Between(post)Socialismand(neo)Liberalism

SofiaJuly2013
workshopsdescriptions
I.UrbanTheoryLab:ThinkingAboutHousingAlternatives
Saturday,20.07
14:3018:00
II.MappingthePostsocialistLeft
Sunday,21.07
14:3018:00
III.TherecentwaveofprotestsinEastCentralEuropeincomparison
Monday,22.07
15:0017:00
IV.NeoliberalizingSocialismARearrangementofaMoralUniverse
Wednesday,24.07
14:0016:00
V.Institutionalizingourproject.PoliticalPlatformandIntellectualCooperation
Wednesday,24.07
16:0019:00
I.URBANTHEORYLAB:thinkingabouthousingalternatives
MaryTaylor,AnzeZadel,ThemisPellas
20.07.2013
14:3018:00
***Weaskpeopletobringwhatdatatheycanonhousingalternativesinthe
historyandpresentoftheplace(s)theystudy/live/workin.
This workshop will focus on making the theory that we find central to our task of bridging the
academic/popular divide. One of the tasks we face is not only to critique liberal ideology
but to make it accessible to broader publicsto share language. The idea is to develop a
way of using critical theory that develops from discussing practical situations in practical
and practicable language that overcomes the crisis of representation on the left. This
workshop will focus on developing common (and popularly accessible) language and
media.
This lab will focus on "affordable housing". Inspired by the methods of workers inquiry, we
will explore methods of participatory community theater as a tool to democratize dialogue,
to create a group language based on understanding of different social situations, to
examine internalized systems of power, and to shift from abstract concepts to concrete
embodied experience, and podcasting as a placebased storytelling technique. We will
end the workshop by "drafting" a series of directions for new housing possibilities. taking
into account the historical background and radical political change in the formerly socialist
region.
It is not common today to see exemplary existing models on how to acquire housing at
affordable prices. Through the workshop we want to excavate affordable housing options in
the regions represented. We will encourage collaborative investigation into alternatives
suchashousingcommonsandhomesteadingandtheirviabilityascurrentoptions.
What are the steps to be taken to instigate a wider awareness of these alternatives and
encourage community engagement as well as the initiatives towards realization of new
prototypes? What are historical precedents? What are the financial, organizational and
legal challenges facing these alternatives? For whom will affordable be made
accessible?
II.MappingthePostsocialistleft
RossenDjagalov
21.07.2013
14:3018:00
Our last two Budapest meetings have not only served as a vantage point on leftist parties,
journals, intellectual circles, and social movements throughout the postsocialist world but have
also enabled the encounter of their representatives. No matter how hastily organized, the second
Budapest summer school in 2012 attempted to be a representative event as we made an extra
effort to bring to Budapest activists & academics from most of the different societies comprising
the Soviet bloc, a tradition we are continuing in our third summer school. In the process of
organizing such transnational events, however, we continue to face the same basic questions:
Whom do we invite? How do we get in touch with them? What are they like? The ambition of this
workshop is to make these answers easier next time, to enable both practical communication
between kindred groups in the region and analytical examination of its leftist social movements
and intellectual currents. Such an exercise in mapping is not meant to delimit the scope of our
international interests or engagementsfor we understand the limitations and contingencies of
the postsocialist framework,but only as the first step in understanding our relation to the
internationalleft.
The process of preparing this map should reflect its approximate and dynamic character. We
are not preparing a definitive statement. Our factual knowledge, let alone ideological
assessment, of those of those formations is objectively limited, especially when they are not
represented at our meeting. We fully realize that by the time we put them on the map, some of
the formations will have disappeared, changed character and scale, or been replaced by new
ones. We should, therefore, not only begin this map well before our workshop in July but should
also continually correct and update it long after weve left Sofia. The digital platformfor we will
have to attract some computer literature peopleshould be thus easy to manipulate by
nonspecialists. The July workshop itself will take advantage of the fact the sheer expertise that
wellhaveconcentratedatthesametimeandplace.
In practice, such a map should not limit itself to the name of one or several leftist organizations,
movements, and journals scribbled over a particular country, but should, in bulletpoint format,
list such basic information origins, ideological features, international orientation, etc. Finally, we
should also map the different transnational/ regional organizations such as the Subversive
Forum, European Alternatives, Krytyka Polityczna, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and others that
alsoseektoconnectsomeoftheformationstowhichwebelong.
III.TherecentwaveofprotestsinEastCentralEuropeincomparison
MariyaIvancheva
22.07.2013
15:0017:00
This workshop aims to enhance a critical comparative analysis of the recent protest wave in
EastCentral Europe. There has been hardly any country in the region without minor or major
political and economic crisis. These have mostly resulted in spontaneous small or largescale
protests. The regional wave of protest has been coincident with the global wave of antiausterity
protests since the Greek December of 2008, culminating in the 2011 with the Arab Spring and
Occupy, and then peaking in 20122013 in Eastern Europe and Turkey. Yet, while protests in
most other parts of the world have received extensive coverage and analysis, this has not been
the case with the events in the postsocialist world. Traditional social movement literature,
attuned to the research on the global justice movement in the West, has a prescriptive optics,
which fails to grasp the complex forms of protest in the region. The latter are difficult to tackle
analytically visvis the conceptualization of 1989 as a watershed of processes that went far
before and beyond it the insistence of academic literature on the frames of the nonviolent
protest and colored and peaceful revolutions when speaking of regional uprisings the
confused vocabularies of left, right, and center in the political and media sphere and the
sidetrack of mass mobilizations into the dangerous realm of the rising Right extreme in the
region.
