The contemporary Marxist writer provides analyses of socialist theory, modern political struggle, and socialist societies in Eastern Europe.

The themes in this book concern former Soviet-type societies: 1) Is the capitalist world system willing and able to absorb these newcomers or are they condemned to 'Third-worldization'? 2) Is the neoliberal advice of simultaneous political democratization and economic liberalization a viable path? 3) Is the East Asian model of authoritarianism and governed markets a better option? 4) Can the revolution of rising expectations be harnessed into a new structure of accumulation based on class polarisations? 5) Are there lessons in Chinese market-socialism? In this topical and timely collection, these questions are answered by an interdisciplinary and international team of specialists

This selection of studies discusses potentials and barriers to social and industrial change in Central and Eastern Europe. It is argued that levers of change in today's international setting primarily must be found within the countries themselves. The main themes addressed in the book are firstly the formation of new social classes and institutions regulating social and economic life. Secondly the reshaping of intra-firm as well as inter-firm relations and thirdly links between firms and public authorities including R&D institutions.

The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.

This volume shows how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in Eastern Europe. It investigates the ways in which pleasurable activities were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority.

Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations. Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.