A special and unique form of capitalism has evolved in Eastern Europe after the post-socialist transformation. This form is characterised by the unusual weak SMEs sector, an agricultural sector with few efficient capitalist large farms and many weak small farms often producing for self-subsistence and very weak labour in general. In these new systems, in addition to multinational companies, technocrats have a large weight in the evolving domestic capitalist elite, coming from the second rank of the former nomenclature and often with inherited bourgeois cultural capital.
Original article Nigel Swain: A Post-Socialist Capitalism in Europe-Asia Studies Vol 63, Issue 9 2011