To address these issues and design a research program on the recent protest wave, the
workshopwillbestructuredinthefollowingway:
Short presentations of participants on protests in the respective country they come from or do
researchon.
Brief introduction of the theoretical framework of social movement studies/studies of
contentious politics and the work done through this method in the region. Discussion of other
competingparadigmsandtheoreticalframeworks,adequatetostudytheseprotests.
A collective outline of questions that would need to be answered when writing about the
movements in the region that would allow us to discuss prospects of radicalization and
politicizationofsocialeconomicprotestcampaigns.
While all participants could be engaged in the discussion during the workshop, its aiming it to
collect a number of contributions that would result in textual analyses along the framework
developed during the workshop and summer school. As an end result the workshop aims to
gather a number of participants that would ideally cover most countries with major campaigns, to
write papers along the proposed theoretical lines. This group should gather after the workshop
and agree on possible dates for online/offline meetings, preliminary and final deadlines, and
publicationthatcouldbetargetedbysuchtexts.
IV.NeoliberalizingSocialismARearrangementofaMoralUniverse
AgnesGagyi&RazvanDumitru
24.07.2013
14:0016:00
We aim to look at the process in which systems of social interaction and related cosmologies
(or moral universes) were transformed by the postsocialist transition. We believe that such an
approach to the social history that brought us to the present day is indispensable for new
projects of emancipatory politics. It sheds light on a territory of symbolic, moral and spiritual
forces that one might want to reject as false consciousness, but the analytical eye will have to
recognizeasamajorelementofsocialandpoliticaldynamics.
Oneofourinsightsisananalyticapproachthatconsiderschangeasamagicalprocess.
A magical process responds to a magical thinking that is something in which the impossible
becomes possible. At the societal level it may be seen as an alteration of reality from its previous
course. An example would be a moment or process of transcendence that reorganizes ones
universe so that one becomes able to live a life one would have considered immoral and/or
impossible before. According to some anthropologists (Robbins, Zigon) this means a
reorganizationorachangeinthevaluesstructure.
In this sense the postsocialist transition was the displacement of the values centered around
the proclamation of solidarity and egalitarianism as paramount values predicated by the socialist
regimesandpartiallyinternalizedbymostofthepopulation.
However, during the socialist period these paramount values were in dissonance with the
individual struggle to achieve a better urban and modern life but also to conjure the scarcity
embedded in the socialist economies (Lampland 1991, Verdery 1996). The sudden end of the
socialist regime and its discourse (Yurchak 2006) was replaced by an official and elite driven
discourse centered on entrepreneurialism with the affirmation of individualist set of values,
usually clustered under the umbrella of neoliberalism (see Dunn 2004, Rose 1991). This
replacement found a prepared terrain at the level of daily practices through which individuals,
their families and broader networks lived through the scarcities of the socialist systems thus,
these inherited networks of social cooperation were put to work in new contexts of capital
extraction. The more recent surge in social tensions in the context of crisis and austerity in our
region often takes the form of fundamentalist and transcendental ethnic essences. Can we
understandthemasanewattempttoreorderthevaluesstructure?
What we ask in this panel is to give an account on how this sudden change, obviously traceable
during a short period, had impacted on different categories of people? Who were the people
most permeated by the new discourse, did that mean an adoption of a new set of values? It is
obvious that some people were better fitted through their positions and experiences to benefit
from the change, however where were the old values based on solidarity and the denial of
selfinterest left? Do we witness in the recent period a reemergence of the old set of values
mostly denied in the last two decades from public prominence being transformed and disguised
in political movements such as nationalism and populism? Is the disillusionment with the period
of the transition period generating a new shift in values? In this sense, do new nationalisms and
populismscarryagainmagicaltraitspointingtowardsanewtransformation?
We invite papers and ideas on popular moral understandings of postsocialist situations from
various social positions. We also invite you to recommend theoretical tools and existing literature
that might help us think further and compare our cases with similar social phenomena in
differentglobalandhistoricalcontexts.
