Since the collapse of the communist system in eastern Europe, the historiographies of the different countries of the former Soviet bloc have taken different paths.Footnote 1 Two things appeared initially at least to speak for a common point of departure: the significant change of personnel and the contraints of the institutional bases of historical research, on the one hand, and the “abolition” of Marxist-Leninist historiography, on the other.Footnote 2 However, cultural and political traditions and the “embedding” of historical research in the respective societies prior to 1989 in terms of the manoeuvring room that researchers had created for themselves vis-à-vis state socialism – all of this accounted for a broad spectrum of differences. These differences are also evident in regard to the question of how the historiographies of the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Federal Republic of Germany have contributed after 1989 to working-class history under communist rule.
Working-class history is understood in this article as the social history of workers.Footnote 3 Were the developments in historiography in eastern Europe after 1989 able to connect to social-historical or sociological investigations prior to 1989? The answer to this question alone provides a colourful picture.
While it has been pointed out for Romania, for instance, that the sum of “new scholarship on the Romanian working class” is thin “because sociology was banned in the 1980s as a separate discipline”,Footnote 4 sociology and social history in Poland and in Hungary were established at a comparatively high level long before 1989. The most recent Polish studies on everyday life in industrial plants during the communist era refer as a matter of course to sociological and social-historical works from the 1960s.Footnote 5 Czech and Slovak historians, in contrast, agree that social history, especially the social history of workers prior to 1989, did not produce anything they could draw upon.Footnote 6 The situation is also different for the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although unbiased West German voices affirmed that historical research in the GDR did include productive social-historical approaches prior to 1989,Footnote 7 these remained relevant in the appropriation process of East German historiography by West German historiography only to the extent that isolated GDR researchers were exempted from the demonstration of West German “cultural sovereignty”.Footnote 8
Figure 1 Workers from the Cumon factories in Bratislava after the nationalization of industry in October 1945. The Slovak text on the right reads: “Victory of the People’s Will!”. Photograph: Private collection of the author.
The political implications of historical analyses of communist systems are particularly evident in the case of the GDR. After 1989, the assumption of the GDR’s “illegal character” initially unleashed an avalanche of research on the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and the entire repressive apparatus of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [Socialist Unity Party of Germany]) dictatorship, which employed a rigid conception of totalitarianism. Only when a certain disillusionment emerged in the course of such investigations did the emphasis shift slightly in favour of social-historical approaches, which, however, had a bad reputation from the very start as “leftist” trivialization of the SED state,Footnote 9 and which still continue overall to represent a “minority phenomenon”. In the meantime, calm has largely returned to the front between these two research trends, and both conceptions are currently practised in peaceful coexistence.Footnote 10
The Czech And Slovak Republics
After 1989 working-class history stood at the very bottom of the priority list of Czech and Slovak researchers, and even today its position has improved only marginally. Attempts to approach social history have occurred on different levels. At times studies conceived as general or political history have been “socially enriched”.Footnote 11 Frequently spectacular events or ruptures in the development of the communist system have been investigated in terms of social background or social consequences – for instance, the currency reform of 1953.Footnote 12 A third variant concentrates on long-term changes in the social macrostructure of the entire society; the guiding issues here are the social and economic consequences of the Sovietization of the country following the communist assumption of power in February 1948.Footnote 13 Fourth, a path to social history is also sought through an analysis of social policy and the social system.Footnote 14 Closely related to this are investigations of industrial relations issues and thereby also trade unions.Footnote 15
Figure 2 May Day poster of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in 1946. The Czech text reads: “Work, Strength, Peace for the Republic, Happiness, Well-Being for the People. The Whole Nation with the Communists!”. Design: Zdeněk Rossmann, 1946. Private collection of the author.
