The Knowledge Question in Centrally Planned Economies Beyond the Socialist Calculation Debate (Romania, 1949-1989)

ZGW Kolloquium am 1. November 2017

The lecture explores the politics of knowledge production that made central economic planning in state socialism possible. More concretely, it investigates the shifting relationship between practices of industrial management and the knowledge regimes that enabled the state to make industrial production legible for the simultaneous pursuit of capital accumulation, labour control, and social emancipation. Focusing on the case of Romania between 1949 and 1989, the talk opens new possibilities of rethinking the field in which the factory and the worker emerged as objects of analysis in state socialism.