Comments on Kolankiewicz.

The article presents a comment on a previous article that appeared in the September 1996 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. How can classes emerge from a system whose goal was to destroy class society and to supersede it with a superior social order? Are there elements in a state re-distributive system, which can be transformed back into a social structure, which had seemingly been obliterated? Simply posing such a question makes it clear that writer George Kolankiewicz is, perhaps, being over-ambitious if he is seeking a common theoretical approach to encompass such a wide range of conditions, from Russia and the Ukraine at one extreme where pre-Revolutionary social structures in the early years of this century were very different to those parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire at the other, which were split apart by the Iron Curtain after the Second World War. According to the author, Kolankiewicz has written a very stimulating paper dealing with an exceptionally difficult problem area. The real difficulty is that sociologists know so very little about the networks of the new finance capitalists. There may be parallels with the great families who built up British merchant banking based on the cousinage.