Whereas these kinds of works usually touch on the self-conception of social groups only through the question of whether the wage, consumption, and general social policies of the state accorded with the needs of these groups, sociological investigations of the social conditions of the Czechoslovakian population have developed a more differentiated set of methodological tools.Footnote 16 Although these studies should by and large be classified as transformation research, they frequently offer significant information about all social groups, including the workforce, for the final decade of the communist era.Footnote 17 Investigations focusing exclusively on the social conditions of workers continue to be rare.Footnote 18
The first studies on the cultural-political and political-ideological orchestration of the working class have been published,Footnote 19 as have studies on the workplace clubs that were supposed to integrate the recreational activities of industrial workers with a “work culture” tailored to increased production.Footnote 20
Investigations of the repressive structures of the communist system focusing on all social groups are also informative for the issue at hand. These include studies on labour law in the early 1950s,Footnote 21 penal practices of the regional courts,Footnote 22 and compulsory labour camps.Footnote 23 Studies of university history shed light on the inclusion of the working class in higher education;Footnote 24 and editions of primary-source texts on the history of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party (KSČ) can also be fruitful for working-class history.Footnote 25 The development of KSČ membership has been thoroughly investigated and provides an exact picture of the changing and, after 1948, dramatically shrinking importance of workers within the party.Footnote 26
When workers are the explicit focus of an investigation, entirely different conceptions of working class history are employed, as is illustrated by studies on recalcitrant behaviour, protest, and worker deviance. On the one hand, these studies follow the aforementioned pattern of elucidating the social dimensions of various “great events and major figures”, and thus fit into into the predominant trends in political history. This is true, for instance, for the investigation and documentation of the industrial unrest in Brno 1951,Footnote 27 the depiction of the workers’ strike in early June 1953 immediately after the currency reform,Footnote 28 and a study on worker behaviour in 1968.Footnote 29 On the other hand, these kinds of events are also taken as an opportunity to analyse from a long-term perspective protest behaviour with regard to the establishment of and the resistance to power claims by the party and state leadership within factories and firms.
This includes approaches to strike research,Footnote 30 and studies on the erosion and decline of industrial socialist work initiatives on the basis of counter-strategies by workers in the first two decades after 1948.Footnote 31 These investigations broach the question of the real range of power that the communist dictatorship possessed, an issue that is explicitly addressed in analyses of the informal power position of workers in firms as the basis of protest and reproducible opposition.Footnote 32
Massive objections have recently been raised to the rigid conception – predominant in contemporary Czech and Slovak research – of the communist system as an “iron cage of obedience”.Footnote 33 This criticism is aimed at a monistic notion of power that refuses to acknowledge the results of social-historical research, which demonstrate the necessity of conceiving power relationally. According to this critique, the dividing line between “regime” and “society” introduced in the Czech totalitarian paradigm is pure mystification because the integration of the population under the communist dictatorship was carried out on the basis of pre-political dispositions. One consequence of this empirically dubious dichotomy between “regime” and “society” is the “exoticization” of the communist system.
The accusation of “exoticizing” the era of real socialism can be well demonstrated using precisely the example of working-class history: although research on past epochs has produced studies on working-class history that satisfy the demands of modern social history,Footnote 34 a kind of “special methodology” has essentially been claimed for the communist period. This claim stands and falls with the thesis – which has yet to be verified in broad realms – of the communist party’s ubiquitous power over the entire society.Footnote 35 This thesis is treated even more dogmatically in Slovak historiography than in Czech historiographyFootnote 36 – with the results anticipated by the critiqueFootnote 37 that Slovak historians exhibit almost no interest in the communist era.Footnote 38
In the meantime, the erosion of the hardcore version of the totalitarian paradigm has also become evident.Footnote 39 This can be seen, for instance, in reviews of relevant publications, which react with surprise that, in this genre, the question of grounding the communist system in the social lifeworld of the population has not been raised at all and that a view “from below” is completely lacking.Footnote 40 The “front change” by former protagonists of this genreFootnote 41 also suggests an imminent change of course in research on historical communism. This may also be true of the tendency in the past to tie laurel wreaths to intellectual opposition to communist rule and simultaneously furrow one’s brow at certain forms of worker resistance (absence, go-slow protests, worker morale, etc.).Footnote 42
Figure 3 May Day demonstration in Prague in 1965. In the front row are members of the Czechoslovak Youth Union. Photograph: Private collection of the author.
The crucial issue here, however, is that this dogmatic conception of totalitarianism stands on empirically shaky ground. This is true, for instance, for examinations of the year 1968, whose brilliance lives from a kind of argumentum e contrario: the darker the “totalitarian night” of the 1950s, the brighter the Prague Spring shines. The emergence of the autonomous interests of workers in 1968 – at odds with the reform course – with their critique of the party’s “managerial socialism”,Footnote 43 as well as everyday life in the province during the Prague Spring,Footnote 44 demonstrate that claims about the departure of the entire Czechoslovakian society to “new shores”, repeatedly emphasized and contrasted to the 1950s, cannot hold up to more rigorous examination.
