The Capitalist Personality

Face-to-Face Sociality and Economic Change in the Post-Communist World

Christopher S. Swader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135100674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

Modern capitalism favors values that undermine our face-to-face bonds with friends and family members. Focusing on the post-communist world, and comparing it to more "developed" societies, this book reveals the mixed effects of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships. While most observers blame the egoism and asocial behavior found in new free-market societies on their communist pasts, this work shows how relationships are also threatened by the profit orientations and personal ambition unleashed by economic development. Successful people in societies as diverse as China, Russia, and Eastern Germany adjust to the market economy at a social cost, relaxing their morals in order to obtain success and succumbing to increased material temptations to exploit relationships for their own financial and professional gain. The capitalist personality is internally troubled as a result of this "sellout, " but these qualms subside as it devalues intimate qualitative bonds with others. This book also shows that post-communists are similarly individualized as people living in Western societies. Capitalism may indeed favor values of independence, creativity, and self-expressiveness, but it also rewards self-centeredness, consumerism, and the stripping down of morality. As is the case in the West, capitalist culture fosters an internally conflicted and self-centered personality in post-communist societies.

1Introduction

Recent transformations have affected the way that economically ‘successful’ people in China, Russia, and Eastern Germany care about their close interpersonal relationships. The shift in economic culture stirred the pot of values that motivates people in everyday life, and the resulting brew is rife with tension. This book addresses the question of ‘how’ values change in connection with the shift to capitalist culture. Contemporary economic culture favors values that conflict with the value of intimate social ties. ‘success’ is bought through sacrifice.

Psychological tensions burden modern life. Overwhelmed with information, responsibilities, and choices, we struggle to keep our lives, and our minds, in harmony. Conflicts over how to spend our time, our money, and our mental resources are so common that it is tempting to assume that they are universal. This is particularly the case with work–family conflicts. Yet this is what I would like to denaturalize. Tensions between work and family, or more broadly between economy and sociality, are an integral part of most of our lives. This is largely because most of us live in societies transforming themselves toward, or already within, capitalist models. The capitalist mode of economic organization spurs conflicts, particularly work–family conflicts, as a product of its operation. This book highlights how such tensions have grown more strident in post-communist societies as a result of their recent transformations toward market capitalism. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many sides of these transformations have been deeply investigated, but not yet this one.

Almost no scholars have earnestly attempted to answer the question of “what happened to the social psychologies of those who experienced the transformation from communism to capitalism?” (Kupferberg 1999, 24). Maybe it is because we take as self-evident the social-psychological ‘nature’ of communism, as described, for example, by the esteemed playwright, dissident, and later president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel: “It is the worst in us which is being systematically activated and enlarged—egotism, hypocrisy, indifference, cowardice, fear, resignation, and the desire to escape every personal responsibility …” (The Economist 2011, 23). However true such accounts are, and they certainly meet many people's understandings about communism and social life, the inverse does not logically follow. The collapse of communism does not bring about a social resurgence by eliminating a source of human egotism and indifference. This is because capitalism also has an anti-social face.

There are two common ways to link the economic form and the mind. One involves the economy forging individual minds as a blacksmith hammers nails. This notion is top-down and structural, and the result of a mind that ‘matches’ the economy emerges from the economy creating the minds (and other products) that it needs in order to function. The second paradigm involves individuals choosing to become blacksmiths. This idea is bottom-up and agentic, and the match between minds and the needs of the economy is circumstantial to individual desires—apparently arbitrary—to become blacksmiths. The weaknesses of each of these stories are obvious. One neglects individual circumstances and action, whereas the other underplays environmental incentives and obstacles.

These views can be neatly meshed together. Instead of the economy ‘forging’ the mind or the mind merely ‘choosing’ to become an economic actor, both of these factors interact in individuals’ ‘becoming’ economic actors in a cyclical process in which individual choices are both framed by and themselves frame economic culture. Continuing with the blacksmith metaphor, the choice to hammer nails and act as a blacksmith creates a tendency for an adaptive and reflexive person to increasingly ‘be’ a blacksmith in patterned ways that ensure success. These adaptations were not all consciously chosen themselves, but they are often side effects of the original decision to blacksmith. To blacksmith means to transform one's environment and oneself according to the imperatives of blacksmithing. Metal becomes something to be formed, melded according to the smith's will. Family members as well may be converted into supporters, apprentices, and servants. The smithy also learns to read his/her customers, to hammer just enough nails, horseshoes, and swords, and to convince the public of the high value of these products. On average, the person who achieves the greatest success occupationally as a blacksmith also becomes the most personally blacksmith-like, whatever those characteristics may be.

