Suchergebnisse

Foreword : what was the plan? And what was it meant to do? / Don Kalb -- I. Primitive socialist accumulation in Cluj -- 1. Productive state apparatuses : taking over the factories, 1944-1948 -- 2. 'More precious than gold' : labour instability and the 'stickiness' of everyday life -- 3. 'Workers', 'proletarians' and the struggle for cheap labour -- II. Time and accumulation on the shop floor -- 4. 'Hidden reserves of productivity' and the quest for knowledge --5. Productive flows and factory discipline -- 6. Planned heroism and nonsynchronicity on the shop floor -- Epilogue : really existing socialism as nonsynchronicity.

AbstractDrawing on the Romanian case, this article argues against looking at state socialist regimes through the lens of exceptionalism, and assesses the merits of analysing them from the perspective of primitive accumulation. Integrating socialist projects into a longer history of modernization, capital formation, and struggles over labour and land allows me to develop a four-step argument about primitive socialist accumulation in Romania. First, I argue that, in Romania, peasant dispossession had underpinned capital formation for roughly 150 years before the communist takeover. Second, these mechanisms of primitive accumulation constituted crucial matrices for class formation that were irreducible to ideal-typical processes of proletarianization. Third, the articulation between peasant dispossession and strategies of keeping labour cheap was state-led, mandated, or protected, and stood at the core of all modernization projects for the whole period under discussion. And fourth, seen through these lenses, the communist collectivization and nationalization in the 1950s appears as one instance, among others, in a longue-durée history of primitive accumulation in the region.

Abstract This article investigates the recent attempts to integrate Eastern Europe in global labour history as a unique opportunity to formulate an intellectual agenda that would place the region on the global map, but on its own analytical terms. Based on two interconnected research projects on industrial labour in socialist Romania, it argues that these integration efforts have to start with a systematic endeavour to bring labour history and the history of capital formation in the region together. The endeavour of articulating a truly global labour history from a specifically Eastern European angle requires us to reconsider the scale(s) at which we construct our narratives, moving away from an epistemological perspective that favours eventful fractures and towards a processual analysis of labour in the region. ; This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 792833. The article reflects only the author's view; the Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

This essay delves into the ways in which people in Craiova lived through the Romanian national lockdown and its aftermath, and offers a glimpse into the (working-)lives in which crisis is always the 'normal.' The chapter treats the global pandemic as a non-event, to question the "normal lives" we are supposed to go back to: a normal that glorifies narratives of honest labor, while making stable and reliable work a thing of the past; a normal that does not allow the transformation of large categories into surplus populations to be recognized for what it is – a structural feature of late capitalism – but translates it into a repertoire of personal moral obligations and failures. ; This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 792833. The article reflects only the author's view; the Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.