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Gender is rarely considered in the works on state socialism in Czech history writing. Given the prominence of the equality of the sexes in communist rhetoric and the heated anti- and pro-feminism media and intellectual debates of the 1990s, the omission stands out as a remarkable loss of opportunity in historical research. It also defies logic. For if “emancipation” and “equality” were so strongly present in pre-1989 discourse and women constituted half the population, does it not follow that the plain demographic fact should drive the interest of researchers to inquire where this population was, what it did, and what it had to say? The question has so far attracted primarily sociologists, but how does it fare in historiography? What are the losses of the absence and the gains of the inclusion of a gender perspective on the history and memory-making of state socialism? This article will first consider the status quo of gender blindness in Czech historiography and its possible reasons in the context of the legacy that state socialism left to social sciences and humanities: the legacy of expertise, disciplinary legitimation and epistemological legacy. A discussion of the consequences of the near absence of gender history and analysis from post-1989 interpretations of state socialism in historiography follows: blind spots and loss of knowledge, lack of precision and a gender bias of historical accounts, and perpetuation of false legacy. Finally, the article discusses the gains to Czech historiography, memory-making and international discussion, if scholars do consider gender.

The paper examines the changes during state socialism in Czechoslovakia in the understanding of the post-reproductive sexuality of women, focusing on the network of medical experts and shifts in expertise, which gave rise to a ‘new kind of person’: sexually active climacteric women. Analyzing the medical press, we show how Czechoslovak experts moved from an exclusive focus on women of reproductive age toward seeing climacteric women first in connection with their working capacities and gynecological health, and over time more as sexual beings. We trace the changes in the broader societal discourse and the shifts in (primarily gynecological) expertise that facilitated a gradual rejection of the stereotypical image of ‘fading’ women and made the emergence of sexually active climacteric women possible. Moreover, we highlight the role of transnational knowledge circulation. We demonstrate how expertise was transformed after Czechoslovak experts became acquainted with the work of the US sexologists Masters and Johnson in the second half of the 1960s. As the systems of knowledge realigned, expertise shifted toward emphasizing the existence and importance of sexual pleasure for (post-)climacteric women. Pointing to similar developments in neighboring countries, we highlight the importance of comparative approaches to state-socialist sexualities.

The collapse of state socialism and the introduction of market relationships in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in profound changes of urban development. Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe indicates that the development of a strong housing market and growing material inequalities contribute to the socio-economic polarization of city districts and residential segregation. Based on empirical data, we analyze spatial variation of migrants’ first residential choices within Moscow, i.e. intensity of in-migration to a specific district. We test the theory-driven hypotheses about the association between residential choices and housing prices. Our results show that there are some areas that attract migrants of specific socio-economic status. However, housing prices do not explain a substantial share of variance in the intensities of in-migration, at least at the level of city districts; quite a strong association is only evident for foreign migrants. Thus, we find limited evidence of the Moscow’ socio-spatial structure polarization due to the residential choices of migrants.

A pure capitalist system has private ownership of wealth and administration of the economy via markets. As pure socialist system has stare ownership and administration by a bureaucracy. One offers growth and insecurity, and the other offers security and stagnation. In reality, neither has existed nor can exist for long. The feasible alternatives are welfare capitalism and market socialism. Over the last fifty years, the transition from welfare to corporate capitalism has taken place in the West under U. S. leadership. It has resulted in increasing insecurity and inequality within rich countries and between rich and poor countries. The transition from bureaucratic to market socialism in China over the last twenty years has brought to its people amazing growth and prosperity- and many of the ills of a market economy. It remains to be seen whether market socialism in China is an attractive alternative to welfare capitalism, or is no more than a transition to corporate capitalism. RESUMO Um sistema capitalista puro possui propriedade privada da riqueza e administração da economia via mercados. Como sistema socialista puro, encarou a propriedade e a administração por uma burocracia. Um oferece crescimento e insegurança, e o outro oferece segurança e estagnação. Na realidade, nem existe nem pode existir por muito tempo. As alternativas viáveis são o capitalismo de bem-estar e o socialismo de mercado. Nos últimos cinquenta anos, a transição do capitalismo do bem-estar para o capitalismo corporativo ocorreu no Ocidente sob a liderança dos EUA. Isso resultou no aumento da insegurança e desigualdade nos países ricos e entre países ricos e pobres. A transição do socialismo burocrático para o socialismo de mercado na China nos últimos vinte anos trouxe ao seu povo crescimento e prosperidade surpreendentes - e muitos dos males de uma economia de mercado. Resta ver se o socialismo de mercado na China é uma alternativa atraente ao capitalismo de bem-estar, ou não é mais que uma transição para o capitalismo corporativo.

