At this [second] Congress, we see taking place a union between revolutionary proletarians of the capitalist, advanced countries, and the revolutionary masses of those countries where there is no or hardly any proletariat, that is, the oppressed masses of colonial, Eastern countries. It is upon ourselves that the consolidation of unity depends. World imperialism shall fall when the revolutionary onslaught of the exploited and oppressed workers in each country … merges with the revolutionary onslaught of hundreds of millions of people who have hitherto stood beyond the pale of history and have been regarded merely as the objects of history
V. I. Lenin.Footnote 1Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of “World imperialism,” however, Lenin also pressed for a broader, ongoing world-historic anti-imperialism in alliance with the oppressed of the East, who, it seemed, were neither sufficiently proletarianized, nor, as yet, subjects of history. There are many ways to situate this particular moment in Lenin's thought. One can see the budding conceits of Marxist social history, or “history from below,” in which millions in the East could become historical subjects under the sign of “anti-imperialism.” One can also see this gesture to those outside the pale as a flourish of the emergent Soviet empire, and as a projection of anxieties about Bolshevik control over a vast and varied Russian countryside with its own internal enemies. But Lenin also spoke to audiences who would make up the next, Third International, like the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, who saw imperialism dividing the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. For this Third Worldist audience,Footnote 2 looking increasingly to the new Soviet Union for material and military support for “national self-determination,” Lenin extends the historic mission of a future world socialism.
As Young (Reference Young2001) demonstrates, the congresses of the Third International or Comintern, between 1919 and 1935, revealed an ongoing tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. On the one hand, Stalin sought to impose a linear view of history in which national liberation would pave the way for European-led world communist revolution. On the other, peripheral communist movements refused Moscow's imperial tutelage, often forging alternatives like “African socialism” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The Comintern created space for anti-imperialists from a variety of regions to rethink concepts and connections. After Stalin abandoned internationalism, the exiled Trotsky led the Fourth International, with an ideology of “uneven and combined development” that saw areas under colonial rule as “backward by their own essence.” Revolution in agrarian China challenged this ideology through a largely peasant-based, nationalist, socialist liberation movement. Subsequent socialist movements, in Southeast Asia and Africa in particular, turned to Chinese support and Maoist ideology after the onset of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960–1961. Development strategies of newly decolonized states in the second half of the twentieth century must be situated in their efforts to exploit Cold War rivalries between West and East, First and Second worlds. Third World socialist states participated in these maneuvers just as much, careful to claim independence from Chinese or Soviet control while relying on their imperial powers for military, scientific, and economic aid.
By the late twentieth century, new forms of critique emerged from the exhaustion of anti-colonial nationalism, as well as from the failures of postcolonial nation-states to deliver on promises made during liberation struggles. Critics of nationalism and development in various former colonies spoke out against the persistence of poverty and inequality. Sometimes, as is the case with livelihood movements in contemporary South Africa, these claims have been made in socialist terms, but not exclusively so. Within this broader climate of critique, the academic field of “postcolonial studies” emerged, initially from literary and cultural studies. The term “postcolonial” has since gained wide currency across the disciplines as well as in non-academic writing. In its broad sense, postcolonial critique has had important antecedents, such as Fanon's (Reference Fanon1963) searing indictment of post-revolutionary betrayal. In this work, Fanon shows how the tools and languages used to galvanize anti-colonial sentiment among the subject population become effective elite instruments in a narrow “pseudo-nationalism” that only perpetuates the psychic and socio-economic violence of colonialism after the end of formal colonial rule. Crucially, Fanon turned to socialism for solutions. Many others have not.
The reticence of postcolonial thinkers to invoke socialist alternatives may be part of a more general reluctance to make political claims from within the constraints of academic writing. A new critical approach to colonialism and its legacies emerged in the 1980s—as Stoler (Reference Stoler1995) argues in one genealogy—from frustrations with the confident functionalism of 1970s Marxist peasant studies, obsessed with precisely defining agrarian institutions in order to predict the likelihood of left politics. Fleeing from this vanguardism, many scholars also left behind Marxist certainties, particularly in the wake of Said's Orientalism and Foucault's archeological and genealogical methods. Historians and anthropologists of colonialism instead became increasingly proficient in exploring the discursive and practical relations that enabled or undermined colonial projects (e.g., Cooper and Stoler Reference Cooper and Stoler1997).
Postcolonial studies drew selectively from the new scholarship on colonial history, power, and culture. Key scholars re-read historical, literary, and cultural texts, drawing from innovations in western philosophy while also raising critiques of nationalism, feminism, and racism outside the academy. Said (Reference Said1978; Reference Said1993) used Foucault to critique the history of European representation of the Arab world, while engaging critically with Palestinian liberation and self-determination. One of Derrida's key translators, Spivak (Reference Spivak1987; Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988), also contributed to critical thought in India, as a translator into English of the Bengali feminist activist and writer, Mahashweta Devi. Other work, such as Bhabha's (Reference Bhabha1990; Reference Bhabha1994) on colonial mimicry and hybridity and Mbembe's (Reference Mbembe2001; Reference Mbembe2003) on African postcoloniality and “necropolitics,” drew variously from Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault to explain constructions of selfhood, state power, and power over life and death in areas structured by past and present imperialisms.
When postcolonial studies incorporated historical work, the result was often faulted for its overly “literary turn.” This was the case with the Indian historical school of Subaltern Studies, initially a response to Marxist nationalist historiography in India, brought into the postcolonial canon with the publication of Guha and Spivak (Reference Guha and Spivak1988), prefaced by Said. Historical work from this school, by Amin, Arnold, Chakrabarty, Chatterjee, Guha, Prakash, and others, became classics in a widening postcolonial corpus concerned with histories of medicine, crime, peasantry, labor, and nationalism. Debates ensued, comparing this “post” across sites, in relation to other “posts,” and examining the adequacy of these “posts” for treating continuities and ruptures with colonial structures, institutions, and ideologies.Footnote 3 Postcolonial insights have since been used far beyond literary studies and beyond former colonies (Loomba, Kaul, and Bunzl Reference Loomba, Kaul and Bunzl2005; Cooper and Stoler Reference Cooper and Stoler1997; Coronil Reference Coronil1997; Eley and Suny Reference Eley and Suny1996; Hall Reference Hall, Chambers and Curti1996). It is with this wider field of postcolonial thought, not just with its most often cited representatives (e.g., Spivak, Bhabha), that we deal in the present essay.
