"'Who was going to Paris at the time'? Training abroad, generational pride, and shopfloor politics in late socialist Romania"
Abstract
In the late 1970s, at a time when traveling abroad was an unattainable dream for most Romanians, one thousand workers, foremen, and engineers from the city of Craiova were boarding the trains that were going to take them to France. They were the first employees of a still under construction car factory, which operated as a joint venture between the Romanian socialist government and Citroën. The production facilities of the French manufacturer were the final destinations of the heroes of our story. They were going to spend months learning the craft of car making from the French managers, competing on the assembly line with the French workers, sharing food and gossips with their Romanian colleagues in the evenings, and taking occasional tours of Le Louvre during the weekends. To this day, "Who was going to Paris at the time?”, a question often heard in Craiova, functions at multiple levels: the way it happened, the way it is remembered, the way it is told, the way it is heard, and the way it is forgotten. It condenses a memory of class that outlasts the social fabric it originated from, and continues to structure generational imaginaries and the possibility of solidarity on the shopfloor. The lecture draws on this little-known history of transnational training to analyse the ways in which the struggles for access to capital and advanced technology prompted the formation of an aristocracy of labour in late socialist Romania. It discusses how this process simultaneously engendered a radical reframing of the relationship between the state and the late socialist working-class and new paths to self-transformation. The lecture argues that the history of socialist workers should be examined in connection with the fate of labour in other parts of the world, and read as an integral part of the global advance to flexible capitalism.