This article disentangles and explores some commonly made assumptions about egalitarian state-socialist ideologies. Based on the conceptual framework of the multiprinciple approach of justice, it presents the results of an in-depth analysis of (e)valuation patterns of distributive justice in Cuban state-socialism. The analysis mainly focuses on ideational conceptions of distributive justice (just rewards), but it also accounts for distribution outcomes and resulting (in)equalities (actual rewards). The results of the comparative case study of the Cuban framework of institutions and political leaders’ views in two periods of time, the early 1960s and the 2010s, point to (e)valuation patterns that are generally labelled as egalitarian, such as the allocation rules of outcome equality and (non-functional) needs. However, contrary to common assumptions about egalitarian state-socialist ideologies, the results also point to several other patterns, including equity rules as well as functional and productivist allocation rules. I argue that many of these (e)valuation patterns, in their connection to the discursive storyline of the Cuban economic battle, are indeed compatible with egalitarian state-socialist ideology.

Based on our collective ethnography of Cuba's socialist system for the provision of state-subsidised food, this article explores manners in which the state weaves itself into the fabric of people's everyday lives in state-socialist society. Instituted by Cuba's revolutionary government in the early 1960s, Cuba's 'state system for provisioning' is still today the backbone of household subsistence, propelling individuals into direct daily relations with the state via its neighbourhood-level network of stores that distribute food catering to citizens' 'basic needs'. Our ethnography brings together a series of studies conducted by the members of our team in different parts of Havana, charting the most salient aspects of people's interaction with the state in this alimentary context. We argue that the state becomes pervasive in people's daily lives not just because it is present in so much of it, but also as the basic normative premise on which people interpret and evaluate everyday comportments in the interactions food provisioning involves. Life in state socialism involves the constant and intricate comparison of its own realities against the normative ideals the state purports to institute. These 'vernacular comparisons' between life and state, as we call them, are the 'local knowledge' of state socialism in Cuba.A partir de nuestra etnografía colectiva del sistema del abastecimiento de alimentos subsidiados por el Estado cubano este artículo explora las formas en las que el estado se imbrica en el tejido de la vida cotidiana de las personas en el socialismo de estado. Instituido por el gobierno revolucionario cubano a principios de la década de 1960, el ‘sistema estatal de abastecimiento’ de Cuba es todavía hoy la espina dorsal de la subsistencia de los hogares, el cual impele a los individuos a establecer una relación cotidiana y directa con el estado a través de la red de establecimientos comerciales a nivel de barrio que distribuyen alimentos de acuerdo con las “necesidades básicas” de los ciudadanos. Nuestra etnografía reúne una serie de estudios llevados a cabo por los miembros de nuestro equipo en diferentes partes de La Habana, describiendo los aspectos más significativos de la interacción entre las personas y el estado en este contexto alimentario. Argumentamos que el estado se vuelve ubicuo en la vida cotidiana de las personas no sólo por estar presente en numerosos aspectos de la misma, sino también por ser el supuesto básico y normativo con el que la gente interpreta y evalúa sus comportamientos en las interacciones cotidianas relacionadas con el abastecimiento alimentario. La vida en el socialismo de estado involucra una constante e intrincada comparación entre los ideales normativos que el estado pretende institucionalizar y sus realidades. Estas ‘comparaciones vernáculas’ entre vida y estado, como las llamamos, son el ‘conocimiento local’ del socialismo de estado en Cuba.S’appuyant sur une ethnographie collective du système socialiste cubain en matière d’approvisionnement de nourriture subventionné par l'État, cet article étudie la manière dont l'État s'immisce dans la vie quotidienne des gens, dans une société socialiste. Instauré à Cuba au début des années 1960 par le gouvernement révolutionnaire, le « système étatique d'approvisionnement » constitue encore aujourd’hui l'épine dorsale de la subsistance des foyers, et pousse les individus à entretenir des relations quotidiennes directes avec l'État à travers son réseau de magasins de quartier, qui distribuent des aliments correspondant aux « besoins vitaux » des citoyens. Nos travaux ethnographiques réunissent une série d'études, menées par les membres de notre équipe dans différents secteurs de La Havane, mettant en évidence les aspects les plus saillants de l'interaction entre les individus et l'État dans le domaine de l’alimentation. Nous soutenons que l'État pénètre dans la vie quotidienne des gens, non seulement parce qu'il y est presque omniprésent, mais aussi comme une prémisse normative fondamentale à partir de laquelle on interprète et évalue les comportements quotidiens dans les interactions faisant partie de l'approvisionnement alimentaire. La vie sous le socialisme étatique implique une comparaison complexe et constante entre ses propres réalités et les idéaux normatifs que l'État prétend instaurer. Ce que nous appelons les « comparaisons vernaculaires » entre la vie et l'État composent la « connaissance locale » du socialisme étatique à Cuba.

