KÜRESEL POLİTİK EKONOMİ

Serfdom: the status of peasants and lower class people under feudalism, in which they were forced to work for lord’s manor with little rights.

Capitalism: a mode of production that depends on private property and accumulation of profit through market exchanges.

Civil Society: It generally refers to the sections of society and their political, economic activities, which are independent from government.

Bolsheviks: Dominant section of Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party, split from reformist Mensheviks.

Lech Walesa: Polish retired politician and labor activist. Founder of the trade union Solidarity In 1980’s. Served as president of Poland between 1990-1995.

Mikhail Gorbachev: 8th and the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and the last leader of the USSR.

In 1985, amidst all these problems surrounding Soviet society, Mikhail Gorbachev, 54 year old politburo member, was chosen as the general secretary of the party. He saw the need for reform in the system and declared his program of Glasnost and Perestroika. Glasnost & Perestroika: Gorbachev’s reform for political and economic liberalization and transparency in the 1980’s USSR.

Shock Therapy: In economics, sudden withdrawal of currency and price controls over markets and fast trade liberalization, privatization and cuts in social spending. In terms of transition to a free market economy, Yeltsin and his main aid Gaidar applied what economists called shock therapy to the Russian economy in order to finish this transition period as soon as possible.

In 1989 first in the Eastern Europe, Polish government recognized the Solidarity trade union as a formal opposition and it paved the way for the formation of first non-communist government in Eastern Europe after senate elections. But Solidarity movement and its long time leader Walesa’s anti-party, anti-political stance somewhat weakened the active formation of political organizations in the new parliamentary republic.

China has transformed itself from an isolated state into manufacturing workshop of the world in the last three decades since 1980’s. At the beginning of 1980, China’s total share of world production was 2.6 percent, while this decade that number rose to almost 9 percent of the total world output. So, one can predict the enormous transformation that China went through with the expanding globalization of production.

Serfdom is the status of peasants and lower-class people under feudalism, in which they were forced to work for lord’s manor with little rights.

Civil Society generally refers to the sections of society and their political, economic activities, which are independent from government.

Vanguard Party: In Leninist theory, communist party should form the vanguard
of the working class and lead them in revolutionary struggles

Comecon is a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, an institution that was made of 7 East European countries and USSR. It lasted from 1949 to 1991.

Lech Walesa: Polish retired politician and labor activist. Founder of the trade union Solidarity in the 1980s. Served as president of Poland between 1990-1995.

In 1985, amidst all these problems surrounding Soviet society, Mikhail Gorbachev, a 54-year-old politburo member, was chosen as the general secretary of the party. He saw the need for reform in the system and declared his program of Glasnost and Perestroika. Gorbachev, like Khrushchev in 1956, criticized the stagnation of Brezhnev years and call for reforms in the system. Glasnost was a program to increase democracy in all levels of Soviet society, this reform aimed to attain a level of transparency in government affairs. That would be the solution to high level of bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption within the Soviet Union.

In terms of transition to a free-market economy, Yeltsin and his main aid Gaidar applied what economists called shock therapy to the Russian economy in order to finish this transition period as soon as possible. In economics, the sudden withdrawal of currency and price controls over markets and fast trade liberalization, privatization, and cuts in social spending is a shock therapy.

Poland was an exception compared to other countries in the bloc as it had milder authoritarianism because of earlier started resistance to full-scale Soviet control. After 1976 it’s civic associations, especially the Solidarity trade union, began its democratization demands against single-party government. Also in 1989, Polish regime under general Jaruzelski was the first in Eastern Europe in terms of initiation for democratic multi-party elections. That multi-party election framework was negotiated with the opposition groups. Poland created a semi-presidential system under Lech Walesa’s leadership and consolidated its democratic transition earlier than others. In Linz and Stephan’s words, this consolidation usually means that consecutive multi-party elections are held without significant disturbance and the country sees a change of leadership in that period of transition. Other issues that helped Poland in this relatively easier political transition were, first, Catholic church in the country had some autonomy from the Communist-led governments and began a culture of resistance with the help of papacy.

China has transformed itself from an isolated state into the manufacturing workshop of the world in the last three decades since the 1980s. At the beginning of 1980, China’s total share of world production was 2.6 percent, while this decade that number rose to almost 9 percent of the total world output. So, one can predict the enormous transformation that China went through with the expanding globalization of production. But what made those changes in China? If we look at the features of the Chinese revolution in 1949, it was different from Soviet experience in terms of the dominance of peasants over the culture and politics of the country. So China did not develop even early Soviet democracy. Maoist largely accused the USSR in the 1950s for collaborating with the world capitalist system.

In today’s China, one can argue that more than half of the total production was made by private sector, though they had strict guidelines from the state and government plan. So China can be accepted as a mixed economy that successfully combines private initiative and profit motive with general industrial plans of the state. But also since 2001 when China entered into WTO ( World Trade Organization) most economists in the WTO classified Chinese enterprises as not different from private corporate entities in terms of decision making autonomy. That means these state-owned corporations usually decide production and marketing according to the market price signals.