Search

Our paper proposes to rethink the concepts of modernization and modernity in the context of state socialist and postsocialist transformations in Eastern and Central Europe. By focusing on historical transformations, we seek to challenge normative and static constructions of the state socialist legacy and show that such perceptions are rooted in the Cold War ideological division. One way to contest this division is to reconceptualize socialist modernity. Drawing on James Ferguson's seminal study on the "expectations of modernity," we argue that modernization was central to the Eastern European Communist parties' claims to legitimacy. While the state socialist experiment proved to be a failed political and social project, the dreams of modernity bereft of socialism continued to shape people's self-images and social visions beyond the borders of "Eastern" Europe. In order to better understand the state socialist legacy and the political and social thinking of "postsocialist" people, we propose to link the study of the small transformations of everyday life with the critique of binary constructions of the concepts of socialism and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to investigate the working-class background of the failure of the economic reform of the 1960s in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The reform attempted to bring more incentives and market-like elements into labour organisation and management practices. However, there was an essential discrepancy between loyal party work and strong ideological commitment, and the 'capitalist' managerial practices. Despite the fact that the SED (the Communist Party of the GDR) invested a lot in the training of socialist technocrats, the regime's rigid ideology and its political constraints severely curtailed the extent to which technocrats could deploy their expertise. Egalitarianism and the 'workerist' ideology of the Party were effective obstacles in the implementation of the 'scientific-technical revolution', thus making a case for an aborted Fordism or a failed socialist modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretically, the essay is built on Karl Polanyi's interpretation of disembedding and Chris Hann's application of this model to post-1989 Eastern Europe. The essay sets out to explain why trade unions failed to become a successful countermovement in the Polanyian sense of the word by analysing four sources of power available to unions. We go on to analyse the social and political consequences of this failure, demonstrating through the analysis of life-history interviews how 'lonely fighters' can become rightwing voters and activists, thanks to the rise of a new political culture on the shopfloor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Hungarian sociography being a specific genre, a mixture of sociology and belles-lettres. Topics include establishment of the Hungarian People's Republic followed by the White Terror and the restoration of a right-wing and autocratic regime; and gradual social decline and disintegration, a lack of job opportunities, high unemployment, the escape of specialists and intellectuals from the town.

The article seeks to place the workers' road from socialism to capitalism in East Germany and Hungary in a historical context. It offers an overview of the most important elements of the party's policy towards labour in the two countries under the Honecker and the Kádár regime respectively. It examines the highly paternalistic role of the factory as a life-long employer and provider of workers' needs for the large industrial working class which the regime considered to be its main social basis. Given that the thesis of the working class as the ruling class was central to the legitimating ideology of the state socialist regimes, dissident intellectuals challenging this thesis were effectively marginalized or forced into exile. After the change of regimes, the "working class" again became an ideological term associated with the discredited and fallen regime. The article analyses the changes within the life-world of East German and Hungarian workers in the light of life-history interviews. It argues that in Hungary, the social and material decline of the workers -- alongside the loss of the symbolic capital of the working class -- reinforced ethno-centric, nationalistic narratives, which juxtaposed "globalization" and "national capitalism", the latter supposedly protecting citizens from the exploitation by global capital. In the light of the sad reports of falling standards of living and impoverishment, the Kádár regime received an ambiguous, often nostalgic evaluation. While the East Germans were also critical of the new, capitalist society (unemployment, intensified competition for jobs, the disintegration of the old, work-based communities), they gave more credit to the post-socialist democratic institutions. They were more willing to reconcile the old socialist values which they had appreciated in the GDR with a modern left-wing critique than their Hungarian counterparts, for whom nationalism seemed to offer the only means to express social criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While appreciating the novelty of Ákos Huszáir's model, the article criticizes his normative concept of capitalism by drawing the attention to the essential differences between postsocialist capitalism and the normatively understood West-European and Anglo-Saxon capitalist development. Privatization has never been accepted by Hungarian society as legitimate. The dispossession of the working people, who were the "owners" of property in principle, reinforced unequal competition. This undermined social trust in the established norms and the new democracy, which rendered democratic institutions essentially fragile in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]