Deconstructing the romance of the bourgeoisie: a Russian Marxist path not taken
Review of International Political Economy, 10 (1):
93--117 (February 2003)DOI: 10.1080/0969229032000048871
Abstract
In the 1990s, Russian reformers vainly sought to discover a bourgeoisie committed to democracy, productive economic behaviour, and an ever more elusive 'civil society'. Their quest constituted the latest chapter in a centuries'-long struggle that began with the challenge posed by economists like N. F. Daniel'son (Marx's foremost disciple) to 'Orthodox' Marxists and to state capitalists of the tsarist regime. The latter two groups agreed to discount Daniel'son's data on the state-dependent, risk-averse and politically undemocratic behaviour of Russia's bourgeoisie, as well as the statistical and economic evidence that had led Marx to reconsider his skepticism about the role of peasantries in the development process. In the past and in the present, even-handed and unsentimental comparative research on the bourgeoisie as well as other, less privileged economic actors in the development scenario remains - regrettably - quite rare.