Socialist Economic Development in the 21st Century

Over a hundred years after the first socialist revolution broke the global monopoly of capitalism, a new class of socialist-oriented socioeconomic development is coming to the fore. Capitalism is still dominant worldwide, although its hegemony is no longer undisputed, and humankind is now faced with a key existential challenge. This book proposes an alternative path to overcoming the worldwide crisis of globalized capitalism. It offers a novel, balanced, and historically rooted interpretation of the successes and failures of socialist economic construction throughout the last century.

Left Ruins in Ethiopia: Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroepistemic Historiography

This essay uses the notion of necroepistemology to expose the killing of the other as executed by the neoliberal historiography in Ethiopia. Utilizing Fanonian negative dialectics, it critiques the ahistorical, immaterial, and reified object, as well as universal history, promoted by the official Ethiopian historiography’s absolute time, space, and matter. It does so to reveal the ways in which the enduring social questions and new imaginations are dismissed by this historiography as the work of the global-local left. To counterbalance this practice, I return to the 1974 Ethiopian socialist revolution and to the staging of Ethiopian socialism as a critical transnational rethinking of the human in the country. At the same time, attending to the everyday struggle of women performers in both the imperial and revolutionary spaces, the essay reminds us how the revolutionary practice, which had envisioned a new social human, ended up marking female performers’ bodies as dangerous for the socialist movement. Revealing the ways in which women performers collaborated with and fought against a male revolutionary figure, this essay ends with a call to respond to the current necroepistemic moment to draw attention to the historically vulnerable people who are dying in Ethiopia in the here and now.

Which vietnam is under new french research today?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the humanities and social sciences were largely at the service of an idealised quest aiming at the socialist revolution. In France, academic research on communism in the Third World countries was fuelled by anti-colonial guilt. The change came from within in the early 1980s, when the exodus of Viet Kieu and the security orientation of the country's reunification distracted some of the intellectuals who were fellow travellers (compagnons de route) from the triumphant narratives about this country in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1983, a book vividly presented the contradictions of this period experienced by specialists of Vietnam in France with regard to their present or past commitments with Vietnamese communist regime. The historian Georges Boudarel mentioned: This publication is not a crusade, without complexes or taboos. It intends to place itself under the sign of mutual respect, plurality of points of view, coexistence and tolerance of opinions. These are not exalting slogans, nor are they flags to mount an assault. These terms lack panache and hardly rattle in the wind. But they sum up the hard experience of men. We will not hesitate to make them ours.

“Cuba, Nicaragua, Unidas Vencerán”: Official Collaborations between the Sandinista and Cuban Revolutions

The Cuban and Sandinista Revolutions stand together as Latin America's two socialist revolutions achieved through guerrilla insurgency in the latter half of the twentieth century. But beyond studies that demonstrate that Cuba militarily trained and supported the Sandinistas before, during, and after their guerrilla phase, and observations that the two countries were connected by the bonds of socialist revolution, the nature of Cuba and Nicaragua's revolutionary relationship remains little explored. This article traces exchanges of people and expertise between each revolutionary state's Ministry of Foreign Relations and Ministry of Culture. It employs diplomatic and institutional archives, personal collections, and oral interviews to demonstrate the deep involvement of Cuban experts in building the Sandinista state. Yet, Cuban advice may have exacerbated tensions within Nicaragua. This article also shows that tensions marked the day-to-day realities of Cubans and Nicaraguans tasked with carrying out collaborations, revealing their layered and often contradictory nature. Illuminating high-level policy in terms of Cuban-Nicaraguan exchanges and how they unfolded on the ground contributes to new international histories of the Sandinista and Cuban revolutions by shifting away from North-South perspectives to focus instead on how the Sandinistas navigated collaboration with their most important regional ally.

World War II and the Creation of Asian Communist States

Mao’s formula for coming to power differed from the Bolshevik pathway. It entailed a peasant-based guerrilla war that helped to defeat Japanese occupation and that went on to defeat the Nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in conventional warfare after World War II was over. There were many differences between the Maoist and Soviet models of revolution, but there were also many similarities in the willingness to attempt a “socialist” revolution in a peasant society, in the glorification of revolutionary violence, in the determination to ensure that the communist party monopolizes power and politics after winning the civil war, in the determination to build socialism thereafter, and in the commitment to anti-imperialist struggle within a world communist movement led by Moscow.

