Event overview
With Alina Sandra Cucu, Post-Doctoral fellow, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths University of London
Due to the current Industrial action, this seminar has been cancelled.
The lecture explores the transformations of industrial labour in Eastern and Central Europe at the intersection between historical dynamics of capital accumulation, global managerial ideologies, and local strategies of social reproduction. It challenges the still dominant narrative of industrial development in East-Central Europe as a clearly-cut historical move from a set of top-down strategies for mobilizing workers in a “workers’ state” towards ageneralized decline of labour after 1990. Instead, I propose that a surprisingly stable structure of labour reproduction within families and closely-knit webs of social relationships accounts for the fate of industrial workers since the end of the Second World War and into the present.
The talk draws on the findings from two interrelated historical ethnographies of industrial labour in Romania. The first is an investigation of primitive socialist accumulation and the implementation of Soviet-style planning in the multiethnic city of Cluj, in the aftermath of the Second World War. The second project focuses on a Romanian car factory successively owned by Citroën, Daewoo, and Ford, to offer a relational analysis of how Eastern European productive capacities have been integrated in global value chains and constituted into a reservoir of cheap and controlled labour in the last five decades.
I build on these cases to investigate the global changes in production politics that have transformed the Romanian factories into an extended workbench for Western European companies as an encounter between the logic of socialist accumulation and the crisis-led“spatial fixes” materialized globally since the 1950s. This allows both for a rethinking of the transition from Fordism to flexible production beyond the capitalist core, and for an analysis of its impact upon workers’ biographical openings and imaginaries of the future.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Mar 2020 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
