Social Class, Cultural Politics and Social Science in Postcommunist Romania

Cornel Ban, Brown University

From national-stalinism to the liberal-conservative synthesis A creative hybrid between Herderian nationalism and (neo)Stalinism had been the ideological mainstream of real-existing socialism in Romania for almost half a century after World War Two.1 Marxism itself had been creatively grafted onto ethnonationalist concepts2 and with few exceptions (Lukcs, Marcuse and Althusser), Western Marxism remained unavailable and politically problematic for research.3 With specific regard to class and class analysis, in Romania mainstream social science and political theory stuck to the orthodox Soviet Marxist line. Some sociologists (Pavel Campeanu and Mihail Cernea) used critical Marxism as a platform for the critique of Stalinist class stratification,4 yet repression prevented them from publishing their analyses in Romania or to spur the formation of communities of scholars doing unorthodox class analysis.5 After 1989, a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism became the dominant intellectual frame through which the most influential public intellectuals and commentators understood the social realities of Romanian postcommunism.6 Some chose libertarian social philosophy and economics, others became doctrinaire neoliberals and yet others articulated an explicit penchant `for neoconservatism. But they all had in common the flat rejection of all ideas associated with the Left.7 According to one prominent liberal commentator, even the theoretical ideas associated with the democratic left confronted a presumption of intellectual illegitimacy.8 The result was that outside a few speculative journalistic interventions,9 the concept of class and the analysis of its effects were sidelined.10 Yet away from the limelight of mainstream cultural reviews and popular media, the 2000s ushered in social scientific research on class stratification and the local production of alternative political vocabularies that legitimated critical discussions about class. It is to these new developments that I now turn. Sociology and the rediscovery of social class It took almost ten years for social scientists to rediscover social class in postcommunist Romania. Basically it was not until the second half of the 2000s that social class made the object of systematic research and teaching in academia. The trailblazers were the sociology departments in major universities (Cluj, Bucharest) and the Institute for Research on the Quality of Life (IRQL), a public think-tank affiliated with the Romanian Academy. Veteran sociologists (Dumitru Sandu, Ioan Marginean)11 opened up the analytical frameworks and a generation of younger ones (Irina Culic, Catalin-Augustin Stoica, Laureana Urse, Octavian-MarianVasile)12

embarked on systematic empirical investigations just as it became obvious that the formation of a large middle class, the normative guiding post of much of postcommunist politics, was far less robust than expected. It also became obvious that even as Romania experienced its first long boom, the new economic system kept the majority of the population in the condition of working poor just as the share of the economy owned by a few hundred millionaires and billionaires continued to grown at breakneck pace.13 Such developments drove a wedge between the majority of liberal-conservative intelligentsia, who saw class as a residual category of Soviet Marxism, and mainstream sociologists who found class and its effects in social reality to be meaningful social categories in the analysis of Romanias eclectic capitalism. Social class generated new research agendas and several generations of undergraduates have now taken classes on class stratification. Perhaps ironically, the sociologists efforts to make class salient were supported by the corporate sector, as marketing firms, the business press and TV stations who sought to demonstrate that Romania shed its socialist socio-economic legacy started to generate data showing the increasingly skewed distribution of income in the country towards capital owners and professionals. The existing sociological research uses eminently eclectic analytical frameworks and methodologies that blend Weberian, (neo) Marxist and Bourdieuian perspectives on class.14 Thus, Catalin Augustin Stoicas work on the formation of the Romanian class of employers draws heavily on both Weberian and Bourdieuian concepts to explain the conversion of the organizational and network resources of Ceausescu-era cadre into capitalist entrepreneurs. Similarly, Octavian-Marian Vasiles attempt to map out all social classes in 2000s Romania draws on a mix of measures culled from sociologists as different as Erik Olin Wright and Anthony Giddens. Similarly, the classes being taught on social stratification in sociology departments take all approaches taught in Western universities seriously.15 But even though Romanian sociologists have generated enough self-reflexive engagement with