While postcolonialism was developing in this way, Glasnost, Perestroika, and the fall of the Berlin Wall were fundamentally challenging Soviet and East European studies. In direct confrontation with the advocates of shock therapy from the western development establishment, scholars of postsocialism—by which we refer largely to the former Soviet bloc,Footnote 4—were now able to draw upon fieldwork to show the fallacies of mainstream transitology, a perspective that continued to organize the world in flat Cold War binaries of capitalist West and communist East and to ignore specific relations of work, property, kinship, and other organizational forms. Although many postsocialist critics, academic and otherwise, continued to view Marxism with some suspicion as the ideology of totalitarian socialist states, some, such as Burawoy, championed the usefulness of Marxism for understanding concrete struggles and outcomes after socialism. In other words, while many postcolonial scholars fled from Marxist political economy for new kinds of archival, textual, and philosophically informed critique, some postsocialist scholars turned to ethnographic fieldwork, sometimes with Marxist tools, in order to fight World Bank orthodoxy.Footnote 5
These movements of scholars, critics, worldviews, and commitments prompt our central question: what is to be gained by thinking “between the posts”? We note that this question has been posed primarily, if not only, by scholars of socialism and postsocialism, and in particular by Burawoy (Reference Burawoy, Burawoy and Verdery1999: 309–10), Kandiyoti (Reference Kandiyoti and Hann2002a; Reference Kandiyoti2002b), and Verdery (Reference Verdery and Hann2002), rather than by postcolonial thinkers. Perhaps the reason is the emergence of postsocialist studies from the dramatic collapse of Soviet and East European socialisms, which forced scholars of socialism to seek out new paradigms—something the longer-established postcolonial studies had already been developing. This dramatic set of events opened unexpected opportunities for ethnographic research, both on the legacies of socialism and on everyday life in socialism's wake. Questions soon emerged concerning what frameworks would best serve the new research. Might postcolonial thought contribute to this process—indeed, might its very existence have spurred the rapid formation of postsocialism as a problematic? Postsocialist studies, a product of a rupture in academic careers, thus generated new interdisciplinary traffic in ideas.
WHICH POSTS?
Before proceeding, we must clarify what we mean by “postsocialism” and “postcolonialism,” and why this comparison is useful. Are our two posts of the same kind? (We think they are, although each “post” contains its own peculiarities.) Should we add another, “postmodernism,” as well? (Despite its formative role in postcolonial studies, we choose to leave it aside as overly vague and as less productive than the pairing we have selected.Footnote 6)
“Postsocialism” began as simply a temporal designation: societies once referred to as constituting “actually existing socialism” had ceased to exist as such, replaced by one or another form of putatively democratizing state. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more, and most of its successor states did not advertise themselves as socialist (even when they arguably still were).Footnote 7 “Postsocialism” referred to whatever would follow once the means of production were privatized and the Party's political monopoly disestablished. What would be the life experience of the people formerly incorporated into socialist states, and how would their experience under socialism influence their fates?
While “postcolonialism” would seem to be a parallel investigation of what happened to the colony after independence, postcolonial studies did not follow exactly the same trajectory. The high point of decolonization was between the late 1940s and the 1960s, but postcolonial studies emerged as a body of thought only in the 1980s, in the wake of critiques of Orientalism and Enlightenment rationality, and with close attention to rethinking Eurocentric philosophy and historiography. Developed as a retreat from conventions of Marxist historiography and nationalisms of various stripes, postcolonial critique arose at a time when self-professed representatives of capital and civil society had launched a fierce attack on state-centered development from across the intellectual and political spectrum. “Postcolonialism” as a concrete abstraction did not emerge after a sudden collapse of “actually existing colonialism,” in other words, but at least two decades after the highpoint of decolonization, as a critical reflection both on colonialism's ongoing presence in the projects of post-independence national elites and in notions of nationalism, sovereignty, accumulation, democracy, and the possibility of knowledge itself.
Over time, “postsocialism” too came to signify a critical standpoint, in several senses: critical of the socialist past and of possible socialist futures; critical of the present as neoliberal verities about transition, markets, and democracy were being imposed upon former socialist spaces; and critical of the possibilities for knowledge as shaped by Cold War institutions. Here, postsocialist studies began to converge somewhat with the agenda of postcolonial studies. Just as postcoloniality had become a critical perspective on the colonial present, postsocialism could become a similarly critical standpoint on the continuing social and spatial effects of Cold War power and knowledge (such as in the remaking of markets, property rights, democratic institutions, workplaces, consumption, families, gender/sexual relations, or communities). Although postcolonial scholars have focused more on questions of epistemology than have postsocialist scholars, broader areas of similarity make our posts comparable enough to conceive of a traffic in ideas between them.
In sum, despite differences in timing, both “posts” followed and continue to reflect on periods of heightened political change—the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communist Party monopolies, or the formal granting of independence—and both labels signify the complex results of the abrupt changes forced on those who underwent them: that is, becoming something other than socialist or other than colonized.
The potential joining of postsocialist and postcolonial studies raises both connections and methodological parallels. Newly opened archives in the former Soviet space expanded scholarly use and critique of the state-produced historical record, as is commonplace in colonial and postcolonial studies. The collapse between archive and field, which had already created new forms of ethnographic engagement in postcolonial contexts, began to enrich postsocialist studies as well.Footnote 8 Beyond the question of parallel archives and research agendas, we hope to restore research connections that should never have been separated. Not only were Eastern Europe and much of the former Soviet Union under a form of colonial domination, but numerous other “Third World” countries—Cuba, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Laos, and so on—had entered the Soviet orbit as part of establishing their independence from one or another western imperial power. To think about these geopolitical peripheries with tools from both postcolonial and postsocialist studies enables thinking critically about colonial relationships together with market and democratic transitions. In this sense, and given actual connections between the legacies of colonialism and socialism in contemporary empires, we neglect thinking between the posts at our peril.
BETWEEN THE POSTS: THE ARGUMENT
In this essay, we pose three areas in which thinking between the posts can be useful for ethnographic and historical analysis of societies in the shadows of empires, whether capitalist or socialist. First, at a general level, the relative specializations of each offer complementary tools to rethink contemporary imperialism. Second, to posit the Cold War as a spatial, institutional, and ideological phenomenon implies a refusal of the Three-Worlds ideology that associates postcoloniality with a bounded space called the Third World and postsocialism with the Second World. We ask how Cold War representations of space and time have shaped knowledge and practice everywhere. Last, we ask how each framework treats the making and unmaking of state-sanctioned racisms that rely not necessarily on biological conceptions of race but on institutional and biopolitical mechanisms, which differentiate populations into subgroups having varied access to means of life and death. We ask how a post-Cold War lens shapes a fresh critique of state racisms that build on and supersede what W.E.B. Dubois (Reference DuBois1969) called the problem of the color line, through group-targeted exposure to crime and incarceration, disease and medicine, unemployment, and survival in market societies. In the following sections we pursue these broad questions, beginning with the intertwined dynamics of capital and empire.
