User:Cdjp1/sandbox/Genderpostcommunism

=Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe=

Changes in gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism have been an object of historical and sociological study.

Historical context
The Eastern European state socialist regimes proclaimed women's emancipation in the late 1940s. Legislation was passed that radically altered women's position in societies of Eastern Europe. New laws guaranteed women's equality in society and marriage, and women as well as men were required to become productive members of society by working for wages and engaging in political activism. Women's participation in the workforce continued to increase through the period, with some countries seeing 50% of the workforce being made up of women by the end of the communist period. In most countries the right to abortion was codified into law by the end of the 1950s.

Political leaders viewed women's presence in the workforce as providing an opportunity to instill communist ideology in new generations of women.

Though such advancements were made, Soviet and Warsaw-pact governments generally framed feminism a "bourgeois ideology".

Changes in post-communist states
The dissolution of the Soviet system was followed by a rapid increase in poverty,  crime,  corruption,  unemployment, homelessness,  rates of disease,   infant mortality, domestic violence and income inequality, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy and income. Many people in post-Soviet states felt that their lives were worse off after 1989, when capitalist markets were made dominant.

Government
With the transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies and democracies, many states saw a dramatic drop in the number of women represented in state parliaments. Such an example can be seen in the parliament of Albania where the number of women representatives fell from 73 to 9 in the first post-collapse elections. The transition also saw a reduction in women's participation in the new political systems. These factors have made it difficult for women to advocate for women's rights in central and eastern Europe after the transition.

Employment
The transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies saw an over-representation of women in unemployment that had not existed before in the central and eastern European countries. Though there was variation in this change depending on the country. In the former Soviet Union this transition led to significant changes in all spheres including the labor market. Whilst there was a gender pay gap in places such as the Soviet Union, due to protective legislation that restricted women's employment in jobs that were considered dangerous or physically demanding which meant that due to the fact that in the centralised wage system, where market forces did not interfere, earnings within sectors were determined by the perception of a certain sector's productivity, laboriousness and social usefulness, women in Russia were highly concentrated in white-collar sectors such as education, healthcare, trade, food and light industry, their earnings were on average lower than those of men throughout the whole of the Soviet Union's history, a similar concentration of women in the workforce and a similar trend were also seen in the German Democratic Republic. After the collapse, due to laws such as the Law on the State Enterprise (adopted prior to transition in 1987), meant that goods-producing enterprises had to meet their wage payment obligations from their own revenue. While this change scarcely affected women, as women were still concentrated in the "nonproductive" sector, it did affect the pay gap between women and men. The nonproductive sector, encompassing such sectors as education and healthcare, was still financed from the state budget and was therefore at greater risk of budgetary cuts, which occurred in the transitory period. Women continued to have lower wages than men after the collapse, with increases in the wage gap in most countries, this occurred alongside an increase in the overall income inequality. In this transitory period for many states there was economic disaster, and Gale Stokes comments on how "many of the customary practices of ordinary life, such as the value of time, gender relations, the nature of public discourse, and the job environment, changed." Due to women being concentrated in the lower tier of the income distribution, they were more vulnerable to such changes, and the rising social inequality had an adverse effect on the gender pay differentials during the transition years. Rita Hansberry, Christopher Gerry, Byung-Yeon Kim and Carmen Li provide evidence that the increase in dispersion of incomes brought about by liberalisation had a negative impact on the gender wage gap in Russia.

Beyond income equality, the transition increased the gender discrimination in workplaces. Many women left professional and managerial positions that women had occupied previously due to the ongoing removal of state childcare services in central and eastern European countries. Due to family considerations, it was predicted in 1993 that many women would leave the work force and consolidate in occasional, short-term, seasonal, undeclared, and other kinds of precarious work, and this has been shown to have been the case in later research.

Éva Fodor and Anikó Balogh, contrary to other researchers, based on pre-collapse and post-collapse survey data, have said that opinions on women as homemakers and their contribution to the workforce, have changed little in central and eastern European states, and in contrast western European states have greatly liberalised their views on women within the home and workforce.

The transition also saw a shift in most economies from heavy industry to light industry, this saw many men made redundant from jobs within heavy industry moving into light industry which had been a highly feminised sector of the economy during the communist period.

