Failure of Transition

Annotation

This e-book links the process of 'transition', which started in the former Soviet system about 20 years ago, to the recent global financial and economic crisis. We consider 'transition' as a shift from one socio-economic 'dreamworld' to another, rather than as a real change towards freedom and democracy, as most mainstream commentators would have it. Our argument is that this 'transition' to a capitalist, free market society was bound up with a host of dream-like imaginations of social and economic progress, which were also found on the imaginary horizon of the Soviet system. We argue that the two systems, and hence also the recent global capitalist crisis, can be understood as being determined by complementary economies of desires, which, however, cannot be fulfilled. The e-book uses critical-theoretic, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist frames in order to unravel the fantasmatic kernel at work of both socialist and capitalist utopias. These fantasies do not only struggle to uphold their hegemonic grip on the economy but on the very production of subjectivity.