This article examines the social history of socialist work movements in Czechoslovakia during the first two decades of the Communist regime in the country. These movements were attempts to increase industrial productivity and to transform preexisting working-class culture. Not only did they founder on the chaotic operation of the bureaucratic planned economy and the endemic shortages it brought in train, they also foundered on the realities of labor relations in Czechoslovak enterprises. These were marked by the continuity of tensions inherited from the immediate postwar years that persisted into the Communist era, and the strength of egalitarian values among Czechoslovakia's working class.