The Fragility of Class Analysis in Romania

Beyond Anticommunism: The Fragility of Class Analysis in Romania The debate about socio-economic inequalities and class has become increasingly important in mainstream academic and political debates. This article shows that during the late 2000s class analysis was rediscovered in Romania both as an analytical category and as a category of practice. The evidence suggests that this was the result of two converging processes: the deepening crisis of Western capitalism after 2008 and the country’s increasingly transnational networks of young scholars, journalists, and civil society actors. Although a steady and focused interest in class analysis is a novelty in Romania’s academia, media, and political life and has the potential to change the political conversation in the future, so far the social fields where this analysis is practiced have remained relatively marginal. Rediscovering Class Popular and academic class analyses are constitutive elements of an emerging social opposition to the neoliberal consensus in Romania. In 2012 and 2013, extensive social protests around issues such as the continuing privatization of healthcare or the activities of multinational mining operations raised new and difficult questions about market-society relations and the conditions of working people.1 These protests did not precipitate a paradigmatic breakthrough. Neoliberal and right-wing populist voices continue to suffuse the public sphere while left-leaning critics remain largely marginalized. Nevertheless, the 2012–2013 protests, occurring in the context of the ongoing post-2008 economic crisis, not only served as vents for frustration with corruption and austerity, or opportunities for single-issue movements, but also helped introduce an alternative discourse sensitive to inequalities and critical of the local adaptations of neoliberalism. The protests became sites of deliberation, however small, about whether the class cleavages generated by Romania’s dependent development2 are reconcilable with democracy itself. Activists pointed to the intricate causal relationship between class privilege and political privilege. After years of almost automatic endorsement of pro-market reforms by powerful social coalitions, the protesters and their deliberations made visible the emerging left-wing networks of those who came of age in the late 1990s and who have made social class a fundamental category of their analysis of the status quo. Although small, divided, and thus far unable to substantially broaden their base,3 their vocal critique of Romania’s variety of capitalism and of capitalism itself has caught the establishment by surprise and injected new ways of thinking about contemporary Romanian society. These critics had little to do with the generally well-funded and institutionalized civic leaders of the 1990s who made a name for themselves through relatively successful campaigns for better liberal democracy, less graft, and more effective state institutions. For the emerging young left-wing critics of the status quo, the civic generation of the 1990s was guilty of packaging together democratization with neoliberalization, and therefore responsible for the adoption of policies that generated a plethora of social ills, from skyrocketing inequality to environmental degradation and the weakening of the secular nature of the state. Rather than appeal to the wellworn Romanian nationalist critiques of capitalism, these critics draw on cosmopolitan discursive repertoires and references that would sound familiar in a typical European or North American campus or activist milieu. Articulate, highly educated, typically Western-trained and untainted by connections to the authoritarian past, these critics of the status quo showed not only academic skill or desire to openly assume their left-wing political identity and explore the possibilities of the democratization of economic life. They were also able to translate academic critiques of neoliberalism and/or capitalism for the mainstream media. In a country remarkable for the paucity of its leftist intellectual tradition and for the strength of its postcommunist “liberal-conservative” politics (free-market economics plus conservative national sensibility), the rise of this generation seemed to augur in 2012/2013 a momentous shift in the Romanian political culture. Thus, while being underdeveloped before 1989, and explicitly rejected in the decade after, class analysis is experiencing a rebirth in contemporary Romania. This has been the result of several converging processes. First, there was a veritable intellectual revolution in the field of humanities and cultural media that started in Cluj, a prominent academic city, at the cusp of the new century. By the early 2000s, cultural debates were informed by challenges posed by a generation of philosophers and cultural activists steeped in various Left traditions, from left liberalism and social democracy to various forms of Marxism and anarchism. By the late 2000s, these transformations went from political philosophy and the visual arts to civil society organizations and the sociology department of one of the country’s best universities. Here, a critical mass of new faculty trained at or linked to the Central European University, West European, and American academia gave class analysis a systematic teaching and empirical research component. Second, the deepening of the neoliberal policy program adopted during the Great Recession opened new avenues for intellectual contestation in the academic and public spheres. This article will develop these arguments by drawing on participant observation, content analysis of academic and