Of course, modern economies are not overpopulated with blacksmiths. Yet, just as for the medieval artisan, in order to be successful in the modern market economy—to become a successful manager, entrepreneur, or businessperson—an individual undergoes certain conscious and unconscious transformations toward behavioral ‘best-practices.’ What then are the tools of success for key occupations in a market economy? As I argue in detail in this book, they include calculative rationality, the commodification of time, the exploitation and instrumentalization of relationships, image cultivation and consumerism, personal ambition and independence, work focus, materialism, tolerance of failure, and moral flexibility. People who adopt these tend to reap benefits for themselves, and in having done so, they have adapted in ways which constitute the contemporary economic culture. However, to follow these rules of the game also results in important repercussions for life spheres beyond work.

Which side effects does this new mentality bring about in other life domains? In terms of politics, research has argued for strong links between capitalism and pro-democratic, self-expressive, and tolerant attitudes. The modern economy, through the economic growth it brings, appears to widen personal aspirations and self-expression and fosters liberation from tradition and material scarcity (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Yet, aside from these repercussions with clearly political implications, which effects does this adaptation have within the realm of interpersonal relationships? If we look at the private sphere, at arguably the core aspect of human sociality, the face-to-face social bond, we see a very different picture. Capitalism produces tensions that challenge face-to-face sociality in everyday life. This book describes how capitalist culture tends toward the individualization of values in this sense, one that involves sacrifice, even for the economic ‘winners.’

Such sacrifice comes about because those who adapt to these particular best-practices are likely to experience tensions with their social convictions, such as the high valuation of face-to-face ties. Two examples begin to illustrate this. “Time is money” is an adage adhered to by successful businesspeople. This means that every minute is potentially convertible into economic gain. Evenings and weekends are convertible as well. In fact, they count for even more if they are wasted by a competitor on the family but utilized by a smart entrepreneur for work. Time is, of course, valuable for other things besides work, such as leisure, and/or spending time with our families and friends, so its allocation to work can cause anxiety. In another example, personal relationships become ‘useful’ for business. A friend or a relative is also a potential client, investor, worker, or partner. Modern workers who successfully and cleverly instrumentalize their interpersonal relationships tend to be rewarded by the economic system. Yet many of those who are using or exploiting their interpersonal ties, or creating new ties for explicitly instrumental reasons, may feel uneasy a result, even aside from the effects of this form of behavior on their partners. The short examples above, the instrumentalization of time and of relationships, are two of the best practices talked about by successful post-communist businessmen. Not all people, of course, follow this perceived cultural code. However, those who do are likely to be rewarded. At the same time, people report that these adaptations cause them moral disquiet. I argue that this cognitive dissonance is itself a major force for adaptive change. The drive to resolve this dissonance is a prime factor leading to more individualized values, because people tend to relieve their mental conflicts by becoming more rather than less individualized and work-oriented. The capitalist personality is more at peace when it values face-to-face bonds less.

Yet why do I write of personality, and how is it linked to culture? The word ‘personality’ derives from the Latin ‘persona,’ which refers to the theatrical mask worn by Greek and Roman actors (Feist and Feist 2005, 3). There is much disagreement about definitions of personality, but a common one is that “personality is a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person's behavior” (Feist and Feist 2005, 4). Therefore, personality should help us to predict behavior (see also Ryckman 2008, 4–5). In this respect, personality overlaps with the concept of values. Often seen as less enduring than personality traits, values are the general cognitive constructs that allow individuals to prioritize their behavioral choices (Schwartz and Bilsky 1987). They are the meeting point between behavior and cognition. Personality can be viewed as a container for values.

This book argues strongly for a degree of malleability of personality features linked to patterned prioritization of behavioral choices, of values, in the face of radical social change. While it is often assumed that these traits are stable across time and between social contexts, this notion is contested. Particularly, in rapidly changing societies, such as in post-communist space, people do radically change some, although not all, of their key perceptions, priorities, and actions within the world, sometimes at the cost of dissonance and sacrifice (see also Kohn et al. 2002). Much of this book explains the reasons and directionality for a category of such changes: those concerned with people's valuations of intimate face-to-face communication and relationships. Furthermore, a key argument of mine is that personalities are patterned by a variety of cultural influences; economic culture is among them.

