Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Anton Kuijsten, Hans-Joachim Schulze and Klaus Peter Strohmeier (eds): Family Life and Family Policies in Europe, volume 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 509 pp.
For some decades scholars in the field of family sociology, family policy, demographers and in comparative studies of gender and the welfare state struggle with the relationship between family policy and family life. This book offers an intellectual and empirical overview of the complexities of that issue, and presents some striking results on the relationship between family policy and demography, gender equality family formation divorce. It also contains some inspiring reflections on divergence and convergence of family policies in European welfare states and on the core issue: does family policy matter and if so, in what way and under what conditions? The authors recognize that family policy and family laws are not the only factors that influence family life and family relationships, they also pay attention to cultural values and norms. Because of their methodological and theoretical reflections on the study of policy effects on family life, this book is a good example of how inspiring the interdisciplinary comparative study of family life can be if scholars combine demography, sociology cultural studies as well as social policy analysis.
The first aim of the project exists in developing a family typology that may serve to answer the question: Can any evidence be provided that family policy matters for family life? A related question is: What exactly are similarities and dissimilarities between the welfare states concerning family policy and is there any convergence between the welfare state typology of Esping Andersen based upon social security systems and stratification of the breadwinners and a welfare state typology based upon family relations and gender-equality?
In his introduction of the book the project leader Kaufmann warns the readers not to be too optimistic. He signals several problems. At the conceptual level there is the problem of the definition of what exactly should be classified as ‘a family’. Other problems have to do with the social policies at stake; can we talk about family policy even if countries have no articulated family policy? Should population policy be included? What to do with social policies that are not articulated as such but may influence family life and family formation, such as taxation systems, social security, housing and employment policy and the transformation of public services? Also, only some countries have family policies, if they have them these can be either explicit or implicit. So, what kind of family policy matters?
Kaufmann also recognizes that family life is not only influenced by policies. The family is a partial institution, or a partial social system functioning in relationship to intergenerational networks, cultural values and norms of the wider society and to other social institutions such as the educational system, the labour market, welfare institutions, healthcare etc. Since social scientist can not create an experimental situation by eliminating other social influences, one can only approach reality as good as possible by a systematic cross-national comparison of a selection of policies influencing the family and outcomes in terms of family forms, fertility and nuptiality rates, divorce rates, family income and women's labour market participation. The various cross-national comparisons of the relationship between family policy and family life that are made in this book result in the following conclusions:
There is indeed evidence of a relationship between family life and family policy, although not an unmediated relationship. Given the combination of family policy, family life, cultural values and even law, welfare states have distinguished family regimes.
Family policies contain economic as well as ecological incentives. Both relate to time for care, as many feminist scholars have already pointed at in the past decade. Economic incentives are for instance family and child allowances and tax reductions for breadwinner families. These are incentives to support families in the material costs of children and in the costs for time to care, that is to say the reduction of wages due to spending time to the upbringing of children. The costs of the – part-time – housewife so to say. Ecological incentives are care provisions substituting parental time to care, they offer both parents the possibility to be employed.
The results of working with the distinction between economic and ecological incentives are striking: collective ecological incentives perform best at all indicators. Countries that have the best care services have the fewest income equality between all forms of families, the highest rates of women's labour participation, the highest fertility rates and also free choice for choosing one's form of private life is highest. This confirms the articulation of a care policy on behalf of individualisation as well as on behalf of the family. Both individual and familial interests can go together at least when good and coherent care policies are developing.
Welfare states differ in their respective family policies. The welfare state typology based on social security (the Esping-Andersen typology) differs from the welfare state typology based upon family regimes.
