Building Socialism Constructing People

This volume focuses on the issue of identity within the context of the radical shift that took place in Romania during the late 1940s and early 1950s, as a result of the process of Sovietisation, or “cultural colonisation” (a concept analysed in particular detail in this book). It adopts a novel approach to this theme, by studying the issue of identity within the context of the first decade of the Romanian communist regime, with the help of a series of concepts and theories belonging to the disciplines of Western cultural, media and gender studies, as well as those relating to colonialism and imperialism. Of particular interest to this volume is the use of the press as an essential instrument for Romanian propaganda in terms of spreading, as well as controlling, the new set of politically-established identity patterns. As such, the press provides one of the most relevant environments for the analysis of the major cultural, social and political identity shifts that took place in Romania during the late 1940s and the 1950s. The book follows the evolution, deconstruction and reconstruction of identity at both the micro- and macro- levels, focusing on some of the most significant identity pattern constructs in terms of reconfiguring cultural identities. The volume consists of a series of theoretical, as well as cultural, press analyses and case studies, based on a set of influential concepts and theories referring to identity, media discourse, and propaganda, in association with newly-introduced concepts such as “cultural colonialism” and cultural “canon” negotiation, amongst others.

Harnecker offers a useful overview of the changing political map in Latin America, examining the trajectories of several progressive Latin American governments as they work to develop alternative models to capitalism.--Provided by publisher.

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

The years 1955-1959 in Communist China included striking fluctuations and successes for Mao Tse-tung's Party, and the working out of the first Five-Year Plan for economic and agricultural development. This newly integrated picture of five crucial years pioneers the use of documentation for dealing with Communist China.

The failure of command central planning in the twentieth century has led to a general disillusionment within the socialist movement worldwide. Some alternatives to capitalism have been proposed since the end of the Cold War, but none has offered an alternative form of economic calculation. This book explains how modern information technology may be used to implement a new method of economic calculation that could bring an end to capitalism and make socialism possible. In this book, the author critically examines a number of socialist proposals that have been put forward since the end of the Cold War. It is shown that although these proposals have many merits, their inability effectively to incorporate the benefits of information technology into their models has limited their ability to solve the problem of socialist construction. The final section of the book proposes an entirely new model of socialist development, based on a "needs profile" that makes it possible to convert the needs of large numbers of people into data that can be used as a guide for resource allocation. This analysis makes it possible to rethink and carefully specify the conditions necessary for the abolition of capital and consequently the requirements for socialist revolution and, ultimately, communist society. Information Technology and Socialist Construction will be of interest to students and scholars of political economy, the history of economic thought, labour economics and industrial economics.