The ‘capitalist personality’ is the personality type favored by (in that it accrues rewards), and functional for, key entrepreneurial, business, and managerial roles within a capitalist economy. The most basic way that personalities are influenced by social constellations is not through imprinting upon them key and abstract functions, but rather through agents’ own actions in response to the perceived environment. This model is not a deterministic one. Rather a capitalist economy embodies forces that tend to bring certain patterns of personality into effect through rewarding particular values.

Of course, we can think of many cultural influences that affect personality. We can imagine a communist personality (Wang 2002), an agricultural personality, the authoritarian personality (Adorno 1976), democratic personality (Lasswell 1951), a traditional personality, a middle class personality, an artistic personality, or a factory personality (Inkeles and Smith 1974). Each of these are, of course, in addition to national, ethnic, religious, and gendered patterns of personality, some of which social-psychologists differentiate and categorize, for instance into the individualist and collectivist dimension (Triandis 2001). These different spheres of cultural influence each contribute, in contending and combinational ways, to personality adaptation. An individual personality, such as you or I, is then the battling overlap of these contending spheres of cultural influence, intermeshed with genetic factors. Yet it is unsatisfying to simply say that we are formed from a variety of cultural raw-materials. It is rather important to identify how the main cultural spheres impact personality in specific ways. It is with this in mind that the capitalist personality is investigated. This particular personality has a secondary effect in that its favored values tend to result in the latency of values that allow intimate relationships to flourish.

This book draws evidence for these claims from societies that have recently undergone a transformation from a planned to a market economic system: economically post-communist societies, in particular China, Russia, and Eastern Germany. These three societies are chosen as the most-dissimilar cases among new free-market countries. Notably, China, Russia, and Eastern Germany vary radically in their cultures, languages, histories, ideologies, and centrally-planned and free-market economic conditions. However, the unifying factor is that they each experienced a near-total transformation to a market economy the past twenty years. Moreover, as I argue in this book, each has experienced shifts in social values during this same time period. Therefore, China, Russia, and Eastern Germany are chosen not only as a few of the world's most visible examples of new market economies, but more pointedly, because their starkly different ideologies, cultural and historical influences, and levels of transition-era economic prosperity demand that their similarity, the presence of social devaluation, be explained.

The post-communist condition in this sense is telling of capitalism at large. It depicts, through noting commonalities between different post-communist cases and elucidating the mechanisms directly linked to structural economic change, an aspect of the capitalism also very much alive elsewhere: an anti-social nature in terms of face-to-face sociality. What do I mean by ‘anti-social?’ The sociality dealt with here is one that is close at hand rather than abstract and far away. It deals with families and friends rather than institutions and strangers. It occurs through everyday conversation at the dinner table or over coffee rather than via memorandums or video-conferences. This face-to-face communication is a core means by which human norms are transmitted and reinforced, by which we receive much of our psychological well-being, and still where we spend large proportions of our time. It forms one of the most fundamental features of our social structure and social nature and is nonetheless highly sensitive to social change. Despite this, research on the close face-to-face bond is nowadays largely forsaken except for scattered ruminations about its demise, which form the ‘dark side’ of the coin of individualization referred to in contemporary sociological thought. In contrast to this relative silence, this problem was one of the prime interests among classical sociologists: how the development of the modern economy affects the social relationship.

Of course, capitalism is no homogenous monolith (nor behemoth) bridging all societies (See Hall and Soskice 2001). Rather, given our knowledge of the different forms of capitalism and the vast differences in specifics of the market-economic transformations in the post-communist world, the common cross-country observation of de-socialization despite these differences supports the idea of a capitalist ethos.

Breaking with practice, this book does not deeply investigate the underclasses who have been unable to stay afloat in capitalism's rising tide in Eastern Europe and Asia. Their stories are indeed filled with poverty, injustice, and private turmoil. Instead I write about those people who enjoy ‘success’ because so much has been made of their stories. They symbolize opportunity, and often, hope, as if only economic growth benefited people more equally, more would enjoy greater material, and therefore social, well-being, like the newly rich. We are told a similar story by social theories that highlight economic development as the first step to social and political evolution. Politics and society have moved “backwards” in Eastern Europe because of their lack of economic development, according to this view (Inglehart and Baker 2000).

