Andrew G. Walder
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520064706
- eISBN:
- 9780520909007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520064706.003.0003
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
This chapter is concerned with the organizational characteristics that give the communist state the capacity to shape worker political association and activity in distinctive ways. Corporatism ...
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This chapter is concerned with the organizational characteristics that give the communist state the capacity to shape worker political association and activity in distinctive ways. Corporatism ideally seeks to manage the associated conflicts for the good of the nation; communism seeks to reorganize society in such a way that private interest groups cannot find organized expression or even a clear social identity. The Chinese party-state is represented in the factory by two organizations that shape political relationships and interests right down to the shop floor. The discretion exercised jointly by the shop director and party branch secretary appears to be a throwback to the foreman's empire of the contracting era of factory production in many parts of the world. The chapter then compares Stalinist and Maoist mobilization. The Chinese party appears genuinely to have viewed the moral cultivation of citizens as the only effective way to generate commitment and obedience.Less
This chapter is concerned with the organizational characteristics that give the communist state the capacity to shape worker political association and activity in distinctive ways. Corporatism ideally seeks to manage the associated conflicts for the good of the nation; communism seeks to reorganize society in such a way that private interest groups cannot find organized expression or even a clear social identity. The Chinese party-state is represented in the factory by two organizations that shape political relationships and interests right down to the shop floor. The discretion exercised jointly by the shop director and party branch secretary appears to be a throwback to the foreman's empire of the contracting era of factory production in many parts of the world. The chapter then compares Stalinist and Maoist mobilization. The Chinese party appears genuinely to have viewed the moral cultivation of citizens as the only effective way to generate commitment and obedience.
Katherine Lebow
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451249
- eISBN:
- 9780801468865
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451249.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter addresses agitation and mobilization in Nowa Huta—particularly, the almost relentless labor competition campaigns urging workers to build socialism “faster, better, cheaper.” The chapter ...
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This chapter addresses agitation and mobilization in Nowa Huta—particularly, the almost relentless labor competition campaigns urging workers to build socialism “faster, better, cheaper.” The chapter addresses a seeming paradox: labor competition elicited genuine enthusiasm among certain workers in Nowa Huta—especially new workers and youth. At the same time, party activists struggled—to little avail—to mold local labor heroes or “model workers” to fit the party's image of model socialist citizens. The chapter suggests, therefore, that enthusiastic participation in Stalinist mobilization campaigns had both complex roots and unanticipated consequences. The visions of collective effort and shared reward evoked by labor competition, in particular, reinforced popular understandings of a moral community of labor in Nowa Huta.Less
This chapter addresses agitation and mobilization in Nowa Huta—particularly, the almost relentless labor competition campaigns urging workers to build socialism “faster, better, cheaper.” The chapter addresses a seeming paradox: labor competition elicited genuine enthusiasm among certain workers in Nowa Huta—especially new workers and youth. At the same time, party activists struggled—to little avail—to mold local labor heroes or “model workers” to fit the party's image of model socialist citizens. The chapter suggests, therefore, that enthusiastic participation in Stalinist mobilization campaigns had both complex roots and unanticipated consequences. The visions of collective effort and shared reward evoked by labor competition, in particular, reinforced popular understandings of a moral community of labor in Nowa Huta.
Katherine Lebow
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451249
- eISBN:
- 9780801468865
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451249.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This book is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's “first socialist city” by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula ...
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This book is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's “first socialist city” by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with “new men,” themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society. The book explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in “building socialism”—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.Less
This book is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's “first socialist city” by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with “new men,” themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society. The book explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in “building socialism”—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.
