From Masses to Classes? Class Analysis of Post-Socialist Economic Protest

Three decades of neoliberal restructuring in European post-socialist countries led to inquiries related to various societal responses to economic transformations. The transformation from a specific “class-less” society of state socialism to a post-industrial capitalist society with declining relevance of class has been studied from various perspectives (social stratification, value change, political polarisation). However, we do know very little about the nature of the socio-economic protest against the post-socialist restructuring which emerged after the regime change and continues today. While the fall of socialist regimes was often driven by shapeless social forces such as broad national movements and cultural elites, the structural features of the economic protest that emerged after the return of capitalism remain understudied (Dinev 2020). By structural features, we mean the basic character of the socio-economic protest with regard to two major paradigms of societal reactions to the rise of the capitalist economy: coordinated class-based mobilizations (K. Marx) or fragmented chaotic/unspecific countermovement (K. Polanyi) (Silver 2003). Did any economic protest challenging the logic of neoliberal policies after 1989 show patterns of class mobilizations, and if so, when and how? This paper aims to analyze the field of economic contention using the relational perspective in the study of collective action (Emirbayer 1997; Diani 2015). It conceptualizes economic contention as a specific field of collective action where various collective actors make their claims, employ protest repertoire and coordinate their activities (Melucci 1996, Crossley 2002). We define class-based economic protest as both linked to political parties and ideology and coordinated by collective actors representing specific class interests (ESeC model). We build on the formal social network analysis of protest event data in two post-socialist countries with a history of rapid re-installment of capitalism - Czechia and Slovakia - between 1989 and 2022.