Reproductive rights and sexual violence
Some rights, such as reproductive rights which had been achieved under the previous socialist regimes were subsequently challenged in countries after the fall of those regimes. The restriction of access to abortion in the years immediately after the collapse saw mass protests from women in Czechoslovakia and Poland, with the number of legal abortions conducted per year in Poland dropping by over 30,000 from 1991 to 1993.

In Russia, pornography proliferated after the collapse, whilst in the former Yugoslavia an epidemic of mass rape occurred. Slavenka Drakulić described the liberalisation of the economy and society in Yugoslavia as: "We live surrounded by newly opened porno shops, porno magazines, peepshows, stripteases, unemployment and galloping poverty [...] Romanian women are prostituting themselves for a single dollar in towns on the Romanian-Yugoslav border. In the midst of all this, our anti-choice nationalist governments are threatening our right to abortion and telling us to multiply, to give birth to more Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks."

With the negative economic situations many women found themselves in during the market liberalisation of the economies, human traffickers became prominent in trafficking women around central and eastern Europe, and to western Europe from central and eastern Europe for prostitution.

Health
The transition lead to a reduction in the life expectancy of people across society in many countries, though to a lesser extent for women.

Economic participation
Kristen Ghodsee comments how whilst many suggest that all women in Bulgaria were negatively affected by the collapse, some groups of women did relatively well after the collapse, specifically those in the tourism industry, who had higher levels of general education, work experience with Westerners and knew Western foreign-languages. Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović points out how at the same time women made up two thirds of the unpaid workers present in Bulgaria during the transition. Mariya Stoilova found that women's economic activity in post-socialist Bulgaria was most affected by the age of the women, with older women who were in employment during the socialist system having the lowest rate of economic activity in post-socialist Bulgaria, and while younger women still faced sexist discrimination in employment opportunities, they were more economically active than older age groups of women.

Religious reaction
Following the collapse the Pomaks of Bulgaria saw a resurgence in orthodox forms of Islam and Christianity, as many believed their "traditions were corrupted by communism", with similar sentiments seen in other groups. This encouraged a return to traditional gender roles for men and women. Ghodsee comments on how for some men this included more strictly policing their wives' bodies than they had previously under the communist regime, and how also many women "seemed eager" to adopt such traditional gender roles. With the lack of autonomous feminist movements during the socialist period of Bulgaria, women's rights in the post-communist country has not had a great grassroots base, and is instead conducted mainly through professional NGOs.

Violence against women
Psychotherapists reported that reports of domestic violence increased in Bulgaria during the transitionary period, attributing this increase to the serious economic problems many families and households faced.

Controversies
There is controversy with regard to the view, which is often promoted in the western Europe, according to which the fall of communism had a disproportionate negative effect on women in those countries, and there is criticism of stereotypical views presented in the media about the status of women from this region both during and after the fall of the communism. Such views are often accused of being rooted in the common idea that western cultures are better and must save "less developed" societies. This is linked to objections in painting feminism in eastern Europe as "a matter of catching up with the West."

With regard to central and eastern European countries, the fall of communism had severely affected the whole society (including through violent wars such as Yugoslav Wars and post-Soviet conflicts), and in some cases, such as the fall of the heavy industry, men were worse affected. With regard to social policies, these have varied greatly by country, both during and after the fall of communism, given that former communist countries are not a monolith and there were and are differences between them (half of European countries are former communist countries). For example, while in Poland abortion was restricted in the 1990s, in other countries the fall of communism actually led to the liberalisation of reproductive rights, such as in Albania, especially during the later stages of the communist period, which saw aggressive natalist policies.

Critics argue that the claims made by the former communist regimes regarding the official data about the situation of women under those communist governments should not be taken for granted, as while there were laws that supported gender equality in the Soviet Union, these were not well or always followed.

Support for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia
The term originated as a phrase for British hardline members of the Communist Party. Journalist Peter Paterson asked Engineering Union official Reg Birch about his election to the CPGB Executive after the Hungarian invasion:


 * "When I asked him how he could possibly have sided with the 'tankies', so called because of the use of Russian tanks to quell the revolt, he said 'they wanted a trade unionist who could stomach Hungary, and I fitted the bill'."

The support of the invasions was disastrous for the party's credibility.

By extension, anyone who agreed with these Soviet repressions could be called a "tankie". Carole Pateman, realising the shortcomings of the ideological orthodoxies of Cuba in the 1960s, including support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia asked:
 * "How could Castro be a 'tankie'?"