Polish Republic
Traditional social-historical preferences, an open intellectual climate for the real problems of real workers, and the fact that demonstrations by workers repeatedly shook the communist system in Poland to its foundations before Solidarność induced its collapse make Polish historians’ interest in working-class history after 1989 understandable at first glance.Footnote 45
In fact the history of political opposition to real socialism in Poland has also been written as working-class history marked by strikes,Footnote 46 mass protests,Footnote 47 street battles,Footnote 48 and widespread insurgency movements.Footnote 49 The parts of the workforce from which the strikers came have been elucidated for the entire duration of the People’s Republic of Poland. The social structures of the working masses that flowed into Solidarność in the early 1980s have also been well researched.Footnote 50 Polish historians do admit that a certain “heroization” of the working class cannot always be avoided,Footnote 51 but they have attempted to work against this in various ways.
For Polish historians, it remains an open question whether the frequent worker unrest in Poland was pivotal to the changes in the political system. Did this unrest aim at a different form of the distribution of goods or at changing the principles of the political order? After 1989 – in the transition to the market economy and to democracy – this question spurred a debate, in which many participants judged the democratic potential of the working class sceptically.Footnote 52 The fact that workers here have been ascribed little affinity to pluralist valuesFootnote 53 also connects to sociological research prior to 1989.Footnote 54
That the less flattering modes of worker behaviour have also been investigated suggests this is a realistic perception of the workforce. This includes, for example, the role of a significant portion of the working class in the March events of 1968, when workers allowed themselves to be drawn into the anti-Semitic smear campaign incited by the Polish United Workers’ Party.Footnote 55
Methodologically, Polish historians have avoided the socio-political “particularizing” of the working class through the concept of “social resistance”,Footnote 56 a move that has also been supported institutionally by the activities of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institut for National Thought) and the KARTA Centre.Footnote 57 This concept re-enacts the approach of “social self-organization”, through which the democratic opposition in Poland began in the mid-1970s to address society itself rather than the state as its primary interlocutor. These ideas gave rise in 1976 to the Komitet Obrony Robotników (Committee for the Defence of Workers),Footnote 58 whose significance as “a civic movement of moral resistance”Footnote 59 lay in the fact that extremely diverse social groups accepted its programme and that it enabled a rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the opposition. This concrete socio-political generalization of dissent, protest, and resistance, which the mass movement Solidarność was able to utilize at the beginning of the 1980s, also made possible numerous publications that closely tied working-class history and social history – whether from the standpoint of the working class’s relations to the changing power elites,Footnote 60 the position of workers during critical upheavals,Footnote 61 or workers’ state of consciousness in relation to other social groups.Footnote 62
Evidently this is one way to get away from the figures of thought in Cold War literature, in which every form of protest in real socialism was elevated to fundamental opposition to the communist system. Especially sociological investigations have worked against this kind of interpretation by demonstrating under which socio-structural conditions actions representative of broad strata were possible under communist rule.Footnote 63 Approaches to comparative protest research for eastern central Europe also affirm methodological efforts to socially “fortify” the notion of resistance.Footnote 64
This concept shifts attention to group-specific distinctions and simultaneously to the question of adaptation to existing circumstances,Footnote 65 an issue that investigations of workplace history have also pushed into the foreground: focusing on the control of firms by the party and by labour unions and on the activities of security forces helps to illuminate adaptations made in everyday life.
