Spatial and Social Inequality in Communist Countries and in the First Period of the Transformation Process to a Market Economy

Abstract

This paper argues that Marxism created new forms of inequality but was not able to abolish many of the old inequalities inherited from capitalism. The legacy of history, social and spatial division of labor, the hierarchy of control in large organizations and power relations proved to be stronger than the Marxist ideology, the abolishment of private ownership, the nationalization of the economy, central planning and all other instruments of Marxism that were meant to create equality and a “new socialist human being”. The author claims that an authoritarian and dogmatic ideology such as Marxism inevitably creates structures of organization where power and decision-making are extremely centralized. Furthermore the so-called “administrative allocation” of scarce resources and the way in which the leading party members were recruited contributed to the centralization of power and high-ranking decision making. In this bureaucratic competition for scarce resources the “periphery” had almost no chance. The image of “greater equality in socialism” was constructed by propaganda and by the communist monopoly over mass media, scientific publications, statistics and public education. In the empirical part the author discusses three examples of inequalities in communist systems: the spatial concentration of highly qualified jobs, gender disparities in the labor market and the inequalities experienced by gypsies. The third chapter deals with the new spatial patterns of inequality emerging in the first period of the transformation process to a market economy.