Existing literature on self-building suggests classic state-socialism restricted the practice and it expanded only during the disintegration of the regime. The current article challenges this, to d...

Karl Polanyi’s scholarship is interpreted in radically different ways. The “hard” reading of Polanyi sees him as a radical socialist; the “soft” reading presents him as a theorist of mixed economy. This article sides with the soft interpretation. It uses Polanyi’s biography to explain his theoretical “elusiveness,” presents a novel interpretation of his three types of economic integration, claiming all economies are “mixed.” While it acknowledges Polanyi as one of the major sources of world system theory, it claims that Polanyi saw not only the dangers, but also the necessity and positive consequences of globalization. Finally, it shows that, in spite of Polanyi’s life-long commitment to the political left, his scholarly work did not offer an apology of socialism. Instead this article uses Polanyi’s theory of economic integration to build a critical political economy of state socialism.

This paper focuses on the development of the political thought of Czech Marxist philosopher Egon Bondy. It examines his criticism of state socialism in the Eastern Block from a Marxist perspective, and it outlines the development of his analysis. The study covers the period from the late 1960s until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a period during which Bondy explored the historical constitution and nature of a ‘new ruling class’ in the USSR, as well as deeper trends of convergence between Eastern and Western politico-economical systems. In the 1980s Bondy analysed the reasons for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though Bondy was, during most of the period of state socialism between 1948–89, a forbidden author, he was also one of the main critics of the political approach of Charta 77 and Václav Havel. This criticism is also outlined in the paper.

As early as 1962, Jurgen Habermas was convinced that Karl Marx’s theoretical attempt to ‘turn Hegel the right side up’ had resulted in a one-sided embrace of revolution and a perilous rejection of legality and rights. Habermas would restate these remarks thirty years later in Between Facts and Norms, noting that the collapse of state socialism, with its characteristic disdain for legality and rights, culminated in the discrediting of revolutionary Marxism. This article revisits Habermas’s theoretical dichotomy between revolution and legality in view of his ambivalent relationship to ‘Marx’s spectre’ and shows its significance for Habermas’s ongoing debate with Wolfgang Streeck concerning the tension between democracy and capitalism. Using textual evidence from Marx’s neglected journalistic writings before, during, and after the 1848 revolutions, the article offers a competing perspective of Marx’s views on legality and rights at a time when their respective fates were critically at stake. A careful reconsideration of Marx’s reflections and a confrontation with his spectre offers Habermas fruitful resources for responding to Streeck’s critique and for reviving the project of ‘radical reformism’ at a time when the liberal constitutional order finds itself under attack.

The article presents state-socialist and Catholic reproductive and population politics of Cold War Poland, focusing on competing discourses of population growth that were present in public debates ...

