Creating a Socialist Intelligentsia

China’s Post-Socialist Inequality

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the launch of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1978, China has undergone dramatic changes that have affected the lives of Chinese citizens in multiple ways. With the step-by-step dismantling of China’s system of centrally planned socialism and other reforms, growth rates have accelerated, producing rising living standards, reduced pove...

Basic Income as a Socialist Project

Most discussions of Basic Income revolve around two clusters of issues: first, the normative implications of Basic Income for various conceptions of justice, and second, the pragmatic problems of the sustainability of basic income given a range of economic considerations including such things as effects on tax rates, incentives, labor markets, and so on. These are obviously important issues, bu...

Gendering Socialist Popular Cultures

Hungary: Towards a Socialist Market Economy?

The recent decades of Marxist social science, particularly political economy, have been characterized by an intense theoretical defensive. The shortcomings of Eastern European socialism and its ideological reflections have been revealed gradually. However, the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" has not been accompanied by an alternative socialist theory. The image of the society to be achi...

The State Socialist Mortality Syndrome

Death rates for working-age men in European state socialist countries deviated from general improvements in survival observed in the rest of Europe during the 20th century. The magnitude of structural labor force changes across countries correlates with lagged increases in death rates for men in the working ages. This pattern is consistent with a hypothesis that hyper-development of heavy indus...