The original article was published in New Left Review II/15 (May-June 2002).
The European Project especially since the Maastricht Treaty (1992) is reducing the margins of manoeuvre of national economic policies without making a governance of substitution emerge in return at the level of the Union! This self-inflicted mutilation by European States relates to all aspects of economic life and was chosen by the dominant big capital because this was its means to crush the social power that workers in Europe had conquered before.
The political left and mass movement in Latin America has taken up the task to develop theoretical and practical alternatives to neoliberal globalisation. The condition to re-launch the global class struggle is to strengthen the Venezuela-Cuba "axis" as well as the progressive states in the southern continent. The transition to Socialism in the 21st Century can only develop from the popular resistance organised from below.
Anders Åslund: How Capitalism Was Built. The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, Cambridge: CUP, 2007The original article was published in Internationale Politik – Global Edition.
The first part of the study reviews the Hungarian state socialism's literature on commuters and gives a picture on the way how the official discourse addressed commuting workers. It is important to be noted that urban workers often envied families having income both from industry and agriculture and this split was reinforced by propaganda. Nevertheless a large group of long-time commuters came from the poorest, for whom moving into the cities and taking non-skilled industrial jobs could mean certain positive social mobility. In the second half of the study the author analyses documentaries how they present in the 70s and 80s the poverty and lack of protection of commuters travelling on "black trains" as a social question.
The article is only available in Hungarian.