The battle of Detroit and anti-communism in the depression era

This article is an exploration of Diego Rivera's visit to Detroit in 1932-3. It seeks to use his experiences, and in particular the spectacular popular reaction to the Detroit Industry murals he pointed, as a prism for anaylsing varieties of anti-communism in. Detroit in the depression era. The article argues that close relationships between Private capitalists, most notably Hen?)) Ford and a Mexican communist, expose contradictions in big business's use of anti-communism in the interwar period, and suggest that anti-communism was a more complicated phenomenon than simply a tool for the promotion of free enterprise'. Moreover, by comparing the public reaction to the artists' work with their original intent, it is possible to see how members of Detroit's society unconsciously, used anti-communism to sublimate broader concerns over race and ethnicity gender, politics, and religiosity in a region in the throes of profound social change. The article seeks to highlight elements of these latent anxieties and fears in order to show how anti-communism acted as a vessel for social debate

Religion in Eastern Europe After the Fall of Communism: From Euphoria to Anxiety

In the decades prior to the implosion of the communist system, change could be discerned here and there in Eastern Europe. The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of the most pertinent developments that spurred the transition from communism to post-communism, employing some fairly broad brushstrokes to make my case

Human Capital Formation during Communism and Transition: Evidence from Bulgaria

Is it true that communist countries had well-developed human capital, or is it just a myth? What were human capital stocks at the beginning of transition to market economy? What happened to human capital formation during the transition? We attempt to answer these questions using evidence from Bulgaria. This is also a story about how a communist government had coped with labour market problems in a small closed economy. Unfortunately, during communism, there had been quite insufficient public information on human capital. Therefore, in the first place, we collect, synthesize and analyze all available information from official statistical publications as well as internal reference books and administrative documents, which used to be classified during communism, and at present are available at the Central State Archives. Next, we construct human capital indicators based on educational data for the communist period and track the dynamics in human capital formation for both communism and transition. Finally, we identify key policy and political measures which have affected human capital formation. Main findings show that communism started with extremely underdeveloped human resources. During the entire period the government had tried to provide favorable conditions for human capital formation. Communist policy measures gave significant results in the 60s, but had been ineffective in sustaining better education in the long run. As a result, the start of transition was characterized by poor levels of human capital due to an educational crisis in the last decade of communism (then, about 60% of the population in Bulgaria was with primary or lower-level of education). We assume that lack of economic incentives at individual level had determined weak pursuit of better education.human capital, communism, transition, human capital formation, determinants of human capital, labour market policies in communism

Great Leap into Famine

famine, China, communism

Red star over Iraq: Iraqi Communism before Saddam [Book Review]

This article reviews the book 'Red star over Iraq: Iraqi Communism before Saddam', by Johan Franzén

Communism and economic modernization

The paper examines the range of national experiences of communist rule in terms of the aspiration to ‘overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically’. It reviews the causal beliefs of the rulers, the rise and fall of their economies (or, in the case of China, its continued rise), the core institutions of communist rule and their evolution, and other outcomes. The process of overcoming a development lag so as to approach the global technological frontier has required continual institutional change and policy reform in the face of resistance from established interests. So far, China is the only country where communist rule has been able to meet this requirement, enabled by a new deal with political and economic stakeholders. The paper places the “China Deal” on a spectrum previously limited to the Soviet Big and Little Deals

Minorities’ protection in Russia: is there a ‘Communist Legacy’?

Book synopsis: Twenty years after the demise of communist policy, this book evaluates the continuing communist legacies in the current minority protection systems and legislations across a number of states in post-communist Europe. The fall of communism and the process of democratisation across post-communist Europe led to considerable change in minority protection with new systems and national political institutions either developed or copied. In general, the new institutions reflected the practices and experiences of (western) European states and were installed upon advice from European security organisations. Yet many ideas, legislative frameworks, policies and practices remained open to interpretation on the ground. With case studies on a diverse set of post-communist polities including Slovakia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Estonia, Croatia, the Baltic States and Russia, expert contributors consider how the institutional legacies of the communist past impact on policies designed to support minority communities in the new European democracies. Providing unique empirical material and comparative analyses of ethnocultural diversity management during and after communism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, European politics, political geography, post-communism, ethnic politics, nationalism and national identity

The Grand Experiment of Communism: Discovering the Trade-off between Equality and Efficiency

This paper aims to explain the rise and fall of communism by exploring the interplay between economic incentives and social preferences in different economic systems. We introduce inequality-averse and ine¢ ciency-averse agents responding to economic incentives and transmitting their ideology as they are a¤ected by evolving outcomes. We analyze their conflict through the interaction between leaders with economic power and followers with ideological determination. The socioeconomic dynamics of our model generate a pendulum-like switch from markets to a centrally-planned economy abolishing private ownership, and back to restoring market incentives. The grand experiment of communism is thus characterized to have led to the discovery of a trade-off between equality and efficiency at the scale of alternative economic systems.capitalism; communism; inequality; inefficiency; ideological transmission; economic transitions

How to Think Critically about the Common Past? On the Feeling of Communism Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary Romania

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, nor the signal of a deep value tension between governance and the people. Rather, I propose to understand this collective feeling as the symptom of a deeper need at a national level for solidarity and ultimately about recapturing a common feeling of identity in solidarity. This hypothesis would be in line with a phenomenological approach to memory as a process of establishing shared codes by rewriting the past in such a way as to strengthen social bonds and make possible a reimagining of a common future. Nostalgia for communism does not need to be ultimately an uncritical stance as it has been depicted, instead one could interpret it as a form of critical reflexion about our current forms of life. Instead of seeing communism nostalgia as a specific form of being stuck in the past, one could explore its potential for pointing at the things that are still not working in the current neo-liberal regime

Lost in Transition? The returns to education acquired under communism 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Using data for 23 economies in Eastern and Western Europe, we find evidence that having studied under communism is relatively penalized in the economies of the late 2000s. This evidence, however, is limited to males and to primary and secondary education, and holds for eight CEE economies but not for the East Germans who have studied in the former German Democratic Republic. We also find that post-secondary education acquired under communism yields higher, not lower, payoffs than similar education in Western Europe.