Going West: Socialist flexibility in the long 1970s

IF 1.7 1区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY
Alina-Sandra Cucu
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

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.
走向西部:漫长的20世纪70年代社会主义的灵活性
本文分析了罗马尼亚社会主义后期经济词汇、实践和制度的一些转变,这些转变伴随着高附加值和技术驱动的工业化。报告调查了1960 - 70年代该国商品生产日益融入世界市场所带来的挑战,并评估其经济主管人员为应对这些挑战而采取的措施:生产重组;规划机制的重构;以及保持廉价劳动力的策略。这篇文章表明,铁幕背后的规划者与他们的西方同行面临着类似的问题。它表明,社会主义经济管理者的解决方案不仅反映、模仿和翻译了西方的管理意识形态和实践,而且代表了对世界市场挑战的创造性的当地反应。我认为这些解决方案构成了一种成熟的“社会主义灵活性”。分析这些灵活的解决方案如何与资本主义核心的新自由主义放松管制并举,有助于我们质疑中央计划经济和市场经济之间的分析分离,以及1989年作为历史断裂的强大叙事。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.30
自引率
5.30%
发文量
28
期刊介绍: Journal of Global History addresses the main problems of global change over time, together with the diverse histories of globalization. It also examines counter-currents to globalization, including those that have structured other spatial units. The journal seeks to transcend the dichotomy between "the West and the rest", straddle traditional regional boundaries, relate material to cultural and political history, and overcome thematic fragmentation in historiography. The journal also acts as a forum for interdisciplinary conversations across a wide variety of social and natural sciences. Published for London School of Economics and Political Science
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