There are some problems with assuming that value change stems only from economic conditions (thereby sidestepping the role of the ‘economic culture’). First, China reports many of the same types of corruption and social anarchy—such as high rates of juvenile delinquency or property crimes—as Eastern Europe, despite its backbreaking and reliable economic growth. Second, many of the new rich in Eastern Europe achieved success in the 1990’s through criminal activities (see Volkov 2002), are highly materialistic, and are hardly known for being pro-social. Third, as I will show in the following chapters, the social mentalities of post-communist states have not moved backwards, but in critical ways have become more ‘Western,’ with enhanced individualism, ambition, work orientation, and moral flexibility. Therefore, I have placed special emphasis on the new rich, the ‘winners’ of the transformation, as the flag bearers of the new economic system. To blame cultural problems solely on economic scarcity and inequality ignores the fact that the capitalist economic system, even in its ideal state, is also far from utopian. In other words, if the vanguards of new capitalism possess values that may be socially problematic, we can no longer write these problems of as due to inadequate economic growth or distribution. They are cultural and systemic rather than conditional, merely based on malfunction or harsh material conditions. These members of the new successful classes possess personality characteristics that are formed, not out of scarcity, but as a direct response to liberal economic culture. Comparative interviews with successful people and their own fathers illustrate this dynamic.

The central idea behind my interviews is to compare theoretically most-affected people with less-affected cases. With this in mind, two categories of informants were interviewed: the ‘most-affected’ young businessmen, entrepreneurs, and managers, and their own ‘less-affected’ fathers.

Men were interviewed, rather than women, as the ‘most-affected gender.’ Research indicates that women tend to be more compassionate, less competitive, and less materialistic than men (Beutel and Marini 1995; see also Appendix C). Therefore, interviews are conducted with men and their fathers as these interviews reveal the greatest contrasts and thus allow for an analysis of how capitalist value change occurs where it is found.

Shanghai, Moscow, and Leipzig were selected as the most culturally modern and economically developed cities of each society. Interviews were conducted in these ‘most-affected’ cities in order to maximize chances of finding the ‘most-adapted’ persons, in order to see how this adaptation works.

In his description, Becker (2006, 41) notes that “Shanghai is where modern China took its shape.” Shanghai has always been the vanguard, foreshadowing China's future, for better or for worse. He also notes its Janus-face qualities as the pinnacle of Chinese modernity:

Reviled in the 1920s and ‘30s as the “whore of the East” or admired as East Asia's greatest metropolis, China owes its first modern factories, banks, schools, universities, financial markets, newspapers, orchestras, and film stars to Shanghai. (Becker 2006, 41)

Historically situated as a center of early 20^th-century Western economic power in China, its government has capitalized on Shanghai's economic history by forming it into the modern giant of China's post-Mao economic boom.

Non-Muscovite Russians are fond of noting “Moscow is not Russian.” Only fifteen years ago, Moscow still felt like it had one foot in the Soviet past, while simultaneously being overrun by strip-clubs and casinos. Now, the city is packed with masses running on the heels of oligarchs, poor migrant workers from Central Asia, and streets lined with ritzy restaurants and cafes. Indeed, it hoards the majority of the country's wealth and vices and is sprawling with the new rich. In the city center, the famous grey of the Soviet past makes way for neon lights and sleek luxury automobiles. The reasons for resenting Moscow are obvious to most Russians; it represents the sharpened tip of the (admittedly quite long) spear of contemporary Russian economic and cultural development.

In Eastern Germany, Leipzig has been chosen for investigation. Berlin was not selected because of its unique East–West linkages. It would have been difficult to isolate former East Berlin social life as purely socialist in the same sense that it would now be impossible to designate it now as ‘Eastern German.’ Leipzig has an old commercial history, is host of the world's o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Capitalist Personality
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Permissions
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Becoming Homo-Economicus
• 3 “The Wall in the Head”: Mechanisms of De-socialization
• 4 The Chinese, Russian, and Eastern German Contexts: Social Values and Economic Change
• 5 Individualism, Ambition, and Work
• 6 “Get Rich First!”: Materialism and Consumerism
• 7 Family Relationships and Friendship
• 8 Morality, Religion, and Politics
• 9 The Wild West?
• 10 Discussion: Ambivalent Individualization and Capitalist Culture
• Appendix A: Methods
• Appendix B: T-test Results
• Appendix C: Results on Social Values and Gender
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index