This volume offers a good illustration of the complications in defining families cross-nationally. For example Kaufmann states that ‘we are speaking about forms of private living and not about forms of family life’. Indeed, singles and people living apart together cannot be captured by the definition of ‘family life’ but instead should be categorised under the heading of the ‘non-family sector’. However some authors use a much more restricted definition of ‘the family’ including only married couples with or without children. Partly this is due to what exactly is categorized as ‘a family’ in the countries under study. The project might have gained consistency by discussing the definition of family life beforehand. The Canadian sociologist David Cheal (19) offered four alternative ways to approach the family in times of diversification: (1) concept specification (implying the restriction of the concept to married people with children only); (2) concept abandonment (this option avoids to use the concept ‘the family’ by using the concept ‘primary relationships’ for all kind of structured interpersonal ties); (3) concept displacement (plead for by discourse oriented sociologists who do not see the family as a fixed category any longer but focus on the way the concept is used by different categories of the population in every day life); and (4) concept expansion (an option to include different class of family groups; such as primary relationships between partners, the living apart together and the co-habiting partners; a relationship between parents and children of all kind, a relationship between siblings and all other variations that can be imagined).
A second issue to which the volume contributes is whether diversification of family patterns results in polarisation of families. Some authors, like Schulze, states that people without children increasingly are better off than people with children. Kunzler in contrast, defends the pluralisation thesis; instead of polarisation the variety and plurality of family forms increases. Indeed both authors are right: Schulze's conclusion about the relative poverty of parents can be fully explained by the income difference between single breadwinner and dual breadwinner parents. The implication is that not the re-productive parents and the non-reproductive singles or couples, but the breadwinner/housewife family and dual earner families are the most dichotomous categories. Such is an important conclusion from the perspective of social policy: families can gain by family policies that stimulate mothers’ employment.
Finally the authors introduce several typologies of welfare states from a family perspective. Stromeijer explores the diffuse character of family policy and offers a thoughtful analysis of the complications of studying family policy given these complications. It becomes evident that because of a lack of clear objectives regarding family formation and family relationships in the countries under study, it is much more problematic to develop a typology on basis of family regimes. Therefore the volume offers five possible typologies of family regimes; one is based upon the extent and speed of modernization of family relationships. The second one refers to the outcomes of economic and ecological interventions. The third typology is based upon policy profiles (pro-family/pro-natalist, pro-family/non-interventionist, pro-egalitarian, pro-traditional) and the fourth one on taxation policies (individualistic, familialistic and etatistic). The fifth typology analyses differences in law systems and their consequences for family life (Code Napoleon, German-speaking countries, including Turkey, Scandinavian, Common Law, UK).
By doing so the authors have made crystal clear that it is not at all an easy task to develop a comprehensive typology of family regimes on basis of which welfare states can be distinguished. Maybe the authors of this book once will reflect on the question if such a typology can be constructed anyway and what will constraints can be expected in such a project.
Trudie Knijn, Professor of Social Science, Utrecht University.
Stephen A. Resnich and Richard D. Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 353 pp.
Within the Marxist paradigm, one might distinguish between three major approaches to the class structure of the USSR. Following Stalin's pronouncement in 1936 that antagonistic classes no longer existed, Marxist–Leninists defined it as the initial socialist phase of the communist mode of production: state ownership, planned production under the hegemony of the communist party secured, it was contended, the elimination of the bourgeoisie and its exploitation – through the market – of the working class. While one has to search hard for advocates of this position in contemporary sociology, these views have shaped the Marxist ideological response. Trotsky and his followers in the Fourth International conceded that changes in property ownership had created a qualitative shift in the relations of production. However, the Stalinist political formation had not pursued the revolutionary trajectory made possible by October. A privileged stratum was in power and a political upheaval (not revolution) was necessary to displace the ‘degenerate’ leadership to put it back on its proper revolutionary course. The third, and probably dominant, view among contemporary Marxists (and also non-Marxists) is that the USSR never was socialist at all: it was state capitalist. This approach is both criticised and developed by the authors of the book under review.