The Bolshevik myth of October 1917

Bolshevik mythology presented the events of October 1917 as an effect of the operating laws of history, i.e. a necessary phenomenon through which the sense of history manifested, and, at the same time, as an effect of the activity of the masses led by the Bolshevik Party, an act in the power struggle. The Bolshevik myth of October 1917 was a founding myth; it created an impression that there had come a “new era in the history of humankind”, ending “all forms of exploitation”. It legitimised the government established at the time as one rooted in the revolution opening this new era and representing the most profound interests of a class that was to abolish the most tragic division in the history of humankind — class division. The myth of October had to have its collective and individual heroes. From this point of view its content was described in the most succinct manner by the following formula: the Great October Socialist Revolution was carried out by the working class allied with the poor peasantry led by the Bolshevik Party headed by Lenin. The cult of Lenin was primarily a cult of a victorious revolution and party leader that had led the masses to a triumph. Almost identical formulas were used by Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev. However, the real heroes of the revolution were the Bolshevik themselves, their party and their leaders. In Stalinist times the main protagonist of the October myth was the “Bolshevik Party of Lenin-Stalin”. The leading role in the party became a crucial element of Bolshevik mythology, independent of political transformations and turns in the USSR.

Residues of History, Affect, and the Resonance of Revolutionary Spirits in Two Cuban Forms of Spiritism

The figure of the Revolutionary or independence fighter, or indeed the Afro-Cuban maroon, is a fundamental trope of efficacy in Cuban Spiritism. But the question of the vestiges, or residues of resistance and ruin in bodies is an interesting one to ask in the light of Cuba’s socialist Revolution and its obvious traces of trauma in people’s bodies. I will look at two cases, in different historical periods, that understand Revolution as a material dimension of the body; in the first case as a molecular structure of the body enmeshed with the dead — which must be necessarily disentangled; in the second case, as an attrition, a worn-out ideal, which, when manifest as the disenchanted, pragmatic street-wise spirits of a post-1980s Cuba, perpetuate the remnants of something “lost” in people’s sensory experiences. In both cases I will follow Kristina Wirtz’s proposal of applying the concept of “chronotopes” to Afro-Cuban religion, as well as looking at affect as an intensive force that manifests as a bodily awareness of Revolution modulated through states of possession.

An Honourable U-Turn? Finland and New Europe after the End of the First World War

The article deals with the situation of a small, newly- and uncertainly independent country that had a peculiar experience in the year 1918. The country had declared its independence in December 1917, had received the recognition from Soviet Russia, the Nordic countries, Germany and its allies, and France in January 1918. Almost simultaneously, it drifted to a civil war, in which both the Germans and the Russians participated. However, the Civil War was mainly a domestic concern, and the outcome was the defeat of an attempt at a socialist revolution and the victory of an extremely pro-German government that even elected a German king in Finland in October 1918. The project was never fulfilled, but the experience left an exceptional, pro-German mental heritage, to which the terms of the armistice of November 1918 was a shock. They were seen as unjust, revengeful and even petty—both by the Finnish “Whites” (non-socialists) and the “Reds” (socialists). The Versailles Treaty in 1919 did not directly concern Finland. However, it might have done so in the question of Finnish borders, which was still partly unresolved—both in the west (a strife with Sweden over the Åland Islands) and in the east (ethnically Finnish Eastern Karelia). Moreover, the Allies were uncertain whether Finland should be considered Scandinavian or Baltic. Britain and the United States had not yet recognized Finland’s independence, so in order to secure independence and territorial integrity, the Finns had to adjust to the Allies’ demands and actively drive a Western-oriented policy. This was done for the same reason why the German orientation had been previously adapted—the threat of Russia and revolution—but it was psychologically strenuous for some political circles because they felt that there was an element of dishonorable opportunism to it. However, they could offer no alternative in a situation in which a newborn state had to secure its independence and legitimacy in New Europe, adjusting to disappointments and demands.

The reasons for the institutionalization of administrative responsibility in post-revolutionary Russia (1917-1924).

Introduction. The relevance of this topic is due to the ongoing reform of responsibility for administrative offenses, discussions in the scientific literature on the delimitation of crimes and administrative offenses and the grounds for their delinquency. The study of the historical stages of the normative isolation of responsibility for administrative offenses from the point of view of events taking place in political, economic and social life, in our opinion, helps in determining the development trends of this institution. In this article, the author aims to identify the reasons and conditions for administrative responsibility as an independent institution after the Great October Socialist Revolution. The gradual normative separation of responsibility for administrative offenses from criminal responsibility falls on the period of war communism and the first half of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Methods. The author uses the classical historical and legal research method, which includes both a chronological analysis of social, political and economic factors, and a study of the legal regulation of legal institutions over a period of time. Results. In the first years of Soviet power, administrative coercion, along with other measures of state coercion, was considered as one of the means of strengthening socialist legality and fundamental order and security. The normative separation of administrative responsibility from criminal responsibility during the first half of the new economic policy was due to the development of economic relations and technical progress. In general, it was associated with Soviet ideology, a permissive type of legal regulation, an increase in the number of rules issued by the state in various spheres of public life, the creation of control and supervisory bodies that required their own operational leverage on citizens and organizations, including in the form of imposing penalties.