Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation

286 Pages·2008·3.52 MB·English

by  Harry West, Parvathi Raman

Enduring Socialism

Enduring Socialism
Explorations of Revolution and Transformation,
Restoration and Continuation
Edited by
Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
First published in 2009 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2009, 2010 Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman
First paperback edition published in 2010
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without the written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Enduring socialism : explorations of revolution and transformation,
restoration and continuation / edited by Harry G. West and Parvathi
Raman. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84545-464-7 (hbk : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-84545-713-6 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Post-communism. 2. Socialism. 3. Communism. I. West, Harry G.
II. Raman, Parvathi.
HX44.5.E63 2008
335--dc22
2008032548
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Printed on acid-free paper.
ISBN 978-1-84545-464-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-713-6 (paperback)
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Introduction: Poetries of the Past in a Socialist World Remade 1
Parvathi Raman and Harry G. West
1. From Socialist Chiefs to Postsocialist Cadres: Neotraditional
Authority in Neoliberal Mozambique 29
Harry G. West
2. ‘For Eating, It’s Guangzhou’: Regional Culinary Traditions
and Chinese Socialism 44
Jakob A. Klein
3. Searching for the Time of Beautiful Madness: Of Ruins and
Revolution in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua 77
Dennis Rodgers
4. The Object of Morality: Rethinking Informal Networks
in Central Europe 103
Nicolette Makovicky
5. Vietnamese Narratives of Tradition, Exchange and Friendship
in the Worlds of the Global Socialist Ecumene 125
Susan Bayly
6. Waste under Socialism and After: ACase Study from Almaty 148
Catherine Alexander
7. Corruption and the One-party State in Tanzania: The View
from Dar es Salaam, 1964–2000 169
John R. Campbell
vi | Contents
8. Media and the Limits of Cynicism in Postsocialist China 190
Kevin Latham
9. The Rooted Anthropologies of East-Central Europe 214
Chris Hann
10. Historical Analogies and the Commune: The Case of
Putin/Stolypin 231
Caroline Humphrey
11 Signifying Something: Che Guevara and Neoliberal
Alienation in London 250
Parvathi Raman
Index 271
List of Contributors
Catherine Alexanderis Reader in Anthropology, Goldsmiths,
University of London.
Susan Baylyis Reader in Historical Anthropology, University of
Cambridge.
John R. Campbellis Senior Lecturer in Anthropology of Development,
SOAS, University of London.
Chris Hannis Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Halle.
Caroline Humphreyis Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative
Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Jakob A. Kleinis Lecturer in Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of
London.
Kevin Lathamis Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, SOAS,
University of London.
Nicolette Makovickyis Junior Research Fellow in Social Science and
the East European Member States of the European Union, Wolfson
College, University of Oxford.
Parvathi Ramanis Lecturer in Anthropology, SOAS, University of
London.
Dennis Rodgersis Senior Research Fellow, Brooks World Poverty
Institute, University of Manchester.
Harry G. Westis Reader in Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of
London.
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INTRODUCTION
Poetries of the Past in a Socialist
World Remade
Parvathi Raman and Harry G. West
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx not only suggested
that revolutions tended to ‘conjure up the spirits of the past’, but also
expressed his hope and expectation that revolutionary socialism would
not do so – not ‘draw its poetry from the past’, but instead, ‘only from the
future’. From the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to China and Vietnam,
from Ethiopia and Tanzania to Cuba and Nicaragua, the socialist
revolutions of the twentieth century purportedly embraced Marx’s
mandate, endeavouring through varied means to thoroughly rewrite the
landscapes upon which they occurred. Upon coming to power, socialist or
communist regimes often sought completely to transform politics,
abolishing multiparty regimes and electoral processes through which self-
interested and divisive parties vied for political control, while conceiving
of socialist ‘new men’ (in some cases, although not always, including
women) as the locus of revolutionary political subjectivity and channelling
political processes through ruling party institutions and hierarchies.
Socialism similarly aspired utterly to transform economic relations
through the abolition of various forms of private property and/or market
exchange. In its most dramatic forms, such initiatives literally entailed the
reconfiguration of urban and rural landscapes, including ‘villagization’
and the construction of communal infrastructures, and the razing of
dispersed rural homesteads, urban ‘slums’, or ‘unruly’ marketplaces. In
many revolutionary socialist contexts, the rituals of the ruling party – from
party cell meetings to party congresses and rallies – were intended to
supplant rituals of a religious nature, as devotion to ancestral spirits and
deities gave way to investment in the common project of human progress.
Allegiances to family, ethnicity and nation were to disappear entirely with
2 |Parvathi Raman and Harry G. West
the emergence of class-based consciousness and solidarity. In this brave
new world, little of the old world was to be recognizable.
Curiously, at a time when socialism is said by most to have failed – in
what has been defined by many as a ‘post-socialist era’ – those proclaiming
socialism’s end have inherited socialism’s antipathy for the past (or, at
least, the socialist past). The postsocialist doctrine of ‘transition’ – to a free
market, to democracy, to a more ‘open society’ – has partaken of the same
modernist self-assurance as did socialism in the middle decades of the
twentieth century – an orientation that David Harvey warns has ‘no
respect even for its own past, let alone that of any pre-modern social order’
(Harvey 1990: 112). Accordingly, with the dawn of postsocialism,
reformers have, ironically, echoed socialist revolutionaries in asserting the
erasure of socialism itself from the landscapes they have endeavoured to
rewrite.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which to most represented the
collapse of socialism, was at once both keenly anticipated and surprising
in its suddenness. According to Konrad Jarausch, ‘only a few … had
noticed the rumblings of the communist earthquake, [and] historians
were as confused as others about the sudden crumbling of the Soviet bloc’
(Jarausch 2006: 59). Experienced as an epochal shift, the swift
disintegration of Eastern European socialism was understood as the
consequence of its inherent internal failures, combined with its inability to
withstand the example of Western progress, which increasingly seemed to
shape the desires of its citizens. The Soviet Union’s last president, Boris
Yeltsin, came to publicly embody the disintegration of the entire Soviet
state, and an entire socialist project that could no longer be merely
reformed. Indeed, attempts at reform were viewed by many as having
opened the floodgates to collapse. Policy makers within socialist states
and beyond suggested that the socialist misadventure now had to be
subjected to a major economic and political intervention in order to
address its terminal malaise. The cure was seen to lie in the dismantling
of socialism itself– in the ‘shift’ to a market economy, the introduction of
political pluralism, and the promotion of civil society, which was
positioned in opposition to the ‘totalitarian’ state.1
To a significant degree, policy making in socialist states around the
globe has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, been informed by social
scientists working in the field of ‘Postsocialist Studies’ who have sought to
provide conceptual tools with which to understand a new global terrain.
‘Post-socialism’, for some, has come to mean the death of socialism and the
triumph of capital (Derrida 1994), and has been dominated by the
metaphor of ‘transition’. Framed through Cold War discursive idioms, and
reproducing its binary suppositions, commentators from both right and
left have talked predominantly in the language of collapse, perceiving a
‘transformational moment’ which heralded either a triumphal ‘end of