Socialist Society Research Articles

Imagining the zadruga. Zadruga as a Political Inspiration to the Left and to the Right in Serbia, 1870-1945

The concept of zadruga has shown its persistence over a long historical time and on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum. The zadruga was positioned as key political ideal for Svetozar Marković’s early socialists since the early 1870s, but it was also a key ideal of the extreme right in the 1930s and 1940s (Dimitrije Ljotić, Milan Nedić). As a key political term, zadruga was employed in very different contexts – from an imaginary idyllic socialist society of equals in the mid-1800s to the cornerstone and bulwark of racial purity almost a century later. In this article zadruga is explored as a polical, economic and social ideal. This comparative study has revealed deep similarities between populist socialism and extreme right-wing ideologies of the 1930s and 40s. Although those movements were temporally and ideologically distant, there was a single conceptual pattern that united them, and which can be summed up with a single word – the zadruga, as a persistent ideological cornerstone.

REPRESSION AGAINST SOVIET REPATRIATES AFTER WORLD WAR II: FORMATION OF THE POLICY OF OBLIVION IN THE USSR

Summary. The purpose of the study is to analyze the causes and features of the repressive policy of the Soviet government towards its own citizens, who, for various reasons, found themselves in the status of displaced persons outside the USSR during the World War II. The study also aims to identify the features of the formation of a policy of oblivion in the Soviet Union on the forms and methods of repatriation and repression against repatriates.The research methodology is based on the application of general scientific and special historical methods. The author adheres to the scientific principle and principles of historicism, systematization, verification, objectivity and value approach to the studied phenomena. Interdisciplinary research is focused on the involvement of historical-comparative and historical-system methods, techniques of microhistorical analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the continuation of studies initiated by domestic and foreign researchers, in particular, the repressive policy of the Soviet government towards its own citizens who were repatriated to the USSR after the Second World War from the western and the Soviet occupation zone.Conclusions. The Soviet leadership made every effort to return its own citizens who found themselves in Europe after the end of World War II as displaced persons. The degrading conditions of repatriation and filtration demonstrated the attitude of the Soviet regime towards repatriates. The Soviet totalitarian state did everything to isolate post-war Soviet society from "unreliable elements", for which purpose enormous funds were spent and considerable human and material resources were used. The myth of "a wonderful life in a socialist society" created for decades continued to be maintained after the war, and therefore it was dangerous to admit into Soviet society those who posed a partial threat to the myth. Citizens who had to go through repatriation and humiliating procedures of checks and filtrations, in fact, the war ended only at the gates of checkpoints. Above them, and their relatives, for several decades hung the brand "was in the occupied territories", which, in fact, in many ways limited the normal existence in Soviet realities. Repression against Soviet repatriates is another criminal page of the Soviet regime that deserves a comprehensive study and return from oblivion.

"Filial Piety" in The Analects of Confucius and "Filial Piety" in Today's Society

Against today’s backdrop of "filial piety" in society, the “filial piety” in the Analects of Confucius triggered heated debates. Since ancient times, “filial piety”, which is of great importance to traditional Chinese culture, has been an important part of Confucianism. “Ingratitude” will inevitably be condemned by society. But nowadays, “irrational filial piety” will turn into “foolish filial piety”. Therefore, what people should do is to carry out "rational filial piety" and carry forward Chinese traditional culture critically so as to make contribution to building a harmonious socialist society.

Protesto bielorrusso:

A situação na Bielorrússia é preocupante e emblemática. Preocupante, pois importa para a sociedade russa, povo ligado entranhadamente à Bielorrússia e sua história. O desfecho político da revolução democrática pode tanto dinamizar as forças de transformação social da Rússia, quanto ser mais um polo avançado dos EUA a pressionar os destinos emancipados da Rússia. Emblemático, pois desvela a possibilidade de futuros mais democráticos e emancipados de uma sociedade socialista. O que pode ensejar o surgimento de um polo democrático radical aliado das forças russas de transformação social.

Socialismo como estratégia para enfrentar a pandemia de COVID-19

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar as condições objetivas anteriores à pandemia causada pela COVID-19 que facilitaram ou dificultaram o enfrentamento desta doença em Cuba. Para isso, será descrita a estratégia cubana para enfrentar a nova doença, enfatizando que no protocolo de atendimento, o isolamento social é a etapa essencial para contenção da doença e, portanto, de responsabilidade e execução do Sistema de Saúde Nacional. Esta estratégia para enfrentar a doença, com a valorização da vida humana e a solidariedade, só são possíveis frente às instituições e aos valores construídos em uma sociedade socialista, o que, portanto, nos enseja a revalidar o socialismo como única opção possível para o futuro da humanidade.

