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At the heart of today's fierce political anger over income inequality is a feature of capitalism that Karl Marx famously obsessed over: the commodification of labor. Most of us think wage-labor economics is at odds with socialist thinking, but as Martha Lampland explains in this fascinating look at twentieth-century Hungary, there have been moments when such economics actually flourished under socialist regimes. Exploring the region's transition from a capitalist to a socialist system--and the economic science and practices that endured it--she sheds new light on the two most polarized ideologies of modern history. Lampland trains her eye on the scientific claims of modern economic modeling, using Hungary's unique vantage point to show how theories, policies, and techniques for commodifying agrarian labor that were born in the capitalist era were adopted by the socialist regime as a scientifically designed wage system on cooperative farms. Paying attention to the specific historical circumstances of Hungary, she explores the ways economists and the abstract notions they traffic in can both shape and be shaped by local conditions, and she compellingly shows how labor can be commodified in the absence of a labor market. The result is a unique account of economic thought that unveils hidden but necessary continuities running through the turbulent twentieth century.

AbstractThis article constitutes a critique of abstraction as an analytic tool. The argument advances the idea that formalizing practices are indexical; that is, the way abstractions are realized necessarily incorporates features of the context in which they are produced. The expression formalizing practices refers to a series of actions or operations that make quantification, rationalization, and standardization possible. Entailed in all these procedures is an attempt to select and isolate features that exemplify a specific phenomenon or social process, or in the case of standardization, that stipulate its contours and dimensions. These features are presumed to be immanent from the start, but in fact, formal representations are carefully crafted, finely tuned instruments. In order to clarify these practices, I delineate three phases of their construction: the conceptual phrase, the choice of analytic strategy, and the specification of its formal representation. In other words, this approach suggests the value of examining formalizing projects as crucibles where cultural assumptions and practical reasoning are condensed into formulae. These ideas are explored in relation to the use of time and motion studies employed in early socialist Hungary to determine the new socialist wage system. While a decidedly local story, the implications of the analysis are much broader. The possibility of adopting this approach to the study of other formalizing practices, such as algorithmic systems and digital databases, is suggested. The analysis also raises questions about the commensurability of long-held concepts in social theory.

Two wage systems designed to improve productivity among Hungarian workers are compared. The first, calorie money, was a short-term solution to keep workers properly nourished and hard at work in a capitalist economy in the midst of inflationary chaos at the end of World War II. The second, technical norms, was a long-term project initiated by the socialist state to design norms based on workers' physical capacity in order to extract the greatest amount of effort most efficiently. In both cases, wages were set according to the level of exertion expended by the worker, not by output, which is commonly understood to be the measure of productivity. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to situate the early socialist project in Hungary within a longer history of rationalization and scientific management in the first half of the twentieth century; and (2) to explain how different conceptualizations of labor generate distinct approaches to determining wages and establishing norm rates. This approach draws attention to two central questions: the structural character of the transition to socialism in 1940s Hungary and the historical contingencies of the definition and assessment of work.

Mit Blick auf die Transformationsforschung stellt sich die Frage, welche Aspekte der Kollektivierung der Landwirtschaft ausschließlich sozialistisch waren und ob sich einige ihrer Merkmale nicht auch weitgehend in den modernisierten kapitalistischen Volkswirtschaften wiederfinden lassen. Ein profundes Verständnis der postsozialistischen Landwirtschaft erfordert nach Meinung der Autorin eine genaue Betrachtung der Unterschiede zwischen Eigentumsrelationen, modernen Produktionsmethoden und Managementpraxis in der kollektiven Landwirtschaft. Werden diese Differenzierungen nicht getroffen, fehlen die notwendigen Voraussetzungen für eine Analyse der sich gegenwärtig vollziehenden ökonomischen Transformationsprozesse. Die vorliegende Studie setzt sich mit einer viel diskutierten These über die Transition in Osteuropa kritisch auseinander. Es handelt sich dabei um die Behauptung, dass schon eine geringfügige institutionelle Strukturänderung ausreiche, um den Volkswirtschaften dieser Länder eine neue Gestalt zu geben und bestehende, den Zugang zum internationalen Handel blockierende Barrieren zu beseitigen. Die Autorin zeigt demgegenüber am Beispiel der neuen Agrarelite Ungarns in der ersten Hälfte der 90er Jahre, dass soziale Beziehungen und kulturelle Standpunkte erheblichen Einfluss auf volkswirtschaftliche Transformationsprozesse ausüben. (ICI2)

Since 1989, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have mourned the death of jokes in postsocialist societies. While in fact humor has not gone away, the everyday experience of sharing jokes as an intimate form of political criticism has indeed vanished. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the history of Hungarian humor, this article contributes a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarship on Soviet laughter, by examining the "loss of the joke" as both a cultural phenomenon and a critical discourse in postsocialist Hungary. First, we argue that a series of important shifts in the way Hungarians work, socialize, communicate, and engage in politics has led them to be far more circumspect in sharing political humor. Second, we analyze the self-reflexive perception of loss as a form of cultural criticism that indexes broader anxieties about the challenges of interpreting the operations of power under postsocialism. With this shift in political sensibility, we argue, the lament that the joke is "lost" may now offer more effective political commentary than a joke itself.