distributive issues to produce a consistent interest in class, they have been less keen to take the step from sophisticated descriptions towards the systematic exploration of the ramifications of class in social phenomena. For years now, the agenda has been dominated by analyses of class lifestyles and the canvassing of the population into classes based on established Western templates of class structure. While the neo-Marxist approach to class of Erik Olin Wright is respectfully considered and at times operationalized, there seems to be a lingering suspicion among these economists towards using neo-Marxist class analysis as well. And these potentially ideological reservations seem to hold most scholars back from doing any kind of class analysis. Finally, while the mapping out of the middle class and of the ethnic underclass (the poor Roma) has received much attention, there has been very little interest in the working class.16 The sparseness of class analysis and the current oblivion to the working class are deplorable features of Romanian sociology on class. Hopefully as more progressive political lexicons become legitimate, it will become more obvious that even if one shuns Marxist concepts one can engage with a slew of questions that are highly germane in the current historical context: If class interests are indeed not given, when are they most likely to lend themselves to

reinterpretation by political entrepreneurs? Why do some fractions of the upper class monopolize opportunities for profitable economic deals whereas others do not? How does the postcommunist middle class defend its property and status credentials differently from the upper class? How do increasing opportunities for transnational education and the cultural capital they bestow affect the likelihood of acquiring political and financial capital? Is economic capital as tied to political capital today as it was a decade ago? How does class closure occur in postcommunism? Such questions are perfectly defensible from within the liberal tradition, and the social analysis of postcommunism, twenty years after 1989, can only benefit from scholarship attempting to address them. The emergence of an articulate Left cultural tradition in Romania during the past decade may spur such developments in the future by pushing liberal sociologists to do the empirical class analysis they are reluctant to pursue today. Changing the Tracks of Class Analysis? The Emergence of Intellectual Left Romania17 By the 2000s in Romania cultural debates experienced the challenge posed by a generation of academics and cultural activists steeped in the large tent of various Left traditions, including the Marxist one. [PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THERE CAME TO BE A generation steeped in Left traditions if the situation is as you describe above, with everything connected to the Left rejected.] The main consequence of the rise of an intellectual Left in Romania was that discussions over social conflict over distribution are now complemented by incipient discussions over conflicts of production. Critical talk on the cultural politics of class stratification in the age of neoliberalism has earned its own space in Romanian intellectual debates. The users of these new discourses are typically young, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, divorced from the networks and ideas of national-Stalinism and share a sense of irreverence towards the liberal-conservative intellectual mainstream. To the horror of the cultural mainstream, for some in this group Marx and Marxism are sources of inspiration rather than objects of scorn. It is safe to say that it is from this environment that one can expect class analysis to emerge in the not so distant future. The rebirth of the Romanian cultural left was made possible by the convergence of endogenous and transnational processes in the culturally dissident milieus of the Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj. The first movers were a group of students of the philosophy department informally known as the Cluj Group, who launched a student-run philosophy review18 and later enjoyed the sponsorship of Timotei Ndan, a former arts department professor turned successful entrepreneur in the printing business. The members of the group launched a few cultural reviews and one of them (IDEA art + societate) managed not only to survive since 2001, but also to become the most internationally-respected Romanian cultural review.19 Ndan also established a publishing house that has churned out some of the most interesting references of the contemporary Marxist and critical postructuralist thought.20 Touched by transnational influences, the group benefited from French and North American graduate studies in philosophy, political theory and social science21 and two of its main mentors are foreigners with attachments to Cluj.22 Traditionally a site of flamboyant ethnic nationalism, the RomanianHungarian city of Cluj thus became a site of leftist internationalism.

