Democracy and Socialism

Béla Greskovits' presentation on economic populism and neoliberalism

Neoliberalism and Economic Populism| Béla Greskovits Béla Greskovits discusses the relationship between economic populism and neoliberalismBéla Greskovits is University Professor at the Department of Internatio...

Ákos Kopper brilliant presentation speculates whether or not populism lends itself to the construction of an alternative international order.

Populism and the International Order| Ákos Kopper Ákos Kopper brilliant presentation speculates whether or not populism lends itself to the construction of an alternative international order.Ákos Kopper is A...

Carlos de la Torre and Enrique Peruzotti's excellent theoretical and historical overview of Populism in Latin America

Populism in Latin America | Carlos de la Torre and Enrique Peruzotti Carlos de la Torre and Enrique Peruzotti discuss the complex history of populism in Latin America. Introduction by Antal Orkeny: 00:00 - 7:20Presentation by ...

"Populism and Social Integration: The Role of Civil Society" by Márton Gerő

"Populism and Social Integration: The Role of Civil Society" by Márton Gerő Márton Gerő presents theoretically the relation of populism and civil society, and shows, empirically, how this interaction unfolds in the case of Hungary.Th...

"A Theory of Populism" by Pierre Rosanvallon

"A Theory of Populism" by Pierre Rosanvallon Pierre Rosanvallon develops an illuminating theory of populism which emphasizes the centrality of electoral majority over the fundamental principles of libe...

"Populism as Politics and the Social Context of Populism" with Andrew Arato, Márton Gerő, Antal Örkény

https://youtu.be/KW20or7vvR0

Populism as Politics and the Social Context of Populism Andrew Arato lays out his conceptual definition of populism, and place the contemporary version in a historical set of stages. He then distinguishes left and...

The 2021 Spring Series "Populism in History and Theory" will feature distinguished scholars from around the world.

For more information visit: https://sites.google.com/view/populism-in-history-and-theory/home

Democracy and Socialism updated their website address.

The Chinese historical experience with socialism is one of the most complex and significant cases in world history. Ying Chen undertakes the daunting challenge of presenting a sweeping survey of the Chinese trajectory from the pre-revolution context all the way through to the present. She explicates the structure of the socialist system in China, highlighting its achievements and failures. Chen then takes us through the reform period, shedding light on the political backdrop of this massive transition process. She argues how the gains made during the socialist period made the reform "miracles" possible, while raising caution about the unsustainable nature of these miracles.

"China: Socialism and After" with Ying Chen Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Jens Beckert's fascinating presentation explores the conceptions of temporarility and futurity in Socialist thought, art, and politics. Beckert's aim is not to wager on what the future of socialism will be, but instead to examine the ways in which socialist imaginations of the "future" mobilize social actors. In contrast to the endless linear-time of capitalist modernity, socialist ideas contain, Beckert claims, a kind of eschatology of the end of history.

"The 'Future' in Socialism" with Jens Beckert Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Ross Poole takes us through the trajectory of social democracy after the second world war. The social democratic welfare state arrangement throughout many countries in the West came out of a compromise between labor and capital. Its eventual decline associated with the rise of neoliberalism forces us to take account of both its achievements and its limitations.

Post-War Social Democracy and the Welfare State Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Sanjay Reddy's goal here, in his own words, is to temper enthusiasm for socialism with "a dose of realism." He does this by taking us through a brief, critical and enlightening overview of János Kornai's intellectual project which involved a comparative analysis of socialist and capitalist economic systems. Reddy draws attention to Kornai's incisive criticisms of the socialist system, which Kornai thought was bound to fail because of its fundamentally political character. However, Reddy also importantly highlights the very limitations of Kornai's comparativist ambitions because Kornai never subjected the capitalist system to the same level of scrutiny and, paradoxically, he failed to recognize how many of his insights, ranging from his theory of the soft budget constraint to the problems of shortages, also applied to non-socialist economic systems.