Investigations of workplace history with a primary interest in the everyday life of workersFootnote 66 – including examinations of the subcultural milieu, especially of young workers in model socialist cities such as Nowa HutaFootnote 67 – attained a level early onFootnote 68 that suggested comparisons with other socialist countries.Footnote 69
Drawing upon research on working-class milieu and traditions in Poland,Footnote 70 investigations have also depicted the forms of surveillance of these milieus.Footnote 71 Studies on the control of firms and factories through workplace committees of the party and trade unions also exist.Footnote 72 Numerous investigations have examined the oppositional strategies of workers that aimed at avoiding surveillance and disciplinary action.Footnote 73 Work by women in industrial plants has also been analysed within the scope of research on women’s occupational labour.Footnote 74 Whereas prior to 1989 worker discipline and productivity were usually treated critically,Footnote 75 the work ethos now receives its due,Footnote 76 without neglecting the phenomenon of “amoral familiarism,” that is, those corrupt and illegal practices in everyday life (not only that of workers), which reflect the fact that moral and legal criteria lose their validity outside of “local” environs.Footnote 77 Finally, studies on the lifestyles of workers are also part of the broad spectrum of issues concerning working-class history.Footnote 78
Although conceptual precautions have, as we have seen, been taken to prevent working-class history from drifting off to a special status, there continue to be critical voices as well: advocates of the ethos of martyrdom and resistance inherited from of the resistance of World War II still favour both oppositional actions and spectacular revolts and conceal conformist attitudes by workers.Footnote 79 They do not regard references to the unresponsiveness of workers to communist ideology,Footnote 80 and to the extensive failure of totalitarianism in PolandFootnote 81 as helpful. Instead they argue, supported by grassroots sources,Footnote 82 that workers thoroughly internalized the communist promesse du bonheur of a “better life”, but that they continued to experience “relative discrimination” under communist rule. The growing discrepancy between expectations and reality, they insist, has been crucial in workers repeatedly taking their affairs into their own hands.Footnote 83
Hungarian Republic
A central focus of working-class history in Hungary after 1989 has undoubtedly been the Stalinist period from 1948–1956. One indication of a systematic interest in this phase is that primary-source editions on working-class history under communist rule began with this period.Footnote 84 For the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest, the years 1948–1956, as the prehistory of the popular uprising in the fall of 1956, stand at the centre of its research interests, although these are oriented around political history. The most important publications of the institute include the documentation of the Revolution of 1956.Footnote 85 Outside the institute, the history of the workers’ councils in the uprising of 1956 was quickly updated after 1989.Footnote 86
Research on Stalinism, however, has not been conceived in such a way that the uprising of 1956 serves as its vanishing point. Studies on social change in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century disqualify the assumption that a surfeit of social problems existed in the revolutionary year of 1956.Footnote 87 Investigations of Hungary’s cultural development in the second half of the twentieth century that include the cultural situation of workers do not point to any profound ruptures in 1956.Footnote 88 In addition, studies assessing the human and social costs that Stalinist industrialization demanded of Hungarian workers have resisted the temptation of depicting worker’s reactions to terror, violence, and impoverishment as a cumulative process that reached its climax in 1956.Footnote 89 These studies are driven to large degree by reflections on how working-class history can be combined with anthropological research,Footnote 90 and they are more interested in the diversity of the social causes of worker protest than in the conditions under which such protest was manifested politically.Footnote 91 Research on the working-class milieu – the milieu of the “new working class” that the party attempted to recruit from its own supporters is also considered hereFootnote 92 – suggest that the social “penetration depth” of the peripetia of political developments was minor. Connecting to older studies of local history,Footnote 93 scholars have outlined the working-class milieu for a particular city district or city. Examples of this are investigations of the Budapest working-class district of ÚjpestFootnote 94 and of everyday life in the model socialist city of Sztálinváros.Footnote 95
Studies on the history of trade unions have also concentrated on the terrorist phase of the party dictatorship (1948–1956),Footnote 96 and have shown that the founding of communist trade unions was carried out over the heads of a disempowered workforce, which under the Horthy dictatorship and Nazi occupation had lost its connection to trade unions committed solely to the ideology and practices of social peace.Footnote 97 Historians regard this stripping of workers’ organizational ties in society along with the ensuing social and moral consequences as an essential preliminary stage, if not the most important precondition, for the far-reaching adaptation of workers to the authoritarian-repressive structures of the early phase of the socialist transformation.Footnote 98
This is the point of departure for a series of investigations with two explicit objectives. First, they demonstrate that socialist industrialization (which might have been especially rigid in Hungary) evoked a counter-movement by workers in factories, through which they were able to mitigate the dictate of ever increasing planning goals by means of informal agreements with workplace and local power elites, and thereby harmonized these goals with their own traditional “production culture”. Second, this informal power position of workers has served as the starting point for the social history of a “production regime” generated “from below”, which is distinguished from standard portrayals of the history of economics and planning under state socialism as the history of its institutional framework.
