Planning the state: Labour and the making of industrial socialism in Romania, 1944-1955 - PhD defense of Alina-Sandra Cucu

PhD defense of Alina-Sandra Cucu

Dissertation Examination Committee:

Chair: Constantin Iordachi, Associate Professor at the Department of History, CEU

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

Internal Examiner: Prem Kumar Rajaram, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

External Examiner: Martha Lampland, Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego

Abstract:

The dissertation explores the contradictory unfolding on the ground of the early years of socialism in Romania. It centres on the relationship between labour and the state as it was lived in the cities, in the villages and in the factories of a country that constitutes the ideal space for revisiting the core lines of force around which socialist construction in conditions of uneven and combined development emerged. It argues that socialism was fragile from its very inception, because it aligned the needs of accumulation with the requirements of an emancipatory project into an artificial historical simultaneity. This simultaneity produced class struggle and a surprisingly weak state around several dimensions: labour stabilization, control, and expansion; knowledge production; and conflicting temporal regimes. Along these lines, this project explores the Romanian state socialism in its formative years and it approaches it as radical nonsynchronicity produced by a long history of unnevenness, dispossession, and isolation.