Through the intellectual output of the Cluj group23 and of several other groups connected to it such as Urban Blog,24 Protokoll25 and Critic Atac,26 formerly ignored left-liberal and (neo) Marxist references entered the Romanian cultural sphere. It is important to acknowledge that the largely philosophical grounding of this group seems to have acted as a break on the undertaking of empirical neo-Marxist class analysis. Indeed, while there is a very sophisticated and contextualized knowledge of the neo-Marxist tradition in political philosophy and cultural studies, one can encounter little work on social class and class analysis from a neo-Marxist perspective. It is also obvious that the discussion on class tends to be focused around culture rather than socio-economic realities and the basic references of neo-Marxist class sociology are far from being common currency. Yet the emergence of the cultural left makes class a legitimate topic of cultural conversation and some of the first attempts to deliver a neo-Marxist class analysis of Romanian social relations seem promising. Most remarkably, since 2010 philosopher Gabriel Ghindea has broken new ground by sketching out hypotheses anchored in neo-Marxist class analyses that address such cornerstones as the fall of Romanian national-Stalinism, the role of neoliberalism as the ideational utopia of the middle class and the political consequences of the downward mobility of the middle class under neoliberalism.27 Outside of the neo-Marxist philosophers of the Cluj Group, a group of social scientists have begun to address labor-capital relations from historical institutionalist perspectives that explore the possibility of a class compromise between organized labor and capital through industrial relations institutions. For example, the public policy analyses of Victoria Stoiciu have provided critical frameworks for looking at the normative and empirical bases of recent initiatives to eviscerate the very bases of class compromise (collective bargaining institutions and unionization rights) and to turn labor-capital relations into a zero-sum game.28 Conclusions Romanian intellectual life has come a long way in terms of engaging with class issues. After a decade of liberal-conservative hegemony when class was a taboo, mainstream academic sociologists and a new wave of leftist philosophers have rediscovered class as a legitimate analytical artifact. For the former, class has been an opportunity to break new empirical ground while for the latter class has offered opportunities for critical engagement with the dominant liberal-conservative thought. It therefore seems that it would take the neo-Marxist bibliography of sociologists and the philosophical milieu of the Cluj Group to create opportunities for a heterodox form of class analysis to emerge in Romania. Given the speed with which things have changed in the 2000s and the fact that more Romanian social scientists are returning from Western graduate schools that moment may not be too far in the future. Cornel Ban

Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescus Romania, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. A. T. Srbu & Alexandru Polgr (coord.). Genealogii ale postcomunismului, Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2009. 2 Of particular interest here is Verderys subtle analysis of the efforts of some mainstream sociologists and theorists to produce a version of revisionist Marxism that implausibly placed a Herderian concept of the Nation in the center of class analysis. See Verdery, 158-165. 3 Vladimir Tismaneanu was able to carry out his research on the Frankfurt School and the New Left only through developing very creative contacts with visiting American scholars and local owners of large libraries. 4 Milovan ilas, The New Class. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1957; Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul J. Kuron, and K. Modzelewski. 1966. "An Open Letter to the Party." New Politics, 5 (2): 5-47; Stanislaw Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; For extensive overviews of class analysis under socialism see Ivan Szelenyis "Social Inequalities in State Socialist Redistributive Economies." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 10, 1978; pp. 63-87; The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies The American Journal of Sociology, 88, 1982, pp. 287-326. 5 Published under a pseudonym in the US during the late 1980s, Pavel Campeanus Syncretic Society was an analysis of Romanian National-Stalinism and its class structure from a critical Marxist perspective. His analyses were unfortunately less rigorously empirical than those of Polish and Hungarian sociologists but his arguments were based on Campeanus participant observer experience as a former member of the Party elite. For the outstanding place of Campeanus work in East European critical social analysis see Katherine Verdery, Konrad and Szelenyis model of socialism, twenty-five years later, in Theory and Society, 34, 2005, pp.1-7; Theorizing Socialism: A prologue to the ,Transition. American Ethnologist, 18 (3), pp. 421-422; 424-425. Both Campeanu and Cernea left the country for the United States. 