This article compares Austria with three of its former state-socialist neighbouring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The authors are guided by the assumption that it is necessary to analyse changes in both the structure and the perception of inequality and that the two are interconnected. They assume that some general differences exist as a result of the legacy of state socialism in the three post-communist countries, but also that significant differences exist between those three countries themselves that stem from their different paths of development in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the first part of this article, differences in the societal-political aims of a Western country such as Austria and those of state-socialist countries are discussed. The authors argue that the state-socialist countries were able to contain income inequality but were less successful at limiting other aspects of inequality. Austria, on the other hand, was able to avoid the severe income inequalities of the capitalist system by introducing democratic-corporatist institutions and a strong welfare state. In the second part of the article the authors investigate the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys. The majority of the population in all four countries think that income differences are too large, but there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves significantly higher than do people in the other three countries and see their society as dominated by the middle classes. The opposite is true in Hungary, where most people think that they live in a society characterised by a small elite, and they see the mass of the people at the bottom.

In the mid-1980s, the Eastern Bloc faced increased pressure on the issue of human rights from western governments, ngos, and indigenous dissident. Although the Socialist Bloc had claimed to represent the ideals of human rights throughout the Cold War, by 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev called on the leaders of the Eastern Bloc to work together on a coordinated response to this threat and in response East Germany proposed the creation of an international declaration based on the principles of socialist—rather than bourgeois—human rights. Within a few years, however, the project collapsed in ignominious failure as it provided a vehicle for reformers to challenge the status quo in the name of human rights by demanding greater democratization. Although the project was originally devised to refute the human rights claims of the West, it instead acted to spur on the intellectual collapse of the Eastern Bloc’s ideological unity at its time of greatest crisis.

Was there a state-socialist model of school sex education and if so, what characterized its form and content? What shaped the specificities and divergent characteristics of each country? The paper ...

Since the collapse of state socialism thirty years ago, and the promise of a unified Europe that it signalled, the everyday life of Roma, Europe’s largest minority, has changed significantly. Roma ...

Roman Krakovský’s State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia presents a multi-faceted social and cultural history of state socialism in Czechoslovakia from its dawn in the early postwar years to...

The 1989 collapse of state socialism in Europe ushered in a wave of political democratisation and economic liberalisation that quickly spread from Eastern and Central Europe to the Soviet Union. Ob...

Based on 17 months of ethnography at three different online dating agencies in southern China, this article examines the life histories and decision-making processes of women who seek marriages with Western men. Most women in my study are middle-aged (over 40), divorced, and come from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. I explore how emerging inequalities brought on by China’s transition from state socialism toward a global market economy shaped their shared desires to seek out-migration via marriage. My work is set against the backdrop of China’s economic ascendance on the world stage alongside a relative decline of the West. I compare how Chinese women from diverse class backgrounds envision a relatively homogenous group of men: Western men in agriculture, manufacturing, and small business sectors who feel they have been left behind by globalization. My results show that China’s uneven development has fractured the local marriage migration market into different niche sectors, where each sector is occupied by women who envision Western men and the relative decline of the West differently due to differences in their own social positions and access to resources in China. Their social positions are, in turn, shaped by the intersectionality of many factors including age, generation, parental status, income, etc., which I explore in depth in this article. This study illuminates the importance of adopting a more intersectional approach to analyses of migration as our world becomes increasingly decentered, diversified, and yet polarized.

Whilst the fall of state socialism in 1989 opened up a space for the Polish LGBT movement to emerge and develop, over the last three decades the process has taken place against the backdrop of mate...

The elites of Western Europe prefer social security for all citizens as the major aim of the EU, while the preference of Central and Eastern European elites is for a more globally competitive Europ...

How does an increase in cultural diversity affect state–society interactions? Do institutional differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous communities influence economic activity? I argue that heterogeneity not only impedes informal cooperation but also increases demand for third-party enforcement provided by the state. Over time, the greater willingness of heterogeneous communities to engage with state institutions facilitates the accumulation of state capacity and, in common-interest states, promotes private economic activity. I test this argument using original data on post-WWII population transfers in Poland. I find that homogeneous migrant communities were initially more successful in providing local public goods through informal enforcement, while heterogeneous migrant communities relied on the state for the provision of public goods. Economically similar during state socialism, heterogeneous communities collected higher tax revenues and registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates following the transition to the market. These findings challenge the predominant view of diversity as harmful to economic development.

