анонимный вопрос

I remember defining capitalism as a social arrangement in which the dominant form of relations between people is commodity-money relations. A more classical definition, which was common in the Soviet Union, states that capitalism is a social arrangement in which the means of production are privately owned. It is quite obvious that in the nineties in Russia, there was no pure capitalism according to either of these definitions, but rather a transitional form of society, where old socialist (or despotic, in my understanding) relations were dying out, and capitalist ones were replacing them (as for the features of feudalism in the “sovok,” they did not disappear under the new order and have persisted to this day).

However, it must be remembered that, generally speaking, the term “capitalism” is more journalistic than scientific; therefore, when speaking about the existence of capitalism in a certain country at a certain time, we are speaking more about the society’s correspondence to certain values at that time. That is, capitalism rather in the sense of Weber (the spirit of capitalism as rationality and the Protestant work ethic) or Schumpeter (the spirit of capitalism as entrepreneurship and creative destruction).

Now, in the Russia of the nineties of the last century, the spirit of capitalism according to Schumpeter was present in abundance. It was a time of enormous opportunities and that very creative destruction. As for the spirit of capitalism according to Weber, it was nowhere to be found. What work ethic? Man is a wolf to man; if you want to survive, you have to know how to hustle. Capital was created primarily by plundering the Soviet legacy, by that same creative destruction, and by the ability to adapt the fragments of the old to new conditions better than others, rather than by the capacity for hard work, painstaking saving, and careful investing.