Rowdytum im Staatssozialismus: Ein Feindbild aus der Sowjetunion by Kotalík Matěj (review)

SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 792 Kotalík, Matěj. Rowdytum im Staatssozialismus: Ein Feindbild aus der Sowjetunion.KommunismusundGesellschaft.ReihedesLeibniz-Zentrums für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam, 10. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin, 2019. 399 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. €50.00 (paperback). The Czech scholar Matěj Kotalík has set himself a challenging task in this detailed new study, based on his 2017 PhD thesis at the University of Potsdam. His aim is to trace the ‘geobiography’ of the Russian concept of khuliganstvo (itself a term adapted from the English word ‘hooliganism’) as it travelled across borders of time and space from late tsarist-era St Petersburg through the USSR of the Lenin, Stalin and early Khrushchev eras, and on to post-1956 Communist Czechoslovakia and East Germany. This is a story that cannot be told in straightforward linear terms, for as the author readily concedes, khuliganstvo had multiple, contested meanings in the political, judicial and social spheres. Furthermore, the Communist satellite states had their own terms for it: výtržnictví in the Czechoslovak case, and Rowdytum (another borrowing from the English language) in the East German case. In all three countries, popular perceptions of ‘hooliganism’ rarely matched the definitions underpinning official crime statistics, while even the basic distinction used to exclude deeds motivated by personal economic gain, revenge or jealousy from the realm of khuliganstvo, namely that the latter had to involve an element of ‘pointless’ violation of social norms, often proved unworkable in practice. In spite of these difficulties, Kotalík makes a strong case for seeing the management of khuliganstvo in the years 1956 to 1979 as a good example of the ‘social practice of rule’ (Herrschaft als soziale Praxis) in the post-Stalinist ČS(S) R and GDR. Applying theoretical approaches developed by Alf Lüdtke, among others, regarding the ‘permeated’ (durchherrschte) nature of Communist societies, he argues that a rough consensus emerged between ruling parties, mass organizations, the police and criminal justice systems and the population in general that there was a problem with ‘hooliganism’ which needed to be addressed in a coordinated way. As the 1960s continued, the notion that this was at heart an ideological issue involving Western penetration of young minds was quietly put to one side, and instead a more sociological approach was taken, based on the perceived need to understand the ‘hooligan’ in the context of changing family structures, evolving technologies and new leisure opportunities as socialist societies developed. Greater care was also taken to differentiate between ‘serious’ and ‘trivial’ forms of ‘hooliganism’, to educate parents, teachers and employers, and to persuade all adults that they were collectively responsible for helping young people to manage their free time in a constructive way. However, this consensus was fragile, and became more so in the 1970s. In post-1969 Czechoslovakia ‘normalization’ brought with it a ‘(re-)ideologization’ REVIEWS 793 (p. 263) of approaches to ‘hooliganism’, symbolized above all by the prosecution of members of the rock group Plastic People of the Universe for the offence of výtržnictví in 1976. Ordinary Czechoslovaks were hardly moved by this event, but objected loudly whenever the authorities took actions that singled out members of their own families as ‘hooligans’. In Honecker’s East Germany, especially after the signing of the Helsinki agreements in 1975, the regular police (Volkspolizei) came to resent the new expectation that they avoid heavyhanded tactics in situations where the Western media might be present. They also complained about the lack of ‘civil courage’ among ordinary citizens, who often failed to intervene against anti-social behaviour. Yet citizens could be equally critical of the Volkspolizei and its Czechoslovak equivalent, the VB (Veřejná bezpečnost), either for being too tough or not tough enough. Interestingly, against the background of riotous youth demonstrations in East Berlin on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the GDR’s founding in October 1977, Kotalík uncovers evidence of Vopos beating up and arresting innocent bystanders in side-streets. Here, the police developed their own form of defiance (Eigen-Sinn) in reaction to the ‘restraint’ they had to show towards the active ‘Rowdys’ on Alexanderplatz. Problems like this grew worse in the 1980s, but Kotal...

