Book reviews

Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory. Harvard University Press, 1977. Russian Research Center Studies, 77. xiv + 275 pp.

Fredrick J. Fleron, Jr. (ed.), Technology and Communist Culture: The Socio‐Cultural Impact of Technology under Socialism. Praeger Publishers, New York and London, 1977, 518 pp.

David Lane, The Socialist Industrial State: Towards a Political Sociology of State Socialism. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1976. 230 pp. £5.95.

Edward L. Warner, III. The Military in Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Institutional Analysis. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977. 314 pp.

Economic Relations Between Socialist Countries and the Third World, edited by Deepak Nayyar. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977. xiv + 265 pp. £15.00.

Donald D. Barry, Georg Ginsberg, and Peter Maggs, Soviet Law After Stalin, Part I, The Citizen and the State in Contemporary Soviet Law. Leyden: A. W. Sijtoff, 1977. xv + 303 pp. D.fl.86.00. $36.00.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. 309 pp. $17.50.

Tucker, Robert C. (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. New York: Norton and Co., 1977, xx + 332 pp. $19.95.

Maurice Friedberg, A Decade of Euphoria. Western Literature in Post‐Stalin Russia, 1954–64, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & London, 1977. xii + 372 pp. £13.15.

Gregory Walker, Soviet Book Publishing Policy, Cambridge University Press, 1978. xvi + 164 pp. £6.95

Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917. London: Macmillan, 1977. 208 pp. £8.95.

Andrew Borowiec, Yugoslavia After Tito, Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Government, New York and London: 1977. 122 pp.

B. Knei‐Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford University Press, 1978. 629 pp. £15.00.

Bogdan Szajkowski, ed. Documents in Communist Affairs 1977. Swansea: Christopher Davies (Publishers) Ltd. in association with the University College Cardiff Press, 1978. 363 pp. £6.95 or £4.50 paperback.

Nonconformity and Dissent in the Ukrainian SSR, 1955–1975: An Annotated Bibliography. Compiled by George Liber and Anna Mostovych. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1978. xxxix + 245 pp.     

Viewing Spatial Consequences of Budgetary Policy Changes

While the research community is often very concerned with the distributional effect of public policy decisions, the geographic distribution of the affected populations is often overlooked. This paper argues that seemingly geographically neutral policies have spatial consequences and that the choice of how to measure them is important. We suggest that maps provide a powerful tool for communicating these ideas to policy makers and that geographical information systems supplemented by spatial statistics yield information that assist policy debates. We develop metrics to illustrate how geographic information provides insights into the spatial consequences of Medicaid expenditure changes in Ohio.     

Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat

This article discusses how members of marginalized groups in the Indian state of Gujarat make sense of hegemonic discourses about national development in light of their own experiences and material circumstances. For many, the idea of development resonates even when they do not experience material progress in their lives. This partial hegemony of development discourse can be explained by the concept of “political articulation.”. This captures the political process by which parties succeed, at specific historical moments and under certain circumstances, in joining different, even potentially conflictual interests by referring to a common idea and project. The article focuses on Ahmedabad city where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created a cross-caste bloc through the trope of development. The BJP has been particularly effective in linking the idea of development to mundane concerns about security, identity and spatial order. However, anxieties about the degradation of labour by increased casualization, informalization, and socio-spatial marginalization have disrupted this common sense linkage and weakened the hegemony of the BJP's model of development.     

Creativity,entrepreneurship and economic development: city-level evidence on creativity spillover of entrepreneurship

We examine the black box of creativity, entrepreneurship and economic development by asking about the mechanisms through which creativity can influence economic development in cities. We propose that, like the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, creativity spillovers occur and can be slowed by a creativity filter. We examine how creativity and entrepreneurship, and creativity and a melting pot environment, interact to influence urban economic development. Using data on 187 cities in 15 European countries for the period 1999–2009, we advance the extant literature by providing evidence on the existence and dynamics of a creativity filter.     

Revolutions: a twenty-first-century perspective

Abstract

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.     

Potential Challenges to Targeting Low- and Moderate-Income Communities in a Time of Urgent Need: The Case of CDBG-DR in New York State after Superstorm Sandy

New York State received $4.5 billion in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds after Superstorm Sandy. A major CDBG-DR requirement is to prioritize assistance to low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations. The state is spending two fifths of funds on community-wide (e.g., infrastructure) recovery activities. For these activities to be documented as LMI, a specified percentage of residents benefiting from them must be LMI. We explore the potential tension between addressing community recovery needs and prioritizing LMI assistance. Specifically, we develop a series of scenarios to estimate the likelihood that any community-wide activities will be documented as LMI in New York State. We find that documenting these activities as LMI is largely dependent on the underlying demographics of disaster-impacted areas. Additionally, as recovery activities increase in size, thereby impacting larger populations, they are less likely to be documented as LMI, potentially disincentivizing larger, more impactful investments. We recommend empirically based LMI targets for CDBG-DR grantees.     

The Politics of Rule of Law Reform: From Delegation to Autonomy

How can we understand the delegation of power and authority – for example, from a polity to an administrator - in a world of fragmented governance? In this paper, I introduce the practices of contemporary ‘rule of law’ and ‘governance’ reform, which reframe this question in politically powerful ways. These practices are increasingly important in development contexts, and beyond. Practitioners begin with the assumption that some sort of administration occurs in the development contexts in which they work. They then focus on how to convene a political community in which to embed – and potentially legitimate - that administration. They thereby reconfigure the question of delegation into one of autonomy – or managing the extent to and ways in which the administrative legal system self-produces. In doing so, I argue that contemporary rule of law practitioners wield constitutional power under the rubric of workaday administrative reform. At the same time, they efface their political accountability.     

Marx’s critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism

Abstract

Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production. That analysis could illuminate how capitalism’s contradictions drive its imperialist expansionism and how and why resistance to it must, equally necessarily, take national forms. As a result, major currents of Marxism in the West either have paid attention to imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance but without Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production or have insisted that their (mistaken) conception of Marx’s analysis implies that capitalism has no necessary connection with imperialism. Neither tradition can actually develop Marxism to comprehend the actual historical record of revolutions since Marx’s time. Neither can inform new mobilisations against capitalism, whether in or outside its homelands. It is high time we return to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as value production and develop it.