"Neo-tankies"
Satirist Martin Rowson observes that the hardline, black and white, authoritarian outlook of the far left has often been preserved by some of its former members, even when other aspects of their leftism have been shorn by experience or ideological shifts:


 * "John Lloyd is one of those pro-war lefties or ex lefties, whom I prefer to call neo-tankies, who've dragged their Manichean mindset from the Cold War and insist on seeing the final battle between good and evil just round the next corner."

He says:
 * "I came up with this word to describe Lloyd, Hitchens, Aaronovitch and the rest of them … It honours the pro-war ex-left's origins by acknowledging the neo-conservatives, that bunch of ex-Trots who believe in the violent export of democracy throughout the world on the back of the US-military industrial complex, and the tankies, the old diehards of the British Communist party who supported Stalin or Moscow's line at every turn, above and beyond accepting unquestioningly Soviet tanks trundling through Budapest or into Czecholoslovakia"

Definition


After the Prague Spring, the term was used to describe Communist party members of Western countries who had supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact states, of which Czechoslovakia was a member. According to Christina Petterson, "Politically speaking, tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China, etc." It was also used in the 1980s to describe the uncritical support the Morning Star gave to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. By 2017, tankie had re-emerged as internet slang for Stalinists and other authoritarian communists, used by other Marxists, and it became particularly popular among young democratic socialists. Modern tankies generally do not get along with non-Marxist–Leninist segments of the left and many of those who oppose tankies also consider themselves leftists.

Especially in context of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the term has also been used, such as by Sarah Jones of New York, for "elements within the self-identified [American] left that have soft-pedaled Russia's aggressive foreign policy and history of human rights abuses", with The Intercept journalist Roane Carey identifying the "key element in the tankie mindset [as] the simple-minded assumption that only the U.S. can be imperialist, and thus any country that opposes the U.S. must be supported."

Usage
Tankie has its origins in British political rhetoric. It has since become a popular pejorative in English-language social media. In 2017, left-wing writer Carl Beijer argued that there are two distinct uses of the term tankie. The original, which was "exemplified in the sending of tanks into Hungary to crush resistance to Soviet communism". More generally, a tankie is someone who tends to support "militant opposition to capitalism", and a more modern online variation, which means "something like 'a self-proclaimed communist who indulges in conspiracy theories and whose rhetoric is largely performative. He was critical of both uses.

An instance of the modern usage is the description of those "who instinctively defend China based on the idea that it is an example of actually existing socialism resisting Western imperialism", in discussions around the Uyghur genocide, where in this defence they will neoconservative analysis to justify the "anti-terrorism" operations of the Chinese government. The term tankie has also been used in contemporary times to describe the defenders of dictators like Bashar al-Assad or those who propagate pro-Russian narratives in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

In the United Kingdom
Tankie originated in the UK as a term for hardline members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The Stalinist wing of the CPGB was also sometimes called "tankie" and was associated with the views of the strong CPGB presence in British trade unions. Journalist Peter Paterson asked the Amalgamated Engineering Union official Reg Birch about his election to the CPGB Executive after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Paterson recalled:

"When I asked him how he could possibly have sided with the tankies, so called because of the use of Russian tanks to quell the revolt, he said "they wanted a trade unionist who could stomach Hungary, and I fitted the bill.""

The support of the invasion of Hungary was disastrous for the party's reputation in Britain. The CPGB made mild criticisms of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which they justified as a necessary intervention, although a hardline faction supported it, including the Appeal Group who left the party in response.

The term continued to be used into the 1980s, especially in relation to the split between the reform-minded eurocommunist wing of the CPGB and the traditionalist, pro-Soviet group, the latter continuing to be labelled tankies. In the 2006 play Rock 'n' Roll by the Anglo-Czech author Tom Stoppard, the character Max, based on Eric Hobsbawm, discusses with Stephen what to read to hear what is happening in the Communist party, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Their options are Marxism Today and the daily newspaper, the Morning Star.

"MAX: Marxism Today? It's not so much the Eurocommunism. In the end it was the mail order gifts thing. I couldn't take the socks with little hammers and sickles on them.

STEPHEN: Well, Read the Morning Star and keep up with the Tankies.

MAX: The Tankies... How the years roll by. Dubcek is back. Russia agrees to withdraw its garrisons. Czechoslovakia takes her knickers off for capitalism. And all that remains of August '68 is a derisive nickname for the only real communists left in the Communist Party."

