postsocialism: ideals , ideologies and practices in Eurasia

edited by C.M. Hann      London and New York: Routledge

Whither postsocialism?   Katherine Verdery pp15-21
possible analogues beween postcolonial studies and post socialism

1)  how Soviet imperialism shaped present-day africa, Latin america, and asia
p16 'Moscow Centre' aimed to integrate its dependencies into a process of accumulating not capital but,  ... allocative power through accumulating means of production.
(verdery  1991 'Theorizing socialism: a prologue to the transition'  American ethnologies 18)
Integral to this goal was building a wall that would insulate it and its dependencies from process of capital accumulation.
2)  how the interactive field uniting colony and metropole helped to constitute and transform the imperial center. thus, how did the soviet union's relations with its various satellites constitute and transform 'Moscow center' itself?
3) The role of knowledge and representation in colonial rule
the Cold War organized the world around a dichotomy different from that of postcoloniality— not colonies and metrople, 'the West' and 'the Rest,' but East and West, communism and capitalism.....
perhaps we should speak, then, not of post socialist but of post-Cold War studies.

post Cold war   and the third world
the very concept of a third, nonaligned World itself emerged from the Cold War.
the presence of the soviet system gave a very particular shape to global politics... the global order that gave rise not only to neocolonialism but to postcolonial studies itself was an order structured by the Cold War.
(here Verdery tried to justify the historical connection between post socialism and post colonialism studies    however, socialist ideas also fueled anti-colonial struggles    here is the danger of collapsing post-socialism and post Cold-War)

Is it possible that the "flexible specialization" ... is in part a result of the challenge posed by socialism? Capitalist growth depends on consumption.. with the expansion of socialism..., a staggering proportion of the world's people was hindered from consuming Western goods.
the crisis began when consumer markets for the output of mass production became saturated. the solution was to develop new techniques for expanding demand and consumption, Without socialist autarky, would this solution have arisen precisely when it did?
(David harvey and other when examine postmodernity and flexible accumulation never consider the pressure from the socialist side   it might be a productive way to understand this issue)



Burawoy, Michael. 2001  "Neoclassical sociology: from the end of communism to the end of classes" american journal of sociology 106