The book is a journey through the economic culture of the first Bulgarian capitalism, which formed between the Liberation and the beginning of the 1940s. Marked by the communism and the following opening towards the world, this culture continues to be reborn in today’s economic forms. The whimsical links between yesterday and today, revealed throughout the text, lead to long-standing, resilient roots of the communal (etatist, clan, or collectivistic) principles, which has never stopped undermining the full-blooded competition in the economy and constructing a "panel" existence. 

 

Looking back at the past gives an irreplaceable opportunity to delineate the causes for the stubbornly recurring inability to meet the standards of an authentic market. Communal Capitalism is a reflection on this problem, an essay penetrating into the varied folds and layers of the "documentary economics", preserved in the archival legacy and in the testimonies of the contemporaries.