Czechia, with “social classes voting for political parties that defend their class interests.” 21 The classical Weberian concern with opportunity hoarding and conflict over rents was present in the analysis of the fate of the nomenklatura group after the fall of state socialism. The underlying question thus was whether the nomenklatura group was able to reproduce its privileges (or rents) in the new system. There was a larger degree of elite replacement in Czechoslovakia than in Poland and Hungary. 22 In what was dubbed a “revolution of deputies,” the directors of larger companies typically either retired or faced a downward mobility. 23 Other than that, there was very little on class agency in the conflict over control of production, as in the political-economy and Marxist approaches.
The lack of interest in the conflict over production and the social structure of the new capitalist order is particularly striking given the prominence of the privatization agenda throughout the 1990s. Czech sociologists were part of the large comparative project that led to the book Making Capitalism without Capitalists, 24 but they apparently did not share the interest of the authors in the “neo-classical” sociology of class formation and elite struggle. In fact, research on elites was one field of study where the concept of class appeared to be taboo. Among the capitalist classes, only the small entrepreneurs were typically discussed as a class. 25 Those controlling the commanding heights of the economy were analyzed only as an economic elite, hence a focus on their composition in terms of their education, skills, age profile, and career history. Their strategies were analysed in terms of how they evaluated policies such as privatization; political linkages were analysed in terms of elite perceptions of these links. 26 A systematic analysis of the actual privatization strategies and the formation of the new capitalist class was left to scholars working abroad. 27
The Value and Material Hegemony of the Middle Class
One class, however, had a prominent role in sociological discourse: the middle class. The concept, though, was rarely used as an analytic concept. The actual use of the concept was helpfully clarified by a leading analyst of the middle class: “it replaced the value and material hegemony of the working class to become the criterion for assessing the development of the social structure.” 28 The middle class was assumed to lean towards “rational political reactions,” reject extremism, and seek compromise. 29 The power of the middle class was deemed to be associated with social cohesion, political stability, and economic growth. 30 Večerník’s extensive discussion of the plight of the middle class defined the latter “more as a state of mind than a precisely delineated rank of occupations, income and consumption.” 31 Its value orientations included a future orientation through innovations, a human-capital based accumulation, and a differentiated consumer orientation. Empirically, it distinguished the old middle class “engaged in the production and distribution of material goods and services” and the new middle class “engaged in the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge.” 32
The situation was disappointing. The research showed that middle class did consolidate its stratification position, but it did so by avoiding a relative decline in the 1990s, unlike the case of the lower classes. 33 Thus, while postcommunist capitalism brought about an improvement in the standard of living for the majority of the population, the gains from growing inequality were concentrated among a small group of the “upper class.” Thus, only the top 5 percent of earners could be constituted as actual winners in regards to the transition. The middle-income categories were among those that kept losing their relative earning share at the expense of the top earners throughout 1989–2006. While the subjective identification with upper-middle and upper classes increased from 3.0 to 10.9 percent in 1991–2007, middle-class self-identification decreased from 61.1 to 35.6 percent in the period. 34 Moreover, the middle class became differentiated, with those dependent on the public-sector employment not doing very well. 35
The focus of the status-inconsistency discussion thus shifted from the losers of the state-socialist stratification system (non-manual workers with secondary degrees) to the postcommunist plight of the white-collar workers with university degrees working in the public sector. 36 The latter might have had enjoyed lower returns on education than common in the West, but they had been among the status-consistent groups in the socialist system of stratification. The relatively low return on education in the public sector under the new system became a major concern for sociologists, who were likely to be rather familiar with the experience of that social group. The plight of this group was seen not only as morally unjust and economically inefficient, but also as a political problem, since it implied a weak middle class.
The definition of the interest of the middle class became a prominent rhetorical tool for sociologists of different ideological persuasions to argue for policies they preferred. 37 Thus, for essentially political reasons, the question of what was good for the middle class thus became as important as the analytical concern about its composition and social role. 38
A Functionalist Approach to Class
Class became relatively prominent in sociological discourse as an explanatory concept in the 2000s. 39 What is striking about these accounts is their functionalist interpretation of inequalities. There has been a tendency, in other words, to see the class system as a functional prerequisite of an efficient labor market. The critique of the inefficiencies and injustice associated with status inconsistency thus gave rise to the notion that the alignment of education, occupation, income, and possibly also worldview/lifestyle is a sufficient condition for efficient labor-market allocation and a meritocratic system of social stratification. This seems to represent the long-lasting legacy of the anticommunist critique that has shaped the writing of sociologists of different political persuasions. For Machonin, however, meritocracy and class differentiation were understood as two contradictory stratification principles. 40 He thus criticized the new social system for retaining elements of communist egalitarianism as well as for creating class differences, as they both undermined the meritocracy. 41 This distinction reflects the international mainstream in social sciences and economics, but it has become much more blurred in recent sociological production on class in Czechia.
