Съветът за помощ на евреите („Жегота“) в структурите на полската нелегална държава

Author(s): Waldemar Grabowski / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2017

The persecution of the Polish society by German occupiers is the cause of both individual and institutional support actions. As part of the actions of the Polish Underground State, such an action is carried out by the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile, and in particular the Department of Labor and Social Welfare. The aid action are aimed at both repressed and threatened by reprisals, citizens of the Polish state, regardless of their religion and nationality. Due to the particularly brutal behavior of the Germans, directed directly at the destruction of the entire Jewish people, the authorities of the Polish State, together with many public and political organizations, held an organized action to help the Jews from the end of 1942. To this end, the Polish Council to Aid Jews ("Jegota") was established. Within his modest possibilities, the Council was making efforts to save as many Jews as possible.

Létezik-e szocialocén?

Author(s): Zsuzsa Gille / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

The goal of this essay is to reevaluate state socialism’s environmental record. Zsuzsa Gille argues that state socialist modernity had its own view of nature and materials, as well as a largely misunderstood ethical stance to consumption that is ignored in today’s studies of capitalocene examining the interrelations of capitalism and climate crisis. This article provides a view not so much of the environmental advantages and disadvantages of central planning or “backwardness,” but rather demonstrate a unique economic logic that arguably carried some potential for a greener postsocialism. Instead of returning to the rightfully criticized Anthropocene term, however, Zsuzsa Gille argues for a more central role for waste and materiality in our understanding of the current dilemmas around global environmental problems.

A parasztok maguk csinálják történelmüket, de nem szabadon

Author(s): Philip McMichael / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

This essay employs contemporary peasant mobilizing discourses and practices to evaluate the terms in which we understand agrarian movements today, through an exercise of historical specification. First, it considers why the terms of the original agrarian question no longer apply to agrarian change today. The shift in the terms corresponds to the movement from the late‐nineteenth century and twentieth century, when states were the organizing principle of political‐economy, to the twenty‐first century, when capital has become the organizing principle. Second, and related, agrarian mobilizations are viewed here as barometers of contemporary political‐economic relations. In politicizing the socio‐ecological crisis of neoliberalism, they problematize extant categories of political and sociological analysis, re‐centring agriculture and food as key to democratic and sustainable relations of social production.

Forradalmi stratégia egy felmelegedő világban

Author(s): Andreas Malm / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

It doesn’t take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution. If the planetary order upon which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they possibly remain stable? Various more or less horrifying scenarios of upheaval have long been extrapolated from soaring temperatures. In his novel The Drowned World from 1962, today often considered the first prophetic work of climate fiction, J. G. Ballard conjured up melting icecaps, an English capital submerged under tropical marshes and populations fleeing the unbearable heat towards polar redoubts. The UN directorate seeking to manage the migration flows assumed that ‘within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions’ – but that assumption ‘was obviously fallacious’. A drowned world would be nothing like the one hitherto known. In more recent years, the American military establishment has dominated this subgenre of climate projection. Extreme weather events, the Senate learned from the 2013 edition of the ‘worldwide threat assessment’ compiled by the US intelligence community, will put food markets under serious strain, ‘triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism’. So far, the sworn enemies of revolution have dominated this frenzy of speculation. Little input has come from the other side: from the partisans of the idea that the present order needs to be overthrown or else things will turn out very badly. But if the strategic environment of counterinsurgency is shifting, so is – by definition – that of revolutionaries, who then have just as compelling a reason to analyze what lies in store. The imbalance in the amount of preparation is glaring. Those who pledge allegiance to the revolutionary tradition – in whose collective mind the experience of 1917 will probably always loom large – should dare to use their imagination as productively as any writer of intelligence reports or works of fiction. One might begin by distinguishing between four possible configurations of revolution and heat.