6 After Marxist references receded further in the background in an intellectual atmosphere in which Marxism, Stalinism and neo-communism had often been used interchangeably. The national-Stalinist legacy endured in various hybrids of New Right and state socialist ideological constructs, yet this metamorphosis failed to become hegemonic in the political mainstream, in the bulk of organized civil society and in academia. 7 For an overview see I. Preoteasa, Intellectuals in the Public Sphere in Post-Communist Romania: A Discourse Analytical Perspective in Discourse and Society, 13 (2), 2002, pp. 269-292; M. Miroiu, (1999) Societatea Retro Bucuresti: Editura Trei; D. Barbu, Republica absenta, Bucuresti: Nemira, 1999; O. Tichindeleanu, Colonizarea intim i stnga n Romnia Le monde diplomatique (Romanian edition), 2006; A. T. Srbu & Alexandru Polgr (coord.). Genealogii ale postcomunismului, Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2009. 8 A. Cornea, Prezumtia de ilegitimitate a stingii. Dilema 416, 2001. 9 Some liberal-conservative intellectuals spent much time poring critiquing what they saw as evidence that during the 1990s Romania did not converge with the neoliberal model: the existence of a superclass of managers of state-owned enterprises, corrupt bureaucrats and criminals of various stripes alongside the refusal of the industrial working class and of peasantry to migrate into services and the small business
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sector. This kind of journalistic talk about social class became a rhetorical instrument for advancing the cause of economic liberalization, 10 Ironically, this self-imposed ideological side blinding resulted in complete lack of awareness of libertarian contributions to class analysis. Libertarians or classic liberals crafted their own anti-Marxist class theory whose main claim was that that capitalists were, along with workers, a productive class who create utility through voluntary exchange rather than an exploitative and parasitic class. In turn, as long as workers sold their labor freely exploitation was impossible. See Hart, David M., and Walter E. Grinder. The Basic Tenets of Real Liberalism. Part IV Continued: Interventionism, Social Conflict and War. Humane Studies Review 3, no. 1 (1986):17; Liggio, Leonard P. Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism. Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 15378; Raico, Ralph. Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggios Paper. Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 17983; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis The Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol IX, no. 2, 1990. 11 Sandu, Dumitru. (2000). Patterns and dilemmas in class empirical analysis. Introductory note for part one Transeurope internet course. Module 5 Stratification and lifestyle; Mrginean, Ioan, Larionescu, Maria, Neagu, Gabriela. (2006). Constituirea clasei mijlocii n Romnia. Bucureti: Editura Economic 12 Catalin Augustin Stoica, From Good Communists to Even Better Capitalists? Entrepreneurial Pathways in Post-Socialist Romania East European Politics and Societies, 18, 2004, pp. 236-280; Laureana Urse, Clasele sociale n Romnia, CIDE Anale nr.3/2002; Stnculescu, Manuela Sofia, Berevoescu, Ionica. (2004). Srac lipit, caut alt via! Fenomenul srciei extreme i al zonelor srace n Romnia. Bucureti: Editura Nemira; Octavian-Marian Vasile, "Stratificare sociala in Romania: o analiza de clase latente" Calitatea vietii 3-4/2008; Coma, M. (2006): Stiluri de via n Romnia dup 1989. Cluj: Presa Universitar Clujean, pp. 55-71, 161-233, Irina Culic, I. (2002): Ctigtorii, ClujNapoca: Ed. Limes. 13 Since 2005 the flagship business weekly Capital produces a list of the 300 richest Romanians. In 2009 Forbes magazine (the Romanian edition) produced its own ranking. 14 Romanias most important interwar economists (Vasile Madgearu and Mihail Manoilescu) took class seriously and Madgearu went as far as accepting the idea of the class struggle. See Costin Murgescu, Mersul ideilor economice la romani, Editura Stiintifica, Bucuresti, 1987. 15 The sociology department of university of Cluj offers a class in social stratification in which students are walked through the classical and modern contributions to the study of social classes and inequality. The course has the reputation of pushing students to apply the concepts on Romanian social realities. 16 The only exception is Crciun, M., Grecu, M., Stan, R. (2003) Lumea Vii. Bucureti: Paideia. The only other relevant contribution has been authored by an American anthropologist. See David A. Kideckel, Getting By in Postsocialist Romania. Labor, the Body and Working-Class Culture, Indiana University Press, 2008. 17 The bulk of this analysis is based on an unpublished manuscript authored by Andrei State (The Intellectual Left in Postcommunist Romania). 18 The review Philosophy and & Stuff was published continuously between 1997 and 2001. After 2001 the editors of this review join forces with Timotei Ndan and Attila Tordai-S. and publish the cultural review Balkon, a project that soon morphed in the IDEA art + societate Magazine and Idea publishing house.