1. Rethinking Empires
One of the key debates in Cold War thought concerned the problematic relationship between capital and empire. Lenin (Reference Lenin1939) saw imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, in which monopolies replace capitalist competition and carve up the world, providing a vent for capitalist crisis as well as a foothold for geopolitical influence. Orthodox Marxists such as Warren (Reference Warren1980), following Marx's (Reference Marx1853) note on colonialism in India, posed imperialism as the vehicle for the spread of authentic capitalism. Radical dependency and world-systems theorists, still presuming an expanding western capitalism, sought autarchic solutions through the socialist developmental alternative. These theorists argued that the process of imperialism deprived formerly colonized nations of the ability to transform their economies into productive capitalist societies, and that their transformation might be better served through socialist trajectories of their own making. In practice, however, newly decolonized countries were fertile ground not so much for a thousand socialist flowers to bloom but for a range of Cold War proxy wars and resource-extraction struggles between the superpowers, waged in the name of sacred Cold War verities.
At stake in both decolonization and the Soviet creation of East European satellites were new kinds of political and economic interventions into the affairs of formally sovereign states. To see these new political, economic, and cultural tools as imperialist requires questioning the idea, expressed by Cooper (Reference Cooper2005),Footnote 9 that imperialism entails formal political incorporation. Whether or not to recognize polities as imperialist informs much of the confusion about what imperialism means. In our view, a definition of empire ought to include such imperial innovations as the U.S. government's neoliberalization of war through military contractors like the Blackwater mercenary firm, or its use of legal-spatial black holes like the “extraordinary rendition” of untried terrorist suspects to foreign soil for interrogation, torture, and indefinite imprisonment.
In certain instances, scholarship has linked complex understandings of capital accumulation with the dynamics of imperial polities. For example, Cooper's work (Reference Cooper and Cooper1983) productively considers capital and empire as intertwined projects, explaining a series of boycotts, strikes, and disturbances that ramified across British colonial space in the 1930s and 1940s as varied responses to colonial capitalist crises. Inflected through diverse institutions and rural-urban connections, these actions were certainly not recognized at the time as responses to capitalist crises, nor—except by the colonial office in London—as an interconnected set of struggles. Cooper's argument sets a standard for thinking beyond the empirically observable to background conditions, spatial connections, and forms of knowledge that enable or call into question the violent interplay of capitalist crises and colonial rule.
Such work is also necessary for our imperial present. Recent debates over whether and in what sense neoliberalism and U.S. militarism cohere as a new imperialism provide one point of departure. For instance, Mann's Incoherent Empire (Reference Mann2003) concludes that contemporary U.S. imperialism is being reduced simply to U.S. militarism, which is not sufficient to sustain empire. Hardt and Negri's Empire (Reference Hardt and Negri2000), in contrast, makes a strong case for a new form of capitalist empire that is based not on states but on a decentered, rhizomatic, biopolitical sovereignty. Harvey's work on U.S. capitalist empire introduces the concept “accumulation by dispossession” to argue that in the balance between different mechanisms of capital accumulation—primitive accumulation (e.g., using brute extraction to privatize various commons) as opposed to expanded reproduction (promoting economic growth that incorporates workers as consumers)—the former has acquired new prominence (Harvey Reference Harvey2003; Reference Harvey2005).Footnote 10 His argument provides tools for thinking about the links between accumulation and market exclusion/inclusion, which can be used to compare spatial dynamics of government, accumulation, and commodification across empires. What, if not accumulation by dispossession, were the nationalizations and collectivizations the Soviets imposed on their satellites? Events in postsocialist Eastern Europe during the 1990s show accumulation by dispossession in a particularly glaring form, with various capital interests advocating privatization on the grounds that what people are being dispossessed of has no value anyway (see, for instance, Alexander Reference Alexander, Humphrey and Verdery2004; Verdery Reference Verdery2003), because socialism used its resources inefficiently and was in all respects inferior. Might we find a comparable role for devaluation in postcolonial capital accumulation as well?
Examining forms of accumulation by dispossession also sheds new light on subaltern protest, a concern in postcolonial scholarship not often contextualized in wider relations of capital and empire. Hence, Gulick (Reference Gulick, Yuen, Burton-Rose and Katsiaficas2004) explains the massive resistance of workers and peasants to post-Maoist capitalism in China, and the Party-state's effective containment of this powder keg, as crucially linked to China's relations with U.S. capitalist imperialism (see also Lee Reference Lee2002). In China as in South Africa, the erosion of the conditions of reproduction of land and labor lie at the heart of proliferating struggles over accumulation by dispossession today (Hart Reference Hart2002). These struggles take many forms: over land rights, privatization of basic services, access to medicine, or rights to livable residence. The processes are comparable to those found in postsocialist critiques of market transition and its failures, even if they may be understood in quite different terms. Such degradations and impoverishments have been sites of intense scrutiny in analyses of the former Soviet bloc since its collapse, as entitlements are withdrawn, bodies are commodified and then devalued, and the former socialist welfare states abandon all pretenses at providing a social wage. There is now ample work on the global effects of neoliberalism, which Harvey (Reference Harvey2005) identifies as a global process of elite class (re)constitution. Crucially, in most former colonies these elite compacts work through legacies of states that, unlike actually existing socialisms, were never committed to providing welfare to all citizens. This was certainly the case with South Africa's welfare state under Apartheid. Indeed, the end of twentieth-century socialism in Europe is often invoked as evidence for the illogic of the very notion of a social wage and for the necessity of elite-led neoliberal transitions.
Work on the technologies of imperial power is growing for the Soviet empire as well. Using newly accessible archives, scholars have begun to ask how that empire worked (e.g., Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005; Martin Reference Martin2001, and n.d.). What were its ambitions, instruments, technologies, and plans for ideological transformation? What were its conditions of possibility, as compared with Western Europe's empires? Was the Soviet Union in fact a colonial power at all (see Todorova Reference Todorova2007, who claims it was not)? To begin with, Moscow did not organize its empire like most European capitalist empires, such as France, Britain, or Portugal. While all these empires involved complex combinations of conquest, infiltration, and annexation, their projects differed fundamentally. “Moscow Centre” aimed (unsuccessfully) to integrate its dependencies into a process of accumulating not capital but, as Verdery has argued elsewhere (Reference Verdery1996: ch. 1), redistributive (or allocative) power. This involved accumulating means of production that would enable party-states to control the production of goods for (re)distribution to the populace—a prime legitimating ideology for the Soviet system—and thereby to shore up the power of the Communist Party. Integral to this goal was building a wall that would insulate the Soviet bloc from capitalist accumulation. The obsession with security meant that the point of expanding the empire westward was less to incorporate more resources for capital accumulation than to create a buffer zone called “Eastern Europe,” separating Soviet imperial territory from European capitalism and its polluting effects. Might Soviet imperialism shed light on U.S. imperial cartographies that combine concerns of security and markets in differentiating the world? An example is the United States Department of Defense's Thomas Barnett, who in 2003 divided the globe into “the Functioning Core” and “the Non-integrating Gap” (to which most of the world is consigned)? As Sparke (Reference Sparke2005: 277–80) argues, this spatial imaginary presumes U.S. multilateralism in “the Core,” and, when necessary, unilateral aggression into “the Gap.”