In addition to a brief outline of this research programme, which emphasizes the limits of state control over the production process,Footnote 99 this approach has also been applied to two different complexes during the early phase of the socialist transformation: the attempts by workers to informally regulate work-time and wages;Footnote 100 and the bargaining strategies of the skilled workers who sought to maintain or reintroduce within the workforce hierarchies tied to traditional working-class culture, in which a generational conflict between older and younger skilled labourers was also evident.Footnote 101 This approach has proved equally productive when applied to the economic reforms under Kádár in 1968,Footnote 102 which did contribute to some degree to the political pacification of the workforce, but were also eroded over the long-term through the informal “production regime”.Footnote 103 The report by a “key worker” at the Red Star tractor factory in Budapest suggests that the concept outlined above of the informal adaptation of the planning system to social relations at the workplace does in fact do justice to Hungarian reality.Footnote 104
Like their Polish counterparts, Hungarian researchers have also examined the contemporary question of how four decades of communist rule effected the workforce, in other words: how the resource “labour” available for the Hungarian path to capitalism was procured. This includes analyses of the labor marketFootnote 105 and investigations of worker behaviour in the changing social and workplace constellations.Footnote 106
In addition to the emphasis on the Stalinist dictatorship, long-term investigations of the social situation of the workforce after 1956 also point to the emergence of a second focus in Hungarian research on communism. As in Poland, these investigations presuppose, on the one hand, a conflict between ideological representations of the working class and the real experiences of workers under communist rule; at the same time, these investigations also elucidate how the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party dealt with this contradiction, which it found worrisome at times.Footnote 107 On the other hand, changes in “working-class life” in Hungary have also been analysed from a long-term perspective, a research orientation strongly influenced by the aforementioned anthropological interest and that connects the issue of “working-class life” beyond material indicators of living standards to psychic-mental structures, ties to traditional values, private and public modes of social behaviour, and cultural orientations.Footnote 108 Related to this are also studies on the self-conception of female factory workers.Footnote 109
Republic Of Romania
“New scholarship on the Romanian working class is almost non-existent”, someone who ought to know wrote in the spring of 2009.Footnote 110 The only thing that should be added here is that the methodological-conceptual approach to Romanian working-class history in real socialism is more research-intensive in many respects than, for instance, in Poland or Hungary; nevertheless, the few existing investigations of working-class history here are promising.
As a major social group, the Romanian workforce is a product of the country’s socialist industrialization. Around 1930 industrial workers comprised approximately 8 per cent of the entire population. For this reason, an interpretive model that is widely used for obvious reasons by Czech, Polish, and Hungarian scholars cannot be applied to the history of the Romanian working class: the examination of the strategies used in conflicts between working-class traditions and the demands of the new reality under the communist dictatorship. The history of Romania’s social democracy rewritten after 1989 makes clear that Romanian workers had no recourse to political traditions:Footnote 111 while the study does allude to connections between the party and the workforce, it cannot get around the fact that the social basis of Romanian social democracy during the interbellum period was shaped above all by low-level white-collar employees.Footnote 112 In fact only after World War II was there a larger influx of workers into the party as a result of the collapse of the old party system.Footnote 113
For this reason, far more than elsewhere, Romanian workers were confronted with the necessity of learning processes. The fact that between 1950 and 1989 there were only thirty-six known cases of worker strikes, demonstrations, and revolts in Romania – limited almost every time to a single factoryFootnote 114 – should thus be attributed not only to the (undisputed) brutality of the Ceauşescu regime. Even where workers could draw upon a long tradition of collective action – for example, in Czechoslovakia – it still took some time before they were able to identify which means should be used in confronting the state and the party in order to attain their demands.Footnote 115 Comparisons with other countries could in fact help avoid rashly labelling Romania a “special case”.