Lakhatási helyzet a válság után

Author(s): Ágnes Gagyi,Csaba Jelinek,Zsuzsanna Pósfai,András Vigvári / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 26/2019

Housing is one of the fundamental elements of social reproduction, and also a market through which financial extraction from households takes place. We investigate the contradictory relation of these two functions of housing in Hungary in the context of the long economic downturn starting with the crisis of the 1970s. Within this period we focus particularly on the years following the economic crisis of 2008 and the political turn of 2010, which are starting points of the „System of National Cooperation”; the new conservative regime built up by prime minister Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz . First, we analyze how the financialization of housing unfolded in Hungary primarily through mortgages, and what form it currently takes in a transformed system of semiperipheral hegemony. Second, we give an overview of how the housing policies of different governments throughout the studied period mediated between external economic pressures and social reproductive needs. The third part of the article discusses informal housing practices, which develop when the state and market do not provide housing solutions, and households rely on their own resources in responding to their housing needs. We discuss the global economic conditions of housing (financialization), housing policies and informal practices of households as different constituent elements of the same process. Housing is both an important vehicle for investment and financial extraction, and a precondition for social reproduction. The tension of these two „expectations” from housing guides us through the various aspects and chronology of our analysis.

‘Gezi Spirit’: Narrative Fragments and Modes of Articulation. Ethnography of Post-Protest (Istanbul 2013–2015)

Author(s): Zornitza Draganova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This text is based on an ethnographic study on the protests and civic initiatives that initially took place in 2013 but then continued with varying intensity throughout the following years. While applying the method of participant observation during the Gazi events’ and conducting interviews with individuals who had taken part in the protests, a main goal of this study is to grasp the transformation in the identification, articulation and presentation of important and secondary topics and problems that had been brought forward throughout the public discussions. The initial motivation of this study is the idea that after the first demonstrations and clashes, the interpretation of the political projects’ turbulence, of the reinvention of urban spaces, of the success or failure of diverse protest and resistance practices, gradually modifies the way the aforementioned events and ongoing processes are being thought and talked about. The research questions the respondents’ participation in protests, the constitution and disintegration of communities, the ‘diagnosis’, ‘prognosis’ and ‘rationale’ elements in respondents’ and informants’ micro-discourses and their acts in relation to diverse initiatives. The text attempts to systematize the observation data and the collected ‘narrative fragments’ within four ‘modes of articulation’: transformative, subjective, argumentative, and topological.

A gondoskodás újraszervezése

Author(s): Noémi Katona,Loren László,Andrea Czerván / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

The starting point of our paper is that the capitalist socioeconomic system treats life-reproducing reproductive work and one of its forms, care as free resources, as individual responsibilities, placing their costs on families and households, especially women. The low level of state engagement and the emergence of for-profit market services further exacerbate the crisis of care as well as inequalities in care. In the paper, we first introduce grassroots cooperatives and initiatives in the field of elderly care and child care that revalue and reorganize care in a participatory, democratic and solidarity-based way in order to strengthen carers as well as those with care needs, and to improve the quality of their lives. These include workers’ (carers’) cooperatives, users’ cooperatives (cooperatives of people with care needs), multistakeholder cooperatives and mothers’ centers, the communities of women with small children. We then introduce political movements struggling for the systemic transformation of reproductive work and care. We argue that the institutions of care should be owned and controlled by communities, while the state should continue to play a coordinating, funding and regulatory role in meeting needs and recognizing care work.

A lakhatási válságra adott közösségi válaszok

Author(s): Csaba Jelinek,Zsuzsanna Pósfai / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

Since the crisis of 2008, housing is yet again and increasingly becoming a form of profitable financial investment. This tends to dominate over the claim that each person has the need and the right to access affordable, good quality housing. Across the globe this tendency is intensified by state policies as well. However, bottom-up initiatives organizing themselves for collective housing solutions are also gaining ground. These self-organized, „self-help” models open the possibility for economically vulnerable social groups to support each other in finding solutions for their housing problems, and also to collectively access resources that would individually be impossible to reach. This paper presents such an alternative housing solution, notably the model of rental-based housing cooperatives. Rental housing cooperatives are institutions organized in a bottom-up manner with the aim of providing affordable, good quality and stable housing for their members. We discuss two examples from Germany and from Uruguay for successful rental housing cooperative networks, which have existed for several decades. Finally, we present the steps which have been taken in the past years in Hungary and in the Eastern European region towards the establishment of such a model.

