Neoliberal Hegemony and Narratives of “Losers” and “Winners” in Post-Socialist Transformations

An important feature of post-socialism is a radical change in the dominant ideological discourse within a short historical span. For some time after the collapse of the USSR, the term “ideology” acquired a negative quasi-Marxist connotation and was rarely used in the Russian literature devoted to social transformations. The old communist ideological platform was completely delegitimized. In the 1990s, scholars shunned the term “ideology,” believing that the end of the Cold War was the “end of history,” that is, the end of ideology.¹ Meanwhile in Russia, as in almost all of the Eastern and Central European countries that joined the global market, the neoliberal hegemony has penetrated the social fabric, even under conditions of fairly extensive political pluralism and other competing ideologies. Despite the complexity and contradictions in reform implementation, we must attend to its neoliberal platform and its impact on social norms.

Although Russia is among the countries where globalization has had the least impact on the economy, in terms of liberalization, openness, and competition, we can hardly doubt that neoliberal discourse signifies the incorporation of that country into the global sphere, its catching up with modernization and orientation towards the developed Western world. Looking at the post-socialist transformations, Klaus Mueller and Andreas Pickel emphasize not just economic policy, but “the policy of transformation, based on a strong belief in the market as a kind of meta-institution of social change” (69). They call that conception the “neo-liberal discourse of radical reform,” stressing that “it is not simply the application of neoclassical economic theory of transformation, but rather the discourse containing general concepts of the change in institutions and collective action and political normative judgments” (72).

The narratives that elites use for social distinction and control manifest this discourse in particular, frequently deploying the discourse of “winners” and “losers” when discussing social transformations in post-socialist countries. In countries where radical reforms are taking place, there are, and will always be, winners and losers, since the articulation of winning or losing always accompanies rapid and drastic changes. This approach is quite common in theorizing transition. Extensive scholarship analyzes the transformations in post-socialist countries using these categories, including Christopher Bryant and Edmund Mokrzycki’s The New Great Transformation?, Zsuzsa Ferge’s Winners and Losers after the Collapse of State Socialism, Claus Offe’s Varieties of Transition, and Göran Therborn’s European Modernity and Beyond.

It is important to understand how “winners” and “losers” are defined and what narratives are used to illustrate social success or failure. I argue that the emergence of these narratives functioned as a crucial mechanism of legitimization of the radical social inequalities which emerged or were reproduced in the post-socialist period. At the same time, these narratives can be also viewed as constituting an Orientalizing discourse reflecting the increasingly dependent position of Russia or Eastern Europe in relation to the Western “consensual empire.” Consequently, the academia is strongly involved in the process of reproduction of narratives of self-Orientalizing character that naturalize social distinctions and inequalities.

This article addresses the following issues: first, the role of intellectuals in the formation of hegemonic neoliberal discourses in post-socialist societies; second, the constitution of post-socialist narratives of “winners” and “losers”; third, the grounds for distinguishing between “winners” and “losers” in Russia; and fourth, the entrenchment of the discourse of success in the Russian transformation.

Frames of Reality Perception: Hegemony, Discourse, and Role of Expert Community

In Eastern European post-socialist countries, the neoliberal discourse has transformed the content of ideology, but has not changed the nature and mechanisms of domination. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony explains the mechanisms of domination and is quite relevant to post-socialist transitions to neoliberalism because of its particular salience to the exploration of massive changes in social norms and popular “common sense.” The Italian Marxist Gramsci created the concept of hegemony, although the translated writings of his works contain no precise definition of it. In one of the statements that comes closest to defining its meaning, Gramsci describes hegemony as the...