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Going West: Socialist flexibility in the long 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2022

Alina-Sandra Cucu Open the ORCID record for Alina-Sandra Cucu [Opens in a new window]
Alina-Sandra Cucu*
Affiliation:
Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 10119 Berlin, Germany
*
E-mail: cucualinasandra@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article analyses some of the transformations in economic vocabularies, practices, and institutions that accompanied the turn towards high value-added and technology-driven industrialization in late socialist Romania. It investigates the challenges posed by increasing integration of the country’s commodity production into the world market in the 1960–70s and assesses the measures adopted by its economic executives as a response to these challenges: the reorganization of production; the reconfiguration of planning mechanisms; and the strategies of keeping labour cheap. This article shows that planners behind the Iron Curtain wrestled with similar problems to their Western counterparts. It demonstrates that the solutions of the socialist economic executives not only mirrored, imitated, and translated Western managerial ideologies and practices but also represented creative local responses to the challenges of the world market. I argue this constellation of solutions constituted a fully fledged form of ‘socialist flexibility’. Analysing how these flexible solutions paralleled the neoliberal deregulation in the capitalist core helps us question the analytical separation between centrally planned and market economies and the still powerful narrative of 1989 as a historical fracture.

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Article
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , July 2023 , pp. 153 - 171
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 792833. It was finalized during my stay at The Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes, where my fellowship was supported by the International Labour Organization.

‡

An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Workshop ‘Ruptures, continuities, consolidations: Reconsidering global economic processes since 1945’, at the Historical Institute, University of Berne. The author would like to thank the workshop participants, the conveners Robert Heinze and Patrick Neveling, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

References

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20 Alina-Sandra Cucu, ‘Socialist Accumulation and Its “Primitives” in Romania,’ International Review of Social History, 67, no. 2 (2022): 251–74.

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22 Alina-Sandra Cucu, ‘Producing Knowledge in Productive Spaces: Ethnography and Planning in Early Socialist Romania’, Economy and Society 43, no. 2 (2014): 211–32.

23 Romanian Statistical Yearbook 1990, 240.

24 Alina-Sandra Cucu, Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Socialist Industrialism in Romania (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 75–108; Grama, Laboring Along, 125–78.

25 Romanian Statistical Yearbook (Bucharest: Comisia Nationala pentru Statistica, 1990), 240.

26 Cucu, Planning Labour.

27 Giovanni Arrighi, ‘Spatial and Other “Fixes” of Historical Capitalism’ (paper presented at the conference on globalization in the world-system: mapping change over time. University of California, Riverside, 7–8 February 2003).

28 Daniel Chirot, ‘The Corporatist Model and Socialism,’ Theory and Society 9, no. 2 (1980): 363–81; Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 82.

29 Frieden, Global Capitalism, 351–7.

30 Ban, Dependenţă şi dezvoltare, 50.

31 Ban, Dependenţă şi dezvoltare, 71; Cornel Ban, ‘Sovereign Debt, Austerity, and Regime Change: The Case of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania,’ East European Politics and Societies 26, no. 4 (2012): 743–76.

32 Frieden, Global Capitalism, 397.

33 Ban, Dependenţă şi dezvoltare, 65; Ban, ‘Sovereign Debt’.

34 Ban, Dependenţă şi dezvoltare, 70–6; Ban, ‘Sovereign Debt’.

35 Arhivele Naţionale ale României (henceforth ANIC) [National Archives of Romania], Central Committee of the Communist Party, Economic Section (henceforth CC Economica), 49/1967, 20.

36 Ban, Dependenţă şi dezvoltare, 70.

37 https://icsid.worldbank.org/resources/databases/bilateral-investment-treaties, accessed August 8, 2022.

38 Roland Schönfeld, ‘Romania’s “Mixed Ownership Companies”: A Showcase Example of East-West Industrial Cooperation?’ Soviet and Eastern European Foreign Trade 13, no. 4 (1977/1978): 25–49.

39 Schönfeld, ‘Romania’s “Mixed Ownership Companies”’.

40 Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.

41 Law 1/1971, ‘On foreign trade activity and economic, technical and scientific cooperation of the Socialist Republic of Romania’; Decree 2/1975, ‘On the establishment of the department for international economic cooperation attached to the Ministry for Foreign Trade and International Economic Cooperation’, and the special laws on participation: Decree 424/1972, ‘On the establishment, organization, and functioning of mixed companies in the Socialist Republic of Romania’; Decree 425/1972, ‘On control of the profits of mixed companies established in the Socialist Republic of Romania’; and Decree 52/1975, ‘On the participation of Romanian economic units in mixed companies abroad’.

42 Schönfeld, ‘Romania’s “Mixed Ownership Companies”’; Radu Ioan Şimandan, Gabriel Claudiu Mursa and Vlad Paşca. ‘The Silence of the Herd: Exploring Ownership Concepts in Communist Romania’, in Populating No Man’s Land: Economic Concepts of Ownership Under Communism, ed. J. M. Kovács (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 207–30; Alexandru Deteşan, Societăţi comerciale—societăţi mixte: formă eficientă de cooperare internaţională [Trading Companies – Joint Companies: Effective Form of International Cooperation], Supplement of Viaţa Economică (Bucharest: Intreprinderea Poligrafică Informaţia, 1972); Grigore Florescu, Societăţile mixte în România: nouă formă de cooperare internaţională [Joint Ventures in Romania: New Form of International Cooperation] (Bucharest: Litera, 1977); Ion Rucăreanu, Societăţile mixte constituite în Republica Socialistă România: fundamentare, caractere, constituire [Joint Ventures Established in the Socialist Republic of Romania: Basis, Characteristics, Establishment], Institutul de Cercetări Juridice (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1976).