Rather like some west European imperial systems, the Soviet Union also provides lessons about the spatial ordering of empire.Footnote 11 That empire operated at three distinct levels: (1) the Soviet Union itself, a large and expansionist unit incorporating peoples differentially within a single entity; (2) the “satellites” in Eastern Europe in orbit around “Moscow Centre” but not directly incorporated into Soviet territory; and (3) additional states enjoying various degrees of client status (Cuba, South Yemen), as well as leftist parties aspiring to create such states (in Mozambique, South Africa, etc.). Only the Soviet Union itself is Cooper's type of empire—a political unit incorporating subordinate peoples—yet we can scarcely deny its imperial relation with satellites and clients. How might better understanding of the Soviet Union's satellite periphery provide tools to analyze the spatial dynamics of other empires? Might such comparisons help us understand the imperial qualities of the European Union (e.g., Sissenich Reference Sissenich2006), or China's increasing presence in Africa?
Concerning accumulation, we might see the Soviet empire as pursuing Harvey's accumulation by dispossession but in a more radical way, by decisively and rapidly dispossessing the owners of means of production in favor of the vanguard Party and proceeding to develop the productive forces on that basis, allegedly in the public interest. This radical solution applied first to Soviet territory but was exported in modular fashion—and with varying success—to satellites and to some clients. Although all these dependencies were yoked together in a world communist movement, however, they did not expand socialist-style accumulation of power at the center. The satellites formed replica regimes, each accumulating redistributive power within its own borders but not transferring that power to the hegemon in Moscow (except insofar as the mere existence of other communist states reinforced Soviet hegemony). Therefore, the “glue” of this empire was different from those empires built around capitalist accumulation. How can we specify this difference? Should we pursue Jowitt's provocative suggestion that the Soviet empire was held together by “mechanical” rather than “organic” solidarity (Reference Jowitt1992: 174)? What exactly were the differences between and relations among the “inner tier” of Soviet Republics, the “second tier” of East European satellites, and the “outer tier” of client states in Africa, Asia, and the Americas? How were “tiers” constructed as spatial archetypes for use in imperial policy? Will the answers to these questions illuminate comparisons with other imperial systems, such as that of Great Britain?
An important point of intersection between postcolonial and postsocialist scholarship centers on how empires fostered or suppressed ethnic and national sentiment. Contrary to popular understanding, the Soviet Union did not simply suppress such sentiment but reified the national principle into a fundamental organizational device, one that contributed to its own downfall. “Nationalities” were both reinforced and created, in processes admirably revealed by postsocialist scholars such as Slezkine (Reference Slezkine1994), Martin (Reference Martin2001), Brown (Reference Brown2004), and Hirsch (Reference Hirsch2005). Each major nationality had its own republic, and each republic's minor nationalities often enjoyed some administrative autonomy. With the reforms of Perestroika, leaders of these groups acquired powerful levers against the center.Footnote 12 From this vantage point, postcolonial scholars might look more closely at nationalisms such as those described by Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993), which read like a textbook case of Soviet nationalities policy.Footnote 13 Far from suppressing group identities, Western European empires often incited them with imperial policies that reified “chiefs” and traditional authorities as instruments of indirect rule. Hence, colonial administrators and nationalist elites, contending with India's fractured social formation, helped to produce what Chatterjee identifies as the fragments of the Indian nation (women, peasants, outcastes, and so on) that became the seedbeds for a variety of postcolonial cultural nationalisms and subaltern politics. The dialectics of suppression and reification across postsocialist and postcolonial nationalisms might yield important comparative insights.
Questions of nationalism reveal one way in which the very mechanisms of domination may have rebounded against the imperial center, certainly in the Soviet case. Another concerns the satellites’ failure to contribute to accumulation at “Moscow Centre,” which helps explain how the peripheries brought this empire to an end. The Cuban case is an eloquent example of client parasitism, with the full extent of Soviet subsidies apparent only after 1991. Satellites and clients also racked up increasing debts to capitalist countries for the purchase of technology, all of which—as Bunce contends in her essay “The Empire Strikes Back” (Reference Bunce1985)—caused a serious drain on the center's finances and provided an impetus for Moscow to encourage East Europeans to reduce their dependency through systemic reform. In a further irony, socialism's “workers’ states” created powerful working classes whose dissatisfactions led them to challenge the system, as we saw with Poland's Solidarity movement. It is plausible that Soviet concern over the implications of that movement was one factor fueling the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist faction in the Soviet leadership. By supporting reformists in Eastern Europe—and even authorizing the Polish elections in 1989 that ushered in a non-Communist government—his faction then facilitated the “revolutions” of 1989. In this interpretation, the rise of Solidarity in the empire's periphery in 1980 may well have contributed to transforming the entire bloc beyond recognition.Footnote 14 Can we discern similar processes for the empires of Western Europe? Did their colonies, too, become costly and precipitate changes leading to decolonization?
Our first argument, then, has been that thinking between the posts is crucial for comparative insights on accumulation and empire. We argue that such a task requires revisiting the theories, disciplinary frameworks, and institutions that partitioned space into Three-Worlds ideology, such that postcolonialism continues to be associated with the Third World and postsocialism with the Second. In the following section, we turn to the ways in which Cold War representations of space and time have shaped and continue to shape theories and social realities.
2. Ongoing Effects of Cold War Representations and Processes
One of the reasons socialist and colonial empires have been considered largely separate from each other has been the partitioning of the world through what Pletsch (Reference Pletsch1981) insightfully called the Cold War division of intellectual labor. Pletsch argued that the disciplinary durability of Three-Worlds ideology resides in categories constructed along two axes—communist/free and traditional/modern. These yield three domains: a “free” First World that is modern, scientific, rational, and therefore a “natural” society; a “communist” Second World controlled by ideology and propaganda, with “natural” society subordinated to a totalitarian state; and a Third World that is “traditional,” irrational, overpopulated, religious, and economically “backward.” Three-Worlds ideology provided a meta-theory, according to Pletsch, for carving up the disciplines such that the First World was studied chiefly by mainstream economics and sociology, the Second World chiefly by political science, and the Third World chiefly by anthropology and development studies. Among the powerful presumptions of Three-Worlds ideology were that the Second World could join the First if it were freed from ideological constraints, while the Third World might “modernize” if its “traditional culture” could be overcome.
