Following the demise of Communist regimes in 1989, the countries of eastern Europe embarked on a course of rapid political and economic change. Western advisers proffered plans that promised a quick transition to capitalist economies. Conventional wisdom held that since socialist economic systems had been artificially imposed, they could be easily dismantled, allowing free market capitalism to flourish. The wrenching economic and social dislocations that followed belied western economists' glib predictions. These experts had failed to grasp the degree to which socialist economies were intertwined with existing institutions, practices, and social structures. In her new book, Martha Lampland examines the previous transition—the one from capitalism to socialism in Hungary after World War II—to illustrate the complexities of labor valuation under the socialist economic order. Her findings shed light not only on the character of Hungary's socialist economy, but on the reasons it was not so easily disassembled.
Lampland wisely begins her study in the interwar period, where she finds important antecedents to the communist regime's approach to labor and wages. Already in the 1930s, the state role in the Hungarian economy was substantial. And contrary to many existing accounts, which depict the Hungarian Communist Party as importing wholesale the Soviet economic model, Party bureaucrats based attempts at agricultural modernization and scientific wage calculation on ideas from the pre-communist period. The means they used to calculate wages on collective farms derived not from the Soviet model but instead from the ideas of Hungarian economists and work scientists of the 1920s and 1930s. Inspired by German agricultural work science, these Hungarian specialists designed ways to measure all components of the labor process independently of market forces. While they did so as committed capitalists, their ideas ultimately shaped the communist government's system of wages on Hungarian collective farms.
Lampland goes on to show how these non-Party specialists played such an important role in formulating wage policy under the communist regime. As Party bureaucrats took control of the economy, they faced a daunting array of managerial tasks. In need of economic and accounting expertise, they turned to work scientists and other non-Party experts. These specialists embraced the challenge of creating efficient and productive work places, even in a non-capitalist system. They crafted policy instruments, including a scientifically-calibrated wage system for collective farms.
Lampland's broader contribution to economic history is to present the commodification of labor as a historical process. She argues that the role of markets in commodifying labor has been exaggerated, and demonstrates the importance of specialists, institutions, and practices that permit a reasonable approximation of labor's value. In particular, she illustrates the contribution of Hungarian work scientists and economists in assigning a value to specific tasks and creating the infrastructure to make labor markets function. The Hungarian specialists she studies intended their system of labor valuation to work within a market framework. Instead, their ideas became central to the communist regime's matrix of labor value called the work unit, which in turn shaped Hungarians' attitudes about work, time, and money.
Lampland's book provides much for scholars to contemplate. She contributes to a growing body of literature that sees the Soviet bloc as far from monolithic, and that instead examines the particularities of communist rule in each country. She underscores national and regional differences in the process of collectivization and the functioning of collective farms. Her work also suggests that developments in eastern Europe can be fruitfully compared with those in other parts of the world—she notes, for example, that scientific management practices in Hungary were part of an international movement in the twentieth century. Finally, her study calls into question simplistic understandings of the role of markets in labor valuation, and highlights the importance of other mechanisms for defining and assessing the value of labor, including scientific wage calculation. Lampland's book will therefore be of interest to a wide range of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists.