"János Kornai's Critique of the Socialist System" with Sanjay Reddy Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Nancy Fraser discusses her recent text which attempts to rethink what socialism means and looks like in the 21st century. To do this, it is first necessary to understand what contemporary capitalism is. Fraser demonstrates how capitalism is not just an economic system, but, to use her phrase, an "institutionalized social order" which requires a whole set of background social relations and conditions, ranging from ecology, politics, to gender and sexuality. Fraser presents an innovative and generative synthesis of Marx and Polanyi to sketch this expanded conception of capitalism. The question of socialism of course remains to be fully answered and ought to be explored further. Andrew Arato's critical discussion raises issues fundamental to Fraser's ongoing project.

"Capitalism and Socialism Today" with Nancy Fraser Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

This is a collaborative project of leading intellectuals to rethink socialism today.
Our Youtube channel is dedicated to creating a public heterodox archive of socialist ideas:
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Socialism: Past and Present This project is a collaborative attempt by Andrew Arato, Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, and other Faculty members of the New ...

Despite Arendt's aversion to the so called "social question," her seminal text, On Revolution, offers us political insights that are crucial to rethinking socialism today. Richard Bernstein's masterful presentation begins with an overview of Arendt's theoretical framework, distilling her unique conception of action, freedom, politics, power, and revolution. He then offers a critical reconstruction of Arendt's arguments in On Revolution which culminates in her affirmation of councils, a likely political form for socialism today.

Arendt on Revolution Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

In this session Julie Mostov takes a historical view of the Yugoslav socialist self-management experiment. She gives a brief but rich account of Yugoslaivan state formation, and the post WW2 socio-cultural and political context in which the Tito-Stalin split occurred. This split had massive ramifications and motivated the search for an alternative to Soviet style command economy. The Yugoslav worker management system arose out of this complex situation. Mostov and Arato then discuss the structure of the system, critically examining its functions and limitations, and analyzing its complicated relationship to the single party political system of Yugoslavia.

Socialist Self-Management: Yugoslav System Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Oz Frankel and Omri Boehm discuss the complicated legacy of socialist Zionism. They explore the ideology of labor Zionism and the Kibbutzim experience highlighting their scope and possibilities. Frankel and Boehm share a fundamental skepticism about the aspirations of socialist Zionism because of its exclusionary practices and its complicity in the settler colonial project. The discussion also focuses on the gradual decline of the Israeli Welfare state and the consolidation of neoliberalism, raising questions about the contemporary political situation in Israel.

Socialism in Israel Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

In the second of a two-part series on the socialist experience in Cuba, Gabriel Vignoli continues from the historical context he set in the first session. He tries to show how the socialist revolution was motivated not by a priori ideological commitments of the actors involved, but emerged out of strategic consideration shaped by Cuba's experience with colonialism and imperialism. Vignoli suggests that the revolution introduced a completely new political, symbolic and cultural grammar which fundamentally transformed Cuban society. The revolution in the postcolony thus, resignified the category of socialism and nationalism altogether.

Socialism in the Post-colony: Cuban Revolution pt. 2 Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

In the first of the two sessions on the socialist experience in Cuba, Gabriel Vignoli frames his historical exploration of this post-colonial socialist project at the intersection of many axes of tension: theory against experience, dogma against experimentation, determinism against tactical innovation, and nationalism against socialism. In his succinct and illuminating historical account of the pre-revolutionary situation in Cuba, he analyzes how these tensions played out and how the conjuncture was shaded, limited and contoured by the dual forces of colonialism and American imperialism.

Socialism in the Post-colony: Cuban Revolution pt. 1 Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Anwar Shaikh begins by succinctly providing an illuminating account of the broad contours of economics as a discipline. He examines the limitations and dangers of the neo-classical orthodoxy that plagues the economics discipline to frame the importance of the Marx and Hayek debate. He then systematically lays out some of the fundamental elements of Hayek's economic theory and traces the development of Hayek's views on capitalism and socialism as economic systems.

Marx contra Hayek Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

The relation between Socialism and the colonial question is a very significant but often ignored topic in discussions on socialism. Benoit Challand and Ann Stoler shed light on the importance of this issue. Benoit critically explores the practices of European socialists in the colonies and the postcolonial socialist experiments in some African countries. He then lays out reasons for why socialist practices was unable to address the colonial question in a meaningful and generative way. Ann Stoler attempts to highlight the theoretical limits of studying socialist practices in the colonies by examining the complicated legacy and resonance of the Bandung conference and the experience of socialism in Indonesia.