43 ANIC, CC Economica, 49/1967, pp. 6.

44 ANIC, CC Economica, 49/1967, pp. 4. All translations of the archival documents from Romanian into English are the author’s.

45 ANIC, CC Economica, 49/1967, pp. 4. See also Sanchez Sibonyi for a similar argument in the Soviet Union.

46 ANIC, CC Economica, 49/1967, pp. 20.

47 Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993 (Los Angeles: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168–9.

48 ANIC, CC Economica, 73/1967, pp. 7.

49 János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140–5, 466.

50 ANIC, CC Economica, 12/1966, pp. 36.

51 ANIC, CC Economica, 26/1967, pp. 72

52 ANIC, CC Economica, 54/1966, pp.22.

53 ANIC, CC Economica, 12/1966, pp. 21.

54 ANIC, CC Economica, 14/1971.

55 ANIC, CC Economica, 12/1966, pp. 10.

56 ANIC, CC Economica, 12/1966, pp. 26.

57 ANIC, CC Economica, 12/1966, pp. 36.

58 ANIC, CC Economica, 26/1967.

59 Jan Vanous, quoted in Noah E. Gotbaum, ‘The Human Factor: Management and Personnel Issues in East-West Joint Ventures,’ in International Joint Ventures: Soviet and Western Perspectives, eds. A.B. Sherr, I.S. Korolev, I.P. Faminsky, T.M. Artemova and E.L. Yakovleva (New York, Westport CT, London: Quorum Books, 1991), 221.

60 Decree 424/1976 for the establishment of the joint venture between Citroen and the Romanian state.

61 According to Verband des Automobilindustrie e. V. (VDA). Frankfurt, cited in Brian Atkinson, Frank Livesey and Bob Milward, Applied Economics (London: McMillan, 1998), 252 (the figures are given in German Marks (DM) in the original text and transformed in 1980 US dollars by the author for comparison).

62 Cucu, Planning Labour; Grama, Laboring Along.

63 Parpală, O. ‘Despre importanţa unei juste corelaţii între venit si productivitatea muncii’ [On the importance of a just correlation between income and productivity], (Probleme economice, 1958): 84.

64 ANIC, CC Economica, 13/1966.

65 ANIC, CC Economica, 4/1967.

66 ANIC, CC Economica, 9/1966, pp. 7.

67 ANIC, CC Economica, 9/1966, pp. 7.

68 As often confirmed, for instance, by foremen from Oltcit, during my ethnographic fieldwork in Craiova, 2019–2020.

69 Per Ronnås, Urbanization in Romania: A Geography of Social and Economic Change Since Independence (Stockholm: Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, 1984), 72.

70 ANIC, CC Economica, 42/1966, pp. 12.

71 ANIC, CC Economica, 42/1966, pp. 8.

72 Murgescu, România şi Europa, 338.

73 Andrew Janos, ‘Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective: The Case of Romania,’ in Social Change in Romania: The Debate on Development in a European Nation, ed. K. Jowitt (Berkeley: International Studies Monograph 36, 1978), 72–117; Murgescu, România şi Europa.

74 Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926, 1965); Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Donald Filtzer, The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization: Selected Essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980); Richard Day, “On ‘Primitive’ and Other Forms of Socialist Accumulation”, Labour/Le Travailleur 10 (1982): 165–74; Cucu, Planning Labour.

75 Mihail Cernea, Sociologia Cooperativei Agricole (Bucureşti: Editura Academiei, 1974), 74–5; Mihail Cernea, ‘Macrosocial Change, Feminization of Agriculture, and Peasant Women’s Threefold Economic Role’, Sociologia Ruralis 18, no. 2–3 (1978): 107–24; David A. Kideckel, ‘The Socialist Transformation of Agriculture in a Romanian Commune, 1945–62’, American Ethnologist 9, no. 2 (1982): 320–40; David Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

76 Ronnås, Urbanization in Romania, 152.

77 György Konrád and Ivan Szelenyi, ‘Social conflicts of underurbanization,’ in Captive Cities: Studies in the Political Economy of Cities and Regions, ed, M. Harloe (London: Wiley, 1977), 157–74; Cucu, Planning Labour.

78 Ronnås, Urbanization in Romania, 153.

79 Law 2/1968 regarding the administrative organization of the territory of the Socialist Republic of Romania, BO no. 17–18, 17 February 1968.

80 Law 58/1974 regarding the systematization of the territory and of urban and rural localities, BO no 135, 1 November 1974.

81 Decree 53/1975.

82 Cucu, Planning Labour, 130–1.

83 ANIC, CC Economica, 29/1966.

84 John Michael Montias, ‘Planning with Material Balances in Soviet-Type Economies’, The American Economic Review 49, no. 5 (1959): 963–85.