Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggle in Post-Communist Romania - PhD defense of Florin Poenaru

PhD defense of Florin Poenaru

Dissertation Examination Committee:

Chair: Andras Bozoki, Professor at the Department of Political Science, CEU

Supervisor:  Don Kalb, Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

Internal Examiner: Dan Rabinowitz, Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

External Examiner: Katherine Verdery, Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York

External Examiner: Marius Lazar, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca

Abstract:

This is a dialectical and anthropological exploration of Romanian ‘anti-communism’. On the one hand it traces its hegemonic domination in relation to the politics of writing history and practicing public memory after communism, and on the other hand it points out how struggles against the hegemony of anti-communism enabled the emergence of a critical leftist politics for the present with a view to open up future possibilities. By employing the category of class and by using the tools of historical anthropology, this dissertation shows how highly political class struggles have been depoliticized and culturalized through the discourse of anti-communism. It also shows how struggles around intellectual and cultural production have in fact become a vehicle for concrete processes of class formation and their re-articulation.

This research offers then a different understanding of post-communism and of the social phenomena associated with the umbrella term “transition”. First, at a theoretical level, the communist experience is embedded in the wider dynamics of modernity and capitalism in Eastern Europe in the past two centuries. Second, instead of considering transition as a local historical period leading from communism to capitalism in the region, I regard it as a historical problem nested within global transformations.

On this background I insert my local Romanian case. I show how anti-communism, despite being the hegemonic ideology of transition and an intellectual construction, emerged in fact from the class struggles undergirding the communist regime, which opposed the technical and humanist intelligentsia to the party apparatchiks. But this hegemony did not remain unchallenged. A rebel intellectual group of friends from a younger cohort, not affiliated with state and party power, put together a volume of critical readings of the anticommunist condemnation report, commissioned by the Romanian President, through which they signaled the emergence of a new generation that was willing to give voice to its own experiences of the past and articulate its own politics for the present and the future. The dissertation shows that this anti-hegemonic struggle emerged from a common generational biographical trajectory rooted in the developmentalist logic and achievements of communism, and unfolding across overlapping crises of capitalism in the last four decades.