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minister of justice. These courts were not structured tobe independent, and the existing political control fur-

ther increased the likelihood of telephone justice.Socialist legal theory emphasized the key role of the

Prokuratura in the administration of justice. Theorganizational design of the Soviet Prokuratura wasinherited from the czarist administration. It was aselect, centralized body; procurators served in totalsubordination to their superiors, in what was aquasimilitary organization. They were much betterpaid than judges. The Prokuratura was in charge ofcriminal prosecution, representing the state in court,but it also routinely supervised the activities of thestate administration. Lenin considered the Prokura-tura the bulwark of socialist legality. He knew that acentralized state power could not afford any par-ticularism, and all local, particular normative systems

represented serious deviance. Normative particular-ism was especially dangerous if it originated in statebodies. As Lenin wrote to Stalin legality cannot belegality of Kaluga or the legality of Kazan but must beone single all-Russian legality. Thus the task of theProkuratura was to see to the establishment of a trulyuniform understanding of legality. The supervisorypowers of the Prokuratura included the authority toask for ordinary and extraordinary review of courtdecisions, even when it was not a party in the case itsought to review. Ironically, the fear of localismresulted in minimal protection for the population: thecentral bodies had an interest in mobilizing localpopulations against local authorities, and they en-couraged denunciation of local (nonpolitical) abusesto the extent that they deviated from centrally author-ized injustice. The dependence of citizens on localservices was attenuated in the name of central law.Rules of procedure aimed to protect the material andpolitical interests of the state, and allowed forpaternalistic intervention in private litigation. Theprocedures followed simplified continental modelsthat had traditionally existed in the given country.The inquisitorial nature of the traditional continen-tal criminal procedure was further aggravated bySoviet solutions regarding the admissibility of police-gathered evidence.

In civil matters judges were required to establishobjective justice and were not bound by parties

motions. The paternalistic nature of continental civilprocedure dramatically increased, resulting in furtherdependence, as far as the parties were concerned. Onthe other hand, the simplifications and limited accessto court yielded cheap and relatively swift administra-tion of justice (where courts were available at all).Civil litigation rates were stable, and the most com-mon type of litigation was divorce related. Criminallitigation (except when criminal justice was used as atool of class struggle, in the 1930s and 1950s, stabilizedat low level. Criminality was limited because of theefficient social control exercised by the oppressive statemechanism.

See also: Law and Society: Sociolegal Studies;Marxism\Leninism; Marxist Social Thought, His-

tory of; Socialism; Socialism: Historical Aspects

Bibliography

Collins H 1982 Marxism and Law. Oxford University Press,Oxford, UK

David R, Brierley J E C 1985 Major Legal Systems in the WorldToday: An Introduction to the Comparatie Study of Law.Stevens and Sons, London

Eo$ rsi Gy 1979 Comparatie Ciil(Priate) Law. Akade!miaiKiado! , Budapest, Hungary

Feifer G 1964 Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, NewYork

Hazard J N 1969 Communists and Their Law. University ofChicago Press, Chicago

Krygier M 1994 Marxism, ideology and law. In: Krygier M(ed.) Marxism and Communism: Posthumous Reflections onPolitics, Society, and Law. Rodopi, Amsterdam

Marcuse H 1971 Soiet Marxism: A Critical Analysis. Penguin,Harmondsworth, UK

Marx K, Engels F 1976 The Poerty of Philosophy, CollectedWorks. Lawrence and Wishart, London, Vol. VI

Podgorecki A, Olgiati V (eds.) 1996 Totalitarian and Post-totalitarian Law. Dartmouth, Aldershot, UK

Thompson E P 1977 Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the BlackAct. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK

Vyshinskii A I A (ed.) 1948 The Law of the Soiet State.Macmillan, New York

Zweigert K, Ko$ tz H 1987 Introduction to Comparatie Law.Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK

A. Sajo

Socialist Societies: AnthropologicalAspects

Socialist (also known as communist) societies con-stitute a class of twentieth-century societies sharingtwo distinctive features: the political dominance of arevolutionaryusually a CommunistParty, andwidespread nationalization of means of production,

with consequent preponderance of state and collectiveproperty. This definition excludes societies governedby socialist or social-democratic parties in multipartysystems, such as the Scandinavian welfare states. Itincludes the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic ofChina, and (for some part of their histories) the EastEuropean countries, Mongolia, North Korea, Viet-nam, South Yemen, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, andMozambique.

