Surviving Financial Meltdown: Argentina’s Barter Networks
In this chapter of his Money and Liberation, the author describes how millions – in order to survive – started barter trade, one-to-one exchanges after the Argentinean economy collapsed at the end of 2001, throwing away free market and profit principles. They did not try to change the big system or take power themselves. What are the lessons from this case, when masses opted out of a failed capitalism?
No. 96 | (Winter 2012)
The main topic of this issue of Eszmélet is the "structural crisis of capitalism". Historical and theoretical analysis is presented on the social-economical features of "new capitalism" of Easter Europe or by the words of A. Tarasov on the "second edition of capitalism" on the semi-periphery. One crucial element of these is the regression in the agricultural development: the extreme weakness of the SME sector, that is a severe step backwards even comparing to the state socialist era. Although there is a historically determined inherent tension between the socialist-communist ideas of emancipation propagated by the state socialist system and its actual reality but a sophisticated judgement on the system is made in relation to the concurrent developments in Western Europe.
In the documents section a letter of József Szigeti is published from his archives, which casts light on the background why Ágnes Heller defamed István Mészáros. The sociographic photos of Lewis Wickes Hine from the "dark past of America" illustrate that the historical foundations of the most modern capitalism are still working this days despite any change in its present forms.
Table of contents
- Immanuel Wallerstein : The Wold Class Struggle: The Geography of Protest
- Nigel Swain : A Post-Socialist Capitalism
- Alekszandr Nyikolajevics Taraszov : The “Second Edition of Capitalism” in Russia
- Vámos György : Perpetrators and Scapegoats at the Hungarian Radio after 1945
- Susan Zimmermann : Gender Regime and Gender Struggle in Hungarian State Socialism
- Szarka Klára : Illustrated Chapters from the Dark Past of America. Photoes of Lewis Wickes Hine
- Révész József : József Szigeti as Philosopher (1921-2012)
- Szigeti József : Informative Contribution to the Bolivar Prize Case
- Ignacio Ramonet : WikiLeaks
- Tütő László : Resignation, “Better not to Know”, Being Busy Bees. Variations on Withdrawal No. 2 “Escape into Freedom”
- Koltai Mihály Bence : Why Ideology?
The Unavoidable Solitude. Varlam Shalamov and the Theoretical Heritage
The shadow of Solzhenitsyn, who is well known or even a star in the West, still hides the oeuvre of Varlam Shalamov, the representative of Gulag literature overgrowing him. The importance of him can be compared of Gogol, Platonov and Bely. Shalamov, until the end of his life, insisted on the ethos of the Trotskyist opposition of the 1920s and the revolutionary message of the Russian intelligentsia on the "unity of words and act" – not matching anti-Stalinism with anti-Soviet theories.
The “Liberation Theology” of Varlam Shalamov
The theoretical roots of the oeuvre of Shalamov go back to the some kind of "liberation theology" of the renewal movement in the Orthodox Church developed after 1917 under the leadership of Metropolitan Vvedensky, which movement was ardently supported by his father Tikhon Sahalamov. The "Living Church" movement accepted the moral justice of the October Revolution, which it would like to actively introduce in actual life by the church. According to its adherents "communism is identical to the Gospel but was written in atheistic letters". In the 1930s the Stalinist State, after its Thermidorian turn, rather collaborated with the black-hundredist clergymen, which accepted its dictatorship.