ALIENATING LABOR: WORKERS ON THE ROAD FROM SOCIALISM TO CAPITALISM IN EAST GERMANY AND HUNGARY (1968-1989) Anikó Eszter Bartha A DISSERTATION IN HISTORY Presented to the Faculties of the Central European University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2007 CEU eTD Collection Supervisor of Dissertation and Ph. D. Director _______________________ Professor Jacek Kochanowicz Copyright Notice Copyright in the text of this dissertation rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Library of the Central European University. Details may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. CEU eTD Collection 2 Abstract The rapid collapse of the Eastern European socialist regimes rendered the year of 1989 a watershed event. Because of the focus on political upheaval, 1989 was often seen as a “year zero” – an unquestionable turning point. This boundary was first challenged by economic history, which showed that the economic decline of the system started well before its political collapse. This dissertation seeks to explore the social roots of the decline of the socialist regimes through two factory case studies in East Germany and Hungary (Carl Zeiss Jena and Rába MVG in GyĘr) from the late 1960s until 1989. By undertaking a comparative study of the party’s policy towards the working class in these two, partly similar, partly different socialist environments, the dissertation locates common factors in order to answer the question of why there was no independent working-class action against the regimes during the examined period – in complete contrast to the Polish case – but neither did the workers defend the socialist system in 1989. The Honecker regime – just like the Kádár regime in Hungary - propagated a consumption-oriented policy while consequently refusing to widen workers’ participation in the political and economic decision-making process. In this respect both regimes represented variants of a welfare dictatorship. By comparing the East German and Hungarian workers’ experience of socialism, the dissertation also demonstrates that there were common patterns in the development of the relationship between the party and workers in the two countries. It argues that the period of economic reform opened up space for re-negotiating the terms of the agreement CEU eTD Collection between the workers and the party in both countries. Since the party needed the support of the population for the continuation of reform, even in the ideologically more rigid GDR there was an attempt to open dialogue with the working class. Although the hardliners exploited the dissatisfaction of the population in internal party debates about economic 3 reform, the criticism documented in the period went beyond the expectations of the hardliners attacking the contradictions between the “workerist” ideology of the party and the actual powerlessness of the working class in the factories. Even more importantly, the criticism suggests that in the late 1960s the workers in both countries accepted the party as a conversation partner and they believed in its ability to carry through reform. Social dialogue ended in failure in both countries. The party refused to change the power structure; instead, it offered economic concessions to the workers albeit in different forms. Hungary experimented with the expansion of the market, which offered an opportunity for people to earn more money in their “second” jobs after finishing work in the state sector. Honecker, on the contrary, combined central planning with the extension of welfare provision. In accordance with the original emancipatory objectives of the labor movement, policy towards the workers had common features in both countries: amongst these we can count community building (socialist brigades) and educational programs. These attempts, however, ran out of steam by the 1980s, and the “working class” increasingly became, even for the party, an abstract category that only served to legitimize its political rule. For the workers the consumption-oriented policy that was followed in both countries became the basis of legitimacy, and given that it could not offer the kinds of consumption levels that existed in Western capitalist countries, it could only offer poor compensation for the actual lack of control over the means of production and limited political freedom. With the loss of the ideological battle the regime’s support among the working class crumbled, as it was increasingly difficult to sustain the loyalty of the CEU eTD Collection working people. In the 1980s the signs of decline were visible in Hungary and repressed in East Germany. The mounting discontent of the population can be documented through regularly collected information reports. Ideological rigidity was more powerfully enforced in the 4 GDR, where it was the mass flight of the population from the country after the opening of the Hungarian border that eventually demonstrated the unpopularity of the regime. Although both regimes failed, their different political climate was reflected in the memory of the two systems. The ambiguous picture of the Kádár era and the unambiguously negative judgment of the Honecker regime suggest that people regarded limited political freedom as being more important, than material concessions. CEU eTD Collection 5 Acknowledgement I thank my Ph. D. supervisor, Jacek Kochanowicz for his crucial support and patience during the writing of the dissertation. The final version of my work owes a lot to his comments and advises. I thank Stefan Troebst for his encouragement and continuous support for my work. The dissertation also benefited a lot from the inspiring comments of Thomas Welskopp. The fieldwork was completed through grants that I received from the University of Leipzig and the Central European University. I am particularly grateful for the generous support of the ZEIT Foundation and the 4-month Marie Curie-Fellowship in Bielefeld. I am also indebted to the Rézler Gyula Foundation for their scholarship that enabled me to finish the archival research in Germany (Rudolstadt). I also thank Mark Pittaway for proofreading my work and his comments. CEU eTD Collection 6 Preface My interest in labor history was awoken by an interview project that I undertook as part of my M. Phil.-degree in Modern Society and Global Transformations at the Faculty of the Social and Political Sciences of the University of Cambridge in the academic year of 2001/2002. My thesis studied how the workers of the Hungarian Rába factory experienced postsocialist change thirteen years after the change of regime and how they saw the two systems in which they had lived. The scale of change was apparently radical: the personnel of the factory were reduced to one-quarter of the original number. The workers did not only find themselves in an increasingly difficult financial situation but they also had to learn to live with the constant fear of unemployment, and to accept the loss of prestige of working in a “model” factory. These vividly presented “narratives of decline” did not, however, challenge the capitalist order as such. The contradiction between experience and expectation was resolved with the argument that something went wrong with the implementation of capitalism leading to the search for “enemies” and the support of the ideology of the strong state. These results challenged the original hypothesis of the project that the “losers” of the change of regime would be strongly critical of the new system and they would, therefore, support a socialist alternative. Although working-class memory of Hungary’s Kádár regime showed a mixed picture, no one would really identify himself or herself with “actually existing” socialism; neither would they regard it as their system. The construction CEU eTD Collection of memory is, of course, a social process, and one cannot re-construct the functioning – let alone the everydays – of late socialism on the basis of interviews alone. These narratives, did, however, increase my interest in a subject that was less popular at the time I started my research than it is now. Under socialism, any real research on workers was considered to be politically undesirable because it could have been used as a criticism of the socialist 7 system. After the collapse of the Eastern European communist regimes, workers were often uncritically associated with the former, discredited system. This intellectual climate was not very favorable for the rediscovery of the working class. My first research question was borrowed from Michael Burawoy, who conducted fieldwork in Hungarian factories in the mid-1980s. Burawoy originally came to Hungary to test his general theory of the development of factory regimes from bureauractic to hegemonic despotism for the socialist countries as well. During his fieldwork he found that his fellow workers refused to believe that they were building socialism and they effectively distanced themselves from the ruling regime. While with the renouncement of the Soviet control of Eastern Europe it became manifest that the regimes had no popular support, Burawoy wanted to know why the workers refused to support a socialist alternative. In a modified form, it can be also asked why there was no independent working-class action after the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. Both questions implied that workers’ alienation from the socialist system was a crucial factor in their decline. The selection of the two countries was influenced by my M. A.-thesis at the Central European University, which discussed world-systems theory and its explanatory power in the context of Eastern European history. Although both Hungary and the GDR belonged to the socialist bloc, there were important historical differences between the two countries: Germany was a leading industrial nation with a strong working-class movement, whereas Hungary was part of the Eastern European semi-periphery.