A kultúra közjó

Author(s): Virág Buka,Kristóf Nagy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

This article focuses on the emergence of the paradigm of solidarity economy and of the commons in the field of professional cultural production. We unfold the possible mutual cooperation of cultural producers and commoning social movements by examining the case studies of the Resonate music streaming co-op and of the Dutch Stad in de Maak housing-initiative. The case of the Resonate exemplifies how cultural producers can reorganize their industry in a cooperative way to hinder capitalist value extraction. Another type of encounter takes place between culture and commons when cultural producers utilize their knowledge and skills in various solidarity economy projects. We demonstrate this possibility through the case of the Rotterdam-based Stad in the Maak, where the artist-architect founders launched a long-term community housing initiative.

Az állam mi vagyunk

Author(s): Zoltán Sidó / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

According to international case studies on the topic, the rapid and efficient scaling of solidarity economy initiatives requires interventions from the state. This paper analyses three types of state interventions: first, changes in the financial and legal regulations of cooperatives and solidarity economy projects; second, policies that aim to relocalize the economy on a municipal level; and third, efforts to transform state infrastructure in a green and democratic way. We illustrate all three types of interventions with actual case studies.

„Ha frankó, akkor úgy megy, mint a zsebóra” Szövetkezetiség, csettegők és technológiai önrendelkezés

Author(s): Márton Szarvas,Soma Ábrahám Kiss / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

The article shows the importance of technological autonomy for the reproduction of social solidarity economy networks through international and Hungarian examples. It argues that technological innovation is necessary for such projects. Through an example of a handmade agricultural vehicle the article demonstrates the way people tend to organize the necessary technological tools for their social reproduction. The case study is situated in a region called the “Golden Triangle”. Here specialized cooperatives were established where the local lands could be cultivated only through technologically or labor-intensive ways, while the goods produced, like grape, sour-cherry or elderberry, were profitable enough on a small scale. Parallel to the development of specialist cooperatives, locksmiths started to put together vehicles, which were capable of maneuvering in tight rows and deep sand. These were adapted from engines and chassis of Soviet military vehicles. According to our argument the liberalization of the production of agricultural vehicles in the region stimulated employment through the creation of entrepreneurs, while at the same time it enabled the necessary technological innovation required to maintain productivity.

Munkás-önigazgatási kísérletek Magyarországon

Author(s): Eszter Bartha,Tamás Krausz,Erzsébet Szalai,Zoltán Sidó / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

There were several attempts on workers’ self-management throughout the 20th century in Hungary: multiple factories were occupied by workers during the end of the 1st and 2nd World Wars, the revolution of 1956 and the regime change of 1989. Erzsébet Szalai, Tamás Krausz and Eszter Bartha are experts on this topic. In this interview they walk us through the various attempts on workers’ self-management and talk about the difficulties and dilemmas of movements that try to seize the means of production.

Osztályhelyzet, együttes élmény, társas hatóképesség.

Author(s): Zsolt K. Horváth / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 28/2021

The National Association of People's Colleges is often interpreted as a youth organization of the dictatorship and as an association that ensures the youth supply of the Communist Party. Although this view is not entirely illegitimate, it is simplistic insofar as it does not take into account 1) the pre-war people's colleges movement, 2) the nature of grassroots 3) its self- government 4) its role in social mobility 5) and its specific pedagogical and educational psychological aspirations. Of course, the comprehensive history of Nékosz cannot be the subject of such a short writing, so we will focus on elaborating points 3–5. Being the educational leader of Nékosz and researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the Institute of Education of Budapest, the psychologist Ferenc Mérei carried out numerous experiments in primary and secondary schools to develop the effectiveness of the emancipatory school. For him, the model of emancipatory education was the group experience of Nékosz.