The Crumbling Touchstone of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik: Relations between the Holy See and Yugoslavia, 1970–1989

Based on Yugoslav archival sources, the paper analyses the relationship between the Holy See and Yugoslavia as the only Eastern European socialist state with which the former had official diplomatic relations. The relationship between the Holy See and socialist Yugoslavia provides insight into the precarious position of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, but also into the issues and dilemmas that the Holy See faced in terms of its Ostpolitik towards Eastern European socialist regimes. The article initially centres on the parallels between the Holy See and the foreign policy agenda of non-aligned Yugoslavia, especially during the papacy of Paul VI, when both actors shared an understanding of the acute problems of the Global South. It then analyses the stance of the Holy See towards the Yugoslav domestic policy of self-management that claimed that this system could present a viable environment for the life of believers in modern socialist society. The analysis closes with an in-depth examination of the role of the Holy See in the process of convergence between religion and nationalism during the 1980s, in which the Vatican did not play as clear-cut a role as it has generally been ascribed and proved unable to tackle this formidable phenomenon.

Chyngyz Aytmatov's Point of View about Cultural, Social, Economic and Communication Reasons of the Crisis of the World Literature

The article examines the problem of the complete decline of morality and culture under the pressure of mass consumption on the example of the work of the Kyrgyz writer Chyngyz Aytmatov. “ The Brand of Cassandra ” and “ When the Mountains Fall ( The Eternal Bride )” are Aytmatov’s last two novels. They were written after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they were thoroughly analyzed in the article. The plot of the novel “ The Brand of Cassandra ” (1994) is based on the author’s thoughts on the world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of the bipolar confrontation between superpowers and their satellites. Aytmatov had comprehended the real issues of responsibility of each person for the crimes and sinfulness of the world philosophically deeply, becoming global in this work. In the novel “ When the Mountains Fall ( The Eternal Bride )” (2006), the writer, on the example of the life of snow leopard Jaabars and journalist Arsen Samanchin, reflects on the problems of complete loss of spirituality, destruction of moral landmarks, their reduction to material goods in the wild market to Central Asia. The object of the characteristic of the article also became the journalistic heritage of Ch. Aytmatov of the Soviet period, the innovation of which was that the author emphasized the real and inevitable threats to consumption and the dominance of mass culture in both capitalist and socialist society. It is noted that the Kyrgyz writer focused important attention in his work on the problems of moving “ serious ” literature to the periphery of the reader’s attention, the reluctance of the vast majority of individuals to address important issues of human existence, spiritual life. The main emphasis was placed on the fact that Ch. Aytmatov was deeply concerned with the dehumanization of society, subtly felt the crisis in which humanity found itself, concerned more with the accumulation of material goods than spiritual development.

The Dilemma of the Times and the Remolding of the Way of Model Education

As a general method of ideological and political education, model education has played an irreplaceable role in Chinese history. But in this pluralistic social background, it has been questioned and misinterpreted by more and more people, and the role model of traditional model education is gradually weakening. Model Education contributes to the construction of a harmonious socialist society and is an important channel to promote the all-round development of human beings and realize the harmony of interpersonal relations. Combing the theory of model education, endowing it with new connotation of the times, analyzing the situation of the current development and reshaping the new educational path, it plays an inestimable role in the development of individuals and society, it also contributes to the innovation of ideological and political education methods and provides a reference for the overall development of model education.

Research on News Media in Constructing Harmonious Society

<p>Mass media has currently become the “nerve” connecting all parts of society. News media, as an important part of mass media, has become an important part of social structure and the bridge of building a harmonious social network. Moreover, news media has a wide and far-reaching impact on the construction of a harmonious socialist society due to its unique functions.</p>

Show Me Your Watch, and I’ll Tell You Where You Work: Obtaining Scarce Goods via the Workplace in 1960s Socialist Hungary

In the field of consumption history there is growing interest in informal shopping practices, smuggling, and black-market activities in state socialist societies. Yet, little emphasis has been placed on how the foremost socialist workplace, the factory, became a crucial hub for smuggled goods and the extent to which workers played a role within it. This article explores local Budapest court cases from the beginning of the 1960s using the methodological insights of everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte). The cases show that white-collar workers (and in rare cases blue-collar workers) with a command of foreign languages frequently acted as middlemen in making transactions. This specific cultural capital put white-collar workers in a position to gain profit over and above their usual state salary, often contradicting wage hierarchies set by the state. At the same time, blue-collar workers embraced informal shopping possibilities at the factory in a climate of diversifying consumer expectations. This article examines how informal practices of selling and obtaining goods transformed relations among workers and created a new social hierarchy within working-class communities.

