The Relationship between Higher Education and the Workforce in Romanian Socialist Industry Case-study of the ‘23 August’ Factory

This article presents the mechanisms used to integrate higher education graduates in socialist economic units. The case-study referring to the ‘23 August’ factory in Bucharest mainly relies on the files of Securitate, and those of the economic section of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. It also outlines the practical difficulties faced by various groups of higher education graduates – engineers, economic staff, human sciences graduates – as well as their efficiency within the communist industrial framework. The study combines the description and analysis of numerical allocation, the responsibilities and the results of the activities carried out by higher education graduates.

From Labour to Capital: Intra-Village Inequality in Rural China, 1988–2006

Economic inequality has increased greatly in China since the end of state socialist industry and collective agriculture, but the story of inequality is much more complex than just the rural–urban and coastal–inland dichotomies or the relative contributions of inter-regional and intra-regional inequality. Even within inland rural areas, inequality between villages and within villages has also increased greatly. In 2005–06, we were fortunate to be able to work with the Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute to re-survey 90 per cent of 300 families in three villages that we had originally surveyed in 1988. On the basis of these surveys and of ethnographic information, we found that income inequality had increased quite dramatically in all three villages. In structural terms, the primary reason for this increase was the shift from labour power to small-scale capital as the primary source of family income, a shift that occurred differently in each village.

Racism in a “Raceless” Society: The Soviet Press and Representations of American Racial Violence at Stalingrad in 1930

In late August 1930, two white American workers from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit were tried for attacking a black American laborer at one of the Soviet Union's prized giants of socialist industry, the Stalingrad Traktorostroi. Soviet trade-union authorities and all-union editors used the near month-long campaign to bring the two assailants to “proletarian justice,” in order to cultivate the image that workers in the USSR valued American technical and industrial knowledge in the construction of the new socialist society, but vehemently rejected American racism. They reinforced this image in publications by juxtaposing visual depictions of Soviet citizens' acceptance of black Americans as equals against those which portrayed the lynching of black workers in the United States.