Enduring Socialism

Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly post-socialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers. Harry West is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His has conducted research in the northern district of Mueda in Mozambique, where nationalist guerrillas based themselves during the anti-colonial war (1964-1974). As part of his project, he has studied how various social groups experienced, and coped with, violence during and after the war for independence. He has also taken interest in how colonialism and revolutionary socialism reconfigured the institutions of local authority, and, more recently, how post-socialist reforms have fostered a "revival of tradition" in rural Mozambique. Parvathi Raman is a lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She has conducted research in South Africa on the role of Indians in the South African Communist Party and has written about the changing character of the socialist imagination in the twentieth century. She also works on the politics of diaspora, and multiculturalism and the neo-liberal state.

This book of essays, written in honour of James Petras, address some of the most critical issues of our time: those of imperialism, crisis and class struggle. These issues allow the authors to identify both the ‘the enduring verities and contemporary face of capitalism’ and Petras’ contributions.

In The Fire and the Ashes, long-time union economist and policy analyst Andrew Jackson looks back on a fascinating career in the labour movement, the NDP, and left politics, combining keen historical analysis with a political manifesto for today. As one of the few trade union economists in Canada, Jackson brings a unique insider perspective and decades of experience to bear on his critical reflections on the history and changing fortunes of the NDP, the failures of neoliberalism, and the waning and recent renewal of the democratic socialist tradition. What plays out is a battle of ideas fought by Jackson and the wider left—one meant to rekindle both political veterans and a new generation of activists who believe that a true democracy cannot exist with great inequalities of wealth and political power, and that social ownership and public investment must be brought squarely into the mainstream.

Self-sufficiency of the house is practiced in many parts of the world but ignored in economic theory, just as socialist collectivization is assumed to have brought household self-sufficiency to an end. The ideals of self-sufficiency, however, continue to shape economic activity in a wide range of postsocialist settings. This volume’s six comparative studies of postsocialist villages in Eastern Europe and Asia illuminate the enduring importance of the house economy, which is based not on the market but on the order of the house. These formations show that economies depend not only on the macro institutions of markets and states but also on the micro institutions of families, communities, and house economies, often in an uneasy relationship.

In Enduring Change, Ju Li explores the concrete labor and social history of one particular Third-Front industrial complex in China from the 1960s to the globalized present. By connecting the micro-historical-ethnographic research with larger structural dynamics, Li provides a vivid, in-depth, and multi-layered account of how the transformative history of the past half-century has manifested itself in this small industrial site and how several generations of workers there have lived through these turbulences.

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.