Eszter Bartha, Tamás Krausz, and Bálint Mezei, eds. <i>State Socialism in Eastern Europe: History, Theory, Anti-Capitalist Alternatives</i>

Historical materialism, once the theoretical bedrock of state socialism, has long been dismissed by Eastern European scholarship about state socialism. A revitalization of Eastern Europe’s left-wing interpretations and critiques of state socialism is overdue. This task comes naturally for the editors of State Socialism in Eastern Europe, since they and many contributing authors are founders and members of Eszmélet [Consciousness], a Hungarian anti-capitalist journal of social critique. Their present volume narrates state socialism’s economic, legal, and ideological turn to neoliberalism in a context of global historical conditions and social contradictions. They also provide a fresh account of state socialism’s practices, most notably by attending to gender inequalities as a critique of socialist labor divisions in chapters by Eszter Bartha and Susan Zimmermann.The editors frame the diverse chapters as an interrogation of backwardness (material and imagined) and totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. The overarching narrative of the volume argues that state socialism’s erstwhile popularity was built on social progress that addressed material backwardness, eventually through neoliberal policies. These economic policies became unsustainable and incompatible with state socialism’s political ideology. Moreover, party elites’ neoliberal turn consolidated their sociopolitical capital into financial capital, eroding socialism’s legitimacy among its political base. Present-day illiberal political movements in the region reread state socialism’s history as both fundamentally backward and irredeemably totalitarian to politically distance their own current embourgeoisement policies from those of state socialism. The volume demonstrates how varieties of state socialism represented alternatives to centralized totalitarian and decentralized capitalist development and earnestly (though not always successfully) addressed material backwardness. Moreover, the editors insist that political collapses in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 neither mark the end of socialism’s effects nor relegate socialist historical interpretations to narratives of failure.The geographic coverage of the volume, promising all of Eastern Europe in its title, is primarily Hungary. Six chapters focus on socialism and postsocialism in Hungary, one on privatization in the Soviet Union during perestroika, one on postsocialist Slovak history textbooks, and two on the theory and ideology underpinning state socialism broadly across Eastern Europe (though drawing heavily on Hungary). The attention to Hungarian state socialism is practical not only due to the authors’ backgrounds but also because Hungary’s “third-road” socialism, most pronounced in Eastern Europe, serves as a key illustration of alternatives to “totalitarian” models. The Hungarian focus also helps deliver on the volume’s subtitle, which highlights “anti-capitalist alternatives” and demonstrates a “path from state socialism to illiberalism” (17).The book begins with a section on “A Third Road in Eastern Europe.” The first two chapters detail how Hungary’s interconnectedness with the West generated economic and legal practices resembling neoliberalism. Tamás Gerőcs and András Pinkasz connect Hungary’s foreign trade and finance strategies after the 1968 New Economic Model (NEM) with the entrenchment of neoliberal commercial and financial state economic practices. Commercially, the NEM turned Hungary into a bridge for selling goods between East and West—Russian oil for Western consumer goods. Financially, plans for profitable trade became self-fulfilling prophecies, creating a reliance on hard currency and foreign loans and encouraging a spiral of marketization to solve production imbalances. Attila Antal argues that neoliberalism in Hungary grew out of state socialism’s legal system. Complex legal practices served as a smoke screen behind which capital and private ownership could replace state management as the center of the economy. Witnessing privatization in the West, party elites depoliticized private ownership and codified unrestricted capital accumulation for private and corporate owners.The last two chapters in the section deal with gendered labor practices in socialist Hungary. Susan Zimmermann argues that divisions of labor in paid and unpaid work under state socialism in Hungary followed traditional gender roles by assigning undesirable night work predominantly to women. Thus gender divisions of labor disrupted class solidarity, producing socioeconomic inequalities between male and female workers. Some Hungarian women engaged in debates both domestically and with the International Labor Organization to pursue “a politics of class and gender aimed at the improvement of women workers’ class position” (110). Building on this chapter, Eszter Bartha argues that the apparent lack of gender critiques among socialist intelligentsia stemmed from two causes. First, the predominantly male socialist intelligentsia privileged class identities over gender as a relevant social category. Second, the state ignored gendered critiques of authority since class-based agitation from the Left threatened the state’s proletarian credentials. Reading interviews with male and female laborers, Bartha tracks how their aspirations were gendered: men sought social prestige through university degrees, and women sought