The self-perception of Romanian workers does not seem to have deviated significantly from the characteristics observed everywhere in real socialism.Footnote 116 Similarities to other countries are evident in conflict behaviour, for miners, for instance, who in both Romania and Czechoslovakia retained paternalistic patterns of interaction in the sense that in conflicts they insisted on face-to-face communication with the most senior political representatives and rejected subordinate officials as negotiating partners.Footnote 117 Furthermore, even with the limited strike sample for Romania, a long-term change is evident: between the two major strikes that took place in socialist Romania – the miners’ strike in the Jiu Valley in August 1977 and the Braşov revolt at the Steagul Roşu tractor factory in November 1987 – a transition occurred from social demands to political protest against the communist system and explicitly against Ceauşescu.Footnote 118
Romanian researchers have focused on the phenomenon of the peasant-worker, which Romania shared with Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, although the numerical size of this group varied in the different countries. A quick glance at the changing social behaviour of this group from country to country indicates that this part of the workforce, which oscillated between factory work and sideline agricultural labour, deserves closer investigation.Footnote 119 For Czechoslovakia – where in the mid-1950s peasant-workers comprised around one-third of all working class households – scholars have argued that the kovorolníci (iron peasants) represented a kind of “rest mass” of the industrial workforce on the basis of their social distance to the industrial milieu;Footnote 120 in Romania, in contrast, where peasant workers made up 30 to 50 per cent of the workforce, they evidently constituted a ferment of protest and unrest. When the protest broke out in Timişoara on 16 December 1989, which led to the collapse of the Ceauşescu regime a few days later, Moldavian peasant-workers stood in the front lines of the rebelling crowd.Footnote 121
The investigation of working-class history in Romania between 1948 and 1989 has drawn productively in several ways from transformation research.Footnote 122 This history will gain clearer contours when it can be evaluated before the background of more precise knowledge about other social groups.Footnote 123 The analysis of these groups has been overshadowed for the time being by the focus on the terror, control, and repressive apparatuses of the party dictatorship.Footnote 124 This has sparked a debate about the character of the Ceauşescu era, in which the focus has shifted more to issues of the regime’s social resonance than its repressive apparatuses.Footnote 125
Republic Of Bulgaria
According to a study from 2005, the issue of “workers in state socialism” has “not yet been discovered” as a subject of contemporary historical research in post-1989 Bulgaria.Footnote 126 Scholars have, however, begun to approach the issue from several directions. Social-historical studies focusing on the time period from the 1960s to the mid-1990s and incorporating the most important social development trends even outside Bulgaria have described the workforce as an essentially stabilizing element of Bulgarian state socialism.Footnote 127 In doing so, they can point to the fact that no noteworthy strikes or other form of worker protest were documented in Bulgaria after 1956 until the collapse of real socialism in the country in 1989.Footnote 128
According to political-historical accounts, the Bulgarian Communist Party could especially count on workers when the wage system produced egalitarian structures and the economic system maintained orthodox notions of order. Formulated slightly differently, workers stigmatized as socially unjust and – in agreement with intra-party oppositional and leftist dissident groups – as a “betrayal of socialism” distinctions in performance and wages as well as the transition to a decentralized and liberalized economic order, as occured within the scope of economic reforms in the 1960s.Footnote 129 Transformation research, which analyses Bulgaria’s transition to capitalism, has proved fruitful for information about the development of workers’ standards of living since the 1960s.Footnote 130 The reconstruction of trade-union historyFootnote 131 has also proceeded rapidly because in the 1980s the research institute of the Bulgarian trade-union federation conducted a series of nationwide sociological investigations into the situation of workers, which have provided important insights into their everyday life.Footnote 132
Another group of investigations influenced by ethnology and cultural history has focused on Bulgarian society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These investigations are organized primarily around the issue of the “lifeworld”,Footnote 133 and from this perspective they contribute significantly to our knowledge of the modes of living and the self-conception of Bulgarian workers under state socialism. Noteworthy in this context are articles about Bulgarian workers’ perceptions of their own living conditions (on the basis of surveys conducted by the aforementioned trade-union research institute),Footnote 134 about the social situation in youth construction brigades,Footnote 135 about mental and subcultural structures of everyday work life,Footnote 136 and about workplace networks and clientelism, a subject that has also been investigated in detail for Poland and Czechoslovakia.Footnote 137