Revolutionary ruralities: Spaces of surveillance and exclusion in Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Andrés (2016)

The abundance of rural and provincial settings as spaces belonging to or determined by revolutionary time are recurrent elements in Cuban cinema prior to 1989. Many documentaries and films from the late 1960–80s focused on ‘scaping’revolutionary accomplishments and struggles in the construction of a socialist society. At that time, the depiction of provincial and rural towns of Cuba were aligned with and echoed the Revolution’s political and social agenda of collective work, struggle and revolutionary virtue. This article explores rural space, surveillance and exclusions through Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (). The film portrays the punishment and surveillance of a blacklisted homosexual writer in a small town in the eastern part of the island during 1983. This article, first, examines how Santa y Andrés questions the premise that Cuba’s rural and provincial space is a homogeneous revolutionary one, and, second, proposes that the film’s choice of location refashions the rural-provincial space in Cuban cinema as a space of dissidence, exclusionary practices and pervasive surveillance.

KONFUSIANISME SEBAGAI SABUK PENGAMAN RRT

<p>The slogans propagated by Chinese leader Hu Jintao—namely “rise in peace”, “a harmonious socialist society”, and “a harmonious world”—reflects the country’s age-old Confucian values. Considering the fact that the PRC only recognizes communism as the state ideology and that Confucianism was subjected to harsh criticism during the Cultural Revolution era (1966–1976), the presence of Confucian values in PRC’s political propaganda becomes an interesting research topic. Both Confucianism and communism<br />put the state as the center of power and sovereignty. This research used the historicalchronological approach by examining the attitude of the PRC government towards Confucianism from 1980 to 2012. Results show that such a consistent philosophy has been successful in strengthening the government’s legitimacy. As it continues to rise, the PRC needs to adopt a robust philosophical basis such as Confucianism to serve as part of its soft power. Confucianism has been adjusted to the country’s current situations<br />and utilized so extensively for decades that it can be considered as PRC’s main vehicle for national development. This article examines and presents the historical role of Confucianism in PRC’s rise.</p>

Voices from Silence? Reflections on ‘Coming out’ in Socialist Czechoslovakia

ABSTRACT The region of Central and Eastern Europe and oppressive social conditions in former socialist society often became symbols of the impossibility to articulate non-heterosexual identities under the conditions of a totalitarian regime. This study analyzes data from 19 in-depth interviews with people older than 50 living in the Czech Republic who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. It focuses on the ways in which their forced silence and inability to speak about their sexual desires resonated throughout their biographical narratives. The first part of this paper focuses on themes surrounding the absence of representations of non-heterosexual identities in socialist Czechoslovakia’s public sphere and the impact of this absence on participants’ perceptions of their own life experiences. The second part of the paper analyzes the ways in which participants relate to their own coming out and their reflections on their previous lives in relation to newfound opportunities to live outside of heterosexual norms. The paper strives to problematize the concept of “silence” as one of the defining features of this generation, in contrast with the concept of coming out as a sign of emancipation in younger generations.

Shame in a post-socialist society: a qualitative study of healthcare seeking and utilisation in common mental disorders.

After the regime collapse, the former socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe experienced rapid social and economic transformations. Consequently, mental health deterioration coupled with ambitions to break with the past triggered reforms of mental health systems. Yet, 30years later, mental health in the region remains poor. Stigma of mental illness may be one of the factors that delays help seeking and, therefore, maintains status quo. Thus, the aim of the article is to better understand the roots of stigma and the process of stigmatisation in one of these countries - Lithuania. Drawing on Norbert Elias's model of established-outsider relations, the article presents the analysis of 23 in-depth interviews with healthcare providers and users of services diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorders. Said analysis reveals how stigma of mental illness might result in damaged self-image and shame of feeling different. Mental illness and healthcare seeking are perceived as a threat to culturally and historically determined self-values, at the core of which seems to be intolerance of difference. The article contributes not only to research concerning mental health in a relatively understudied region of Central and Eastern Europe, but also to existing literature on stigma as embedded in a local context.

