INTRODUCTION: CHANGING ECONOMIES AND CHANGING SOCIETIES IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM: POST-SOCIALIST CASE STUDIES

Abstract

This special issue addresses peoples’ economies and the way in which individuals, families and communities find their own ways in dealing with the constraints of neoliberal capitalism. We present six original studies from young researchers working on North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Poland, with an emphasis on household economy, production, economic life in rural and urban settings and migration. Sexual workers, illicit tobacco growers, self-enterprising families in rural tourism, food producers, well off urbanites imagining more comfortable life in romantic villages and vendors on the market place invest in their entrepreneurial venture something, if not everything that can be defined as their family capital: labour, land, house and money. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, these societies can no longer be understood within the analytical frame of post-socialist, the one that has been often used in analyses of postulating an uni-linear model of transition from socialism to capitalism. In fact capitalism is already an established system, and at some level remnants of socialism are more likely to be found in big western democracies than in most of the formerly communist countries. And yet, in the postsocialist context, as elsewhere, people transmit something from their past every time they try to erase it, and open new possibilities and ways of thinking every time they claim to eagerly conform to capitalism.

Keywords

• economic anthropology
• changing economies
• changing societies
• capitalism
• Balkans
• Macedonia