Like Romania, the Bulgarian example also suggests the desirability of a comparative investigation of the “peasant-worker” problematic. In the 1960s, around 40 per cent of the Bulgarian workforce was recruited from people living in rural conditions. Research by Bulgarian ethnologists has shown that the mass of peasant-workers largely retained their peasant lifestyle and that they were the actual social carriers of egalitarian ideas with regard to wage policy.Footnote 138 Research in other countries has presumed, in contrast, that the preference for an egalitarian wage policy is more typical of unskilled labourers, the group usually favoured by communist parties, which cannot be conflated with peasant-workers.Footnote 139
Federal Republic Of Germany
In investigating the history of the GDR, researchers addressed a broad array of social-historical issues early on.Footnote 140 It may appear problematic to separate working-class history from these investigations, especially since the most fruitful social-historical research strategies focus methodologically and conceptually on overarching social developments.Footnote 141 On the other hand, the “workplace” as a system has assumed a central position in those studies that, in examining the causes of the GDR’s collapse, have concentrated on the tendeny to informal “socialization of the state”.Footnote 142 Investigations of everyday workplace life in the GDR indicate that places of work were embedded in a network of secondary power and exchange relations beneath the level of formal planning decisions and thus can be understood as the “sediment” from the informal erosion of state structures.Footnote 143
After the information veil surrounding the GDR was lifted with German reunification, concepts were developed to compare working-class history in the GDR with that in the Federal Republic, especially with regard to traditions of working-class milieu.Footnote 144 In addition to the possibility of using now accessible archival sources, studies of oral history also focused on East German working-class milieu.Footnote 145 The question of continuities and ruptures in the social development of the GDR – which is part of the search for the causes of the collapse of the second German state – has proved productive in discussions of working-class milieu.Footnote 146
Scholars of workplace history have also benefited from the altered archival situation, as they can now examine how the GDR dealt with the industrial heritage of the Third Reich and how this heritage effected workers’ modes of behaviour.Footnote 147
This new beginning, however, was characterized above all by a fundamental critique of “older” working class historiography and its emphasis on the “market situation” of workers and the resulting socio-structural implications, the living conditions, and the milieu of workers.Footnote 148 More recent historiography has emphasized, in contrast, a “micro-political” approach, that is, the role of workers as workplace actors who possess manoeuvring room in a complex production and social milieu beyond the formal order of the workplace; it has also emphasized, within the scope of the “turn to cultural history”, the significance of ties beyond the “class model”, for example, the significance of gender, generation, and ethnic affiliation.Footnote 149 These debates have resulted in publications on working-class history of the GDR that expand the analytic frame of working-class history. One such publication is the anthology on the central German chemical industry and its workers in the twentieth century.Footnote 150
Behind these debates are diametrically opposed positions, which necessarily emerged in the course of analysing the working-class history of the GDR on the basis of concepts, questions, and interpretive patterns drawn from West German industrial society. It is difficult, the one side has argued, to transfer concepts such as “class”, “stratum”, and “social protest” from market-oriented, competitive societies to the state socialist, planned-economic society of the GDR.Footnote 151 The other side counters, on the basis, for instance, of the category of “social protest”, with the call to level radically distinctions between “capitalism” and “socialism” in favour of overarching historical research on protest and crowd history.Footnote 152 Initial studies using this latter conception of social protests have already been published.Footnote 153
The example of the worker uprising of 17 June 1953, however, makes clear that using the concepts of a capitalist-critical crowd history to interpret central and politically charged protests cannot hope for broader resonance at this time. Studies of the uprising of 17 June 1953 have been constructed primarily as a history of political events; without empirical comparison to other revolts, they cannot do justice to the claim that this uprising was part of the series of major revolts in German and European history – as was evident everywhere, for example, on the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising.Footnote 154
Incidentally, researchers of the conflict behaviour of workers in the GDR have been unimpressed by the burdens of political tribute with regard to 17 June. Their central argument here has been that workers did not regard massive confrontations with the party and state apparatus as advisable after 1953. The SED’s strategy of social pacification, encircling firms and factories with the Stasi apparatus over the course of the 1960s, the activities of the conflict commissions formed in 1953, and the tacit truce between state and workforce on the issues of wages and norms ultimately resulted in the state itself setting the rules for workplace conflict behaviour after the traumatic experience of 1953.Footnote 155 Research on the group and conflict behaviour of women,Footnote 156 and long-term studies of the mental structures and the social modes of behaviour of the industrial workforceFootnote 157 (in addition to milieu studies), as well as studies on the self-conception of workers from a generational-historical perspectiveFootnote 158 have supplemented and differentiated this model.