Socialist societies came into being with the 1917Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of theSoviet Union. Others founded later by various means(revolution, conquest, or annexation) all reflected the

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influenceboth negative and positiveof the Sovietmodel created under Lenin and Stalin. All employed

extensive coercion and central control, yet they in-creased living standards, access to housing, employ-ment, education, and medical care. Although theyinstituted new hierarchies, they also promoted genderequality and improved life-chances for many disad-vantaged people.

1. Research on Socialist Societies

For much of the twentieth century, social scienceunderstanding of these societies was politically cir-cumscribed. Their own scholars were under strictParty control; nonetheless, invaluable knowledgecame from dissidents (e.g., Bahro 1978, Casals 1980)

and from scholars in countries with strong reformmovements (e.g., Kornai 1980, Wesolowski 1966). InWestern Europe and the US, political and economichostility to communist principles distorted thinkingabout socialist societies as epitomized in the concept oftotalitarianism, which overstressed the importance ofterror and top-down control. In all Western socialscience disciplines, impediments to on-site fieldworkhindered understanding. This situation improved inthe late 1960s, for Eastern Europe, and the 1980s, forthe Soviet Union and China, as deTtente and theimpetus for technology transfer produced an infra-structure for intellectual exchange. The result wasanalyses that displaced totalitarian models to explorethe societies inner workings, with greater attention to

phenomena such as kinship, ritual, the mobilization oflabor, and the exchange of gifts and favors, as well asmore subtle treatments of political economy (e.g.,Humphrey 1983).

2. Political Economy and Social Organization

Although they varied widely in economic development(from industrialized Czechoslovakia, to agriculturalChina and Cuba, to pastoral Mongolia), most societiesthat became socialist lagged behind the advancedindustrial countries economically; all embarked onprograms of state-led development through centralplanning. The following description of their political

economies emphasizes classic socialism prior to thereforms introduced at various times, and draws onresearch in both agricultural and industrial settings inChina, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.

2.1 Redistributie Bureaucracies and ReciprocalExchanges

Owingto therole of exchange in legitimizingsocialism,it is appropriate to begin with Karl Polanyis threebasic modes of exchange: reciprocity, redistribution,and markets. Socialist systems suppressed the market

principle, instituting redistribution as the chief ex-change modality and the systems raison deVtre: every-

one would have the right to work, and the wealththey produced would be redistributed as welfare forall. Centralized redistribution required social owner-ship and control of productive resources, togetherwith centralized appropriation of the product forreallocation along lines set by the Party. The instru-ment Party leaders developed to orchestrate pro-duction and distribution was the plan. Fulfilling it,however, depended on relations of reciprocity, bothclientelistic and egalitarian.

Although these were highly bureaucratized societ-ies, they were not Max Webers impersonal modernbureaucracies dedicated to procedural rationality.Dense social networks sustained reciprocal exchangesthat, far from constituting resistance to bureaucratic

control, were intrinsic to its functioning: horizontalexchanges enabled socialist managers to do their jobs,and clientelism facilitated controlling both labor andParty cadres in seemingly noncoercive ways. Personal-istic ties extended far beyond the bureaucracy as well,linking ordinary citizens with one another and withbureaucrats. The warp and woof of socialist societies,then, consisted of vertical and horizontal relations ofpatronage, loyalty, and exchanges of goods, favors,and gifts. Although the forms of these relationsdiffered according to the various societies prerevolu-tionary histories and cultures, (e.g., gift relations inChina, compadrazgo in Cuba or Nicaragua, or specifickinship structures of Soviet minorities), they werewidely prevalent in all. In each socialist society wordsindicating connections (Russian blat, Chinese guanxi,Romanian pile, Hungarian protekcioT, Cuban com-pangerismo, Polish dojscie) appeared often in dailyspeech.

2.2 Organized Shortage

Personal relations were integral to socialism in partbecause of certain pervasive features of plannedeconomies: tension between Party planners and firmmanagers, bargaining and soft budget constraints, andbarter amid shortage. Socialist property could beproductive only if the centers ownership\control

rights were disaggregated and devolved on to lower-level managers charged with realizing production.Because planning could never foresee all contingen-cies, these managers had considerable discretionarypower. Expected to achieve Party directives withinadequate wage funds and to exceed their plan targetswith inadequate raw materials, they bore responsi-bility far greater than the means allotted them forfulfilling it. Therefore, they strove constantly toexpand their local power base and their effectivecapacities. In doing so, they posed a threat to theirsuperiors, who thus were motivated to encouragesubordinates loyalty with favors and patronage.

