CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Poenaru, Florin Andrei |
|---|---|
| Title | Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggle in Post-Communist Romania |
| Summary | This is a dialectical and anthropological exploration of Romanian anti-communism. On the one hand it traces its hegemonic domination in relation to the politics of writing history and memory practices after communism, and on the other hand it points out how struggles against the hegemony of anti-communism enabled the emergence of critical and leftist politics for the present in order to open up future possibilities. By employing the category of class and by using the tools of historical anthropology, this dissertation shows how highly political class struggles have been depoliticized and culturalized through the discourse of anti-communism. It also shows how struggles around intellectual and cultural production have in fact become vehicle for concrete processes of class formation and re-articulation. This research offers then a different understanding of post-communism and of the social phenomena associated with the umbrella term “transition”. First, at a theoretical level, I embed the communist experience in the wider dynamics of modernity and capitalism in Eastern Europe in the past two centuries. Second, instead of considering transition as a historical period leading from communism to capitalism, I regard it as a historical problem nested within three overlapping transformations: 1) the peripheral incorporation of the post-communist region after 1989 into contemporary global regimes of production, accumulation and division of labor; 2) the de-structuration of industrial production in the northern hemisphere and its attendant economic, social and political institutions – a phenomenon of which the former eastern bloc is a part; 3) the exhaustion of the basic fundaments of western modernity of which the collapse of Soviet modernity was only an early symptom, albeit a crucial one. On this background I insert my local Romanian story. I show how anti-communism despite being a hegemonic ideology of transition and an intellectual construction, emerged in fact from the class struggle undergirding the communist regime, opposing the technical and humanist intelligentsia to the party apparatchiks. Anti-communism was salient for the former to make political claims against the latter in the post-1989 articulation of this ongoing struggle, while anti-communism displaced this class struggle as a struggle against corruption and for western integration. The condemnation of communism as illegitimate and criminal by the Romanian Presidential Commission for the Analysis and Condemnation of Communism in 2006, prior to the country’s EU accession, officialized and institutionalized anti-communism as the hegemonic ideology in relation to the communist past. This hegemony was evident in the field of history writing where anti-communism put forward a hybrid construction, which I call “history -as-memory 1d;. On the terrain of memory practices the pedagogy of memory organized by anti-communism constructed nostalgia as a disease of the popular classes, considered the museum of communism as a definitive sign of overcoming this nostalgia, and inscribed the secret police archive with the power to generate truth about the past. But this hegemony did not remain unchallenged. A rebel intellectual group of friends from a younger cohort, not affiliated with state and party power, put together a volume of critical readings of the condemnation report through which they signaled the emergence of a new generation willing to give a voice to its own experience of the past and articulate its own politics for the present and future. I show that this anti-hegemonic struggle emerged from a common generational biographical trajectory rooted in the developmentalist logic and achievements of communism and unfolding across overlapping crises of capitalism in the last four decades. This legacy, received critically, enabled a different perspective on communism and of the transition period in which issues related to transition injustices, emerging from the constant struggles for livelihood and reproduction, came to the fore and led to the articulation of a critical stance expressed in an idiom of class. This political breakthrough made possible the articulation, after half a century, of a distinct local leftist movement, emerging from local struggles but enabled and crystallized by global dynamics leading to and following the financial meltdown of 2008. |
| Supervisor | Kalb Don |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/poenaru_florin.pdf |
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