Left Perspectives on State- and Post-Socialism I: Alienation Theory and Socialist Practice in Postwar Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In an anticommunist essay from 1986, Czesław Miłosz condemned socialism by these terms: “instead of the end of the oppression of man by man and of alienation, a realm of nearly absolute alienation came into being, where the individual does not belong to himself, both literally and figuratively.” This idea of socialism as absolute alienation has been at the core of anticommunist discourse stemming from Eastern Europe and has had a long afterlife in postsocialist political thinking. Western social scientists involved in alienation research in the 1970s-80s, by contrast, worked with the assumption that for their socialist counterparts “there was no alienation in socialism” and therefore saw little point in building a shared field of inquiry on this subject.
This panel will investigate the varied experiences and forms of knowledge between and invisible to these two positions by exploring how alienation was theorized and discussed in socialism, empirical studies of alienation in socialist work, tactics applied to the problem of alienation, and successful cases in which alienation was confronted head-on, mitigated, or even overcome.
Individual papers will explore the involvement of Eastern European social scientists in the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Alienation in the 1970–80s (Adela Hîncu), Polish socialism’s campaign to disalienate work by bringing artists into the industrial workplace (Eliza Rose), and philosophical discourses about alienation in Yugoslavia and their relation to practices of socialist democracy and ideas about human rights (Una Blagojević).

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Elena Razlogova, Concordia U (Canada)

Papers

• Alienation Theory and Research in the 1970s–80s and the Problem of Socialism - Adela Hincu, Inst of Contemporary History (Slovenia)

• Hydra-Headed Homo Faber: Cooperation and Disalienation in the Polish Industrial Workplace - Eliza Rose, UNC at Chapel Hill

• Theories of Alienation and Socialist Democracy in Yugoslavia - Una Blagojevic, Babeș-Bolyai U (Romania)

Discussant

• Jessie Labov, Corvinus U (Hungary)