Szocioanalízis, avagy játék a társadalmi egyenlőtlenségekkel

Author(s): Cecília Kovai,Melinda Kovai,Eszter Neumann,György Mészáros / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 28/2021

The paper presents the methodology behind and some lessons from a small group training course developed by the members of the Working Group for Public Sociology (Helyzet Műhely). Our training, named after Pierre Bourdieu’s socioanalysis, primarily targets active or future professionals in supportive roles such as social workers, health care professionals, teachers and psychologists. The objective of the training is making participants capable of deciphering the social space in reflective ways: by learning to understand their perceptive, action and cognitive schemes stemming from their own social positions and family socialization patterns; and by exploring the ways in which the social space is perceived differently from different social positions. One of our presumptions is that – similarly to other relations driven by solidarity – the choice of helping professions, the social protection institutional system, and the supporting relationship itself (who and why deserves support and who can decide about it) are fundamentally shaped by the social positions of the participants, and those involved in these relations are only partially aware of these determinations. In fact, the unreflected working mechanisms of our social positions – or in psychoanalytic terms, the operation of our unconscious – sustains the status quo. The paper presents the theoretical insights behind our training syllabus (focusing on the perception of the social, the intersection of ethnic and class relations and racism, the social context and internal hierarchy of supportive professions) as well as the analysis of some concrete examples from our trainings.

A cukor története a kapitalizmus története? (Sidney Mintz: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History)

Author(s): Sándor Kozák / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 29/2021

Review of Sidney Mintz: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА МАЈЧИНСТВА У РОМАНУ „ВОЉЕНА“ ТОНИ МОРИСОН

Author(s): Jelena M. Abula / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 74/2021

This paper will examine the concept of motherhood in the light of black feminism in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Morrison, one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century, is trying to present the development of the African- American community and the institution of motherhood in a society characterized by meaningless divisions between race, class and gender. Slavery problematizes the concept of motherhood which represents a connection of conflicting views shaped by different attitudes towards race, gender and class. Therefore, Morrison uses the suppressed voices of African-American mothers to address the problematic concept of motherhood in slavery. The paper explores the complexity of slavery and its influence on motherhood, the powerful ideology through which the Afro-American tradition is transferred, and it also outlines motherhood as a dominant motif that connects the female characters in Beloved.

Kinek a kultúrája? Táncházmozgalom és hegemónia

Author(s): Márton Szarvas / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 30/2022

Review of Taylor, Mary N. 2021. Movement of the People: Hungarian Populism, Folk Dance and Citizenship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Repressed Utopias vs. Utopian Repressions: Czech Countercultural Communal Living Arrangements in the ‘Normalization’ Era (1970–1989)

Author(s): Martin Tharp / Language(s): English Issue: 46/2023

The present contribution aims to examine this specific historic ‘Second World’ phenomenon — the communal living arrangements attempted by counterculturally minded, predominantly working-class youth in post-1968 Czechoslo-vakia, often (though not exclusively) in the former German Sudetenland — as an instance of the potentials and limita-tions associated with an attempt at a ‘mobile commons’ in 20th-century state socialism. Not only is the legacy of the Czech communes (baráky) an insufficiently researched historical topic, but even further, the placement of this phenomenon between its reflection of the American commu-nal-utopian tradition in its 1960s forms, the emerging critique of industrial modernity, the growth of 20th-century ‘civil-society’ concepts, and the ‘Cold War’ mobilities across the Iron Curtain (intellectual-cultural autarky versus forced political emigration) forms a highly fruitful starting point for wider considerations. Examination of the Czech countercul-tural communal-living attempts within the social framework of the ‘normalization’ order of the 1970s and 1980s — state repression, socialist modernity, anti-public familialism — finds that their character as communities of refuge, rather than as deliberate planned experiments, places them at a particularly unique angle to the utopian vs. antiutopian debates, indeed even calling into question the very premises of this opposition.

Пета конференция на Националните асоциации в Международната социологическа асоциация „Социални трансформации и социология: лишености и овластявания“, 21‒24.11.2022 г., Нова Горица

Author(s): Mila Mineva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Сектантското насилие в Пакистан – тероризъм, или дълбоки религиозни противоречия в обществото

Author(s): Miroslav Mirchev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

The report examines issues related to sectarianism in Pakistan arising from the unequal position of the minority Shia groups in the society. The main reasons are examined, as well as the activities of local terrorist groups and organizations like the Movement of the Pakistani Taliban and the so-called Local Taliban to destabilize the security environment and create ethnic ten-sion. Some of the measures taken by the Pakistani military and state leadership to regulate problems and create religious harmony and social security are also analyzed.