One of the most insistent laments of my teacher, anthropologist Jaap van Velsen, was aimed at Marxists who damned capitalism with utopian socialism. This, he averred, was a false comparison, comparing the reality of one society with an idealisation of another. He demanded the comparison of like with like--that capitalism-as-we-know-it should he compared with socialism-as-we-know-it. In his view, it was a categorical mistake to compare the reality of one society with the utopian version of another, and it was irresponsible of Marxists to let the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe off the hook. His voice boomed all the louder as Marxism became the fashion in the 1970s. When I completed my own study of the capitalist labour process, based on eleven months I spent working as a machine operator in a South Chicago manufacturing plant (Burawoy, 1979), he targeted his wrath at me. He was right: lurking behind my text was an unspecified utopian socialism.
His remonstrations were enjoined by Robert Merton, who reproached me for the false imputation that mistakes capitalism for industrialism. He was criticising an essay I had written in 1982 about the industrial sociology of his recently deceased student Alvin Gouldner. I claimed that Gouldner's classic text, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, missed the specifically capitalist character of industrial bureaucracy. His mock bureaucracy and his punishment-centered bureaucracy were both shaped by the exigencies of wage labour and the competitive pursuit of profit, while his representative bureaucracy was simply unrealisable in capitalism. Merton responded by saying that I had not demonstrated my claims, which would require comparisons of industrial bureaucracy both within and between capitalist and non-capitalist societies (Goulder, 1954; Burawoy, 1982).
To atone for my sins of false comparison and false imputation, I resolved to take actually existing socialism far more seriously. I decided against the easy road of Western Marxism that dismissed the Soviet Union and its satellites as a form of statism or state capitalism, unrelated to the socialist project. Instead, I began a twenty-year journey into the hidden abode of actually existing socialism, the last ten years of which were unexpectedly devoted to following the painful Soviet transition to capitalism. Ironically, in evaluating this Soviet leap into capitalism--the experiments of shock therapy and big bang- I now turned the tables on the avatars of market freedoms. I accused them of false comparisons as they damned the realities of socialism with an idealisation of capitalism, and of false imputations as they assumed that the pathologies of Soviet societies would evaporate if its socialist character were destroyed. They forgot the transition costs, all the higher in a global order dominated by capitalism, as well as capitalism's very own pathologies. The economists thought they were shopping in a supermarket and could just grab whatever combination of institutions they wanted, then walk out without even paying. Indeed, the Russian transition proved to be looting on a grand scale. Having been under the heel of state socialism, the population at large colluded in this unrestrained expropriation to their own detriment. To be sure, they never saw themselves as being in a supermarket but in a prison. They had been there all their lives, so they assumed that life on the outside could only be better. It turned out to be another sort of prison.
The life-and-death costs of a capitalist transition, guided and justified by such false comparisons and false imputations, were no less horrific than those born of similar errors during the period of agriculture's collectivisation and the planned economy. Just as Stalinism eclipsed its atrocities by proclaiming the new order the realisation of 'communism' and by imputing perversions to pernicious capitalist legacies, so the neoliberal economists hid the horrors of the capitalist transition behind the labels of the 'free market' while imputing perversions to the obdurate inheritance of communism or totalitarianism. Behind the social science errors of false comparison and false imputation there lies a mountain of political (ir)responsibility and guilt.
In this essay, I reflect on my own attempts to grapple with the challenges of comparison and imputation in a journey that, in the 1980s, took me from workplace to workplace in Hungary, and then in the 1990s, from workplace to community in Russia's market restoration. What was peculiar, I asked, to work organisation and working-class consciousness in the 'workers' state'--that is, under actually existing socialism; and with what consequences for the demise of the old order and the genesis of the new? And now I must also ask, what are the lasting lessons we can draw from socialism-as-it-was?
The multi-case method
How does an ethnographer compare capitalism and socialism without falling into the traps of false comparisons and false imputations? The old-style anthropologist, alone in his village and focused on the here and now, cut off from the world beyond, has little to offer. No better is the old-style symbolic interactionist or ethnomethodologist, working with the minutiae of face-to-face social interaction, searching for formal theory in social process, suspending both time and space and suppressing the historical contexts of capitalism and socialism.