Our perspective rejects these spatial partitions, preferring a single analytical field—“the (post-) Cold War”—and asking how Cold War representations have shaped and continue to shape theory and politics. Such a perspective refuses the division of intellectual labor through which areas emerging from European colonization go to postcolonial studies and areas emerging from behind the Iron Curtain to postsocialist studies. This division makes even less sense after 1989, when many socialist countries became, like postcolonial ones, synonymous with underdevelopment.Footnote 15 An integrated analytical field ought to explore intertwined histories of capital and empire, as we have suggested, but also the ongoing effects of the Cold War's Three-Worlds ideology. That “War” was quintessentially an organization both of the world and of representations and knowledge about it. What were some of the epistemological and social effects of the Cold War, and how might our framework contribute to modifying harmful side effects? We begin with one of the most important knowledge effects of the Cold War: the dominance of modernization theory in western social science. Here we juxtapose the postsocialist critique of late-twentieth-century “transitology” with the critique of development thought from postcolonial scholarship. Then we turn to social or interaction effects of Cold War representations and processes, to show the fruitfulness of re-conceiving a singular world with differentiated histories.
From the perspective of Cold War ideology, the Soviet Union represented a challenge to a whole way of life and evoked responses on multiple fronts. For example, competition with the “actually-existing” socialist alternative made elites in the United States and especially in Western Europe more amenable to the expansion of social-welfare provisions in response to workers’ demands.Footnote 16 Modernization theory constituted another kind of response. As Gilman shows, modernization theory grew out of post-war U.S. liberalism and “post-war American liberals’ peculiar combination of anxiety and confidence about American ways of organizing the world” (Reference Gilman2003: 4). Research emerging from political science departments—specifically at think tanks at Harvard University, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—was self-consciously “modernist,” focusing not on the “deviant modernity” of socialism but on the dynamic, secular, liberal, and implicitly capitalist West, exemplified best by the United States after the New Deal. Here was an existing utopia that Marxist-Leninists could only promise for the future (ibid.: 14–23). Gilman tracks the career of modernization theory in its multiple iterations across the world, as it produced both debate and vain attempts to squeeze peripheral societies into Rostow's “stages,” through which the rest of the world would find prosperity by following the U.S. lead. In fact, that lead was far from assured. The apparent “success” of rapid industrialization in the 1930s USSR—the social costs of which were shielded from sight for decades—provided a powerful alternative for poor and largely agrarian societies to envision dramatic social transformation by a different route. In the United States, the Soviet example prompted a specifically anticommunist modernization theory, particularly among experts at MIT, the Social Science Research Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Much of the ensuing debate within modernization theory concerned the changing geography of the Cold War, as emphasis shifted from Europe to former colonies of the Third World and to the relative significance of military, economic, and ideological grounds of contestation. Anticommunist modernization theory gained ground precisely at this conjuncture, by emphasizing the economic advantages of alliances with the West, for which western countries were investing in an ever-larger development apparatus. What Gilman crisply demonstrates is how this form of expertise enabled a wide array of experiments in social transformation tied to U.S. interests but tempered by multiple forces (Reference Gilman2003: 42–47). Scholarship like this marks both ruptures with imperial discourses of limited reform (Latham Reference Latham, Engerman, Gilman, Haefele and Latham2003) and continuities with present invocations of modernization backed by U.S. militarism (Haratoonian Reference Haratoonian2004; Stoler Reference Stoler2006).
Modernization theory remained remarkably productive and enabling not just for post-war U.S. foreign policy but also for various postcolonial regimes. Mahoney (Reference Mahoney, Engerman, Gilman, Haefele and Latham2003), for instance, shows how anti-colonial struggle in Mozambique during 1964–1974 ought not be reduced too quickly to a U.S.-Soviet proxy war; the “quasi-fascist dictatorship” in Portugal and the liberation movement under FRELIMO were by the late 1960s engaged in not just a military but also an ideological battle, framed in the terms of modernization theory. Mahoney's analysis crosses boundaries fruitfully, opening up a new arena of investigation: actual struggles over what types of expertise resonate with popular consciousness.
Although versions of modernization theory held sway throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of development came to be fiercely criticized across the political spectrum, despite some scholars’ insistence on its historical and ethnographic specificity and use-value (e.g., Cowen and Shenton Reference Cowen and Shenton1996; Cooper Reference Cooper1996; Cooper and Packard Reference Cooper and Packard1997; Ferguson Reference Ferguson1994; Watts Reference Watts and Crush1995). Postcolonial scholarship, in particular, became increasingly skeptical of “development”—for Sachs (Reference Sachs1992) and Escobar (Reference Escobar1995), just another form of Eurocentric domination. If the idea of development has lingered so long, one reason may be that a socialist ideal kept alive the possibility of using the development concept for other-than-Eurocentric or narrowly capitalist ends, and of seeing it as an alternative imaginary for democratic and socialist futures. A postsocialist sensibility, in other words, undergirds historical and ethnographic studies that find the development concept useful beyond the confines of empires and markets.
Helping to obscure this alternative developmental possibility were other Cold War ideological effects, such as western propaganda about socialism's “inefficiencies” that occluded its potential for competing with capitalist economies. In fact, party-states did have competitive forms. For example, they regularly did what democratic ones did rarely until the 1970s: using soft budget constraints, they protected firms from risk by bailouts of failing enterprises. It was only later that their western counterparts would begin to serve explicitly as cushions against risk. Moreover, socialist countries did so with “taxpayers’ ” money but without the political fall-out occasioned, for instance, as capitalist economies began to violate their own “rule” that bankruptcy is supposed to discipline risk-taking—for example, in the U.S. government's 1989 bail-out plan for the Savings and Loan industry as well as its protection of financial over taxpayer interests in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that precipitated a massive economic crisis in September 2008. In addition, by organizing property in a hierarchy of devolving use-rights rather than ownership rights, socialist states showed how enterprises might successfully shuck off costs and liabilities precisely because they were not owners.Footnote 17 We increasingly see this insight at work both among property-rights theorists and in contemporary practices involving intellectual property, in which not owning but leasing and other temporary arrangements sustain profits (see Verdery and Humphrey Reference Verdery and Humphrey2004). Was socialism perhaps more competitive than we were led to believe?
Although a variety of histories and practices become visible in new ways through a post-Cold War lens, the stakes of integrating the analytic field go far beyond this. The very concept of a Third, Non-aligned World emerged from the Cold War; in the encounter of the superpowers, the “Third World” was constituted as an object of thought and subject of action. The more comprehensive post-Cold War frame we advocate prompts investigation of connections and comparisons across imperial formations past and present, bringing together European empires of previous centuries, Cold War empires and their Third World client-states, late twentieth-century corporate power, and forms of twenty-first-century capitalism. To organize research in this way repositions the Third World in relation to postcolonial thought. Moreover, we gain a rather different view of questions concerning the construction of “the West” and its forms of capitalism by asking how not just the colonies but the very existence of socialism affected their constitution. We offer two broader re-conceptualizations that our perspective facilitates, illuminating the power rather than the truth of Cold War verities. The first concerns the end of South African Apartheid and the second the rise of flexible production systems.
