Shortage Economy / Arbitrage Economy Cover Image
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Икономика на дефицита / арбитражна икономика
Shortage Economy / Arbitrage Economy

Author(s): Todor Hristov
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Институт по философия и социология при БАН
Keywords: shortage; arbitrage; capitalism; socialism; governmentality.

Summary/Abstract: The article claims that the political economy of socialism could be more adequately presented as an arbitrage economy than, as usually considered in present-day communist and post-communist studies, as a shortage economy. In that context, an arbitrage economy is conceived of as economic activities geared at generating profit from the difference between markets, for example, from the difference between the pricing of a product on the government-regulated market and on the open market. The claim that socialist economy was driven by arbitrage is demonstrated by two accounts of the assemblages that the Bulgarian Communist Party developed after 1949 in its ceaseless attempts to tackle the grain deficit: on one hand, as a security apparatus aimed at preventing the deficit, and on the other hand, as a form of arbitrage. Building on the second account, the article proposes that the theory of socialist societies as network societies, developed by the Institute of Critical Social Studies, should be reinterpreted so as to take into account the socialist forms of capital incentives.

  • Issue Year: 47/2015
  • Issue No: 1-2
  • Page Range: 92-110
  • Page Count: 19