Browsing by Subject "Socialism"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Contradictory economies in post-socialist rural Hungary: the emergence, endurance and persistence of the hoop-house economy in Balastya.
    (2009-11) Kaiser-Holt, Sara
    This dissertation is based on ethnographic research conducted in the village of Balástya, Hungary between 2001-2003. It is concerned with the nature of post-socialist life as lived, interpreted, and negotiated by rural people after the collapse of state-socialism. It discusses post-socialist life and economy and how rural people express their conceptions of the past, present and future. My central question is simple. What happens to people's identity and how people invent new ways of generating livelihoods when the political, economic and social system of forty-five years of socialism--a frame of reference that people used and lived through--vanishes and an extralocal economic model is crudely mapped on the lived landscape of everyday reality? As this ethnography demonstrates, post-socialist life is filled with anxiety. I claim that the anxiety is driven and fueled by the transformation from socialism to capitalism, and by the visible gap between observed phenomena of the "lived post-socialism" and the political-economic discourses of "capitalism." This study examines this critical and anxious transformation through the prism of a local economic innovation that I coin the "hoop-house economy." It investigates its emergence, endurance and persistence over time and argues that the shifting meanings of the hoop-house economy accurately mirror this transformation from market-socialism to market-capitalism, all the way up to the creation of the EU's market. Conceptually, the model of the hoop-house economy demonstrates the dialectical relationship between economy's two spheres--house and market. I distinguish among three types of the hoop-house economy, which I call 1) minimal, 2) liminal and 3) maximal and argue that the liminal hoop-house economy best represents the tension between economy's two value domains--commensurate and incommensurate--in post-socialist Hungary. This work challenges generalizations and broad assumptions about the transformation from socialism to capitalism. By examining this transformation through the complexities of local practices and ordinary life, my dissertation extends, but also complicates macro-level analyses, illuminating the linkages between changing political and economic institutions and the micro-level of everyday reality.
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    The Downfall and future of socialism
    (MEP Publications, 1992) Holz, Hans Heinz
    Translation of a new analysis of revolutionary Marxism by an influential German theorist. Professor Holz examines, in particular, the rise and fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. He outlines a theoretical basis for continuing the tradition of revolutionary Marxism in developed capitalist countries. Hans Heinz Holz, a German journalist turned philosopher (Ph.D. University of Leipzig 1969) is coeditor with Domenico Losurdo of the European philosophy journal Topos and is author of several books on philosophy and art. Arguing for the validity of Marxism-Leninism, and emphasizing what he sees as its many achievements, Holz is sharply critical of the shortcomings of its practitioners in the past, culminating in their failure to extend their theoretical understanding of capitalist and socialist society in the light of a changing social reality. --Publisher's summary
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    James Connolly and the reconquest of Ireland
    (MEP Publications, 2002) Metscher, Priscilla, 1944-
    The story of the continuing Irish freedom struggle is incomplete without a reassessment of the role of James Connolly. Connolly was prominent in the Irish, British, and U.S. labor movements, a Marxist socialist, and a militant Irish patriot. Executed by the British as a leader of the Easter Rising in 1916, he was also one of the first theoreticians of the labor movement to come from the working class. Connolly's dramatic career corresponded roughly to the life span of the Second International (1889-1914). His dedication to Irish socialist politics began with the founding of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896. He was the first to link the fight for socialism in Ireland to the struggle for national liberation. In the United States from 1903 to 1910, Connolly learned strike strategy working as an IWW organizer and contended with Daniel De Leon over socialist priorities. On his return to Ireland, the evolution of his thought placed him in the left wing of the Second International during World War I and led to his participation in the Easter Rising. Connolly wrote primarily on immediate issues, but dimensions of his thought survive. In addition to Irish independence and revolutionary theory, political problems relating to religion and to the emancipation of women were of serious concern to Connolly. Above all, Connolly's intellectual legacy makes an outstanding contribution to a socialist understanding of the national question. --Publisher's summary.
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    Red Father, Pink Son: Queer Socialism and Post-socialist Queer Critiques
    (2017-06) Ye, Shana
    The dissertation examines how the affect, memory and trauma of socialism have informed queer life and LGBT activism. Queer sexuality in China is often articulated through a teleological narrative of transition predicated on the dichotomy of socialist oppression vis-à-vis post-socialist liberation. It depicts queer subject as victim par excellence of state violence and pre- or anti-modern traditions, and renders queer practices as radical and embodying notions of progress to transform China from a backward socialist totalitarian “other” to a democratic neoliberal world power. Such making of “Queer China,” I argue, is ironically complicit with Cold War formation and its ongoing impacts on today’s neoliberal gay normalization. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including historical documents, oral histories, cultural productions and ethnographic research, the dissertation unpacks multifaceted impacts of socialist history, memory, trauma, and geopolitical struggles on shaping queerness in order to reframe dominant Cold War culture in the studies of transnational sexualities and to rebuild a radical queer politics freed of commercialism, middle-class assimilation and imperialism under the name of queer liberation. The dissertation reevaluates notions of sexual repression, state violence, progress, visibility and agency to shed light on theoretical and methodological debates on ethnocentrism, othering and normalization. The dissertation argues that a critical engagement with queer geopolitics and situated knowledge from the temporal, regional, ideological and epistemological margins can contribute to the provincialization of “Western” sexualities and decolonization of queer studies derived from US-inflicted modes of sexuality and a Western-based system of modernity.