Published in both English and Romanian, in 2006 IDEA art + societate saw one of its special issues on the genealogy of postcommunism published by documenta 12 Magazines, one of the most prestigious German editorial projects. 20 Idea Publishing House published the first translation in Romanian of key volumes by Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Remo Guidieri, Giorgio Agamben, Boris Groys, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, Grard Granel, G. M. Tams 21 Ciprian Mihali and Adrian T. Srbu pursued doctoral studies in philosophy at University of Strasboug, France. Ovidiu ichindeleanu has an MA in philosophy from the same University of Strasbourg and a PhD from NYU Binghampton. Alexandru Polgr also studied in France, got an MA in political philosophy at CEU and is enroleld in a PhD degree at the University of Ontario, Canada. Veronica Lazr is a doctoral fellow in France and Alex Cistelecan is completing his PhD in Italy. 22 Claude Karnoouh, is a former CNRS anthropology researcher and former member of the French Communist Party who made his career in anthropology studies on the Romanian countryside. G. M. Tams, a Hungarian philosopher, journalist and leftist politician born and raised in Cluj is one of the luminaries of the international radical left. 23 See Gabriel Chindea, Din nou despre decembrie 1989, dar i despre ce mai rmne s nsemne marxismul astzi, Cultura, ianuarie 2010; Alex Cistelecan, Marxism tradiional, marxism critic, in Alex Cistelecan, Veronica Lazr (coord.), Ghid practic de teorie critic, Asociaia Protokoll, Cluj, 2010; Alex Cistelecan, Which Critique of Human Rights? Evaluating the Postcolonial and the PostAlthusserian Alternatives, in Aakash Singh Rathore, Alex Cistelecan (eds.), Wronging Rights?: Philosophical Challenges for Human Rights, Routledge, New Dehli, 2011; Bogdan Ghiu, Criz, anticriz, contracriz. S fim pragmatici!, IDEA art + societate, 33-34, 2009; Veronica Lazr, Abstract, abstracie, in Alex Cistelecan, Veronica Lazr (coord.), Ghid practic de teorie critic, Asociaia Protokoll, Cluj, 2010; Konrad Petrovszky i Ovidiu ichindeleanu, Sensuri ale Revoluiei Romne. ntre capital, politic i tehnologie media, in Konrad Petrovszky i Ovidiu ichindeleanu (coord.), Revoluia Romn televizat. Contribuii la istoria cultural a mediilor, Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2009; Florin Poenaru, Nostalgie, pedagogie, umor, sau despre a doua venire a anti-comunismului, CriticAtac, octombrie 2010; Alexandru Polgr, Restul comunist, in Adrian T. Srbu i Alexandru Polgr (coord.), Genealogii ale postcomunismului, Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2009; Ovidiu ichindeleanu, Modernitatea postcomunismului, in Adrian T. Srbu i Alexandru Polgr (coord.), Genealogii ale postcomunismului, Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2009."(D)elective Electricities: Continuous Currents in the New Democracy," The Rethinking Marxism 2003 Gala, "Marxism and the World Stage," 6-8 November 2003, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; "The Concepts of Production and Creation by Flix Guattari," in the panel "Rethinking Production After Marx," The Rethinking Marxism 2003 Gala, "Marxism and the World Stage," 6-8 November 2003, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. ichindeleanus current work (which includes a forthcoming volume with Verso), focuses on laying the foundations of a new critical theory at the conceptual intersection of open Marxism and postcolonial thought, and based on the historical experience of real-existing socialism and the postcommunist transition. 24 Urban Blog is a network of sociologists and anthropologists based at Babe Bolyai University (Cluj), the University of Bucharest and Central European University. They publish an academic blog that specializes in critical urban studies.
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Protokoll organizes a peoples contemporary art school, publishes political analysis and online book reviews of Marxist contribution in political economy (Giovanni Arrighi) and political theory (Alain Badiou, Slavoj iek, Jacques Rancire). Among its members are three thinkers from the Idea group (Attila Tordai-S., Veronica Lazr and Alex Cistelecan). 26 Critic Atac is a blog and magazine that covers the progressive liberal-Marxist spectrum. Two of its founders (Vasile Ernu and Ovidiu ichindeleanu) come from the Idea group. In early 2011 Critic Atac was the most active commentary platform of the Romanian intellectual left, with a new text every day, and the first ever left initiative to take a position on an old left issue: the proposed deregulation of the Labor Code. 27 Gabriel Chindea, Din nou despre decembrie 1989, dar si despre ce mai ramane sa insemne marxismul astazi Revista Cultura, January 18, 2010; Echivocul neoliberalismului: ideologia puterii sau opiul clasei de mijloc? Critic Atac, October 28, 2010; revolutie si clasa de mijloc, Critic Atac, january 2011. 28 Victoria Stoiciu, Noul Cod al Muncii si legiferarea vechilor coduri nescrise Critic Atac, December 6, 2010; Fructele necoapte ale maniei noastre, Critic Atac, October 5, 2010. Ct de lenei sunt romnii Critic Atac, September 21, 2010.
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