Class Cultures in Postsocialist Eastern Europe

The evolving configuration of postsocialist societies remains a challenge for researchers in the field of social sciences. This is particularly true for those applying class and stratification principles, but perhaps even more so for those who are attempting to illuminate the role of culture in the economic restructuring and restratification of the societies being studied, by emphasizing the symbolic dimension of the transformation process. The social recomposition that accompanied the transition from socialism to capitalism introduced new trends in the formation of class cultures, as well as different forms of symbolic class struggle, defined by Bourdieu as classification struggles, and by Lamont as boundary work. Such changes in the field of class cultures in the postsocialist societies of Eastern Europe are analyzed by Dražen Cepić, with a particular focus on the example of his own country, Croatia.

Cepić is reluctant to use the qualifier ‘postsocialist condition’, with one of his goals being ‘to explore a condition whose actuality had yet to be established’ (8). This has considerable influence on the further interpretation of his findings. The book consists of six chapters. In the introduction, Cepić sets the theoretical framework and argues for postsocialism as an analytical frame of reference. In the following chapters, he explores the cultural, socioeconomic, and moral criteria of shaping group patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the upper-middle class (Chapter 2), the class of entrepreneurs (Chapter 3), and the working class (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 analyzes the case of cross-class friendship, with the aim of supporting the author’s claim that ‘present-day postsocialist societies to a certain degree still continue to be influenced by their state-socialist past’ (25). The final chapter addresses the complex processes of how new class relations and new class cultures evolved.

Cepić analyzes ‘how culture is used as an “order of worth”, a legitimizing principle, in the processes in which actors look at themselves, at the people around them, and the ways all this influences their choice of friends; that is, how culture plays a role in the construction of self-worth, symbolic boundaries, and actual social networks’ (34). Theoretically, his research is based primarily on Michèle Lamont’s studies of symbolic boundaries, as well as on the work of the major French contributors to the field—Pierre Bourdieu, on one hand, and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, on the other. In attempting to reconcile these theoretical strands, however, Cepić completely sidesteps the tensions that exist between them. For Bourdieu, culture is an instrument of pursuing class interests in symbolic and classification struggles, while Boltanski and Thévenot take a far more normatively minded approach and treat values as generally autonomous from their social structural position. Lamont’s arguments tie in with both views, but are closer to the latter.

Cepić reconstructs class cultures on the basis of qualitative data consisting of 65 in-depth interviews: 48 with representatives of the upper-middle class, and 17 with members of the working class, in Croatia between 2008 and 2011. The data also included qualitative social network analysis, complemented with the biographical method. The interviewees were asked to name 20 persons they felt were important in their lives, to comment on this choice, and then place their name labels on an ‘affective map’. Interview questions concerned the respondents’ values, the types of people they appreciate, their idea of success, and their overall experience of social change since the 1990s.

Upper-middle class interviewees used culture to a very high degree to anchor their identity and to distinguish themselves from other social strata—by talking about their fine tastes, valuing education, showing contempt for materialism, mentioning their intellectual friends, or proudly demonstrating their cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitan position often included the tendency to send their children to study abroad, where, as one of Cepić’s interviewees put it, they will learn ‘true values’. The boundaries were drawn by these members of the upper-middle class primarily to separate themselves from those perceived as ‘primitives’, those lacking in basic culture and, of course, fans of newly composed folk music, equated with lower-class people but also the nouveaux riches.

However, the upper-middle class demonstrated another way of defining their own value and evaluating others, linked to entrepreneurial spirit, meritocratic ideology, and success stories in a new system full of opportunities. Entrepreneurs, to whom ‘God has given a talent to work night and day’ (67), do not care much about culture. Some even defended the newly wealthy who attained political positions from attacks by members of intellectual circles, and emphasized their resourcefulness. Aside from that, members of the upper-middle class saw the public sector ‘sloths’, ‘slackers’, and ‘welfare scroungers’ as ‘bad guys’ (75). The entrepreneurs, despite their respect for hard work and dedication, mostly did not equate success with material wealth. In postsocialist societies, Cepić concludes, conspicuous consumption is often related to the ‘new rich’, who amassed wealth quickly and in a dubious or illegal, and thus morally questionable manner.

