| Popis: |
This thesis uses transnational historical materialist theory and methodology to explicate the transformation of Ukraine's economy after the demise of the USSR, examining specifically the period from 1991 to the present. Thus, the thesis explores the ways in which the formation of the capitalist historic bloc, the ascent and agency of Ukraine's capitalist and ruling class(es), and the agency of transnational capital are the driving forces behind that transformation and its socially destabilising nature. Social agency is one critical issue in this argument, in that as this thesis shows the main reason behind the inability to stabilise the social order in Ukraine is the ongoing rivalry in the process of class formation. Neoliberal marketization reforms (actively supported by IMF, WB, and EBRD) allowed Ukraine's rival ruling and emerging capitalist class and their fractions to pursue their personal economic interests and by that undermine possibilities for socioeconomic stabilisation. Thus Ukraine's economy has been shaped through processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003), or privatisation, and capitalist class fractional formation and rivalry. In the latter process a capitalist class-for-itself has emerged through organising its fractions around political parties and through actively engaging with the EU and US lobby and interest groups. Through these practices, a process of trasformismo (Gramsci, 1971) and effective strengthening of Ukraine's capitalist historic bloc is evolving. Ukraine's ideologically semi-denationalised ruling (Sassen, 2007) and capitalist forces that emerge from the trasformismo dialectic by transnationalising Ukraine's state for their own political and/or economic gain essentially institutionalise the discipline of capital and facilitate a passive revolution (Gramsci, Ibid.) towards a generation of consent to the global hegemony of neoliberal market ideology. This 'passive revolution' further incapacitates possibilities for the emergence of ideological and thus political counter-movements and alternative institutional forms. |
