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This anthology concentrates on domestic questions, economic policies, and socialist development and ideology. The essays' subjects include such varied topics as education, economics, the military, leadership, and economic assistance and humanitarian aid.
This book, consisting of eight related articles, deals with several dimensions of socialism in the 1980s just before the beginning of the great changes which took place in Eastern Europe. Profound changes in the political economy of the world in the 1970s led to a decline of over-confidence and over-optimism characteristic of the earlier times both in the West and in the East. The painful experience of stagnation ended the grand Keynesian dream and led to the return of neo-conservatism in the West. The disappointing pace of industrial and technological progress during the Brezhnev era and increasing shortages of productivity of communism in the East. With both sides in the grip of political and economic uncertainties, the ideological confrontation seemed to have lost much of its sharp edge. No longer did the accepted dogmas and ideologies of the past appear either valid or convincing. The presupposition of the debate on comparative economic systems were in need of fundamental revisions. It was in this perspective that the Political Economy Workshop at York University undertook to feature a series of lectures on socialism in its 1988 sessions. Of about a dozen presentations by York University scholars and invited speakers, eight were subsequently made available in the form of articles and are published in this volume. These articles cover a wide range of issues, both theoretical and practical, and from both the Western and the Eastern perspective. It is recognized by all authors that neither the East European experiments in communism nor the Western process into social democracy have been a great success. The clue to what might lie beyond the socialist dilemmas in the age of perestroika will be found only by going through once again to the circumstances which led to the failure of socialism thus far.
These seven essays by the Eastern block's most important economist address and explore many of the critical social and economic issues inherent in the socialist economy. Published in Hungary in 1983, they are the firsthand observations of an insider who attempts to be as frank and impartial as possible about the experiment in his own country. The essays distinguish the classical or traditional form of a highly centralized socialist economy from a system, like that of Hungary's, that is in the process of institutional reforms. They focus on a few important characteristics of social economies, rather than providing a broad description and analysis of socialist systems, in order to stimulate thinking along comparative lines. The wider problems and issues related to socialist systems that they address will interest sociologists and political scientists, historians, and philosophers as well as economists. Kornai points out that because real modern societies are different from the pure models of capitalism and socialism, combinations and mixtures of socialist and capitalist systems, sellers' and buyers' markets, centralized and decentralized management occur widely and intensively in both socialist and highly developed industrial market economies and in the nonsocialist third world countries in some segments and to a certain degree. Looking at these phenomena comparatively reveals both the deep differences and the similarities and analogies between the systems. The essays are: The Reproduction of Shortage. "Hard" and "Soft" Budget Constraint. Degrees of Paternalism. Economics and Psychology. Comments on the Present State and the Prospects of the Hungarian Economic Reform. Efficiency and the Principles of Socialist Ethics. The Health of Nations. JÄnos Kornai is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.
In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds as from the political and social divisions created by a failed socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy. By 1985, Yugoslavia's unemployment rate had risen to 15 percent. How was it that a labor-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a politically based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes the ideology of economic growth, and shows that international constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined government policy. She argues that unemployment became politically "invisible," owing to its redefinition in terms of guaranteed subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at sustaining minimum standards of living and achieving productivity growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and national security, the leadership inadvertently recreated the social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial society.
This book highlights that Soviet economic planners and politicians must come to recognize the need to make fundamental changes, not simply incremental refinements, in the failing Soviet system. It examines the dynamics of the process of perestroika and the complexity of individual economic issues.
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.
To what extent can contemporary socialist economies be reformed by the introduction of markets? The question is usually debated in either a Chinese or an East European context; this collection of eleven essays is unique in taking the first steps toward a comparative analysis. Twenty years of experience with reforms in Hungary and a decade of experimentation with reforms in China proivde a critical mass of evidence for analyzing the problems endemic to cnetrally planned economies and the dilemmas faced in efforts to reform them. In reflecting on the Chinese and East European experiences, these essays trace the shift from a conception of reform as a mix of planning and makrets within the state sector to a socialist mixed economy with implications for the emergence of new social groups and autonomous social organizations. The essays exemplify a new perspective in the study of state socialism that changes the focus from ideologies to economic institutions, examining how the activities of subordinate groups place limits on the power of state elites. The authors include scholars who have shaped debates in Eastern Europe and whose work is now stimulating much discussion in China, as well as representatives of a younger generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists writing on the basis of field research recently conducted in factories, cities, and villages in China and Eastern Europe. The contributors are: Wlodzimierz Brus, Walter D. Connor, Zhiren Lin, Victor Nee, Susan Shirk, David Stark, Ivan Szelenyi, and Martin King Whyte. An introductory essays surveys recent theories and research on state socialism and outlines a new institutional perspective for understanding the dilemmas of partial reforms, the political cycles of reform and retrenchment, and the role of subordinate groups in stimulating changes outside the state sector.