Alan Thomas’ Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy sets itself the ambitious task of synthesising neo-republican political theory and Rawlsian justice as fairness. It is an important and challenging work that will set the stage for a great deal of the discussion not only on justice and republicanism, but also on property-owning democracy, market socialism and broader discussions of alternative economic institutions to come. After reconstructing the argument of the book, this review article turns to some specific points it raises that warrant further discussion. More precisely, it examines Thomas’ critique of market socialism, arguing that it fails to do what it sets out to do: show that market socialism is incompatible with justice as fairness. Having discussed and rejected his critique of the main other model that Thomas considers, I then turn to questions of the feasibility of POD as a feasible alternative to familiar forms of capitalism.

A binary debate has developed internationally between abolitionists and sex workers’ rights (SWR) activists: this involves the so-called ‘sex wars’, which dominate the scholarship and activism regarding commercial sex worldwide. While abolitionists aim to eliminate prostitution, which they see as a manifestation of patriarchy and violence against women, SWR activists aim to recognize sex work as work, and to fight for better working conditions in the sex industry. Both movements have become institutionalized, and various local NGOs and international networks have been established to advocate for these political aims. These organizations try to influence national and international legislation regarding the selling of sex by building powerful alliances. The financial support of donors is also dependent on how compatible these movements are with neoliberal power relations. Furthermore, the development and political influence of local abolitionist or sex worker movements also depends on countries’ positions in the global economy. The paper analyses the political representation and the role of spokespersons within the prostitution/sex work debate and also reflects on the advocacy work of Hungarian organizations active in this field since 1989. It discusses the evolution of a politics of recognition in the struggle related to commercial sex, and how transnational power dynamics on a global scale have affected Hungarian movements and civil society organizations since the era of state socialism.

Scholars have pointed to the period 1958-1962 as the beginning of Taiwan's transition to export-oriented industrialization. Although the Nationalist Party (KMT) had traditionally supported state socialism, the KMT began to oversee economic reforms in the late 1950s, setting Taiwan on the course of export-led growth under a capitalist model. Using archival materials from both the United States and Taiwan, I argue that the reforms resulted from U.S. influence on how the KMT understood the role of economic development in its grand strategy. U.S. arguments succeeded in creating political support at the highest levels of the KMT leadership for a reform-oriented faction in the economic bureaucracy. This finding shows how an aid donor can promote economic reforms even when the recipient is strategically important for the donor: although threats to enforce conditionality may not be credible, the donor can influence the recipient through persuasion.

This essay offers a stylized account of the trajectory of precarious labour in China over the past seven decades and identifies the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. I define...

The paper focuses on the changes that have occurred in women's academic research careers and compares two generations: women who built their career under state socialism (before 1989) and the contemporary young generation of women. It aims to contribute to the discussion of how the current transformation of science and the academic work environment has impacted gender equality and women's careers in academia. A life-course approach is used to analyse the interplay between individual, institutional, and structural barriers in women's careers. Drawing on in-depth narrative interviews, the analysis focuses on the interaction between academic research work paths, institutional and organisational conditions, and family paths and examines the milestones that formed the career paths of women now and in the past, how the dynamics of an academic research career have changed, and how the ways and conditions for combining work life and motherhood have changed. The author argues that the neoliberal transformation of the academic labour market and current Czech family policy leave women increasingly less able to fit their life biography into their preferred career model than they could before 1989.

This paper starts from the observation that, since the collapse of eastern European state socialism, the Roma have become the subject and target of Europe-wide development programs and discourses, while, at the same time, they have been problematized in terms of social, public and national security. Due to the ways in which development and security have ambiguously come together in Europe’s recent history, I will argue that the living conditions of the poorest among the Roma have not only worsened, but also, and more fundamentally, the divide between Europe’s rich and poor has become seriously racialized and almost unbridgeable. I explain how the bio- and geopolitical conditions under which development and security have merged in Europe’s engagement with the Roma have led to a situation in which the official aim of Roma-related development programs – the improvement of their living conditions and life chances – tends to result in a dreadlock.

