|
Research interests
Research program My current research program consists of three projects on Baltic post-communist transformations, labor resistance in East-Central Europe and historical materialist concepts: State, Capital and Labor in Baltic Post-Communist Transformations This research strand builds on my doctoral thesis to investigate the conditions and processes undergirding the economic sociology of post-communist change in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Aided by a historical materialist approach, I seek to unearth the vectors of continuity in the forms of class-constituted rule, study the processes conducive to the exasperation of geographical and social unevenness and center attention on intra- and inter-class conflicts that shaped the trajectories of change. The research project sheds light on previously unexplored themes ranging from the origins of neoliberalism in the Baltics, currency and monetary reforms as exemplary of authoritarian neoliberal statecraft to labor resistance in the episodes of privatization, the modalities of 2008-2011 crisis management, and the rise of far-right in Estonia. The purpose of this project is to provide the first comprehensive and comparative account of the transformation in the Baltics. To realize this objective, I pose five research questions. Debates on post-communist transition divide into three broad strands. Finding the panacea in the trinity of rapid stabilization, liberalization and privatization reforms, neoliberal ‘designer capitalism’ models (e.g. Sachs 1994) have failed to anticipate unprecedented ‘transitional recessions’ alongside chronic unemployment, widening wealth and income disparities. Besides emphasizing the necessity for incremental reform, institutionalist entries (institutional economics, neoclassical sociology and comparative capitalisms tradition) provided more realistic balance sheets of transition by emphasizing its social costs. They also asked how history, culture and politics shaped variegated reform outcomes (e.g. Stark and Bruszt 1999). Critical interventions addressed the topic through the prisms of dependent development, transnationalization of production and neoliberal discourse (e.g. Vliegenthart 2010). Nevertheless, each entry offered inadequate accounts of power relations across various spatial scales and the interiorities between ‘the state’ and ‘the market’. There was an inability to depart from ‘methodologically nationalist’ (van der Linden 2008) forms of enquiry without erasing domestic determinations or failing to consider the agency of labor. Hence, the first research question is: How to conceptualize the forces and factors that shaped post-communist transformation in the east of Baltic littoral? Extant literature on transformation locates the point of departure in the annus mirabilis of 1989 (or 1991). This move not only underestimates past legacies in restructuring processes but also fails to theorize the nature of Soviet-style economic systems. Without answering the question of ‘what was the Soviet Union?’, we cannot grasp the nature of revolutions that produced new territorial sovereignties in the Baltics. This project locates its chronological starting point in the 1940s to probe into economic sociology of Soviet industrialization, labor unrest and the political economy of secession. Its second question asks: How should we understand the social nature of Soviet Socialist Baltic Republics and what are attendant implications for the study of post-communist restructuring? Owing to radical liberalization of foreign trade and investment, fixed exchange rate regimes, fast privatization and indifference to the mitigation of social hardships, the comparative capitalism tradition portrays the Baltics as ‘radical neoliberal’ regimes (Bohle and Greskovits 2007, 2012; Feldmann 2006). While nominally correct, this interpretation says little about the origins of neoliberalism in three national settings, intra-elite contestations and alternative reform options at the start of the transition. Hence, the third question is: What are the institutional, ideational and agential prerequisites for instigating market reforms, and how did they intersect with changing class compositions in the Baltics? Addressing ECE's integration in the global economy, mainstream and critical perspectives focused on the prospects of technological upgrading, the transfer of managerial know-how and built-up export potential (Donges and Wieners 1994; Ellingstad 1997). For different reasons, the region has been regarded as the most attractive destination of foreign investment. However, structural change has been regarded solely from the international prism, leaving the themes of foreign capital’s entry, inter-state competition, interest intermediation between foreign investors and state bureaucracies unstudied. Thus, the fourth question asks: How should we assess Baltic foreign investment-based re-integration into the world market? In the wake of the 2008 crisis, neo-classical and (post-) Keynesian commentators disagreed about the crisis management modalities. Both underestimated the importance of class alliances, comprised of international financial institutions, supranational bodies, local elites and middle classes that pre-programmed the choice of 'internal devaluation' strategy. This scholarship also exaggerated the passivity of Baltic publics against the imposition of austerity measures (Åslund 2010). Subsequently, the disinterest in how after the crisis austerity has become permanent under new EU-level economic governance structures (Erne 2015) – led to an underestimation of far-right reaction manifest in the recent electoral success of Estonia’s EKRE party. Thus, the fifth and final question is: What are the causes of the 2007-8 Baltic crisis, and how do they translate into political responses undergirding austerity programs and post-recessionary socio-economic setting more widely? Cartographies of Eastern European Labor Unrest in the 1990s The project pursues the leitmotif of under-explored instances of labor resistance against and its capacity to shape (and at times even reverse) neoliberal restructuring at the heyday of post-communist transformation. Informed by the interviews with labor activists, trade union members and academics across East-Central Europe as well as primary sources such as independent publications addressing labor affairs, preliminary research shows that the reliance on official strike statistics is untenable insofar as it exaggerates the extent of ‘apathy from below’. The ethnographic forms of enquiry at the heart of this research aspire to reconsider and challenge such assumptions. Revisiting the 'Mode of Production': Enduring Controversies over Labor, Exploitation and Historiographies of Capitalism The collaborative project with Kayhan Valadbaygi revisits once-thriving historical materialist debates on the conceptualization of the mode of production and domestic (household) labor. It is comprised of three inter-related themes. First, the re-examination of the concept of the mode of production by looking at several aspects of the debate including emergence and periodization of capitalism, the ‘schools’ of social formation/articulation and categories of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labor, ‘market dependence’ and ‘merchant capital’. Second, the complexity of the domestic labor debate approached through the lenses of the role of the body in the emergence of capitalism, the interiority between production and social reproduction and household labor as productive or non-productive of value and surplus value. Third, the evaluation of the notion of uneven and combined development as a conceptual tool for analysis of the expansion of capitalism, its relation to the notions of the mode of production and by extension domestic labor, its promises for non-Eurocentric historiography and the critique of its applications. |