Breaking out of these traditional genres of ethnography and seeking to grasp social meaning in the age of globalisation is the appealing idea of multi-sited ethnography--ethnography that connects different sites across national boundaries. Multi-sited ethnography sets out from a rejection of classical anthropology's spatial incarceration of the native, immobilised within and confined to a single place (Appadurai, 1988), and it rejects the enforced coincidence of space, place and culture (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992). Today borderlands, migration, cultural differences within communities and the postcolonial condition all point to ties and identities that have to be explored across and among multiple locales. In one of the field's early programmatic statements, George Marcus regarded multi-sited ethnography as the way to get inside the process of globalisation, rather than seeing it as an external system imposing itself on the life-world (Marcus, 1995). He catalogues the techniques of multi-sited ethnography as techniques of tracing the movement of people, such as in immigration; the flow of things, as seen in commodity chains or cultural artifacts; the manifestations of metaphor, such as in Emily Martin's notion of flexibility; or the unraveling of story, as in the pursuit of social memory or the trajectory of life histories across boundaries.
Multi-sited ethnography works well in following flows, associations and linkages across national boundaries, but it is still marked by a reaction to conventional anthropology. Just as the village or the tribe used to be a 'natural' entity, so now the 'site', albeit connected to other sites, speaks for itself as a natural essence that reveals itself through investigation. Abandoning the idea of a preexisting 'site', we turn from sites to cases, that is, from natural empirical objects to theoretically constructed objects. We have to be self-conscious about the theory we bring to the site that turns it into a case of something--in this instance, a capitalist or socialist factory. What is a Factory? What is a capitalist factory? What is a socialist factory? These are not innocent questions whose answers emerge spontaneously from the data: they come packaged in theoretical frameworks.
Constituting distinct sites as cases of something leads us to thematise their difference rather than their connection, which then poses questions of how that difference is produced and reproduced--in other words, how capitalist and socialist factories are different from each other, and then how that difference is produced and reproduced. Instead of the connection of sites to examine networks or flows, we have the comparison of cases constituted with a view to understanding and explaining their difference. Instead of multisited ethnography, we have multi-case ethnography. In short, the 'case' is doubly constituted: realistically by the social forces within which it is embedded and the social processes it expresses, and imaginatively by the position we hold in the field and the theoretical framework we bring to bear. Only then, when we have constituted the case, can we think about connections.
Accordingly, we begin with factories in specific places: a factory in the USA and one in Hungary; but then the factories have to be constituted as cases, expressive of the worlds in which they are situated--the worlds of capitalism and socialism. The factories have to be rooted in their broader political and economic contexts, in the systems of which they are a product. This is the first step: to see the micro processes as an expression of macro structures. The second step is to recognise the dynamics of change within each order. Capitalism and socialism are not static orders but dynamic societies, and in comparing the two, we have to pay attention to how they change over time--and not only over time, but over space too. We have to recognise both the changes that take place within factories and the variety of factories that can be found within each system--complexities expressive of the character of each order. Just as there is not a singular capitalist factory, so there is not a singular socialist factory. Thus each case dissolves into multiple subcases from which we reconstruct what they have in common, and what makes them part of a capitalist or socialist order.
So much for the realist dimension of comparison--the real forces and social processes at work that constitute the case. But there is also a constructivist dimension to comparison. Any complex site looks different seen from different places within it. A factory, whether capitalist or socialist, looks very different according to whether we take the standpoint of the manager or the worker, just as a village looks different seen through the eyes of Dalits or Brahmins respectively. As ethnographers, we don't have access to some Archimedean standpoint: we are always inserted somewhere in the site, which has grave consequences for what we see. Moreover, once inserted into a specific location, the competences of the ethnographer play a crucial role in dictating the way she or he is viewed and, in turn, views others. Some attributes are learned and others are ascribed, while the specific context, race, gender and age all affect the way others see one and interact with one. I call this first constructivist dimension positionality. In making comparisons between factories, it is important to recognise the embodiment and biography of the ethnographer as well as his or her location. Positionality, as we shall see, is very important in the constitution of the case.
The second constructivist moment refers to the theoretical suppositions and frameworks necessary to make sense of our sites. All three moments--context, process and positionality--are heavily saturated with theory. The very categories of context, capitalism and socialism, presume a theoretical framework of some sort. The dynamics of such systems--that is, social processes--cannot be examined empirically without an understanding of possible internal variation, and this requires prior conceptualisation. Even coming to comprehend the significance of position is not simply an empirical problem, since significance is also theory-laden--significance for what? Indeed, we might say that theory is necessary to keep us steady within the field, giving us bearings on our positionality. To put it more generally and bluntly, the world is complex: we cannot see anything without lenses that make it possible to focus. We carry around lenses that are so much part of us that we don't notice we have them, yet as social scientists our task is to bring those lenses to consciousness, compare one with another, and to develop from them other, more detachable lenses that we call social theory so that we can get on with the business of studying the world. Theory is an inescapable moment in the discovery and constitution of the difference between capitalism and socialism.
It is impossible to concentrate on all four moments of comparative ethnography …