The end of Apartheid in South Africa is an important case of interaction between histories of colonialism and socialism. Is it possible that the existence of the Soviet Union prolonged Apartheid in South Africa?Footnote 18 There were certainly close connections between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP), and several ANC/SACP exiles received military and intelligence training in Moscow, East Germany, Cuba, and other areas under Soviet control. Gorbachev's launching of Perestroika (economic restructuring) and Glasnost (political openness) in the late 1980s parallels the overtures made by a section of the exiled ANC/SACP, with Thabo Mbeki at the helm, to groups in the state and South African capitalists amenable to democratizing politics. In the same brief period—1990 and 1991—in which Gorbachev became the first and last President of the Soviet Union, stripping the CPSU of considerable power and launching revolts from within the party into the streets of Moscow, South Africa's white-supremacist National Party lifted the ban on the ANC and SACP, released Nelson Mandela, and negotiated Apartheid's end. Simultaneously, the U.S. government transformed its view of the ANC and began to treat it as a legitimate political entity rather than a terrorist organization. Would the National Party have made these overtures had the possibility existed that the ANC and SACP might draw South Africa into the Soviet orbit, with all this would mean for privileged South Africans? To what extent were connections with KGB intelligence crucial to the ANC's transition from an exiled, imprisoned, and underground movement with clandestine ties to popular community and labor struggles within South Africa in the 1980s, to a ruling democratic alliance of ANC, SACP, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions? How was the notion of the end of Soviet socialism mobilized in selling orthodox neoliberal economic policy to this ruling alliance in 1996, just two years after the first democratic elections? Bringing postsocialism back into connected global histories of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism would open precisely such questions concerning South Africa's transition to democracy.
Our second example concerns the emergence of new forms of late-twentieth-century capital accumulation variously known as “flexible specialization,” “flexible accumulation,” “disorganized capitalism,” or “networked capitalism.” Since the 1980s, this topic has been the subject of much scrutiny and debate. Our perspective suggests that to at least some extent flexible accumulation may have been a response to the challenges posed specifically by socialism.Footnote 19 Capital requires consumption, to absorb commodities and realize the value upon which sustained accumulation depends—a process dependent upon what Harvey (Reference Harvey1982) calls a “spatial fix”—that is, the possibility of shifting capitalist crises elsewhere. With the expansion of socialism not just in Europe but also in Asia and elsewhere, a staggering number of the world's people were hindered from consuming capitalist commodities. That is, huge spaces were no longer available for the spatial fix, even though the desire for commodities persisted there (especially as of the 1970s, when western goods increasingly seeped into socialist countries despite official socialist ideologies of restraint and national sacrifice).
Scholars rarely look at that period of western capitalism from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Doing so might shed light on how socialism's controls on commodity movements—of both things and people—constrained spatial fixes and perhaps intensified exploitation of non-socialist areas. In other words, did consumption-resistant socialism hasten the global capitalist crisis of the late 1960s, producing flexible specialization and networked capitalisms in response? If socialist autarky of the 1950s and 1960s had not effectively closed off large areas of consumption and cheap labor, would fractions of capital have embraced new technical and organizational means for transforming productivity and targeting consumption precisely in the 1960s and 1970s? Without the Iron Curtain, would niche markets, just-in-time manufacturing, and Internet coordination of multiple sites of production and consumption have been precluded, at least for a time?
Certainly, the 1970s saw intensified concern with how to keep the products of socialist economies out of capitalist markets—that is, to reduce their potential for competing in capitalist space. An important indicator of this was trends in the anti-dumping law being developed in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. Snyder (Reference Snyder2001) describes the creation of a construct, “the Non-Market Economy,” as global capitalism began to falter. This construct specifically concerned the problem of the production subsidies in socialist countries, which made their products cheap relative to those of Europe and the United States. “The Non-Market Economy” concept firmly rejected the possibility that prices could contain information about something other than supply and demand, such as, for instance, information about government welfare and assaults on poverty. For anti-dumping law, all that counted was how to exclude the cheaper products of socialist economies because they were being sold below production costs as assessed in market terms. A similar kind of argument reappeared with the massive expansion of Chinese industry in the late twentieth century, a testament to the power of Cold War spatial constructs. We are just beginning to understand the geopolitical and economic effects of contemporary Chinese industrialization and its domestic discontents, as well as the ways in which western policy-makers draw on Cold War representations of space to attempt to regulate and mitigate these effects.
The issues mentioned here are but a handful of those we might include in the agenda of post-Cold War studies. How best can we think about them? Here we encounter the most important Cold War knowledge effect of all: decades of censorship (including self-censorship) of a Marxist intellectual tradition in U.S. social science, victim first of the McCarthy era and then (after a period of flourishing in the 1970s–1980s) of diatribes against “grand narratives.” In anthropology and to some extent sociology, much of the early research on socialism and postsocialism employed a Marxist-derived political-economy approach (mostly absent, however, from political science and economics). The aptness of critical Marxism for thinking about both postsocialist transformation and postsocialist futures inclines us to see this kind of scholarship as a source of possible refinements in Marxist analysis, for post-Cold War studies more generally.
In the former Soviet bloc, the process of “transition” opens the workings of capital to new scrutiny, enabling us to see more clearly how phenomena such as property rights, commodification, and democratization are being constituted, and possibly illuminating these phenomena for postcolonial situations. For example, the post-1989 allocation of private property rights to Eastern Europe's factory workers and small farmers proved a quick route to dispossession and impoverishment; democratic politics produced nationalist parties that caused serious interethnic conflict, as in Yugoslavia. Did comparable events occur in decolonizing contexts, and did differences in forms of capitalism forge private property and democratic politics along other trajectories?
Just as postcolonial studies retains some of the normative presumptions of anti-colonial nationalism while questioning the limits and exclusions of these nationalist projects, postsocialism can offer a critical perspective both on the legacies of state socialisms and on the possible present and future forms of democratic socialism.Footnote 20 One aim of postsocialist studies in a Marxist vein is to understand actually existing socialisms better, including their Marxist-Leninist ideologies as well as their practices of government, possibly with an eye to new socialist futures. An instance is the work of economist Alec Nove, whose analyses of both actually existing and alternative feasible socialisms epitomize the Janus-faced critique of the postsocialist scholar attentive to both what socialism was and what possible progressive and regressive trajectories might lie ahead. As Nove sees it, feasible socialist interventions after the demise of actual socialisms might include certain forms of state or public property, a mixture of representative and centralized planning, decentralized and worker-managed production systems, the nurturing of negotiation and accountability in politics and the economy, and the protection of various areas of social life from commodification (Reference Nove1983: 245–46). Some of these forms have already been analyzed ethnographically (e.g., Stark and Bruszt Reference Stark and Bruszt1998), and others can be subjects of new postsocialist research. To the extent that postsocialist studies points toward utopian possibilities, it counters resignation to the anarchic and destructive aspects of capitalist imperialism.