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In redistributive systems governed not by demandfor products but by the Partys planned allocation,

materials for production could not simply be boughton a market; their availability depended on thesupplies budgeted in plans and on often-inefficientcentral distribution. Managers, therefore, requestedmore supplies than they needed, hoping to obtainenough materials to fulfill and exceed their targets.Because the planning mechanism required firms toproduce regardless of profitabilitythey operatedunder soft budget constraints and were rescued ratherthan bankrupted if they lost moneylocal managerscould with impunity overstate their needs for materialsand investments and then hoard any excess. They alsostrove to bargain their plan targets downward, makingit easier to fill these and have goods left over.Comparable processes occurred in both industry and

agriculture, as cadres everywhere manipulated infor-mation, under-reported production, and engaged inillicit trade to benefit their firm or locale.

The result of bargaining and hoarding was endemicscarcity of the materials necessary for production;thus, classic socialist societies were economies ofshortage (Kornai 1980). Shortage caused competitionamong firms but also widespread exchanges, managerssupplying from their hoard today the materials neededby others who would return the favor tomorrow.Thus, firms hoarded materials not only to coveremergencies in their own production but to backstopthe supplies needed by others in their network.Shortage affected materials for production and alsoconsumption goods, generating the queues charac-teristic of many socialist societies. It also affected twoother crucial resources: information and labor.

Party planners could implement top-down planningonly if they had detailed and accurate information.This happened rarely, for lower-level cadres had manyincentives to falsify information so as to build careersby appearing successful, evade responsibility for dis-asters, inflate their materials requests, providecushions against production shortfalls, overfulfill theirtargets to receive bonuses, etc. From these discrepantneeds came a perpetual struggle over information.Higher authorities hoarded information as a source ofpower and engaged in continual information gatheringat all levels of society (Horva!th and Szakolczai 1992).

Censorship and careful management of information atthe top provoked information hunger below, gen-erating a culture of rumor, gossip, selective secrecy,and conspiratorial explanations of events, as well asproducing a citizenry skilled at reading between thelines. Classic socialist societies were thus a special kindof information society.

2.3 Labor Shortage and Rights in People

An additional resource subject to shortage was labor.Relatively underdeveloped socialist economies hadinitial problems mobilizing skilled workers where there

was effectively no working class, and they lacked theresources for either paying labor well or substituting

capital-intensive methods. Moreover, the shortageeconomy encouraged firms to employ excess workersso they could complete monthly plans once sufficientmaterials were on hand (in a frenzied effort known asstorming); managers, therefore, padded their work-force, exacerbating shortage. Labor shortage, thus,had both macro and micro dimensions. Means forstabilizing the labor supply included making work-places the locus of benefits such as daycare, housing,vacation permits, pensions, medical care, etc. Certaincities were closed to immigration and construction ofurban infrastructures was limited (Szele!nyi 1983), thuscompelling millions to become village-based peasant-workers.

Within each industrial and agricultural workplace,

managers had to ensure a labor supply adequate toboth normal production and periods of storming.Workers, for their part, might bargain for betterconditions by withholding labor, through intentionalslowdowns or time off for household tasks andmoonlightingthat is, labor shortage gave workersstructural leverage. Conflicting demands for labor puta premium on ways of accumulating rights in people.For managers, these included extending patronageand favors (e.g., access to schooling, houses, orbuilding sites), overlooking petty illegalities, andsecuring loose plans that enabled them to produce asurplus they might use to create labor-securing debtand exchange relations (cf. Humphrey 1983). Bothmanagers and others needing labor might appeal tokinship idioms, emphasize ethnic identities, participatein special rituals, and expand networks of reciprocitythrough gift-giving. Thus, the quest for labor furtherencouraged personal ties and reinforced particularisticidentities.

2.4 Second Economies and Socialist Reform

Believing they alone could best determine how socialwealth should be redistributed, Party leaders initiallyopposed economic activity not encompassed withinplans. The inability of planning to cover social needsat the given level of technological endowment, how-ever, compelled officials to permit and even legalize

some small-scale private effort, known as the second(or informal, unofficial, or shadow) economy. Amongits forms were food production on small plots, after-hours repair work or construction, typing, tutoring,unofficial taxi services, etc. Because these activitiesoverlapped with semilegal and illegal ones, theirsituation was everywhere precarious, with authoritiespersecuting them more in some times and places thanin others. The second economy was largest in Hungaryafter 1968, for example, small in Cuba until CastrosRectification of 1986, harassed in Romania through-out the 1980s; it burgeoned in post-1978 China;extreme forms are reported for the Soviet Union,

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where entire factories ran illegal production afterhours. Crucial to understanding the second economy

is that it nearly always utilized materials from the first(or formal, official) economy; its much-noted highrates of productivity were subsidized, then, by statefirms. The prevalence of second-economic activityboth indicated popular resistance to the Partysdefinition of needs and helped to fill those needs byvoluntarily lengthening the working day.