Their argument is that the essence of ‘state capitalism’ is to be found in the process of the extraction of surplus value. Analogous to the varieties of capitalism literature, the authors distinguish between private and state forms of capitalism. The former is defined in terms of private ownership of the means of production and private extraction of surplus. What made the USSR capitalist was that ‘… capitalist processes … coexist and interact with processes that place state officials (rather than private individuals) in the class position of appropriators and distributors of surplus’ (p. 85). Such officials ‘centrally appropriated’ the surplus produced by workers ‘as per the classic definition of capitalist exploitation’ (p. 88). Resnich and Wolff identify the processes and classes performing this function. The Soviet industrial ministries were ‘parallels’ of the boards of directors of capitalist companies. The production of ‘administered values’ gave rise to surplus and this process was analogous to production for ‘exchange’ (production for profit). The exploitative relationship between state capital and labour remained the same as between private capital and labour. The authors claim that previous theorising in this vein focuses on the power relations between the elite and masses – a political sociology approach – while their contribution is to put at the centre of analysis, economic exploitation – a political economy model.
The authors distinguish between two different types of state capitalism. The USSR was a benign one – it had a ‘human relatively democratic face’ (p. 98), whereas fascism comprised in class terms ‘state capitalism with an inhuman undemocratic face’ (fn. 20, p. 103). Resnich and Wolff undoubtedly make a contribution to the debate by dwelling on the extraction of surplus value. Others have mentioned it but no one has made it the central explanatory variable of a Soviet state capitalism theory. Whether this leads to a plausible conclusion that the USSR was a political economy comparable to Nazi Germany as a sub-type of state capitalism, however, is open to question.
Working within a Marxist political economy paradigm, I content that capitalism is distinguished by the production of exchange value through markets, competition of individual capitals, the necessity to make surplus and consequent labour exploitation leading to the continual accumulation of capital; class conflict is an in-built driver of social change. Soviet ‘state capitalism’, however, had a quite different dynamic of accumulation. Soviet type societies made surplus but the dynamics of the system of production did not stem from competition of capitals (as enterprises had no economic autonomy and were not profit maximising); there was no production of exchange value as there was crucially no free market for commodities and assets; money (as it functions under modern capitalism) was non-existent and there were no financial institutions or banks. The state socialist societies exchanged with the capitalist world system but were not part of it as their economic systems were relatively autonomous.
Superstructural institutions (such as ideology and a dominant communist party) were not supportive of capitalistic forms of exploitation and accumulation. Hence the context in which surplus value was extracted was quite different from that of modern capitalism. No class owned the means of production and officialdom could not legally expropriate surplus for its own ends. The Soviet Council of Ministers could not dispose of assets through a market: there was no market. This helps to explain why in the post-World War II transition in Germany, Italy and Japan, no major changes were necessary in the functioning of the political economy of capitalism. The class structure of post-World War II Western Germany was the same as Hitler's Germany. It seems to be stretching the (Marxist) definition of class too far to say that the dominant class structure of Stalin's USSR is the same as in Putin's Russian Federation. But it does enable current non-Marxist theories of ‘system change’ to be reconciled with the authors’ non-revolutionary approach to the transformation of the former USSR and Eastern Europe.
The book has detailed chapters on the historical development of the USSR, linked rather generally to the over-arching theme of class structure. The more recent processes of transformation from state capitalism to private capitalism, explained in class terms, is underdeveloped. The final chapter, Class Contradictions and the Collapse, details in the post-War period, the roles of detente and the growing privatisation of life, the changing policy with regard to agriculture and the growth of a second economy. The authors note that the class structures of private and state forms of capitalism contain cultural, economic and political problems. But the reader would be more convinced if they could have shown more clearly why it was necessary for state capitalism to move to private capitalism. A hybrid type of political economy seems to have been successful in China. It is here perhaps that distinctions could have been made between the interests of global (private) capital and the global political class. This would involve a quite different type of explanation – one based on exogenous class forces and interests as well as the formation of a new capitalist class in the former Soviet type societies. An implication here is that to integrate these economies into the world economic system, a qualitative, not a quantitative change was required.
This is a book which will attract the attention of Marxists concerned with the evolution and analysis of Soviet type societies. Its historical approach will also appeal to historians of the Soviet Union and Russia seeking a class analysis. It is of less interest to the sociologist and political scientist involved with the current transformation in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Overall, it is a scholarly book which should find a place in every University library.
David Lane, University of Cambridge, UK.