In this section we have explored the knowledge effects of the Cold War, describing its intellectual division of labor and its consequences for the kinds of theory and analysis that developed. We turn now to certain practices of government that Marxist-Leninist regimes shared with colonial powers: an endless pursuit of internal and external enemies and the differential allocation of resources to variously racialized subject populations. In the following section, we explore how thinking between the posts deepens our understanding of state-sanctioned racism.
3. Enemies of the State: Changing State Racisms
A signal achievement of postcolonial studies has been to explain how colonial power worked through forms of difference that were produced in part through colonial encounters and through representations of “self” and “other,” with lasting practical effects. How intrinsic is this process to colonialism and its aftermath? Some scholars have argued that processes of othering are fundamental to all modern states and to the interlaced histories of sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitical government. Stoler (Reference Stoler2006), Gregory (Reference Gregory2004), and Comaroff (Reference Comaroff2007) draw in different ways from the corpus of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to argue that sovereign power suspends its own juridical-legal procedures as it produces exceptional spaces and bodies. We are just beginning to understand ethnographically how exposed and abandoned populations relate to sovereign power over life and death. Indeed, as Holt (Reference Holt2000) argues, contemporary analysis of state racism has moved beyond W.E.B. DuBois’ famous assessment (Reference DuBois1969: xi) that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” New work on state-sanctioned racism is concerned less with color, physiognomy, creed, or blood, than with what Foucault calls “biopolitics”—techniques, expertise, and subjectivity with respect to the vitality of bodies and populations—in relation to capitalism and empire. These tools have helped certain postcolonial and postsocialist thinkers to formulate more clearly how states of all kinds have exercised social, military, and epistemic power over “internal enemies” and othered populations. Biopolitics can also be a useful concept to rethink counterhegemonic movements that, as Comaroff (Reference Comaroff2007) argues powerfully with respect to AIDS activism in South Africa, stand to redefine politics itself. How might thinking between the posts clarify the biopolitics of modern racisms in various contexts, and what possibilities might such analysis suggest for anti-racist and democratic political imaginings in the present? This is our final provocation for post-Cold War ethnography.
One set of insights comes from analyzing state-sanctioned racism in its post-Victorian “scientific racist” form as well as in the three great white supremacist regimes: Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow U.S. South, and apartheid South Africa (the last of which, we have suggested, was shored up by Cold War military and financial aid until the end of the twentieth century). Thinkers as diverse as Foucault (Reference Foucault and Macey2003), Balibar (Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1991), Gilmore (Reference Gilmore2007), Hall (Reference Hall1980), Memmi (Reference Memmi1999), and Stoler (Reference Stoler1995) find that modern racism works through technologies, institutions, discourses, and social relations that unevenly distribute group-specific propensities to sustained and decent life. Scholars have explored new imaginaries and technologies for distributing population-targeted harm in such areas as crime and punishment (Caldeira Reference Caldeira2000; Gilmore Reference Gilmore2002; Reference Gilmore2007; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2006), disease and access to healing (Swanson Reference Swanson1977, Craddock Reference Craddock2000; Farmer Reference Farmer2001; Shah Reference Shah2001), and trans-border migration and border control (Nevins Reference Nevins2002).
The treatment accorded these populations depends, of course, on the prior creation of population categories to be treated differentially, often by labeling them “enemies,” to create fear and to promote political goals. Consolidating both the Soviet and the U.S. empires required suppressing “internal enemies,” through such means as the Soviet “gulag archipelago” or today's U.S. prison-industrial complex (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2007). In the United States such enemies might include J. Edgar Hoover's communists-behind-every-tree, or African-American targets of lynchings, discrimination, and incarceration. If the term “enemy” was less common in colonial contexts than were other means of disparaging and dishonoring “natives” (such as through pervasive images of the “savage” in need of civilizing or controlling by missionaries, educators, police, or colonial administrators), in socialist contexts an obsession with enemies was the very ground of regime consolidation. Multiple idioms of difference—such as religion, gender, class, and national identity—each generated labels for “internal enemies” who had to be persecuted in the name of building socialism. For Communists, class enemies were the worst. The collectivization of agriculture, for instance, mobilized putative class difference so as to gain poor and middle peasants’ support toward eliminating wealthy peasant “exploiters” (kulaks), seen as agents of capitalist reformism who had to be purged in defense of socialist society.Footnote 21
The production of enemies reveals processes that Marxist orthodoxy passed over but that come into view with a postcolonial lens focused on racialized biopower. Thus sensitized, we can explore not only the more standard uses of racial classifications, but also the racializing aspects of assigning people to class categories, which clung to their targets like skin. We might, with Balibar (Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1991), label this practice “class racism”—by which he means the naturalization of class inequality through conceptions of sub-humanity—and we might complement the results of postcolonial research by looking for means of class racism in socialist contexts. For instance, Communist propaganda represented class “exploiters” as vermin, pigs, and other subhuman types, deserving extermination or expulsion. Pollution rules would keep them from reproducing: Communist Parties expected their cadres to divorce wives whose families were classified as kulaks and who were therefore impure (see Kligman and Verdery n.d.). Here is class racism, with class labels being inheritable—China provides the most extreme example—and affecting people's life chances even after persecution had totally impoverished their once-wealthy families. Archival lists of persons by class status include some labeled “former kulak,” indicating that the person's status lived on even after it was officially annulled. This kind of racism is based not in physiognomy but in the premise that one's status is ineluctable and immutable; the physiognomy employed by other racisms is merely the most common way of asserting that immutability. Even as thinking about class racism brings arguments about biopower into postsocialist scholarship, postcolonial scholars might find socialist technologies of people-processing similarly instructive.
Further insight comes from work on how colonizers were set off from their racially inferior subjects. Some studies of colonial settler societies note anxiety about racial and sexual boundaries that were perennially at risk. (This casts new light on Communist Party orders that cadres implementing collectivization were not to have sexual involvements with local women.) Stoler (Reference Stoler2002) observes that Dutch settlers’ anxieties about racial purity in Indonesia—whether in relation to the domestic security of colonial women, the use of local concubines, the growth of “mixed-race” populations, or the education of colonial children—were often especially acute in times of political unrest, when claims to racial superiority would have to be demonstrated more persuasively. Boundary concerns underlie some of the means used to enlist the support of subject populations, through various forms such as “rehabilitation of tradition,” religious revivalism, educational or property reform, technical transformation of production relations, or partial inclusion into colonial bourgeois culture. Do these findings for colonial settler societies suggest similar kinds of analysis concerning the socialist elite [nomenklatura] and their treatment of boundary spaces and hybrid populations, and how subject populations find ways to carve out realms of relative autonomy?
