Page 254 - Primož Krašovec in Igor Ž. Žagar, Evropa med socializmom in neoliberalizmom, Evropa v slovenskih medijih, Dissertationes 12
P. 254
Evropa med socializmom in neoliberalizmom
tain, unrest broke out in 1968 against the rigid system of state administra-
tion, the misery of factory life and the “labor society,” and the lack of di-
rect democracy or actual popular participation in political life. The main
demands of 1968 can be summed up as the demand for democratic social-
ism; that is, moving not only beyond statism and the political domination
of the party (or parties), but also beyond the production conditions typical
for industrial societies of the mid-twentieth century.
Whereas 1968 in Europe was dominated by the leftist political imag-
ination, 1989 was the opposite. Demands for democratic socialism gave
way to traditional liberal demands for human rights, freedom of speech
and freedom of movement, parliamentary democracy for all, and tacit ac-
quiescence to the presumably inexorable global domination of capitalism.
The European political imagination shrank to the opposition between the
free world versus totalitarianism, in which membership of the free world or
the abandonment of “totalitarian” communism in practice also represent-
ed specific, often unpleasant, concessions to the “Western lifestyle.” This
shift to the right after 1989 was manifest both in the development of the
EU in the 1990s as well as in the political climate of post-communist east-
ern Europe during the transition period.
The third part of the volume consists of texts that are not directly con-
nected to the research and that address more contemporary topics in the
sociopolitical development of Europe from 1989 onwards. The first chap-
ter in part three addresses the development of labor policy in Europe, from
the question of industrialized society and experiments with workers’ self-
management to professional “management,” which is considered a necessi-
ty in “postindustrial” society. Chapter two takes a closer look at changes
in work and production patterns from a cultural perspective, showing that
modern transformations of the mode of production do not involve a tran-
sition from industrial to postindustrial society, but the industrialization of
what were previously autonomous areas of culture and intellectual produc-
tion such as journalism, art, and science. The third chapter in part three fo-
cuses on the political and economic development of the EU from the be-
ginning of the 1990s to the present and on university and labor-market re-
forms (the Bologna and Lisbon Processes), which represent both a degra-
dation of intellectual labor as well as precarization of the previously stable
working conditions characteristic of the twentieth-century welfare state.
tain, unrest broke out in 1968 against the rigid system of state administra-
tion, the misery of factory life and the “labor society,” and the lack of di-
rect democracy or actual popular participation in political life. The main
demands of 1968 can be summed up as the demand for democratic social-
ism; that is, moving not only beyond statism and the political domination
of the party (or parties), but also beyond the production conditions typical
for industrial societies of the mid-twentieth century.
Whereas 1968 in Europe was dominated by the leftist political imag-
ination, 1989 was the opposite. Demands for democratic socialism gave
way to traditional liberal demands for human rights, freedom of speech
and freedom of movement, parliamentary democracy for all, and tacit ac-
quiescence to the presumably inexorable global domination of capitalism.
The European political imagination shrank to the opposition between the
free world versus totalitarianism, in which membership of the free world or
the abandonment of “totalitarian” communism in practice also represent-
ed specific, often unpleasant, concessions to the “Western lifestyle.” This
shift to the right after 1989 was manifest both in the development of the
EU in the 1990s as well as in the political climate of post-communist east-
ern Europe during the transition period.
The third part of the volume consists of texts that are not directly con-
nected to the research and that address more contemporary topics in the
sociopolitical development of Europe from 1989 onwards. The first chap-
ter in part three addresses the development of labor policy in Europe, from
the question of industrialized society and experiments with workers’ self-
management to professional “management,” which is considered a necessi-
ty in “postindustrial” society. Chapter two takes a closer look at changes
in work and production patterns from a cultural perspective, showing that
modern transformations of the mode of production do not involve a tran-
sition from industrial to postindustrial society, but the industrialization of
what were previously autonomous areas of culture and intellectual produc-
tion such as journalism, art, and science. The third chapter in part three fo-
cuses on the political and economic development of the EU from the be-
ginning of the 1990s to the present and on university and labor-market re-
forms (the Bologna and Lisbon Processes), which represent both a degra-
dation of intellectual labor as well as precarization of the previously stable
working conditions characteristic of the twentieth-century welfare state.