Following the revolution in 1956, Hungary’s agrarian policy went through changes and reforms unprecedented within the socialist block. The most important reform was the abolition of the system of compulsory delivery. This article aims to outline how the political change affected agrarian economics and also highlights the significant role played by some scholars, with their latent presence and their policy suggestions, which the Kádár Government had the courage to support in November 1956. With the emergence of the so-called Agrarian Lobby, of the intertwining networks of politicians, administrators, and scientists of the agrarian sector, the personal and intellectual preconditions had already been in place before 1956. Institutionalization, however, could only come about after the partial rehabilitation of market economy. The post-1956 political leadership could only meet the challenge of re-defining the relationship of the state and the agricultural cooperatives with the contribution of professionals. At the same time, the shape and nature of Kádár era agrarian economic research were also affected by the alliance between the practitioners of the field and the emerging network of agro-politicians and administrators, the Agrarian Lobby. Two key figures, Ferenc Erdei and Lajos Fehér, shared the responsibility for the better performance of agriculture. This paper also pays attention to the way their cooperation on this reform policy-oriented research was realized and the key role it played in the Hungarian agricultural cooperatives’ emancipation from the bonds of the kolkhoz model in the 1960s.

This article examines the memory of the Red and White Terrors as they relate to public monuments after the collapse of state socialism. It shows how the memory of political violence has been exploited and instrumentalized by various actors to achieve political and cultural ends, and the role of civic organizations and private individuals in keeping the memory of these two key events in Hungarian history alive. Finally, the article discusses the commoditization of memory and memory practices in the last fifteen years, and the role of the Red and White Terror in identity politics.

This paper considers an argument that justice as fairness requires liberal socialism as opposed to a property-owning democracy. It analyses the arguments for departing from Rawls’s principled agnosticism over the choice between liberal market socialism and property owning democracy. It questions the extension of Rawls’s fair value guarantee for the political liberties to all liberty and suggests an alternative interpretation of the kind of predistributive egalitarianism represented by a property-owning democracy.

Holt argues that Rawls’s first principle of justice requires democratic control of the economy and that property owning democracy fails to satisfy this requirement; only liberal socialism is fully democratic. However, the notion of democratic control is ambiguous, and Holt has to choose between the weaker notion of democratic control that Rawls is committed to and the stronger notion that property owning democracy fails to satisfy. It may be that there is a tension between capitalism and democracy, so that only liberal socialism can be fully democratic, but if so,we should reject, rather than argue from, the theory of democracy we find in justice as fairness.

There has been considerable discussion about whether and how China’s political economy will change with economic growth and development. The debate has focused for the most part on the possibilities for either market transition or continued path dependence, and in particular, research has centred on the emergence of business activities and the changing role of local business elites. The results of interviews with 469 members of the new economic elites in five cities suggest that while local politics may indeed have adjusted to the new environment, in elite formation, the market plays a role alongside and sometimes secondary to status and political power. There is a significant pattern of elite privilege that reaches back into the era of state socialism, with further origins for some to be found in the pre-1949 local elites. Even where there are reasons to be sceptical about long-term status claims, there can be no gainsaying the strength of such narratives as motivational forces in business and elite behaviour.

The article introduces the reception of Isaac Deutscher’s work in Eastern Europe in a historical context and shows how deeply this reception was connected to the various transformations of the system, which had been established after the victory of the Russian October Revolution. The author gives a Marxist analysis of the historical development of state socialism and the various changes in Eastern-European Marxist thought which accompanied this history. He belongs to that school of thought which defines this system as state socialism, and he gives a theoretical analysis of its main characteristics, adding that 1989 failed to fulfil the expectations and hopes of many Western and Eastern-European Marxists.

This essay presents some of the major Cuba’s democratic shortcomings nowadays. With a theoretical and practical approach, the author establishes a dialogue between his experiences and the conceptual contributions of prominent contemporary social scientists. He explains, “particratic”, bureaucratic and post-totalitarian performance of the Cuban’s “state socialism”, and its adverse consequences for citizenship. Finally, he analyzes the development of the ongoing reforms and, in this context, he exposes the fundamental pillars that the democratization of Cuban society should include

The disappearance of most state socialist regimes in 1989/1991 afforded scholars from a range of disciplines new opportunities to examine the history of socialist cities and their post-socialist transformations. Recent scholarship has focused particularly on such cities in their corresponding national contexts and with the passing of the Cold War, broader commonalities with the urban history of Western cities have come into sharper focus. Absent in most recent work on socialist cities, however, is attention to the broader ideological, political, and cultural world—the socialist Second World—that bound these cities and their countries together. Similarly lacking is a deeper appreciation of the specificities of the socialist city in contrast to its counterparts in the capitalist West and the global South. Read together, the essays in this special collection underscore the value of re-examining how socialist cities were once part of the myriad relations that gave the Second World its ideological and material coherence in pursuit of socialist urbanity.