material stability by becoming low-level administrators. Ironically, Bartha points out, the socialist researchers who collected these interviews blindly ignored gender divisions.The second section, “System Changes and Alternatives,” evaluates privatization at two different levels of society: from inner-circle party members in the Soviet Union (Tamás Krausz) to villagers in southern Hungary (Chris Hann). Krausz contends that “aspirations of the upper layers of the [Soviet] ruling apparatuses to preserve their privileged social position at any cost” turned market and private property reforms away from rhetoric about preserving socialism to preserving elite individuals’ social positions (171). Party elites recognized that socialist markets and private property indeed exploited workers’ labor, eventually accepting and pushing for economic reforms, represented by Stanislav Shatalin’s 500 Day Program in May 1990. The rapid speed of privatization and the insider knowledge in elite circles meant that party members were able to consolidate ownership of state property for themselves. Chris Hann’s chapter also considers the legacies of socialism and privatization with a local analysis of the southern Hungarian town of Kiskunhalas since 1949. Based on his ethnographic research and experience there, Hann argues that Sovietization successfully industrialized the town while alienating workers from the products of their labor. Quasi-capitalist activities in the 1970s were welcomed by ordinary people (even though these theoretically contradicted their own labor interests in Marxist-Leninist terms). But then, in the 1990s, unfettered capitalist practices exacerbated the mobility of people and capital flowing out of the town, intensifying inequalities. Thus, Hann argues, the recent illiberal backlash to global capitalism (fueled by xenophobic rhetoric) has its roots in nostalgia for an idealized period of state socialism.Turning to public memory about state socialism, section three (“The New Canon”) deals with contemporary history textbooks in Slovakia (Slávka Otčenášová) and Hungary (Bálint Mezei). These authors identify three similar trends in both countries. First, the variety of textbooks exploded in the 1990s, but since then state-controlled narratives have returned. Second, current right-wing states’ historical narratives have rewritten peoples’ experiences of socialism into thinking in terms of oppressors versus oppressed, where the oppressed are either victims or resisters. Third, by comparing and equating state socialism with Nazism, popular understanding of socialism discounts the varieties of existing socialism, instead lumping it all together under the idea of totalitarianism. In Slovakia, Otčenášová shows how the “Other” in historical narratives persisted under state socialism, though always in terms of class difference. Since the 1990s, state-supported narratives have instead promoted an imagined Slovak peasant, standing in for traditional Christian values and economic self-sufficiency, in contrast to socialist figures who represent industrialization and modern social reordering—such as women’s full involvement in the workforce. In Hungary, the pluralization of historical narratives began in 1985 with a law permitting teachers to create their own pedagogical methods. In the 1990s, a lack of historical scholarship on state socialism led the 1995 National Core Curriculum to promote interdisciplinary approaches to describe the recent past, though this became unpopular. Today, Mezei argues, the Hungarian Ministry of Education’s right-wing historical narrative is only balanced by liberal views, while “left-wing arguments are increasingly marginalized” (239).In the concluding two essays, György Wiener and Péter Szigeti provide a theoretical framework for the trajectory of state socialism in Eastern Europe. Wiener argues that regime changes in Eastern Europe demonstrate a materialist view of historical social progress. Socialist revolutions (and installed socialist states) succeeded in the world’s semi-peripheries, where societies were not sufficiently bourgeois or industrialized. Thus the new socialist states had to perform functions of economic development that resembled capitalism and entailed consolidating state and party power, in fact continuing the course of capitalist social development outlined by Marx. Szigeti’s chapter turns to the concept of the agora as both a source and a constant concern for legitimacy for the socialist state. He raises an open question at the very close of the volume: How will future socialist experiments maintain a vanguard party that does not become a vessel for producing a new elite social class?The authors of State Socialism in Eastern Europe provide valuable critiques of state socialism’s legacy, mainly in a Hungarian context, connecting it to the larger region of Eastern Europe. Analysis of other state socialisms would further develop the volume’s arguments that anti-capitalist alternatives take many shapes in diverse historical conditions. The economic, legal, and theoretical focus of the volume’s wide-ranging chapters will interest specialists on state socialism in Hungary, though copyediting issues make the reading at times challenging. Nevertheless, the authors convincingly insist that historical-materialist approaches can shed new light on state socialism’s contested memory and, in particular, that illiberal anti-gender politics today draw on a history of state socialism’s gendered labor practices.

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