We need a strong body of historical and ethnographic research to think in comparative and interconnected ways about how colonialism, socialism, and their aftermaths constructed “race” and “enemy,” employing racial technologies and expertise to differentiate spaces and populations through their contrasting propensities to life and death. Uehling's (Reference Uehling2004) work on the repatriation of Crimean Tatars, whom Stalin forcibly and rapidly removed from their homes in 1944 as “enemies,” focuses on a broad terrain of lived memory and spatialized attachment. Uehling shows how the changing boundaries, entitlements, and affinities of populations and landscapes were tied to broader state-sanctioned racisms, reproduced through various quotidian appropriations and reinterpretations. Struggles over Tatar affiliation in contemporary Russia—whether through their Sunni Muslim or Turkic language affinities, their historical claims to be descendants of the Golden Horde, or their geographical ties to Crimea as an indigenous population—illustrate the productive possibilities in research across various forms of racism. Other research asks how stigmatized populations in Haiti, as elsewhere, are kept from life-saving medicine, as infectious disease follows the fault lines of racialized poverty (Farmer Reference Farmer1993). Still other work looks to the environmental wastes of socialist industrialization, seen in their most deadly form in prolonged toxic exposure following the Chernobyl disaster (Gille Reference Gille2007; Petryna Reference Petryna2002).
As important as post-Cold War ethnographies are to perceiving continuities, they also help us understand discontinuities in the making of post-Cold War enemies, against the intertwined dynamics of western militarism, politicized religiosity, and the geopolitics of the energy-security-industrial complex. Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, the United States has been casting about for new enemies, new sites of danger, to take “Communism's” place. A brief demonizing of Japan gave way, after 9/11, to the “other” as terrorist. Gregory's (Reference Gregory2004) work on “the colonial present” in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq, for instance, explores the recurrence of the Cold War enemy as the terror suspect, whether in entire regions that allegedly foster terrorism, or in the extra-legal powers assumed in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and sites of “extraordinary rendition.”
Given this broad array of state-sanctioned racisms, can “anti-racism” make any sense as a stance? Do targeted populations of the unemployed, criminalized, infirm, exposed, militarized, ghettoized, or incarcerated have anything in common? A postsocialist reading would suggest that all these populations are in various ways remnants of a twentieth-century notion of a social wage, whether through socialism or through real or promised welfare regimes. While these “radiant futures” may have been largely a mythology of the twentieth century, they did have powerful effects in certain places (propping up the fast capitalisms of East Asia, as we suggested earlier), and their demise has led to a global proliferation of livelihood struggles fought by various surplus populations. Forms of biopolitical debris of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism—whether as redundant labor (some of it becoming migrant labor on a wide scale), infirm bodies, infected populations, or polluted environments—become key sites of struggle in most parts of the post-Cold War world. This is certainly a bold claim, in the sense that most of these struggles do not connect even regionally, and very rarely form broader anti-hegemonic coalitions. They can, however, be seen—following Burawoy's (Reference Burawoy2003) bridging of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi—as scattered counter-hegemonies that arise against the destructive effects of commodification following upon the dismantling of state supports for social reproduction. Burawoy's concept of counter-hegemonic solidarities mirrors Nove's defense of “feasible socialism.” Both oppose group-targeted fatalities, to promote solidarities in a world of difference—a postsocialist anti-racism without overarching dialectical certainties or hidden internal enemies.
Reflecting on her optimism about the possibility of a democratic socialism arising from the ashes of its Soviet-style incarnation, and on calls for ‘radical democracy’ that bracket political economy from cultural politics, Fraser (Reference Fraser1997) argues that postsocialist critics must reflect on the global spread of what she calls a “politics of recognition,” so as not to lapse back into the Soviet tendency to replace cultural diversity with a uniform New Socialist Man but rather to link struggles for recognition and redistribution. This is precisely the kind of anti-racism we gain by combining postsocialism with postcolonial analysis of new forms of racism. As Eley (Reference Eley2002) argues in his history of the European Left, it is in breaking away from a sclerotic Left party and making new political spaces to conserve socialist values that the ongoing quest for democracy is preserved. Here we see the utility of our goal of bringing together postsocialist and postcolonial studies toward rethinking socialist and anti-colonial values simultaneously.
CONCLUSION: POST-COLD WAR ETHNOGRAPHY
If Lenin's Comintern was the first global plan for decolonization, as Young (Reference Young2001) contends, it is striking that most states that applied Marxism to development policy have been outside Western Europe: in Russia, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Young poses postcolonial critique as a form of activist writing that draws on this tradition of anti-colonial socialism, in solidarity with ongoing struggles for liberation and economic justice after political independence. In a world riven by capitalist imperialism, analysis in solidarity with such struggles today requires interdisciplinary ethnographic engagement. We have suggested that this kind of ethnography must also employ a critical lens on the global effects of Cold War thought throughout the twentieth century. It is time to liberate the Cold War from the ghetto of Soviet area studies and postcolonial thought from the ghetto of Third World and colonial studies. The liberatory path we propose is to jettison our two posts in favor of a single overarching one: the post-Cold War.
Post-Cold War ethnography could build upon work by “natives,” as analysts of their own condition, in their own terms. In such a corpus we would find figures as diverse as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, José Carlos Mariátegui, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Reinaldo Arenas, C.L.R. James, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, and other anti-colonial or “Third Worldist” figures. Joining them would be their counterpart socialist dissidents and critical scholars, like the East Europeans Rudolph Bahro, Agnes Heller, Iván Szelényi, Jadwiga Staniszkis, István Rév, János Kornai, and Pavel Câmpeanu, all of whom called Cold War truths into question. This corpus would also include critics of U.S. militarism in the Middle East and of the various Asian one-party states. Among today's many Fanons would be writers critical of market fundamentalism and U.S. corporate dominance; artists and others who represent Africa as more than a doomed continent consigned to “structural irrelevance” (as Professor Manuel Castells [Reference Castells1996: 135] boldly put it), and the majestic film-making of Osmane Sembène, who renders visually the interplay of universal and particular themes in African social formations, always with an eye to critique, innovation, and the many cultural fronts in Africa's ongoing decolonization. And this corpus would also include myriad less-privileged activist-intellectuals, rabble-rousers, and self-conscious social outcasts, whose voices lie at the margins of the archives of twentieth-century anti-colonial, socialist, and nationalist struggles.
The Cold War is not yet over. Its influence is felt even now. How else does one understand the importance accorded by both scholars and policy-makers alike to “privatization,” “marketization,” and “democratization”—that troika of western self-identity so insistently being imposed on others around the world as a sign that the Cold War is over? Is the emphasis on these features driven, just as modernization theory was, by the ideological goal of compelling “them” to be like our outdated image of “us”? A central task of ethnographies of imperialism and neo-colonialism today lies in apprehending the traces of the past as they emerge, not as hostage to the overarching power of “capitalism,” “colonialism,” or “socialism” qua fixed entities, but as signs of the tenuous re-workings of twentieth-century capitalist empires and their twenty-first-century successors.
