Left Perspectives on State Socialism I: Post-Stalinist Marxism in East Central Europe

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

After the demise of Stalinism, East European intellectuals within the Communist Party realized that the primary challenge they were facing wasn’t merely the further development of socialism, which would lead to communism, but a need to reformulate the entire socialist project. Thus, post-Stalinist intellectuals gradually abandoned the Marxist orthodoxy and began searching for new interpretations of classic Marxist works that would provide an adequate conceptual framework for solving contemporary problems. In the book “’Rehabilitate Marx!’ The Czechoslovak Party Intelligentsia and Post-Stalinist Modernity” (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming), Jan Mervart and Jiří Růžička look at how new categories of thought were coined for conceptualizing new forms of socialist modernity in Czechoslovakia during the era of post-Stalinism, in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s. The roundtable wants to discuss various shapes and trajectories of post-Stalinist Marxism in East Central Europe. At the same time, it wants to clarify to what extent the analysis offered by Mervart and Růžička can serve as the explanatory pattern for the development of post-Stalinist Marxism in the region and to what extent it enables to capture post-Stalinism as a world of varying socialist visions.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Zhivka Valiavicharska, Pratt Institute

Roundtable Members

• Michal Kopecek, Institute of Contemporary History CAS (Czech Republic)

• James MacEwan Robertson, UC Irvine

• Jan Mervart, Institute of Philosophy CAS (Czech Republic)

• Ying Qian, Columbia U

• Jiří Růžička, Institute of Philosophy CAS (Czech Republic)