Recent scholarship has considered the requirements of justice and economic regimes in the work of John Rawls. This work has not delved into the requirements of justice and liberal socialism as deeply as the work done on property-owning democracy. A thorough treatment of liberal socialism and the requirements of justice is needed. This paper seeks to begin to fill this gap. It will be argued that liberal socialism does significantly better in realizing the two principles of justice. In this paper, first an overview of Rawls’ position on economic regimes, capitalism, and the requirements of justice will be given. In particular it will be considered, how the two principles work in tandem to meet the demands of distributive justice. Secondly, property-owning democracy will be reviewed. Finally, liberal socialism will be examined and discussed as an economic regime that answers the requirements of justice more fully.

Voluntary work of citizens for the benefit of society at large or its underprivileged members is a salient feature of developed civic cultures. Under state socialism, the very essence of volunteerism was hollowed out by its top–down, coercive “management” and ideological control. This article highlights the experiences and perceptions of voluntary work under socialism drawing on retrospective narratives of ex-Soviet immigrants in Israel who continued volunteering after migration. In conclusion, we reflect on the economic and political functions of “mandatory volunteering” in the USSR and discuss some of their analogies in Western democracies. Our study helps elicit the reasons for the slow expansion of volunteering behavior among post-socialist citizens in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

This article uses the concept of ‘scale’ to analyse the relative importance of local, national and global places, events, and explanatory frameworks in everyday lives in late communism. It uses a case study of lesbians and gay men living in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and asks how these groups negotiated the restrictions of life under state socialism. It argues that both individuals and groups used scale in two ways: as an imaginative tool for making sense of the world, and as a political strategy for dealing with the state. In both cases, ‘scaling’, or choosing the scale at which one located oneself and one’s actions, was a means of disrupting and even contesting the rigid hierarchies of state socialist rule.

Malgorzata Fidelis in her bookWomen, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Polandsets out to examine gender policies during Stalinism and their transformation under the subsequent ‘Polish road to socialism’. She shows that the relative political liberalisation in the late 1950s was also accompanied by the abandonment of policies favouring women and the return to conservative prewar gender hierarchies. The essay finds that the book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the vicissitudes of gender struggle during Communism in Poland. It also makes a contribution to the understanding of how the principles declared by the Communist Party were modified in response not only to economic necessities but also to local cultures and popular struggles. In this way it sheds light on the process of the legitimation of the Communist regime in Poland and beyond by accommodating demands from below.

Historians of state socialism have suddenly become well served for studies of popular music. A growing interest in the cultural history of everyday life, youth and leisure in Cold War Europe, often...

© 2019 Urban Research Publications Limited This article studies the development of Warsaw's Służewiec neighbourhood, Poland's largest business district, as a case of real estate financialization. We argue that the neighbourhood's chaotic ‘de-contextualized’ growth was shaped by Poland's semi-peripheral position in the global economy on the one hand—enabling a process of subordinate financialization—and legacies of state socialism on the other. In so doing, we mobilize research on peripheral financialization and global economic hierarchies, and studies of post-socialism to enhance debates about real estate financialization. Commercial real estate—and office development in particular—is a crucial domain in which contemporary core–periphery structures are produced and negotiated. A key function of subordinate financialization is to absorb globally mobile capital—the product of financialization in the core. The case of Służewiec shows that only by considering the interplay of global hierarchies (Poland's position as capital absorbent), local dynamics (fragmented urban development, which was characterized by competition among these unequal municipalities, with local growth coalitions in some municipalities, but not in others) and specific historical legacies (Warsaw's socialist-time functional organization and its transformation, which weakened the city) can we fully understand the specific dynamics that shape real estate financialization in different places. ispartof: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH vol:43 issue:4 pages:666-684 status: published

Prezentowany tekst to esej recenzyjny na temat książki Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism (pod redakcją Agnieszki Mrozik i Stanislava Holubeca, Routledge 2018).