Book chapter
Self-Management, Development and Debt: The Rise and Fall of the 'Yugoslav Experiment'
This is an overview of the rise and fall of the self-management system in Yugoslavia, its reliance on the debt economy and its legacies in the post-Yugoslav context.
In book
This volume offers a profound analysis of post-socialist economic and political transformation in the Balkans, involving deeply unequal societies and oligarchical “democracies.” The contributions deconstruct the persistent imaginary of the Balkans, pervasive among outsiders to the region, who see it as no more than a repository of ethnic conflict, corruption and violence. Providing a much needed critical examination of the Yugoslav socialist experience, the volume sheds light on the recent rebirth of radical politics in the Balkans, where new groups and movements struggle for a radically democratic vision of society.
This book considers several aspects of the transformation of the former state socialist countries: social and economic outcomes; forces in the transformation process; problems of consolidation of the new regimes; and alternative scenarios. The book evaluates the course of transformation of state socialist societies. It focuses on economic change and its impact on inequality and health. Comparisons are made between the successful central European countries now members of the European Union with those of the former Soviet Union. There are detailed studies of the transformation of the (former) German Democratic Republic, Czech Republic, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, as well as the impact on Poland. A feature of the book is the impact of the collapse of state socialism on countries of Asia and the Third World. Alternative scenarios are considered, with specific chapters on China, Cuba, and North Korea. The book contemplates the alternative types of society that might replace state socialism, particularly state capitalism and market socialism.
The paper analyzes how the self-regulatory institutions of two legal professions – attorneys-at-law and in-house lawyers – developed in Poland and Russia from the second half of the 19th century until the collapse of state socialism at the beginning of the 1990s. These two countries constitute the most contrasting cases of socialist transformation in the region in terms of legal traditions and of the broader socio-political context. To adequately grasp the case differences it is necessary to include the formative period of the modern legal profession in the region. The comparative analysis uses the conceptual framework of the sociology of professions. It shows that (1) attorneys-at-law were able to preserve a certain degree of collective autonomy and self-regulation during most of the time; (2) institutional path dependencies reaching back into the pre-socialist past determine the degree of autonomy and self-regulation; (3) the discrepancy between both countries is particularly pronounced in the case of the occupational group of in-house lawyers; (4) the state-socialist regimes were, therefore, not as unifying and homogenizing as it is sometimes assumed.
What our paper as a whole traces is the way that the declarations of nothingness, anarchy, and cosmism all offer a “Russian” mode of thought that is radically decoupled from national identity, particularity, or ethnos – a mode of thought that is preoccupied with and immanently affirms nothingness or the void. To think by beginning with the void is to delegitimate the world – to unground its mechanisms of power, succession, and reproduction. But it is also to think immanently out of this void – to think a future decoupled from tradition and history, and their (sovereign, no less than sacrificial) logics of violence and oppression. In this, the (im)properly Russian thinking of nothingness remains genealogically and conceptually relevant to the debate within contemporary continental philosophy, political theology, and humanities theory broadly construed.
The entry contains a biographical profil of M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky and inform the reader about his works, political activity and ethical views. It puts emphasis on his contribution to the theory of business cycles, economic history and his views on socialism as a positive doctrine.