ABC of Socialism:
International Conference

The ABC of Socialism project brings together scholars who propose to rethink the postwar history of Soviet and Eastern European socialism(s) by focusing on core concepts that organize its conceptual frameworks, policy, and practice: plan, market, value, nature, welfare state, inequality, growth, NTR (Scientific-Technological Revolution), global markets, knowledge, beauty, individual/collective. It starts with a critical interrogation of the state of these concepts in present-day Western historiography and Russian and Eastern European academies. Mired in Cold War tropes or all together missing, they capture vividly the underdeveloped and politicized state of economic, social, and intellectual history of the postwar Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. To counter this state of things, the project’s participants, drawing on their research, undertake a conceptual reconstruction of the intellectual apparatus—ABC of socialism—that the Soviet and Eastern European societies worked out during the postwar decades and which conceptual insights and practical applications, peculiarities and shortcomings carry relevance for thinking about social alternatives in the twenty-first century.