CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Bartha, Aniko Eszter |
|---|---|
| Title | Alienating Labor: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary (1968-1989) |
| Summary | 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 Győr) from the late 1960s until 1989. It argues that the period of economic reform opened up space for re-negotiating the terms of the agreement between the workers and the party in both countries. Social dialogue, however, 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. 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 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 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. |
| Supervisor | Kochanowicz, Jacek |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/hphbaa01.pdf |
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