Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania (International Studies in Social History Book 32)

"Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of 'primitive socialist accumulation' whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers' consumption in support of industrial growth. Focusing on the daily operations of planning in the ethnically mixed city of Cluj from 1945 to 1955, this book argues that socialist accumulation was deeply contradictory: it not only inherited some of the classical tensions of capital accumulation, but also generated its own, which derived from the multivocal nature of the state socialist worker as a creator of value, as living labour, and as a subject of emancipatory politics"-- Provided by publisher Contents Tables Foreword: What Was the Plan? And What Was It Meant to Do? Acknowledgements Introduction I Primitive Socialist Accumulation in Cluj Chapter 1 Productive State Apparatuses Taking Over the Factories, 1944–1948 Chapter 2 ‘More Precious Than Gold’ Labour Instability and the ‘Stickiness’ of Everyday Life Chapter 3 ‘Workers’, ‘Proletarians’ and the Struggle for Cheap Labour II Time and Accumulation on the Shop Floor Chapter 4 ‘Hidden Reserves of Productivity’ and the Quest for Knowledge Chapter 5 Productive Flows and Factory Discipline Chapter 6 Planned Heroism and Nonsynchronicity on the Shop Floor Epilogue: Really Existing Socialism as Nonsynchronicity Bibliography Index Planning Labour explores the early socialist industrialization and the implementation of central economic planning in Romania between 1945 and 1955. Centered on the city of Cluj, an ethnically mixed city in the northwestern part of Romania, this volume examines the deeply contradictory process required for achieving socialist accumulation.