Everyday Socialism

Everyday Socialism
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : OCLC:1127645255
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (55 Downloads)

Synopsis Everyday Socialism by : Rachel Reeves

Everyday Post-Socialism

Everyday Post-Socialism
Author :
Publisher : Springer
Total Pages : 281
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781349950898
ISBN-13 : 1349950890
Rating : 4/5 (98 Downloads)

Synopsis Everyday Post-Socialism by : Jeremy Morris

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

Coca-Cola Socialism

Coca-Cola Socialism
Author :
Publisher : Central European University Press
Total Pages : 362
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789633862018
ISBN-13 : 9633862019
Rating : 4/5 (18 Downloads)

Synopsis Coca-Cola Socialism by : Radina Vučetić

This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy. Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.

Ambiguous Transitions

Ambiguous Transitions
Author :
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Total Pages : 466
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781785335990
ISBN-13 : 1785335995
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis Ambiguous Transitions by : Jill Massino

Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.

Seasoned Socialism

Seasoned Socialism
Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Total Pages : 396
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780253040992
ISBN-13 : 025304099X
Rating : 4/5 (92 Downloads)

Synopsis Seasoned Socialism by : Anastasia Lakhtikova

This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

Synthetic Socialism

Synthetic Socialism
Author :
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Total Pages : 305
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781469606774
ISBN-13 : 1469606771
Rating : 4/5 (74 Downloads)

Synopsis Synthetic Socialism by : Eli Rubin

Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.

Heaven on Earth

Heaven on Earth
Author :
Publisher : Encounter Books
Total Pages : 438
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781893554788
ISBN-13 : 1893554783
Rating : 4/5 (88 Downloads)

Synopsis Heaven on Earth by : Joshua Muravchik

"The search for the Promised Land took socialists in diverse directions: revolution, communes and kibbutzim, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third Worldism. But none of these paths led to the prophesied utopia. Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of easy abundance or in midwifing the birth of a "New Man," as their theory promised. Some socialist governments abandoned their grandiose goals and satisfied themselves with making slight modifications to capitalism, while others plowed ahead doggedly, often inducing staggering human catastrophes. Then, after two hundred years of wishful thinking and fitful governance, socialism suddenly imploded in the 1990s in a fin du siecle drama of falling walls, collapsing regimes and frantic revisions of doctrine."--BOOK JACKET.

Everyday Soviet Utopias

Everyday Soviet Utopias
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 467
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351019767
ISBN-13 : 1351019767
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Synopsis Everyday Soviet Utopias by : Anna Alekseyeva

This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades – the 1970s and 1980s – sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues that the last two decades of the Soviet Union were not characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued; attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considers what these utopian ideas looked like through housing schemes, layouts of districts and cities, design of objects and interiors, and proposals for the organisation of family and social life. Relating developments in the Soviet Union to evolving social theory and postmodernism more broadly, the book draws transnational parallels between the intellectual history of east and west in the late twentieth century.

Negotiating Normality

Negotiating Normality
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 379
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351503280
ISBN-13 : 1351503286
Rating : 4/5 (80 Downloads)

Synopsis Negotiating Normality by : Daniela Koleva

This book is about state socialism, not as a political system, but as an "ecosystem" of interactions between the state and the citizens it sought to control. It includes case studies that demonstrate how the major ideological principles of socialism translated into motives guiding people's lives. This unique post-revisionist study focuses on people's lives and experiences rather than political systems. The studies are grouped around three common elements—socialist labor, the new socialist man, and the socialist way of life. Using first-hand accounts, the authors find minute deviations from the norms that eventually lead to renegotiation of the norms themselves. Focusing on routines, not extremes, they present socialism in its "normal" state. The volume demonstrates different national strategies for dealing with the past in the post-socialist world. Studies of the socialist past may strive to be objective, but their messages tend to be complex. Rather than arriving at one truth about the nature of socialism, this volume explores the many ways people have survived the system.

The Unmaking of Soviet Life

The Unmaking of Soviet Life
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 300
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0801487730
ISBN-13 : 9780801487736
Rating : 4/5 (30 Downloads)

Synopsis The Unmaking of Soviet Life by : Caroline Humphrey

The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten essays from award-winning author Caroline Humphrey. Humphrey explores such topics as the mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism, locating them in the experiences of a wide range of subjects.