Socialism and Colonialism Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the sessions had to be moved online. The video and audio quality is not always consistent. We apologize for the inconvenienc...

Montero discusses Kirchernism, a Left-populism with antecedents in Peronism, as an Argentinian version of socialism with redistributive policies. Using Arato's tripartite distinction between populism as movement, government and regime, she wants to examine the democratic and non-democratic characteristics in Kirchernism and considers whether or not it can be meaningfully differentiated from democracy at the level of regime.

Finchelstein resists to accept the premise that there might be any relationship between populism and socialism. Populism, which Finchelstein boils down to the centrality of the leader as a personification of the "people" and the embodiment of the popular will, is a political theology with an authoritarian and exclusionary core that is fundamentally incompatible with socialism.

Arato's critical response rearticulates his argument for populism as a distinctive regime, and assets, contrary to Finchelstein, that populism and socialism have an elective affinity albeit he agrees that the consequences the affinity are invariably dangerous.

More Info: https://sites.google.com/view/sociologyandsocialism

21st Century Socialism in the Andes? Montero discusses Kirchernism, a Left-populism with antecedents in Peronism, as an Argentinian version of socialism with redistributive policies. Using Arato...

Arato sets out to explore how thinkers of western Marxism, chiefly Gramsci and Korsch, discussed the political phenomena of councils. Gramsci's pre-prison writings sought to develop a theory of council which was at the center of his emancipatory project. But gradually, while in prison, he abandoned its centrality after partly coming under the spell of Lenin and the Russian experiment. Korsch on the other hand, developing his thought during the interwar period in Germany, took a more critical view of councils which he viewed as a provisional government fundamentally incapable of uniform democratic representation.

Socialism and Councils Arato sets out to explore how thinkers of western Marxism, chiefly Gramsci and Korsch, discussed the political phenomena of councils. Gramsci's pre-prison wr...

Duncan Foley surveys the development of the concept of socialism from the French Revolution to the Socialist Calculation Debate. Karl Marx’s politics of revolutionary socialism led by an empowered proletariat nurtured by capital accumulation envisions socialism as a “top- down” system resting on political institutions, despite Marx’s keen appreciation of the long-period analysis of the organization of social production in the classical political economists. Collectivist thinking in the work of Enrico Barone and Wilfredo Pareto paved the way for the discussion of socialism purely in terms of the allocation of resources. The Soviet experiment abandoned the mixed economy model of the New Economic Policy for a political-bureaucratic administration of production only loosely connected to theoretical concepts of social- ism. The socialist calculation debate reductively recast the problem of socialism as a problem of allocation of resources, leading to general equilibrium theory. Friedrich Hayek responded to the socialist calculation debate by shifting the ground of discussion from class relations to information revelation.

Socialist Alternatives to Capitalism: Marx to Hayek Foley surveys the development of the concept of socialism from the French Revolution to the Socialist Calculation Debate. Karl Marx’s politics of revolutiona...

Kautsky's criticism of the Russian revolution, and Lenin's response to it, initiated one of the most significant Marxist debates, namely on the concept of "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Kalyvas' brilliant exposition on the centrality of this concept in Marxist theory, shows how it ultimately became the question on which the Marxist tradition split into the German social democratic and Bolshevik revolutionary strands. The debate raised foundational question about Marxism ranging from the problem of strategy, the nature of revolutionary government, the relationships between democracy and socialism, between civil war and revolution, and between the liberal state and class.
Arato's critical response explicates the tensions and inconsistencies in the concept.

On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Kautsky's criticism of the Russian revolution, and Lenin's response to it, initiated one of the most significant Marxist debates, namely on the concept of "t...

Arato returns to the famous notions of reform and revolution tracing their genealogy back to the dialectic of theory and practice in Marx. He then explicates how reform and revolution become oppositional, the sharpest formulation of which came from Luxemburg who separated the terms with the conjunction "or." This split emerged with the adoption of the Erfurt program by Bernstein, Kautsky and the German SPD, which became the polemical target of Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. While discussing the debates on Erfurt program, Arato also scrutinizes the program to recover its progressive democratic dimensions.

Reform or Revolution? Debates on Erfurt Program Arato returns to the notions of reform and revolution tracing their genealogy back to dialectic of theory and practice in Marx. He then explicates ways in wh...