ABSTRACT
The crisis and collapse of Central and East European (CEE) state socialisms has provided a space for one of the world’s most daring economic experiments: the construction of a capitalist system on what was seen as the deathbed of communism. The attempt to construct a new regulatory fix has resulted in the ascendancy of a policy agenda and ideological discourse orientated towards the creation of globalized market economies through trade and price liberalization, privatization, the attraction of foreign investment, the development of small and medium enterprises, and the restructuring of the state towards a neo-liberal order (Amsden et al., 1994; Gowan, 1995). Six or seven years into the much celebrated ‘transition to capitalism’, however, we have become more sober about the prospects for a rapid transformation of political-economic life in the region. 1 This is perhaps not surprising; those who reject the various one-way transition positions of the likes of Francis Fukuyama (1989), Jeffrey Sachs (1990) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (1990) have argued that capitalism cannot be constructed in the belief that the collapse of state socialism left a tabula rasa in CEE. While transformations in the region have seen the emergence of new forms of political-economic organization and integration, it is the contention of this chapter that the ‘breaking of the old and the construction of the new’ is complex, unevenly developed, multi-determined and ‘embedded’ in the nature of the state socialist system, the struggles that arose out of that system, and its current transformation. This argument suggests that the social relations of production, exchange and consumption are not merely replaced with the fall of state socialism, but are being reworked in complex ways as state socialism meets the capitalist law of value. First, I consider some of the alternative theoretical claims regarding ‘transformation’ and ‘restructuring’ rather than ‘transition’. Following this, the chapter discusses some of the very material consequences of the new economies of CEE and the former USSR. It also examines the complexity and uneven development of geo-economic change in the region and highlights the connections between old and new material practices.
