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Social Theory and the Crisis of Socialism by Larry J. Ray; What Was Socialism, and What
Comes Next? by Katherine Verdery
Review by: Ellen Comisso
Russian Review, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 615-616
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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Book Reviews
615
616
As claims mount for a limited good, the land itself becomes "elastic," so that in the end,
acquiring or reacquiring one's parcel becomes a heavily politicized process. Not surprisingly,
complaints of local "abuse of power" are common (hardly a new phenomenon), as potential
owners-often the same officials accused of "abuses"-invoke the intervention of the central
state on their behalf, thereby augmenting precisely the power "privatization" was supposedly
intended to limit. In effect, the struggle for entitlements continues under the label of private
property, while administrative discretion is now recast as the "rule of law."
From this and other essays, we derive a graphic picture of how both concepts and experiences of "nation," "citizenship," "property," and "the state" have and have not changed
over the past decade in Romania and the former socialist bloc. Like Ray, Verdery does not
see a teleological end to these processes; indeed, she suggests toward the end of the volume
that there is as much evidence that a return to feudalism describes the dynamics of postsocialism as that modern capitalism and democracy are taking root.
The description Verdery gives of the process of change and stability in Romania and the
former Soviet bloc more broadly is a rich one, and one cannot do justice to it in a short review.
Yet in the end, she concludes very similarly to Ray, noting that the emerging social order will
be the outcome of "struggles" rather than "theories." It is ultimately a rather unsatisfying
conclusion, since we know from the start that there have always been struggles, and there will
always be struggles; it is the logic of struggles that we need to understand, and here, we are
still very much wandering in the wilderness of postsocialism.