Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

All days
Go back

Wednesday 23 April 2014 11.00 - 13.00
M-2 LAB21 The Transformation of Labour under State Socialism
Hörsaal 32 first floor
Networks: Labour , Theory Chair: Irina Novichenko
Organizers: Gijs Kessler, Marsha Siefert, Susan Zimmermann Discussant: Andrea Komlosy
Chiara Bonfiglioli : Textile Workers during and after Yugoslavia: from Self-management to Post-socialism
The proposed paper focuses on textile workers in the former Yugoslavia, looking at the development of the textile industry during socialist times, and considering the impact of the Yugoslav break-up and of post-socialist transition on textile workers’ everyday lives and memories. Despite its transnational significance, the history of textile workers ... (Show more)
The proposed paper focuses on textile workers in the former Yugoslavia, looking at the development of the textile industry during socialist times, and considering the impact of the Yugoslav break-up and of post-socialist transition on textile workers’ everyday lives and memories. Despite its transnational significance, the history of textile workers in socialist Yugoslavia is practically absent from comparative studies, such as the recent Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000 (2010). The paper investigates the history of textile labor in socialist Yugoslavia and its legacy in post-socialist, post-Yugoslav states, bringing the case of South Eastern Europe into European and global labor history.

The garment industry flourished in socialist Yugoslavia from the early 1950s onwards: state-owned textile factories employed hundreds of thousands workers, notably women, contributing to the industrialization of rural peripheries. The textile industry covered approximately 12% of total manufacturing in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s Yugoslavia was a leading producer of textile and wearing apparel. Garments from the region were exported all over Western Europe and the Soviet Union, and Yugoslav fashion brands sold their products both on the domestic and on the foreign market. In the 1990s and 2000s, textile production has considerably declined as a result of the post-socialist transition and of the Yugoslav break-up. In some post-Yugoslav states, however, such as Macedonia and Serbia, the textile industry is still a relevant component of the national GDP.

In the last twenty years, different edited volumes have investigated popular culture in Yugoslavia, focusing on tourism, consumption, and everyday life. The theme of labor and of workers’ lives during socialism – and particularly of women workers - has received very little attention, also as a result of the marginalization of workers’ experiences during transition times, and as a result of a framework of analysis which privileged ethnicity and nation-building over social and economic transformations.

It is worthy in particular to consider the Yugoslav case because of its specific form of workers’ self-management, which involved workers as shareholders of social property in an economic setting open to global market relations. The involvement of textile workers in factory management and the openness of the Yugoslav garment industry to the world market during socialism are recurring features in contemporary workers’ narratives. On the basis of oral history interviews, local archives and press material, the paper investigates the history and memory of textile labour from a gendered perspective, interrogating the shifting position of textile workers from socialism to post-socialism, from Yugoslavia to post-Yugoslav states, and raising methodological and theoretical questions about citizenship, gender, memory and belonging.
(Show less)

Alina-Sandra Cucu : “Fordism Without Assembly Lines” and Labour Control in Early Socialist Romania, 1949- 1953
The present paper analyzes factory discipline as the cornerstone of the pedagogical project in which workers were to be recast into subjects of socialist construction. Factory discipline was understood as a central dimension of the never quite realized attempt of the Party officials to produce an equivalence between the discipline ... (Show more)
The present paper analyzes factory discipline as the cornerstone of the pedagogical project in which workers were to be recast into subjects of socialist construction. Factory discipline was understood as a central dimension of the never quite realized attempt of the Party officials to produce an equivalence between the discipline of the state, the discipline of the plan, and the discipline of the working-class. Starting from the documents in the local archives in Cluj, I map the “actually existing” configuration in which this project emerged, exploring its constraints and its proceedings during the first years of planning.
I will show how the effort to organize production and life along Fordist and Taylorist ideas coming on a Soviet pathway produced a strange factory regime and an associated form of moral regulation which can be best called “Fordism without assembly lines”. While planning had to function as a formidable machine to produce modernity through manual labour and mobilization, the fact that assembly lines were very rare in early socialist Romania combined with recurrent sources of breaks in production had serious consequences on the type of authority that could be constructed in the factories. Following a conceptual line opened by the French sociology of labour, I argue that building authority within the factories in Cluj was almost impossible due to the difficulties to ensure a continuous flow of production. Matter actually mattered for a materialist societal project.
Moreover, like in other socialist countries, the possibility to enforce factory discipline was strictly limited by a severe labour shortage and restrictive employment regulations. These conditions fundamentally altered the space within which various indiscipline acts were negotiated and within which the managerial power of the state was exercised. Within this space, making “new” workers could not be separated from managing the “actually existing” ones and the mundane concerns of labour control like stealing, truencies, delays, drinking, or poor quality work. My paper focuses further on the tense but mutually feeding relationship between various disciplinary procedures trying to solve these problems and the ontological fracture presupposed by the rising of a “new world”. I argue that factory discipline, as part of a broader material and rhetorical field in which the socialist worker was imagined, was situated in the space carved at the intersection of several in-built tensions of socialist construction. First, accountability in early socialist factories was built around the tension between individual responsibility and an obssessively collective subject. Second, the attempt to enforce factory discipline aligned the workers along a virtual continuum between “lacking” modernity and “being already there” modernity, or between the backwardness of the semi-proletarian and the advanced historical consciousness of the Stakhanovite. (Show less)