The narratives of the working class interviewees bear witness to the hard life they endured under socialism, marked by daily struggles with poverty. But, because of the high value the system placed on hard work, this is remembered as a life that gave them a sense of dignity. Cepić’s analysis of the working class in postsocialist Croatia reveals its poor material circumstances, practically non-existent social life, and exposure to uncertainty and constant anxiety. Most members of the working class spend their free time watching TV, and some attempt to restore their lost sociability and solidarity through trade union activism and self-organizing activities in neighborhood communities. Another important finding concerns how the working class evaluated the middle class, which occured primarily in the moral register. Interviewees denounced the upper class’s pretentiousness and incivility—‘with the suit, the tie, always perfumed, but then the whole building can hear his screaming’ (107)—or pointed out their unethical business practices—‘the more education you have, the bigger a thief you are’ (109). At the same time interviewees regretted having given up school and thus having missed the chance to attain a similar social position. The author sees such ‘ambiguities and uncertainties in defining what is decent and what is worthy’ as a part of workers’ attempt to develop ‘alternative codes of honour’ (109), but seems himself undecided whether to interpret it as conscious resistance to the dominant values or simply a search for new normative benchmarks. Morals—in the sense of morality, but also work ethics—sometimes appear on both sides of the class boundary in another, completely contrasting function: as a starting point not for social distinction, but for the creation of cross-class friendships. Cepić explains this tendency to transgress class boundaries at the levels of both discourse and practice as a kind of atavism, and proof of the resilience of egalitarian values stemming from the socialist past.

Cepić bases his research of class cultures in contemporary Croatian society on the most pronounced class distinctions—between the winners of transition, embodied by the representatives of upper-middle-class professions, and the losers, that is the workers. Although the author explicates his view of the upper-middle class as part of the dominant class responsible for establishing and maintaining dominant cultural values, readers are left wondering which other boundaries, cultural repertoires, and/or systems of evaluation and justification exist, and what role these might play in social stratification processes. Cepić did not include in his study the dominant fraction of the upper-middle-class, endowed with the highest level of economic capital. All company owners he interviewed were relatively small entrepreneurs. Who are they separating themselves from with the social boundaries they draw, and on what parameters are these boundaries based?

The study places considerable explanatory weight on the collective historical experience of (living in) socialism. Cepić detects considerable egalitarianist tendencies in the responses he collects. He does not go beyond Croatia, however, and thus omits any comparison with the rest of former Yugoslavia, let alone other East European societies, therefore failing to justify the broad title of his book.

The boundary approach and examination of class-specific values in unstable and changing systems is a very challenging field of research. There are no objective evaluative references and well-known cultural markers that can serve as a basis for people to build up their respective class cultures when social structures are in flux, making it difficult for the researcher to even identify them. The most valuable contribution of Dražen Cepić’s book lies in the fact that it provides a close look at the processes of class formation in Croatian postsocialist society, in all their complexity and with all their inner contradictions. However, his decision to trace these processes through individual case studies of professionals and manual workers limits the opportunities for generalization. On the one hand, the consolidation of capitalism has crystallized social classes, as is evident in lifestyle choices, parents’ aspirations for their children’s educational and occupational prospects, and attitudes towards entrepreneurship. On the other hand, however, ‘legacies of the old regime in the form of egalitarian values’ (151), far from having been abolished, have in fact been revived through cross-class sociability. Cepić attributes this egalitarianism, ‘both in a sense of failing to build one’s feeling of self-worth on a class basis, and in the sense of creating cross-class friendships’(152), to the resilience of old sociocultural structures. The author could have considered his findings as a symptom of the present system’s incapacity to meet the expectations of many people and thus a warranted response to rising social inequalities. This, however, is something he failed to do.