V.Institutionalizingourproject.PoliticalPlatformandIntellectualCooperation
AgnesGagyi
24.07.2013
16:0019:00
POLITICALPLATFORM
There is consent that our various initiatives for social change in Eastern Europe should
cooperate.Thereareseverallevelsofthereasonsforthat.
our position within Europe. As the periphery of Europe, we have been divided through
competing against each other. Our only chance to influence European politics which influence
usanywayistoformacommonEasternpoliticalblock.
our position within and outside Europe provincialize Europe, globalize Eastern Europe. From
East Europe, half in and half out of European discussions, we are in a position where we both
have the chance and the need to broaden our perspective, to think and organize beyond Fortress
Europe, reimagine our struggle with relevance to the global level, and build coalitions with
strugglesindecolonialspaces.
symbolic identification. On the symbolic level, dividing and ruling Eastern Europe worked
through nationalisms and nesting orientalisms. For a fullfledged emancipatory project, we will
need to offer another kind of symbolic identification. To emancipate ourselves from under both
enlightened eurocentric antipopulism and compensatory nationalism, we need to put Eastern
Europe on the map again as a scene of global history instead of a secondclass periphery of
Western modernization, to transcend the closed circuit of our relation to imperial centers,
reformulate the question of our emancipation with respect to the global level, and build our
alliances according to that. As Fanon said, we need to become able to imagine our own
existence.
extraregional cooperations and funding. So far, our experience is that East European
organizations are integrated into European struggles through Western hubs, our problematic
specific to Eastern Europe hardly hits the surface on discussions on common European
strategies, and European funds travel through Western hubs that distribute them without clear
knowledge on actors and dynamics in our local struggles. We need to form a bloc in order to
represent our own case on a European scene. Also, we need to form this bloc in relation with
nonEuropeanpartners.
cooperation for strategy at home. Connecting our struggles can empower us locally from
learning from each other and using each others examples in our campaigns, to coordinated
actions.
I propose that on the workshop, we agree on the plan to bring about such a platform, maybe
produce a very basic outline for it, and declare our decision to create it. The final panel of the
Sofia summer school will definitely not provide enough space and capacities to go into the
relevant details of such a platform. I suggest that we leave the articulation of the platform to a
sort of first congress, which could take place in autumn. It could be a process alike last
summers decision to create a common East European discussion platform, followed by the
morepoliticallyedgedOctobermeetinginBucharest,whereLeftEastwaslaunched.
Todiscussanddecide:
doweagreeoncreatingsuchaplatform
howdowebringaboutthe1stcongress
Todiscussinpreparationofthe1stcongress:
whataretheminimalbasicpointsofitsmissionweagreeupon.name.
ideasforitsfunctionsthathavenotbeendiscussed
INTELLECTUALCOLLABORATION
Beside the political platform, there is a need to institutionalize collaboration in the narrower
section of our work, which will be however overrepresented at the Sofia meeting: the intellectual
front. The nature of intellectual work and collaboration is different from the political one. Here we
consider different strategic priorities, which need to be addressed in a specific organization.
Suchprioritieswouldbe:
institutionalizing against the autocolonization of knowledge production. If we are to produce
emancipatory knowledge on Eastern Europe as not a timelagged province, but a genuine scene
of global history, we will need institutionalized opportunities to produce knowledge and talk about
it to each other and to Western and global partners without the obligation to immediately and
separately translate our research into vocabularies developed within Western contexts. So far,
theveryconditionofproducingandsharingsuchknowledgeistodoitinsuchvocabularies.
linking local efforts for institutionalization. As groups, we are on various levels of
institutionalization at home, and it is our collective aim to broaden the impact of our knowledge
production, both in higher education, peoples universities, movements, and the public sphere.
We need to bring our efforts together and think of ways to support each others work, while
keeping in sight the differences between local contexts and strategies. The various forms of a
thinktank,intellectualcooperative,chainofinstitutesetc.canbediscussedhere.
funding.Fortheabove,weneedacollectiveorganizationthat
a) raises funds and coordinates regional projects that are of universal relevance to us (e.g.the
antipopulismprojectacollectiveonlinelibrary)
b) makes possible a more complex coordination between local priorities, needs and strategies,
thatis:makesacollectiveorganizationusefulforlocalpurposes.
Todiscussanddecide:
doweagreeoncreatingsuchanorganization
howdowebringaboutameetingwhereweestablishit
Todiscussinpreparationforthefoundingmeeting::
whataretheprioritiesweagreeuponforitsmission?
howdoweimagineitsorganizationalform?
FORUM
LeftEast
weshouldhaveitasacommonplatformforallthemovementstopublishtheirthingsthere.
this will entail an upgrading in terms of functioning. It's very hard to do it like it is now because it
requires a lot of work. We need an East European editorial board. At least one person from each
organization should coordinate the production of texts from their respective organizations and
promote the site. Technically, we can keep the administrative part at CriticAtac, to upload things
onthewebsite,butgettingsomesortoffinancingforthatwouldhelpsinceitisalotofwork.
making LeftEast stand by its own, not linked with CA like it is now is an option, but this is
requires two things: 1) to make sure there will be a lot of texts 2) an investment in terms of
buying a domain and paying someone to do the technical part. we had the advantage of having
theCAinfrastructureinplacesowecouldbuildonit.
so, as a suggestion for institutionalization we should build a board and make sure people
committotheprojectandbecomespartofourefforts,acommongood.
Todiscussanddecide:
setuptheeditorialboard
setupabasicschemeforhowitwillwork
decide on how the editorial board will continue its work, and how others can contribute once we
leaveSofia
Tobrainstormanddiscuss:
havearoundofproposalsonhowtobroadentheimpactandfunctionsofLeftEast