Accordingly, the class system was seen as a natural stratification regime, common in the West. Matějů and his colleagues discussed the transformation of the stratification system as a transition from “destratification to stratification,” implying that the communist regime was an aberration from the norm rather than a distinct stratification regime. 42 In this view, class is a functional equivalent of market-based economies, apparently ensuring efficient factor allocation in the labor market. Katrňák and Fučík, for instance, associate class differentiation with economic rationality, efficient management, and the profit motive. Accordingly, the emergence of a “performance-based” (meritocratic) society was necessarily accompanied by a constitution of social classes. 43 The term “performance-based” society (“společnost výkonu”) has been commonly used by Czech sociologists as the Czech equivalent of “meritocratic society.” This awkward translation is in itself indicative of the efficiency-bias in the functionalist interpretation of social inequality.
It follows that for most Czech sociologists—with exceptions, notably that of Keller 44 —a class-like system of vertical stratification does not involve an antagonism of interest. Antagonisms, if discussed, are related to the inefficiencies of the redistributive institutions inherited from the past—this can include, depending on persuasions of respective analysts, a range of institutions, including the “pay-as-you-go” pension system and redistribution from the middle class. 45
This functional perspective on the class system contradicts the evidence of class effects—such as that of the class-based discrimination in access to higher education—that Czech sociology itself has shown. 46 What is more, there seems to be a dissonance between the concrete analysis of the class system and the more abstract understanding of the links between the market economy and the stratification system. For instance, Katrňák, who explicitly subscribes to the functional perspective on class at the general level, authored not only a textbook providing an overview of the international evidence on the mobility advantages and barriers inscribed in the class system 47 but also a superb monograph on mechanisms that “condemn” Czech working-class children to “manual labor.” 48 Such a dissonance seems to be characteristic for the ideational legacies of the past that work primarily on the abstract and value levels. 49
Another, and related, legacy of the critique of the state-socialist stratification system is a more positive approach to inequality than common among sociologists in the West. The anticommunist critique involved not only the argument about the inefficiency of the compressed income distribution but also a critique of the apparently negative attitude of the population towards inequality. Accordingly, the attitude of “envy” was seen as a mechanism through which wealth was held under check in state socialism. 50 Popular egalitarianism was thus seen as an obstacle to greater tolerance of inequality, itself supposedly a prerequisite of establishing the “performance-based” principle. 51
The anticommunist critique can be related also to a more negative approach towards redistribution. In general, Czech stratification researchers are less likely to take into account the possible welfare- and efficiency-enhancing effects of redistribution, or its role in correcting market failure. In turn, arguments about the failures of systems of protection and redistribution find relatively high support among Czech sociologists. For instance, one of the conclusions of Večerník”s social report on the 2000s is that the Czech system of social protection contributed to high unemployment by creating a welfare-dependency trap by being too generous to the long-term unemployed. The report, however, fails to provide actual evidence for such a claim. 52 Moreover, comparative data presented in the report show that the Czech social system can be better characterized as efficient than generous, with support for the unemployed decreasing significantly from the mid-1990s.
Conclusion
There might have been, particularly in the 1990s, some aversion to the concept of class as a result of its association with the old regime. The notoriety of the “capitalist class” in communist discourse might have made discussions of political economy unattractive. Nevertheless, the preference for discussing vertical social differentiation in terms of strata seems to follow from the critique of status inconsistency under state socialism, and the consequent conviction that a status perspective is more illuminating in the postsocialist context, too. Yet even though social stratification analyses have not typically been framed in class terms, one can learn a great deal about the Czech class structure in this literature, in terms of groups of people sharing similar attributes related to education, income, and lifestyle, and similar class effects in terms of life chances and preferences, both in the state-socialist regime and in the period after 1989.
Past legacies seem to have had a crucial impact on how “class” was understood once the concept began actually to be used, as has been increasingly the case since the 2000s. Intellectual formation through the critique of the state socialist stratification system, in other words, has distinctively shaped Czech interpretations of the concept of class. This distinct form of anticommunism shaped the interpretations of the broader implications of stratification mechanisms and class effects, giving rise to an overly functionalist approach to the class system. This tendency is rather unfortunate as the specific insights that Czech sociology has to offer could challenge the uncritical popular discourse on social stratification and class. The functionalist package, however, allows what could be a progressive critique to coexist happily with the poverty of the mainstream.