Privatization without Capitalism: The Social Relations of Property in Post-Communist Transitions

The literature on post-communist transitions has tended to conceptualize privatization with an emphasis on the state: private property is secure when the state surrenders its claims to ownership. This approach—though justified and often fruitful—is limited. Private property under capitalism is about more than the state. There are different forms of private property and not all of them characterize successful transitions to capitalism. Drawing on Marx’s Capital, I argue that a defining feature of private property under capitalism is the regulation of social relations between capital and labor. In contextualizing post-communism within historical transitions to capitalism, I seek to highlight the specificity of private property under capitalism and suggest that successful privatization is not the same as a successful transition to capitalism. Through a comparative study of land privatization in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, I claim that while privatization might be necessary for a transition to capitalism, it is not sufficient unless accompanied by peasant dispossession.