Pressure from the second economy was but one ofmany signs of difficulty in socialist planning that led torepeated efforts at reform, initiated from both withinand outside the Party. Beginning with Lenins NewEconomic Policy, every socialist society experiencedcycles of reform and retrenchment, devolution andrecentralization (cf. Skinner and Winckler 1969, Neeand Stark 1989). Most exhibited a trend toward less

stringent planning and the introduction of marketmechanisms, heightened material incentives, andmixed property forms. System-wide experimentationbegan with Khrushchevs 1956 Secret Speech criti-cizing Stalin and increased as each society moved fromextensive development (mobilizing resources) to theintensive phase (attention to productivity). Hungaryand Yugoslavia introduced the most durable earlyreforms; those in the Soviet Union ended in thecollapse of the Soviet bloc, while comparable reformscontinued in China, North Vietnam, and Cuba. Asthey reformed, socialist societies increasingly divergednot only from the Stalinist model but from oneanother, introducing path-dependent differences thatbecame ever more marked.

Despite these differences, the reforms everywhereredefined basic units of activity (e.g., revitalizingvillages or households at the expense of collectivefarms, teams, or brigades); altered gender relations(usually in favor of men and patriarchal authority)and increased other inequalities; affected networks ofreciprocity (expanding horizontal over vertical con-nections); dismantled at least some socialist property(as with Chinas decollectivization, begun in 1978);shifted the locus of authority (usually downward,provoking reactions from higher-level bureaucrats);and entailed new, more intimate forms of statepenetration (implied, e.g., in Chinese rituals that nolonger imagined gods or ancestors as inhabiting a

nether world but found them immediately present).

3. Social Engineering and Resistant Personhood

All Communist Parties promoted massive projects ofsocial engineering. They accorded knowledge andexpertise a privileged place, under Party monopoly.Convinced of the creative power of language, Partyleaders both used and modified language in com-manding ways. They spoke of things that had yet to becreatedthe working class, the proletarian dictator-ship, the new socialist manas if those things alreadyexisted, and they developed hieratic speech with

reduced vocabularies, clusters of noun phrases, andfew (often passive) verbs, creating a limited, static

verbal world. Party cadres intervened exhaustively inall facets of life, aspiring to create new moralities andto control populations in myriad ways. They attackedreligion as superstition, instituted new socialist rituals,and expanded educational access to create enlightenedcitizens indifferent to religious belief. They filled theair with moral exhortations aimed at instilling a new,puritan, socialist ethic. Toward better management ofresources, they introduced massive population pro-grams, from Romanias enforced pronatalism toChinas stringent birth control, insinuating themselvesinto peoples most intimate lives, often to devastatingeffect (e.g., Kligman 1998).

Dedicated to building an alternative to the world ofbourgeois capitalism, communist leaders announced

an assault on all forms of inequality, including thosebased in kinship status, gender, class, and ethno-national difference. Society would be homogenized,lineage-based kinship structures broken up, genderdifferences minimized and authority relations in fam-ilies altered, classes and private property abolished,national minorities given equal chances. New socialentities emergedstate and collective farms, teams,and brigades, for instance, to take the place of kin-groups and village structures. When pre-existing socialrelations proved difficult to abolish, they would be co-opted and turned to the Partys purposes. From allthese efforts would result the new socialist man, anew kind of person, and the people-as-One, a newkindof human community, bearing an exalted socialistconsciousness.

The results of these interventions were decidedlymixed. To begin with, the Party failed to speak withone voice, as ministries vied for resources rather thancooperating to remold society, and as cadres builttheir careers by under- or over-executing centraldirectives and engaging in rampant corruption. Inaddition, the annexation of pre-existing forms inevi-tably modified the purposes they were intended toserve. Exhibiting greater capacity to formulate goalsthan to implement them, socialist governments wereplagued continually by the unforeseen consequencesof their policies. To solve conflicts among nationalitiesthey institutionalized ethnonational difference in ways

that strengthened it; they embraced nationalist idiomsthat then overtook socialist ones (Verdery 1991, 1996).Parties created working classes only to find themselvesopposed by their creation, as with the Polish autho-rities and Solidarity.

Beyond this, resistance to social engineering proli-ferated even as people adopted the new forms. Con-stant surveillance politicized behavior: small acts ofjoke telling became willful anarchy in the eyes of bothauthorities and joke tellers. Dissidents sought supportinternally and abroad for their critiques of the system,launching projects to build civil society against thestate. Less visibly, peasant refusal to accept starvation

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from Chinas Great Leap Forward or EasternEuropes delivery quotas ultimately forced the autho-

rities to renounce these policies (Yang 1996, Re!v1987), while popular insistence on adequate livingstandards pressed the parties toward reform.

