Ideas in Transition: Workers and the Scholarly
Imagination
A critical theory and research project
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, socialist states and communist party regimes in Eastern Europe, scholars excitedly queued up for entry into the ‘laboratory’ of the politico-economic ‘transition’ and socio-cultural ‘transformation’. Excited by the possibilities of observing complex processes of grand societal changes ‘in vivo’, especially by the promise of achieving great scientific insights, scholars were usually engaged in formulating their own predictions. The shared assumption was that nothing is worth remembering and preserving since history had proven the Soviet experiment to be a failure. Yet, the collapse itself, because of its sudden and unexpected nature, has meant that the construction of new institutions and identities could not be undertaken without recourse to knowledge accumulated during the Cold War and the confrontation of East versus West.
Our purpose is to retrospectively examine post-socialist knowledge constructions. In doing so, we focus on the following four dimensions:
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Memories of the workers’ state among workers after 1989 in the context of the disintegration of work-based communities;
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Visions and chances of workers’ self-management after 1989 in the context of local economists’ and intellectuals’ knowledge;
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The emergent hierarchies of knowledge in the discourse on post-socialism in the context of the rise of globalism and the de-legitimation of Marxist and national scholarship;
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The new limits to a scholarly imagination conditioned by discourses on the end of history, the third way and the (remaining) varieties of capitalism.
Different conceptualizations of socialism notwithstanding, one distinctive feature of socialism was that all socialist regimes posed as workers’ states, even though the workers’ role was institutionalized differently in the socialist countries. Therefore, the position of workers can serve as a criterion for discussing the common and distinctive features of the socialist regimes. On the other hand, the big transformation can be grasped on a medium level, from a perspective of the largest social group (organized labor) at the time of the change of regimes.
This approach is all the more justified because, after 1989, the mainstream discourse on socialism was utilized by different actors primarily to realign labor and introduce new labor regimes. Since the working class was central to the legitimation of the socialist regimes, scholarly research on workers before 1989 was often mystified by the official dogma. After 1989, however, it became an unfashionable topic precisely because it was associated with the past regime. Thus it is desirable to revisit memory and praxis of the actually existing socialism and its factory regimes from the perspective of the shop-floor.
Our labor related projects seek to offer comparative studies of workers’ experience of the changes associated with 1989 as well as the opportunities and limits of political action in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia. In the first two countries the socialist regimes sought to politically neutralize the working class by offering material concessions to the people. In Poland and Yugoslavia, however, the working class was a significant political actor during the socialist era. After the change of regime, the GDR adopted the welfare system of West Germany, which mitigated the social costs of industrial re-structuring. Hungary, in contradistinction, was characterized by the outright dismantling of the socialist welfare system. We are interested in a comparative appraisal of the differences and similarities of the workers’ memories, reminiscences and experiences in Germany and Hungary.
In a complementary project, our interest is the comparative appraisal of the trajectory of organized labor in Yugoslavia and Poland in exiting from ‘third way’ self-management socialism. Notable is the strikingly different outcome. During the socialist period, the central position of labor in Poland and Yugoslavia was expressed in the official ideology by the ongoing reinterpretation of concepts such as ‘democratic centralism’, ‘industrial democracy’ and ‘socialist democracy’. The focus is on how the issue of organized labor was re-interpreted and re-conceptualized by influential economic experts and decision makers during the transition from 1988 to 1991.
If the end of socialism seems congruent with the end of history, then 1989 opened many new possibilities for generating knowledge unspoiled by the ‘vices of the past’. Eastern and Central Europe was acclaimed as a ‘laboratory’ by local and traveling scholars on the assumption that the live (re-)construction of democracy, the market and many more institutions and organizations would yield unparalleled insights Yet, fifteen years later, it seems evident to us that the epistemic projects of post-socialism were a failure: no research article or book has been acclaimed by the global public as a breakthrough.
On the other hand, 1989 was constructed by many scholars as the event that settled once and for all the debate on the nature of capitalism and socialism. By the by, this has curtailed the scholarly imagination as any socialist project is now a priori consider to be unfeasible whereas most, if not any, variety of capitalism is considered robust. Intellectually, this is significant, for it would logically invalidate any critical theory project in economics, political science and sociology. In this context we would like to point out that this applies not just to the usual suspects like Jürgen Habermas and Immanuel Wallerstein, but also to economists like James Meade and Armatya Sen. After the Cold War we seem to know a lot, but it also looks like there an increasing number of ideas and relationships that we can no longer think of and about.
Anticipated outcome
Our aim is to initially complete the four working papers as outlined in the full proposal. On that basis we would then like to review the great 20th century debate on capitalism, socialism and democracy with a view to stimulating the scholarly imagination again and broadening our horizon beyond the limited and limiting varieties of capitalism.
Working Group coordinator
Tibor Meszmann
Members
Chris Armbruster, Timur Atnashev, Eszter Bartha, Christian Domnitz, Kacper Poblocki
last modified: 2007-03-01
