The great significance of Marx's explanation is, that here too, he consistently applies materialist dialectics, the theory of development, and regards communism as something which develops out of capitalism. Instead of scholastically invented, 'concocted' definitions and fruitless disputes over words (What is socialism? What is communism?), Marx gives analysis of what might be called the stages...

Communism and the Emergence of Democracy examines communism and its demise through the prism of social theory and political thought. After setting out a critique of conventional approaches to post-communist democratization, Harald Wydra develops his arguments in four historical chapters reflecting on the Russian Revolution and Soviet communism; the beginnings of the Cold War, the East European ...

One of the most puzzling aspects about the functioning of the floating exchange rate regime of the 1980s has been that huge swings in exchange rate have had only muted effects on anything real. To understand this phenomenon, we study the relationship between communism and value neutrality and monetary neutrality. We find that the symmetry of communism is bound to lead to value neutrality. In th...

Using book translations as a measure of the flow of ideas across countries, we test the effect of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe on the international transmission of ideas. We find that translations of Western European titles into former Communist countries increased by a factor of five with the fall of Communism, while translations between Communist countries decreased by a factor...

It is with apprehension but also conviction that I defend Marxism today1apprehension because we live in a period that is suspicious of visions of alternative futures, skeptical of grand historical narrative, dismissive of materialist explanations, rejecting of class analysis while tolerating capitalism's defects and pathologies as unavoidable and natural; conviction because we live in a period ...

Abstract Nostalgia for the Soviet figures prominently in public imaginaries. Such nostalgia has been viewed as subverting and critiquing post-Socialist neoliberal order. Others have suggested that “nostalgia” is a poor vocabulary talking about post-Soviet affect. Ethnographic attention to reveals multiplicity of nostalgic registers. I argue nostalgias can be roughly divided into lyrical, heroic...