This text is a reflection on the production and reception of the first-of-its-kind anthology of autonomist Marxist texts in Bulgaria, published in 2013. After a brief examination of the anthology’s content, the text focuses on four major “problems of translation” that significantly overdetermined the book’s reception and circulation: what the author calls the problems of semantics, history, politics, and ontology. The article concludes that autonomist Marxism might have a unique role to play in radical conversations in the country and identifies the “work of translation” as a key ingredient in expanding the coalitional possibilities of the left in Eastern Europe.
Departing from the recent scholarship that acknowledges fundamental similarities in the post-colonial and the post-socialist experiences, the article argues that comparisons across these two contexts and paradigms prove themselves to be a useful tool for analysis of specific problems of transitioning societies. This claim is demonstrated by examination of the making of public history of the recent past in the Czech Republic and South Africa. Two authoritative aspects of public history are considered: the state-sanctioned commemoration and historiography. Whereas the South African state has sought by the means of transitional justice to reconcile the former victims and victimizers in a shared quest for the truth, the Czech state prioritizes legislative and judiciary assignment of retroactive blame. The South African historiography is closely tied to collective memory and prefers the approach of social history. The Czech historiography of the recent past is dominated by the totalitarian paradigm and prioritizes archival work. In both cases, the political and the historiographical projects seem to overlap in crucial points. It is suggested that the articulation of public history as either resentment or forgiveness may have been ultimately predetermined by the forms of resistance to the opressive regimes.
This paper compares and contrasts two of the few radical political artistic groups of late socialism in Hungary. Through an analysis of the Orfeo and Inconnu groups we highlight their patterns of politicization and de-politicization to show that the critique of existing socialism was not free floating but was embedded in social structures. By going against the current of individualizing and moralizing artistic biographies, we give a historical materialist account of the two groups. Firstly, the paper shows how the anti-systemic mobilization of the two groups was conditioned by changes in Hungary’s world-economic integration and the subsequent restructuration of its field of cultural production. Secondly, it analyzes the tension between two groups’ critique of the oppressive nature of state-socialism and their politics of everyday life, by paying special attention to their uneven gender-relations. The analysis places the political ideas of the two groups not only in the changing landscape of late-socialist dissent, but we link them to class positions and social biographies. The article also highlights how radical, left-leaning criticisms of the state-socialist regime were co-opted into the competing liberal and nationalist cultural-political-economic complexes of the post-socialist order, and how the ways of incorporation were the products of individual but socially situated biographies of the intellectual actors. By combining class analysis and comparative historical research with a sociology of culture and intellectuals, this article draws attention to the role of determinate and contingent historical processes in the formation of anti-systemic mobilizations in late-socialist Hungary.
Political forces dominating the mainstream of the Czech political scene accuse independently living individuals of selfish privatization and extrapolated consumerism. However, the shared household model of living (not in a couple or within own family) extensively spreads among independently living individuals alongside this ''privatization''. The milieu of this specific households, which represent so called ''chosen families'' consisting of flat mates and friends in the flat or house rented in group, is along with single occupied households the source of what is described as ''urban tribes''. Precisely these independently living individuals and their specific structures in contrary prevent and confront the societal erosion and disintegration. Their life-styles and everyday practices extensively lead to activities contributing to community revival at the local level as well as to maintaining of an open character of the society more generally.
The paper interconnects studies of everyday life and everyday consumption and research on socialist housing estates. It is based on an ethnographic stydy of Petržalka, the biggest housing estate in Bratislava, located at the south band of the river Danube.