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.

• Socialism
• coloniality
• decolonial theory
• Marxist humanism
• alternative modernity

Notes

1 For many years now Slavoj Žižek has refused to take seriously the challenge of theorizing from the global South, reasserting the epistemic hegemony of the European radical tradition, from Christianity and Greek Antiquity to the present (2000); for a critique of the implications of that refusal on the territory of the Balkans, see Bjelić (2014) and Homer (2013). Another, arguably more nuanced theorist of the region is Hungarian-Romanian philosopher G.M. Tamás, whose otherwise suggestive concept of post-socialist “post-fascism” still relies very heavily on tradition of the radical Enlightenment as a non-negotiable given (2000). For an insightful engagement with postcolonial theory from an anti-capitalist perspective, see Petrović (2014). For recent critiques of the class myopia of much of what circulates as postcolonial writing globally, see among others Subir Sinha (2015) and Lazarus (2012).

2 For a productive discussion of the different genealogies, geographical perspectives, and possibilities for dialogue between the postcolonial and decolonial traditions, see Marcekke Maese-Cohen (2010)

3 For a distinction between “First” and “Second Modernity,” see for example Dussel (2000).

4 Up until the collapse of state socialism in the country, 49 of the planned 50 volumes of the selected works of Marx and Engels had been translated into Bulgarian (Popivanov 2013).

5 The 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts was the joint product of sixteen academics, among them Marković, and argued against the decentralization of Federal Yugoslavia and the discrimination of Serbs within it. Among other claims, it argued that Serbs were in great danger in different parts of Yugoslavia, notably in Croatia, Slovenia, and Kosovo. See http://www.trepca.net/english/2006/serbian_memorandum_1986/serbia_memorandum_1986.html (accessed 3 November 2017).

6 See Ivan Elenkov for a careful empirical study of the cultural policies of the Zhivkova era, which however does not register the humanist turn or subtle shifts in discursive and polemical contexts but reads it within a broad and generalized Marxist-Leninist ideology of a top-down totalitarian state. (Elenkov 2008).

7 For some of the early consequences of the collapse of state socialism in an African context, see for instance Hutchful (1991).

8 Narodna Mladezh, 8 October 1972.

9 We mean by this the type of logic so powerfully dissected by for instance Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks 2008/1952. Sandro Mezzadra has also argued that, as a rule, international solidarity struggles still preserved the “metaborder” between “the Eastern and Western space where the initiatives of solidarity took place and the “other” spaces within which the actual struggles took place” (2015, 217).