The term is sometimes used within the Labour Party as slang for a politically old-fashioned leftist. Alastair Campbell reported a conversation about modernising education, in which Tony Blair said: "I'm with George Walden on selection." Campbell recalled: "DM [ David Miliband ] looked aghast... [Blair] said when it came to education, DM and I were just a couple of old tankies." In 2015, Boris Johnson referred to Jeremy Corbyn and the left wing of the Labour Party as "tankies and trots", the latter referring to Trotskyism.

Elsewhere
The term tankie has been used in English-language social media to describe communists, particularly those from the Western world, who uphold the legacies of communist leaders, such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. While generally used pejoratively, some Marxist–Leninists have re-appropriated it and used the term as a badge of honor.

The Taiwanese left-wing magazine New Bloom alleges that many modern tankies are members of the Asian diasporas of English-speaking countries. In particular, members of the Chinese diaspora searching for radical responses to social ills such as xenophobia against Asians are drawn to tankie discourse. This modern conception of tankie has also been described as "diasporic Chinese nationalism".

In 2022, New York magazine observed that in the US "[s]o-called tankies don't make up the majority of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership or wield much power within the broader left, but they do exist", and that "[l]eftists from other countries have been contending with the American tankie for years", quoting activists from Hong Kong and Poland, two countries that have existed under authoritarian communist regimes.

General and cited references


= International of Anarchist Federations =

The International of Anarchist Federations (Internationale des Fédérations Anarchistes; abbreviated IAF/IFA) was founded during an international anarchist conference in Carrara, Italy, in 1968 by the three existing European federations of France, Italy and Spain as well as the Bulgarian federation in French exile. Other groups were also present in the formation of the IAF, such as the now defunct London Federation of Anarchists who took part in the preparation for the conference in 1968. According to Time magazine, before the first IAF conference in Carrara could begin, firemen were called to check the venue for bombs. The Carrara congress was a response to a congress held in London from June to August 1958 which "recreated a certain dynamism and wish towards the organisational aspiration of international anarchism".

The IAF has since aimed to build and improve strong and active international anarchist structures. The federations associated with IAF believe that such an organisation is necessary to co-ordinate their international work and efficiently co-operate towards their mutual aims.

In order to further improve the quality of exchange and co-operation, IAF also keeps close contact with other anarchist organisations, such as the International Workers' Association (IWA), an international association of anarcho-syndicalist organisations and unions. The IAF contains many anarchist-communist federations and individuals.

Principles
The principles of work within IFA are that of federalism, free arrangement and Mutual Aid, and as states in their preamble of their principles, the IAF fights for:
 * 1) the abolition of all forms of authority whether economic, political, social, religious, cultural or sexual.
 * 2) the construction of a free society, without classes or States or frontiers, founded on anarchist federalism and mutual aid.

The IAF is committed to direct action, struggle from below, anti-parliamentarism, and opposition to reformism, on both a theoretical and a practical level.

To improve co-ordination and communication within IAF, as well as to provide an open contact address for the public and other anarchist groups and organisations, an International Secretariat (the Commission of Relations of the International of Anarchist Federations—referred to commonly as C.R.I.F.A.) was set up. The CRIFA irregularly rotates among the IAF federations. It is currently based with the Fédération Anarchiste in France. Often, the different member federations will work with one another on certain agreed issues and campaigns, in order to be able to mount a joint worldwide effort to raise awareness and assist the struggle around certain issues.

The different member federations also produce their own publications, such as Le Monde libertaire in France and Belgium, and El Libertario in Argentina. However, there was also an IAF magazine, Anarkiista Debato which, due, however, to a lack of funds, was unable to continue.

A number of reports have been written for the IAF, particularly on issues such as the struggle between the village of Rossport, the Corrib gas field and Shell in 2007. Members of the IAF often congregate at meetings of world leaders, such as Gleneagles in 2005.

Member federations

 * a.Although the FAI is technically an Iberian organisation (in that it encompasses all the regions in the Iberian Peninsula), it does not have members in Portugal or Andorra.

This is the current list of member federations as confirmed during the 11th Congress of the International of Anarchist Federations.

Congresses of the IFA
All members of regional federations meet every three years for a congress that decides on direction and lines of action. One year before the Assembly, the IFA Secretariat and those responsible for international relations in the various federations will determine the agenda, date and location of the Congress. The Congress debates the initiatives of the IFA, passes resolutions and mandates a federation to run the Secretariat of the IFA.


