Goodbye, Postsocialism!

Abstract

This article assesses the trajectory of postsocialism as a concept and mounts a fivefold critique of postsocialism as: referring to a vanishing object; emphasising rupture over continuity; falling into a territorial trap; issuing from orientalising knowledge construction; and constraining political futures.This critique serves to sketch the contours of an alternative project that still recognises difference but foregrounds links and continuities, develops a political edge, and theorises not just about but with and from this part of the world. EAST BERLIN IN 1989. A SINGLE MOTHER OF TWO AND FERVENT SOCIALIST falls into a coma just before the Berlin Wall comes down.When she wakes up again, Germany has been reunified and the socialist regime toppled.But because her condition is so unstable, her family decide not to confront her with the truth.Instead, they start to enact a charade that keeps up the semblance that socialism is still alive.The plot of Goodbye, Lenin! (2003), a poignant film about the force and demise of socialism as a regime, could equally well be a parable for the concept that described what came after: postsocialism.Socialism, the regime, and postsocialism, the concept, both started with the expectation of epochal change, lost touch with people's lives on the ground, disappointed the emancipatory hopes attached to them and then kept on going as though nothing had happened, because no alternative was in sight.When the socialist regimes collapsed in sequence between 1989 and 1992, it took the world by surprise.Observers had diagnosed the malaise of socialist economies since at least the 1970s, but few had expected an imminent implosion in quick succession (Kotkin 2008, pp.4-5;Leon 2011).Uncertainty reigned as to what would follow in the wake of socialism.Would market reforms bring about capitalism triumphant, in a further expansion of global neoliberalism?That is certainly what Gayatri Spivak saw in the 1990s when she wrote in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason that 'today in the post-Soviet world, privatization is the

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