Research on industrial work behaviourFootnote 159 and work organizationFootnote 160 have illuminated primarily the areas of friction between the planning system and the “production culture” of workers based on life-world value orientations. These investigations are less informative about manifest conflicts than about the structural abrasion of the SED’s industrial policies. In addition to the role of plant management in work conflicts,Footnote 161 conflict (and cooperation) between the SED factory groups and workplace personnel have also been investigated for the Soviet occupation zone,Footnote 162, three major industrial firms from 1959 to 1965,Footnote 163 and the state of Brandenburg from 1945 to 1952.Footnote 164 Two publications stand out on research about trade-union and worker relations, one that focuses on the “founding years” of GDR trade unions,Footnote 165 the other on the activities of union workplace representatives from the Free German Trade Union Federation (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund).Footnote 166 Using a broad base of sources, the cultural work of trade unions at the workplaceFootnote 167 has also been analysed as one dimension of the research field “workforce and culture”.Footnote 168
Social-historical and social-political longitudinal studies addressing comprehensive issues have been helpful in better localizing the workforce within GDR society.Footnote 169 An introduction to the most recent research on the subject is provided by an investigation that ties together the broad spectrum of approaches to working-class history in the GDR according to central issues.Footnote 170 Finally, there have also been studies that take relations in the GDR as a starting point and outline a comparative working-class history in eastern Europe – in full awareness of the variations in current research within the different countries. These studies either concentrate on variants of working-class milieu and investigate how the imperatives of the state-socialist system were appropriated within these milieus,Footnote 171 or they delineate different paths of state-socialist development tied to the long-term social development trends of the workforce and of society overall.Footnote 172 The two approaches elucidate “types of decline” for state socialism, each of which tells us something about the forms of transition to post-communist relations.
Summarizing Comments
Investigating “workers in state socialism” may appear today merely to be retrospection on an obsolete social formation from the history of the twentieth century, “without recognizable contemporary relevance”.Footnote 173 This all the more so when the industrial working class as a type, in the traditional configuration that constituted the basis for communist parties in both ideological and practical-political terms, is a historically outdated phenomenon. There is thus a certain consistency in the fact that in discussions about the causes of the collapse of state socialism – insofar as these address the role of workers – the predominiant view is that the workforce produced no structural elements that could be used after the collapse of real socialism for the transformation to a market society.
For instance, the concept of communist neo-traditionalism, which focuses on the networks, patron–client relations, and personally and instrumentally based subsystems in state socialist societies,Footnote 174 moves these informal relations into the proximity of corruption and criminality,Footnote 175 and thereby characterizes the informal power positions of workers in factories and firms in all state socialist countries as a structural attribute incapable of contributing in any productive way to the establishment of a modern social order. Other authors, in contrast, see these networks as a modern socialization form and an important resource in the transition to market society.Footnote 176 It is likely, however, that modernization theory will discover in the state socialist workforce few, if any, structural elements that could be used for the transformation to a market-based order.Footnote 177 This evaluation appears all the more plausible in light of observations here and there of the retreat of the workforce to its old “strongholds”, for example, in the Soviet Union – comparative studies for the countries of eastern-central and south-eastern Europe are lacking – where, after the establishment of the market, the workforce began to seal itself off in its traditional social-moral and socio-cultural values and workplace communicative networks.Footnote 178
If we take up the recommendation made most recently in the debate about new conceptualizations of working-class history and advocate (re-)writing the history of the working class from the perspective of its contributions to civil society,Footnote 179 a different picture emerges, one that offers less occasion for scepticism. Two arguments are immediately evident. First, resistance, dissent, demonstrations, and revolts by workers – not only in Poland, but also in other countries – have consciously sought out the public sphere, thereby strengthening the autonomous public spheres that crystallized around non-state opinion-forming associations (civil initiatives, cultural associations, debate clubs, etc.).Footnote 180 Second, the massive resistance of workers to socialist labour initiatives (peak load and Stakhanov work, socialist competition) had less to do with the refusal to work than with a rebellion against the work-world impinging on the life-world. In order to increase production, teachers were instructed to call upon pupils to encourage their fathers to greater dedication in socialist competitions.Footnote 181
It is an irony of history that this separation of life-world and work-world has today once again become topical. While scholars of communism begin to agree that one of the most important reasons for the collapse of state socialism was inadequate functional differentiation (and this includes the differentiation of work-world and life-world in the sense of productive and reproductive spheres),Footnote 182 behind their backs post-Fordism abolishes this same differentiation. In the production model of global turbo-capitalism, the dissolution of the boundaries between the work-world and the life-world is continued, with the life-world increasingly being claimed as a resource for the work-world.Footnote 183 Theorists of civil society discuss this development as the “colonizing encroachments of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld”.Footnote 184