Nigel Swain : Collectivisation and the Development of ‘Socialist Wage Labour’ in Hungarian Agriculture, 1946-77.
The above was the title of my PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1981) which formed the basis of my first monograph Collective Farms which Work? (Cambridge University Press, 1985). I resurrect the PhD title to emphasise the fact that my central interest in those days, as a sociologist researching ‘actually ... (Show more)
The above was the title of my PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1981) which formed the basis of my first monograph Collective Farms which Work? (Cambridge University Press, 1985). I resurrect the PhD title to emphasise the fact that my central interest in those days, as a sociologist researching ‘actually existing socialism’, was labour and its place within the production relations of predominantly state-owned economic entities. My interest in rural societies was accidental, although it has spawned a career investigating the processes of collectivisation and decollectivisation from an increasingly historical and comparative perspective.

My proposal to the conference is to offer a paper which would be directly complementary to the paper proposed by Zsuzsanna Varga (ELTE, Budapest) on Americanization of a Soviet-type agriculture: the case of Hungary in the 1970s. My paper would be based primarily on my sociological research in the 1970s, but supplemented by the broader if not deeper knowledge that I have uncovered in the intervening four decades. The adoption of American production systems that Zsuzsanna describes represents an extreme case of the adoption of industrialised production relations that characterised collectivised agriculture. My research used two simple concepts, ‘family labour’ and ‘socialist wage labour’, to describe a process whereby collective farms moved from entities based on ‘peasant economy writ large’ to entities employing wage-labour, and a form of wage labour that was located within the same sorts of contradictory production relations as existed in socialist industry. Most countries which collectivised their agriculture went through similar processes, although at different speeds; and it was a key feature in turning collectivisation from catastrophe to success.

My proposal is a paper that would revisit these analytical categories derived from sociological research conducted in the 1970s to contextualise Zsuzsanna’s archive-based, historical research into the specific example of American production systems in that same decade. The two papers might prompt a more general exploration of how social historians relate to the sociological enquiries of the period they are researching.
(Show less)

Zsuzsanna Varga : Americanization of a Soviet-type Agriculture: the Case of Hungary in the 1970s
Hungary, just like other Central-Eastern-European socialist countries completed the Sovietization of agriculture by the early 1960s. The newly established collective farms were clearly incapable of delivering a produce that had been expected from them for years to come. Hungary was in need of corn and meat import. In accordance ... (Show more)
Hungary, just like other Central-Eastern-European socialist countries completed the Sovietization of agriculture by the early 1960s. The newly established collective farms were clearly incapable of delivering a produce that had been expected from them for years to come. Hungary was in need of corn and meat import. In accordance with the living standard policy undertaken after the suppression of the Revolution in 1956, the Hungarian party leadership had to find a solution as soon as possible. Experience from the West had shown that, industrialized production systems enabled the agricultural sector to produce massive amounts at a surprisingly quick rate. In 1969, Hungarian state farm, Bábolna signed a cooperation agreement with a firm from Chicago and was admitted to the Corn Production Systems. A decade later 96% of state and collective farms in Hungary were participating in agricultural production systems and 90% of the country’s corn and 88% of its wheat crop were produced by system members.
The aim of my paper is to analyse the transfer of a capitalist agricultural production system into a socialist economy from a social historical point of view. I believe, this topic could be an interesting contribution to the transnational labor history research, too.
In the first part of my paper I shall briefly summarize the political background of this model-transfer. Which were the pivotal considerations and interests of the American and the Hungarian decision-makers in the process? In the second part I shall examine how the American model of industrialized farming was adopted and spread in Hungary. Since the imported technology was not limited to machinery but included the know-how and the personnel, too, the focus of my research is the changing nature of labour on collective farms itself. What were the new requirements towards the collective farm membership? Which conflicts emerged at the farm level as a result of different ownership-structure, remuneration, and work organization? How did the training system help absorb and spread American industrial-style production systems in Hungary? This central part is based not only on my archival research but also on evidence gained from interviews. In the final part of my paper I shall summarize the results and the limits of the investigated process.
(Show less)



Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer