INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Capitalist Transformations in Eastern and Central Europe

Stream 1 – Capitalism and accumulation in ECE: from the ground up

Conveners: Oana Mateescu, Don Kalb, Sorin Gog

This stream focuses on the sociology and anthropology of capitalist transformations in Eastern and Central Europe. Over the past three decades, the demise of socialism and the regional insertion into globalizing capitalism has generated immense social inequalities, deep spatial unevenness, exploitation, new regimes of labor, new wealth, deep shifts in urban and rural relations, surplus populations and migrations, and capitalist ideologies and subjectivities. New regimes of accumulation and new spatial fixes, encompassing value and values, have emerged and consolidated. Privatizations and markets have dramatically reconfigured social and cultural spaces, sites, practices and imaginations, all part and parcel of the new dynamic class-formations. How has capitalism penetrated and how has it been appropriated in the region? How has the new cultural political economy shaped our states, societies, social relations, subjectivities, intimacies, and temporalities? How has regional insertion in global value chains produced new (or new-old) social spaces, practices, micro and macro power dynamics, class alliances and antagonisms, and state-crafting? What is the relationship, if any, between capitalist transformation and war-making in the East of the East?�

Panels in this stream:

Panel 1 – The politics of capitalist  accumulation (Monday, 19 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 5– Migration regimes and labor struggles (Monday, 19 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 9– Politics of infrastructures and development (Monday, 19 May, 18:00 – 20:00)
Panel 13 – Manufacturing blues and re-industrialisation (Tuesday, 20 May, 12:00 – 14:00)
Panel 17– The precarity of digital, platform and logistics labor (Tuesday, 20 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 19 – Social reproduction: class, care, welfare (Tuesday, 20 May, 14:00 – 16:00) 
Panel 21 – Racialised labor and surplus populations (Tuesday, 20 May, 16:00 – 18:00) 
Panel 23 – Capitalism: moralities and fantasies (Tuesday, 20 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 25 – Chinese investments and new industrial policies in ECE (Wednesday, 21 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 29 – Housing and peripheral financialization (Wednesday, 21 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 33 – Energy transitions and contested green politics  (Wednesday, 21 May, 18:00 – 20:00)
Panel 37– Environmental grey zones: violence, waste and injustice  (Thursday, 22 May, 10:00 – 12:00)
Panel 40 – The pathways of capitalist accumulation (Thursday, 22 May, 10:00 – 12:00)
Panel 41 – Urban labor: relocations and dislocations (Thursday, 22 May, 12:00 – 14:00)
Panel 52– Shifting rural landscapes: land grabbing, agro-capitalism and gentrification (Thursday, 22 May, 16:00 – 18:00)

Stream 2 – The Global Political Economy of ECE

Conveners: Doro Bohle, Cornel Ban, Dana Domsodi

Much of the existing scholarship in political economy and political sciences on Eastern and Central Europe focuses only to a small extent on cross-regional comparisons or on systematic analysis of the impacts of system-level factors on regional developments. Yet for all its historical specificities, this integrated European semi-periphery should not be turned into an exotic object that does not allow comparative work. This stream aims deals with this problem by tempting interdisciplinary scholarship to take more seriously the international political economy dimension of ECE’s shifting developmental paths during and since state socialism as well as the undertaking of focused comparisons between ECE and other semi-peripheral contexts. Its final outcome is a thematically-organized set of studies that can provide a comprehensive answer to the problems outlined herein.�

Panels in this stream:

Panel 2– Bricks, Bridges and Bureaucracy: Eastern Europe’s DIY Statecraft (Monday, 19 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 14 – Green Expectations: Decarbonising ECE Manufacturing and the Rise of China as a Green Superpower (Tuesday, 20 May, 12:00 – 14:00)
Panel 18 – Breaking the Chains (and Maybe the Bank): The Perilous Politics of European Financial Dependency (Tuesday, 20 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 22 – From Classroom to Workplace: Unpacking Eastern Europe’s Political Economy and Gender Dynamics (Tuesday, 20 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 26– Social reproduction in neoliberal times: welfare states, health and the family in Eastern Europe (Wednesday, 21 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 30– FDI-Led  Growth and Frontier Semi-Core Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Wednesday, 21 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 34– Big Tech, Industry 4.0, and the Rewriting of the Peripheral Puzzle in ECE (Wednesday, 21 May, 18:00 – 20:00)
Panel 38 – Financial Regulation, Firm Strategies, and Transforming Dependency in ECE (Thursday, 22 May, 10:00 – 12:00)
Panel 49–  Stripping Democracy’s Assets: Navigating Dependency in Authoritarian ECE states (Thursday, 22 May, 16:00 – 18:00)

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Stream 3 – Political activism and anti-capitalist critique in ECE

Conveners: Enikő Vincze, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Vladimir Simović�

