Socialism Betrayed? Economists, Neoliberalism, and History in the Undoing of Market Socialism (original) (raw)
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Střed. Časopis pro mezioborová studia Střední Evropy 19. a 20. století 6, 1 (2014), 193-200.
Research about "neoliberalism" -a term that is as commonplace as it is ill-defined -has expanded in recent years, not least because of the apparent pressure on this free-market ideology in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. 1 This included scholarly investigations into as well as openly partisan accounts of the historical origins, development and diffusion of neoliberal ideology and politics. 2 Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe has been of particular interest in this context, as it is perceived as one of the regions where neoliberal ideology celebrated one of its most important triumphs, following the collapse of communist regimes in 1989. 3
Neoliberalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism, 2018
This chapter explores the evolution of neoliberalism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It examines the nature of the transition from ‘communism’, and assesses the degree to which neoliberal ideas and policies were imported ‘from the West’ rather than developing out of a process of East-West interchange. ‘Proto-neoliberal’ ideas and social forces, it shows, were present in Eastern Europe and the former USSR prior to 1989. In the following decades, successive waves of neoliberal reforms were implemented by domestic elites, with the support of Western policymakers, business leaders and think-tanks as well as international organisations. As events since the 2008 crisis have demonstrated, the logic of the transformation was to open up the economies of the region to the exigencies of global capital, while restructuring and bolstering the power of domestic elites. The outcome has been growing disillusionment and public discontent with simplistic attempts to install a market economy and Western-style liberal democracy, as well as with the political forces, at home and abroad, that have pushed this process along. The capitalist triumphalism of the early 1990s has everywhere given way to the dystopian realities of an authoritarian, restrictive and reactionary mode of neoliberal capitalism.
This special issue explores how neoliberal ideology -and related economic policies -has been implemented in the once-socialist countries of East-Central Europe (ECE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU). Specifically, the issue argues that this ideology undergoes deep modifications as it meets post-socialist conditions: sometimes it is creatively appropriated, sometimes resisted, and sometimes 'purified' (i.e., implemented more thoroughly than in the Western nations where neoliberalism as an ideology was developed). In doing so, the issue illustrates how 'actually existing neoliberalism,' to use terminology, occurs 'on the ground.' It argues that the 'actually existing neoliberalisms,' which have developed in a variety of post-socialist contexts, can differ profoundly from the theoretical constructs propagated by neoliberalism's supporters, including the major international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). As recent literature on policy mobility makes clear 'It is already widely recognized that it is rarely possible to transfer policies directly, precisely because they emerge from and are responses to particular 'local' sets of social and political conditions which are not replicated in the places to which they are transplanted' (Cochrane & Ward 2012, p. 5). 1 Neoliberalism comprises the policy applications of neoclassical economic theory. Academic critiques such as Harvey (2003, 2005) highlight the connections between these policies, the reinstatement of class power, and the emergence of the current phase of globalization. The narrative of Harvey and others describes a revival of neoclassical ideology in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) in the midst of the 1970s crisis of the Fordist mode of production and the Keynesian political economy model (Harvey 2010; Lipietz 2001). In the 1980s, arguably in reaction to this crisis, the Reagan administration in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK adopted policies that curtailed welfare programs and other redistributive policies; lifted barriers to trade, especially in the financial sector; reduced state intervention in the economy; and privatized many public assets. The vacuum created by the 'rolling back of the welfare state' was filled by an increasing reliance on unregulated capitalist enterprise and public-private partnerships (Harvey 2005, p. 113). Since the 1990s, the US government, along with the IMF and the WB, exerted pressure on developing and developed countries alike to adopt similar reforms (often referred to collectively as 'the Washington Consensus'). Simultaneously, the Chinese government adopted aspects of the free-market economy, marrying neoliberalism and Communist Party rule (Harvey 2005). The European Union (EU) also contributed to this process, although many of its founding members have long social democratic traditions, thus leading EU institutions to promote a medley of neoliberal and Keynesian policies in their sphere of influence. 1
An Unexpected Twist of Ideology. Neoliberalism and the Collapse of the Soviet Bloc
The article addresses the process of neoliberal transformation of the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980-ties and early 1990-ties as analyzed on the example of Poland. Its trajectory generally confirms Loïc Wacquant’s thesis put forward in his article "Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism", that neoliberalism tends to rather capture and use than simply dismantle and weaken state structures and power mechanisms. The author shows that the transition from planned to market economy in the former Soviet Bloc was also accompanied, backed and made possible by powerful ideological operations that reshaped the construction of subjectivity and made it compatible with the neoliberal capitalism. This proves that two modes of analyzing neoliberalism – structural analysis of state power and focus on governmentality – should be treated as complimentary tools of understanding neoliberal transitions. However, contrary to Wacquant, the author claims that in this respect there is nothing new about neoliberalism as a practice, since capitalism has always required a help from the state to maintain a seemingly autonomous rule of the market. Bilbiographical address: J. Sowa, An Unexpected Twist of Ideology. Neoliberalism and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, „Praktyka Teoretyczna” nr 5/2012.
Atlantic Economic Journal, 1995
Assessments of postcommunist economic reforms by systems specialists and those stewarding G-7 assistance are sharply polarized. Both acknowledge that official Eastern European data indicate catastrophic falls in GNP far deeper than the Great Depression of 1929 and a myriad of other failures including rampant inflation, anticompetitive abuses, graft, corruption, and the persistence of socialist ownership and controls. But while the former interpret these outcomes as a consequence of the communist legacy and transmuted anticompetitive institutions, the latter in Schumpeterian fashion interpret them as a successful prelude to competitive capitalism, as the postcommunist East traverses the J curve of recovery to rapid modernization. This essay surveys the recent literature and, siding with the systems theorists, explains why the G-7's interpretation of macroindicators is misleading.