Rethinking East-European Socialism: Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist Decolonial Methodology

Abstract

This text seek to make a contribution to both anti-capitalist and decolonial critique from the perspective of the historical legacy of East-European socialism. More particularly, the text argues that a critical decolonial methodology can shed light on aspects of socialist history that might otherwise be inaccessible or unintelligible, and, conversely, that a critical investigation of the complexities the socialist period can offer important nuances to decolonial theory itself. Along the way, the article offers a brief genealogy of decolonial scholarship in the region and what it considers to be the conceptual advantages or ‘bonus of insight’ of that scholarship in addressing the historical specificity of socialism. Deploying a decolonial interpretative lens, the text then takes up the ambiguous role that Marxist humanism, the dominant discourse in the region during the post-Stalinist period, played in both opening up spaces of freedom and possibility and in laying the ground for the ethnonationalist turn of the 1970s in Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia. In a final section, the article explores instances and practices of collaboration between the socialist East and the anti-colonial South as an important and yet often ignored part of the fabric of socialism. The authors conclude that East-European socialism’s efforts to organize alternative and resistant modernities at times converged and at others starkly departed from the projects of both global capitalist and Western colonial modernity, a historical legacy strained by the tensions of its own contradictions.