This stream focuses on the formation and advancement of political activism and theories critical of capitalism in a semi-peripheral region of Europe with a socialist legacy. In our understanding, both political activism, which includes various forms of self-organizing and collective action with political demands (institutionalized or not in political parties), and anti-capitalist theories address the systemic causes of class-based, racialized, and gendered exploitation, dispossession, and injustice in the fields of labor, housing, social reproduction, climate, cultural production, geopolitics, or, generally, in capitalism. This is our way to comprehend capitalist transformations in Eastern and Central Europe during the past three decades: on the one hand, through the lens of how political activism and critical theories problematized the changing realities; and, on the other hand, by analyzing how social movements, spaces of theorizing, institutionalized civic and political organizations and trade unions shaped and manifested their criticism against capitalism, while developing alternative practices. This conference stream hosts scholars working on critical theories, social, cultural, artistic, and political advocates, and activist academics who use multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches to discuss these topics. This is how we contribute to a collective effort that advances Left politics in Eastern and Central Europe and globally at the juncture of anti-capitalist practice and theory.�

Panels in this stream:

Panel 12– Leftist collectives and right-wing appropriations in contemporary capitalism (Monday, 19 May, 18:00 – 20:00) 
Panel 15– Movements against varieties of capital accumulation (Tuesday, 20 May, 12:00 – 14:00) 
Panel 32– “The Left” – from critical knowledge to activism (Wednesday, 21 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 35– Culture and technology in anti-capitalist activism (Wednesday, 21 May, 18:00 – 20:00)
Panel 36– The political economy of anti-capitalist critique and activism (Wednesday, 21 May, 18:00 – 20:00) 
Panel 39 – How can we organise against the structural silencing of anti-capitalism? (Thursday, 22 May, 10:00 – 12:00)
Panel 42– Prospects of politicisation across movements in capitalism (Thursday, 22 May, 12:00 – 14:00) – 
Panel 44– Anti-capitalist lineages in theorising and political activism (Thursday, 22 May, 12:00 – 14:00)

Stream 4 –  Postwar Socialism and Mixed Social Forms in ECE
Conveners: Adela Hîncu, Attila Melegh, Adrian Grama�

The transitions to socialism in postwar Eastern and Central Europe took place amidst a plurality of social forms: diverse and divergent property relations, ownership structures, patterns of social reproduction, or cultural logics. Shaped by the economic crisis of the 1980s, transitions from socialism similarly produced a diversity of capitalist social arrangements in the region. But socialism was itself far from a homogenous social formation, and in the present-day context of growing social inequalities, regional uneven development, and class struggle, this stream critically returns to it in search for a usable past—relevant for its progressive achievements as well as for its failures, but also as a site of unexplored diversity, potentialities, and experimentation. Papers in this stream address the historical evolution of mixed financial, economic, social, and cultural forms, together with the theoretical and scientific practices surrounding them, toward a greater diversity after initial attempts to introduce strict planning and until the collapse of socialism.

Panels in this stream:

Panel 3 – Whose Theory? Which Marxism? (Monday, 19 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 8 – Rethinking Socialist Investment, Ownership and Income (Monday, 19 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 10 – Pre-Capitalist Pathways: Reassessing the Late Socialist Economy  (Monday, 19 May, 18:00 – 20:00)
Panel 20 – Plural Margins: Race and Disability under State Socialism  (Tuesday, 20 May, 14:00 – 
Panel 24 – Socialist Regimes of Care-work (Tuesday, 20 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 27 – Trajectories of Class (Re)formation and Capital (Re)location (Wednesday, 21 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 31 – The Social Origins of Socialist Expertise (Wednesday, 21 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 50 – Artistic Transitions: The Cultural Life of Socialist Infrastructure (Thursday, 22 May, 16:00 – 18:00)

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Stream 5 –  Genealogies of Capitalism in XIX and XX Century in ECE
Conveners: Alexandra Ghiț, Olena Lyubchenko, Gareth Dale�

Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) has been seen as peripheral to capitalism’s “core”, largely owing to its agrarian character and so-called ‘belated’ industrialization. This stream focuses on the period 1848–1948. It seeks to develop an understanding of how capitalism evolved in ECE, in a variety of registers. One, imperial and geopolitical, explores connections between capitalist development and imperial and colonial power, both within and beyond ECE. Another takes business history as its lens: what do we learn about the evolution of capitalism through studying the biography of particular firms?�

Panels in this stream:

Panel 4– Constructing institutions and identities of capitalist modernity in ECE (Monday, 19 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 7– Genealogies of anticapitalist struggle: Anarchism in East-Central Europe (Monday, 19 May, 16:00 – 18:00)
Panel 11– Imperialism, colonialism, and passages from empire to nation (Monday, 19 May, 18:00 – 20:00)
Panel 16– Business histories between nations and empires (Tuesday, 20 May, 12:00 – 14:00)
Panel 28– Industrial development and dependency in East-Central Europe (Wednesday, 21 May, 14:00 – 16:00)
Panel 43– Women and feminism in early twentieth-century labour movements (Thursday, 22 May, 12:00 – 14:00)
Panel 51– Negotiating and resisting capital on the ground: labour courts, co-ops, and labour struggles (Thursday, 22 May, 16:00 – 18:00)

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