This fall marks the five-year anniversary of the revolutions that overthrew Soviet rule from Eastern Europe. However, more astute inspection of these economies reveals their dissemblance with the true egalitarian ideas of socialism and their parallels with a capitalist mode of production. In the former Soviet Union, workers did not control or organize the means of production, as is characteristic of a socialist or participatory economic system. Rather, there was a separate bipolar system effectively similar to capitalism. The key comparison here is the similar position of labor in each of these systems.
Labor has a subservient and thus compromised position relative to the owning class in both cases.
Neither system gives workers the ability to own, organize and control production according to consumer demand. Workers in Eastern Europe and throughout much of the world still await the establishment of an economic order defined and maintained by their interests. In Poland and Hungary elitists of the former centralized governments are now elitists of capitalist systems. The Communists . The popular uprisings within the region were not accompanied by a change in leadership dynamics.