Marketization and development on a European periphery: From peasant oikos to socialism and neoliberal capitalism on the Danube-Tisza interfluve

Abstract

The modern term economy is associated above all with market exchange. But it derives from the Greek oikos, which for Aristotle referred to the well-managed estate, able to withstand the forces of supply and demand by virtue of a high degree of self-sufficiency. The paper explores the long-term discontinuous expansion of the principle of price-forming markets (in the sense of Karl Polanyi) at the expense of self-sufficiency in a zone of the Great Hungarian Plain where the author has carried out long-term field research. The historically “backward” region of the Danube-Tisza interfluve has been integrated into wider historical processes through different forms of market exchange, first under peripheral variants of capitalism, then in the later decades of socialism, and recently under neoliberal capitalism in a political climate of “illiberal democracy” or populism. The paper analyses continuity and change across these epochs at the societal level, with ethnographic illustrations. In addition to Polanyi’s notions of “market society” and “double movement”, it draws theoretically on Ferenc Erdei’s agenda to overcome rural backwardness through embourgeoisement; it is found that the interests of the rural population were more effectively promoted in the decades of market socialism than in any other period before or since.