ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to critically engage with the three dominant approaches to theorizing the political economy of transition: the neoliberal, evolutionary and institutional approaches. The consequences of thinking about the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism in this binary modality have a twofold implication for theorizing the international political economy of post-communist transition. The global situation that has emerged since the crisis of Keynesianism and the implosion of the embedded liberal compromise in the 1970s was consummated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The chapter also focuses on one of Antonio Gramsci's fundamental contributions to historical materialist thought was his effort to reject a perceived economic determinism and move beyond vulgar use of the base, superstructure dyad. Perhaps not unsurprisingly given the recent hegemony of neoliberalism, the orthodox transitological paradigms have four essential components: the depoliticization of ownership, the depoliticization of allocative mechanisms, the marketization of the economy and the imposition of hard budget constraints.
