Industrial Youth, Housing and Socialist Expertise in Late Socialist Romania

Lauren Nussbaum Housing in Havana : A Socialist Paradox

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...

The moral economy of home construction in late socialist Yugoslavia

Housing shortages in Yugoslav cities were a perennial concern for authorities and citizens alike. They disproportionately affected Yugoslav workers who as a consequence were the demographic most likely to independently construct a family home. This article explores how informal builders justified home construction in moral terms, legitimizing it on the basis of physical labour that was invested...

In Defence of Socialist Planning

In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism Alec Nove criticizes the methods of Marxist economics, as misleading or irrelevant for the task of building socialism, and rejects the goal of Marxist politics—socialism without commodity production—as impossible of realization. Any effective answer to his objections must follow the same procedure that Marx employed in his study of the emergence o...

Gendering Socialist Popular Cultures