 * Creation of the Anarchist International Congress, London, 25 July - 1 August 1958.
 * 1st Congress of the IFA, Carrara, 31 August 5 September 1968
 * 2nd Congress of the IFA, Paris, 1–4 August 1971.
 * 3rd Congress of the IFA, Carrara, 23–27 March 1978.
 * 4th Congress of the IFA, Paris, 31 October - 3 November 1986.
 * 5th Congress of the IFA, Valencia, 1–4 November 1990.
 * 6th Congress of the IFA, Lyon, 31 October - 1/2 November 1997.
 * 7th Congress of the IFA, Besançon, 9–12 April 2004.
 * 8th Congress of the IFA, Carrara, 4–6 July 2008.
 * 9th Congress of the IFA, Saint-Imier, 9–12 August 2013.
 * 10th Congress of the IFA, Frankfurt, 4-7 August 2016.
 * 11th Congress of the IFA, Ljubljana, 24-28 July 2019.

Other anarchist internationals and international networks

 * Anarchist St. Imier International (1872–1877)
 * International Working People's Association (1881–1887)
 * International Workers' Association (1922–)
 * Black Bridge International (2001–2004)
 * International Libertarian Solidarity (2001–2005)
 * Anarkismo.net (2005–)
 * International Union of Anarchists (2011–2013)

Characteristic
E-folklore draws from the heritage of traditional folklore and transforms it into new forms. E.g.:
 * gossip – "important information" of popular websites
 * letters from heaven - chain letters

E-folklore is studied mainly by working out how its content affects the behavior and creativity of the addressee, because the very classification of very dynamically changing products of digital folklore becomes incomprehensible after a short time. Michał Rauszer compares digital folklore to anthropological mana as mere meaning without content, emphasizing that visualizations of online folklore are not important in the study.

The mutual relations of members of online communities are based on the secrets of a given group and the appropriate keys needed to become a full-fledged participant in culture. Users participating in internet folklore identify with the Other, a person outside the community who possesses an unattainable, desirable trait, as can be seen in "spout" photos. At the same time, they avoid initiating Others into the knowledge needed to fully understand their group. Without it, e-folklore cannot be fully understood. This is noticeable with audiovisual material such as memes.

Online activity is characterized by identification with some activity or information with the simultaneous possibility of ridiculing oneself for this type of phenomenon.

The amount of e-folklore content is far more accurate in determining popularity than statistics, because it is created on the spur of the moment as a reflection of real emotions.

Cyberfolklore, like traditional folklore, does not happen at a specific time because it is assumed that it has always been so. Because of this, here and now it occurs at a convenient moment to convey some information, truth or science.

Features of e-folklore:
 * constantly processed and copied
 * spontaneous
 * sensational
 * funny
 * reminiscent of bygone eras
 * dynamically developing
 * conducive to further folklore-forming processes
 * having a collective author
 * has a high speed of information transfer
 * it reaches wherever there is internet
 * giving a lot of anonymity
 * distinct and noticeable
 * cynically distant

Connections with traditional folklore
Similarities:
 * 1) They have a collective author
 * 2) They express the need for community through stories
 * 3) They process existing content
 * 4) They are timeless ("here and now") - events are not identified with a specific period ("it has always been like this", and at the same time "it is happening now")
 * 5) It is fully understood only by those initiated into uncommon information and principles.
 * 6) A person strives to identify with a certain feature - for example, "spout" photos are an expression of the pursuit of having a feature that allows full control over one's own body
 * 7) Contain content that emphasizes fear of the unknown and loss of control (legends)

Differences:
 * 1) Unprecedented anonymity, speed and scope of information dissemination
 * 2) Occurrence of new forms of communication:
 * 3) * chat (chat)
 * 4) * forum
 * 5) * Memes
 * 6) * social networking sites
 * 7) * fansites
 * 8) Occurrence of new interpersonal interactions:
 * 9) * trolling
 * 10) * flame wars
 * 11) * interface-to-interface (instead of face to face)
 * 12) Weakening the role of the sender due to the greater possibilities of the addressee

Technologically revolutionary, cyberspace is yet mythically and poetically familiar, a new venue for expressing traditional themes of hope, resurrection, and safety. – John W. Green, “Cemeteries, Virtual”, Encyclopedia of Death & the Human Experience, Clifton D. Bryant & Dennis L. Peck, eds. pp. 180-182