Fourier, Marx, and Social Reproduction

This article establishes a conversation between the work of materialist socialist Charles Fourier and Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT). SRT has laid the ground to explore who produces the producer, in order to analyze and integrate the role of reproductive labor into a comprehensive Marxist view of the capitalist economy. In the context of the critical re-appraisal of the labor of social reproduction, Fourier offers a key materialist perspective which is also present in Marx: the identity between labor and desire in the socialist project. Fourier's materialism, I show, greatly influenced both Marx and Engels, for whom labor was also to be re-organized in order to fulfil human passions, according to our natural inclinations and needs, and not the other way around. Revisiting reproductive labor from a Marxist and Fourierist lenses is thus also reconnecting with our bodies and desire in a Spinozist manner, and envisioning that any social transformation will also be the result of a dialectical revolution initiated from below, at the level of the living infrastructure or affect. In Fourier, the continuity between production and consumption (and between humanity and nature) is a guiding principle for the socialist society to come. This article argues that in addition to the critique of existing power structures and forms of alienated labor that must be materially and strategically replaced, Marxism also needs to cultivate forms of labor and modes of the labor process where pleasure is affirmed, and where desire can find fertile grounds to re-imagine a different society and push back against the rule of capital.

On the Internationalziation of Legal Education: A Chinese Perspective

In recent years, China’s rapid economic and social development has made the country occupy an important position in the international arena. The economic, cultural, and political exchanges and communications between China and other countries have become increasingly frequent. The internationalization of legal education has also become an inevitable trend of development. However, the current process of internationalization of legal education is also facing many problems. This article mainly studies the origin, purpose and content of the internationalization of legal education to deepen the understanding of the internationalization of legal education, achieve advantages and avoids disadvantages, and explore various ways and channels to develop the internationalization of legal education. More professional talents will contribute to the establishment of a socialist society ruled by law in China, thereby enhancing China’s international influence and international competitiveness.

Higher education expansion, system transformation, and social inequality. Social origin effects on tertiary education attainment in Poland for birth cohorts 1960 to 1988

This paper analyzes the development of social inequality in the Polish higher education system during its expansion after 1990 using data from the Polish General Social Survey. Focusing on the special case of a former socialist society, where higher education expansion has been very rapid and achieved mainly through marketization, this paper highlights the micro-level mechanisms that underlie the inequality dynamic. It shows how actor preferences embedded in the specific historical context shape educational behavior, producing moments of equalization and de-equalization. Class inequality regarding access to tertiary education decreased in the early 1990s and then increased again, as participation in the working classes stagnated at a low level in the later phases of the expansion. In contrast, no equalization has been observed between children of different educational origins. The analysis shows a persistent intergenerational reproduction of educational disadvantage in spite of the expansion. Lastly, consistent with the Effectively Maintained Inequality thesis, this paper provides evidence for underprivileged strata being diverted into second-tier, lower-prestige educational opportunities in the private sector.

Humans, nature and dialectical materialism

Capitalist relations are the crucial object of social critique due to their innate tendency to accelerate the metabolic rift and alienation, yet, I argue, our focus should stretch beyond capitalist relations. Indeed, both ecocidal and conservationist tendencies have occurred in multiple historical forms of social relations, including socialist societies, for example, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These are phenomena that reiterate the social, rather than purely capitalist relations as the driver of environmental destruction. Metabolic rifts occur due to malfunctioning of the human–human/human–nature relationships and it is the elimination and prevention of that malfunctioning that must be the aim of radical environmental politics and policies, not merely (the necessary) elimination of capitalist relations. This article contributes to the symposium in three complementary ways. First, it critiques the application of dialectical reading of human–nature relations as articulated in the Foster–Moore debate in its own right. Second, it rearticulates that reading through the lens of the dialectical biospheric analytics of late Soviet ecology. And third, it invokes the dialectical thought of Evald Ilyenkov.

State Power and ‘Everyday Criminality’ in the German Democratic Republic, 1961–1989

Abstract Friedrich Engels claimed that the removal of the perceived causes of crime in a society—capitalist economic and societal conditions—would automatically lead to the eradication of crime. This did not prove to be the case in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where instances of everyday criminality such as theft, robbery and assault never fell below 100,000 per annum throughout the period of the state’s existence, from 1949 to 1989. This article examines the ruling Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) perceptions of the causes of everyday criminality in the GDR. It shows that the SED concluded that crime persisted because citizens’ ‘socialist sense of legal right and wrong’ (sozialistisches Rechtsbewußtsein) was underdeveloped. The regime measured this by the extent to which citizens supported and participated in socialist society. Thus, crime could be eliminated by co-opting as many citizens as possible into the Party’s political project. The SED’s ideological tunnel vision on the causes of everyday criminality meant that it dismissed hints about the real causes of crime, such as poor supply and living conditions, identified by its analysts. Its failure to address these issues meant that citizens continued to break the law. Thus, the Party’s exercise of power contributed to the creation of limits to that power. Moreover, analysis of opinion polls on GDR citizens’ attitudes to criminality shows that they accepted crime as a part of everyday life.