12. Post-Socialist Contradictions: The Social Question in Central and Eastern Europe and the Making of the Illiberal Right

Abstract

The Social Question in Central and Eastern Europe and the Making of the Illiberal Right Don Kalb Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden have provocatively claimed that the Global South is coming to the North, rather than the other way around. 1 Not "development" toward Northern modernity, but the informalization and flexibilization of the North, as in the South. They see the global economic agenda as hijacked by capitalist interests that seek the precariatization and stepped-up exploitation of the world's laboring populations. Global agencies duplicitously present this agenda as one of employment generation and poverty reduction-and therefore representing the "general interest. " "Rigidities" stemming from the old language of labor cannot be allowed to derail this. The language of labor is a particularist trick on behalf of "rent seekers, " "insiders, " and "oligopolies of labor. " The rhetoric of global institutions has perhaps been changing slightly since the financial crises of 2008-2014. Global economic technocrats consider social inequality now evidently as a negative. But the demand for "structural adjustment" and all that it entails in terms of precariatization and the flexibility of labor remains pervasive, from the IMF to the OECD to the ECB. And then there are "the markets" with their imperious judgments and their rejection of inflation. There is no reason to believe that a new era has arrived. But as they are making this claim, Breman and van der Linden are sharply aware of differences and differentiations worldwide. There is no implication of global homogenization around a zero point of social dumping. But the overall direction they picture is globally shared, and it is useful that they state it without further ado. Until the recent revolt of "angry white labor" in the provinces-a symbol and figure of speech, of course, not a simple reality-social democrats and center-liberals of the "varieties of capitalism" school would certainly have responded to such a

Two theories of money

“…Th e rift s in the EU produced by that series of fateful moments have not been entirely healed yet, though the NextGenEU federal budget with which the EU responded to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 appeared at least to be a temporary game changer (Kalb 2022;Middelaar 2021;Tooze 2021). Th e initial North/South rift s within the eurozone were overlaid by subsequent East/West confl icts within the EU, which on the surface were about diff erent issues but had their roots in the same crisis too (Kalb 2018a(Kalb , 2019, as was the departure of Britain. When it fi nally dawned upon the markets that the actions of European politicians could only mean that they were abandoning the whole Euro-project, they began betting massively against the survival of the Common Currency itself, further increasing the cost of debt and the "sovereign spreads. "…”