Highly complex political effects centered on themaking of persons and political subjects. Redistri-bution and socialist paternalism tended to createsubjects disposed to dependency and passive expec-tation; early campaigns taught the poor to see them-selves as victims of oppression (rather than simply offate) and offered them the Partys instrument ofvengeance, in the form of denunciations. Thus arous-ing peoples complicity, the Party also instilled self-denigration. At the sametime, however, manyadopteddissimulation as a modeof being: apparent compliancecovered inner resistance. The resultant social schizo-

phrenia, doubling, duplicity, or split self is describedfor every socialist society. It accompanied a pervasivedichotomization of the world into Us (the people)and Them (the authorities). More significantly, it en-couraged subtle forms of self-making in peoples ownterms: defiantly they consumed forbidden Westerngoods, created self-respect through diligent second-economy work while loafing on their formal jobs,participated in ethnic- or kin-based identities andrituals constitutive of self, and gave gifts not just tosecure advantage but to confirm their sociality aspersons and human beings.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc hinders a balancedassessment of socialism, which once represented greathope for countless people. Undeniably, socialist soci-eties diminished certain forms of oppression, yet theycreated others. In many of these societies, an early e!lanfor the expressed goals gave way to cynicism and afeeling of betrayal, as the means used to achieve themsabotaged their fulfillment. Admirable gains in edu-cation, medical care, and social well-being counted forless against the devastating purges, labor camps,Party-induced famines, environmental degradation,and abuses of human rights. Top-down engineeringfoundered as socialisms leaders resisted their citizensefforts to educate them about social relationships, selfand human feeling, the value of ritual practices, andthe limits to imposed change. The lessons of thesecitizens refusals, their silent revolutions from below,

should guide future attempts to create alternatives tothe world of global capitalism.

See also: Mao Zedong; Peoples Republic of China;Soviet Union; Stalin; Cold War, The; Communism;Communism, History of; Informal and UndergroundEconomics; Marxism\Leninism; Socialism; Socialism:Historical Aspects; Soviet Studies: Culture; Total-itarianism

Bibliography

Bahro R 1978 The Alternatie in Eastern Europe. Verso, London

Casals F G 1980 The Syncretic Society. M. E. Sharpe, WhitePlains, NY

Horva!th A, Szakolczai A 1992 The Dissolution of CommunistPower: The Case of Hungary. Routledge, New YorkHumphrey C 1983 Karl Marx Collectie: Economy, Society and

Religion in a Siberian Collectie Farm. Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, UK

Judd E R 1994 Gender and Power in Rural North China. StanfordUniversity Press, Stanford, CA

Kligman G 1998 The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Repro-duction in Ceausm escus Romania. University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, CA

Kornai J 1980 Economics of Shortage. North-Holland,Amsterdam

Kornai J 1992 The Socialist System. Princeton University Press,Princeton, NJ

Nee V, Stark D (eds.) 1989 Remaking the Economic Institutionsof Socialism: China and Eastern Europe. Stanford UniversityPress, Stanford, CA

Re!v I 1987 The advantages of being atomized. Dissent 34:33550

Skinner G W, Winckler E A 1969 Compliance succession inrural Communist China: A cyclical theory. In: Etzioni A (ed.)A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations, 2nd edn.Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York

Szele!nyi I 1983 Urban Inequalities under State Socialism. OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford, UK

Verdery K 1991 National Ideology under Socialism: Identity andCultural Politics in Ceausm escus Romania. University of Cali-fornia Press, Berkeley, CA

Verdery K 1996 What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Walder A G 1986 Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work andAuthority in Chinese Industry. University of California Press,Berkeley, CA

Wesolowski W 1966 Classes, Strata, and Power. Routledge &Kegan Paul, LondonYang D 1996 Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural

Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine .Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA

K. Verdery

Sociality: Anthropological Aspects

1. The Problem of Culture

Sociality is the capacity for social behavior, a capacityparticularly marked among human beings, as evi-denced by the intensity, complexity, and endlessvariety of human social life. This definition echoes theearlier use of sociality in philosophy and psychology,where it is used to denote the fact of human socialinterdependence and to correct a tendency in thosedisciplines to explain human behavior in individu-alistic terms alone. Sociality is used differently amongevolutionary biologists, where it denotes the actuallyobserved social behavior of a species, such as itsmating system or dominance hierarchy; sociality sodescribed is then subjected to an explanation from

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

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