media sources, as well as interviews and correspondence with several Romanian sociologists. National–Stalinism and Its Legacy 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.4 In the intellectual mainstream of the ancien regime, Marxism-Leninism was creatively grafted onto ethnonationalist concepts. Verdery offers an excellent, subtle analysis of the efforts of some Romanian academics to produce a version of revisionist Marxism that implausibly placed a Herderian concept of the Nation in the center of class analysis.5 This was essentially the only kind of class that even Marxist analysis allowed. With a few exceptions (a handful of translations from some of the least politically explicit works of Lukács, Marcuse, and Althusser), engaging with critical western Marxism remained largely taboo.6 While many sociologists had the training to carry out interesting kinds of class analysis—because of a deep knowledge of Marxist theory, or familiarity with western methodologies—few dared to confront Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy head-on. While elsewhere in the region, sociologists deployed critical Marxism as a platform for the critique of Stalinist class stratification,7 repression prevented Romanian sociologists doing the same. Nor, of course, could they form communities of scholars engaged in unorthodox class analysis, as happened in places like Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. In the 1970s, empirical analysis became popular, and tolerated in sociology, leading to some international collaboration that enabled some research on class issues. Specifically, a young generation of sociologists clustered around Miron Constantinescu, a reformist Party leader, began to use up-to-date methodologies to study the social dislocations produced by industrialization, urbanization and the collectivization of agriculture.8 Publishing abroad, Mihail Cernea used empirical sociology as a platform for the critique of Stalinist class stratification and idealization of the working class. After a stint at Stanford in the early 1970s, he published in the prestigious Studies in Comparative International Development an article on the class issues raised by urbanization and industrialization.9 Other sociologists took a more theoretical path to analyze the tensions of the existing social order. Published in 1980, under the pseudonym Felipe Garcia Casals, Pavel Câmpeanu’s Syncretic Society offered a critique of Romanian national-Stalinism and its class structure from a critical Marxist perspective that exposed the social tensions of the existing social order. Yet none of these internationally visible scholars left a strong mark on Romanian sociology. Although Pavel Câmpeanu’s work shaped the thinking of Katherine’s Verdery’s exemplary research on the political economy of socialism, it is barely remembered among Romanian sociologists. Cernea turned his research trips to Stanford into a stepping stone for a World Bank job while Câmpeanu’s tense relationship with the establishment prevented him from creating a local “school” of critical research on class issues. Sociological research that dared to look more closely at class issues, however obliquely, was discouraged and, to top it off, the field of sociology itself experienced a drastic repression during the combination of political sultanism and economic austerity that characterized the 1980s.10 In effect, the rebirth of class analysis had to wait for decades—till well after 1989, for at that time nationalStalinist repression was replaced in many university departments by a particularly narrow form of anticommunism. Class and Anticommunism During the 1990s, a strong anticommunist backlash in academia inhibited the development of class analysis in sociology. In the intellectual atmosphere of the time, taking class seriously smacked of “communism.” A synthesis of economic liberalism and political liberalism became the dominant intellectual frame through which the most influential public intellectuals and commentators understood the social realities of postcommunism. While nationalist and authoritarian elements of the old national-Stalinist legacy lived on in various hybrids of New Right ideological constructs, the elements that stressed and bemoaned economic inequalities were not. “Class” now became almost exclusively associated with a Marxism that mainstream thought soundly rejected. Libertarian, neoliberal, and neoconservative ideas flourished and challenged each other. But they all had in common the flat rejection of all ideas associated with the Left.11 As one prominent commentator wrote, even the theoretical ideas associated with the democratic left confronted a “presumption of intellectual illegitimacy.”12 A critical mass of people using the revolving doors between high-prestige academic institutions, the publishing industry, the commentariat, and elite civil society organizations shared unvarnished hostility towards ideas that could be associated with the legacy of socialism, social-democracy, left liberalism, or even the German-style “Ordoliberal” social market economy. Outside a few speculative journalistic interventions, the concept of class and the analysis of its effects were relegated to the margins of intellectual activity. Eventually, however, as the economic problems that were supposed to disappear did not, these “marginal” ideas began moving to the center. Away from the limelight of the mainstream reviews and the popular media, previously discarded intellectual frameworks started gaining new intellectual traction. In the new millennium, long-neglected issues of socio-economic distribution entered public debate as a challenge to postcommunist neoliberalism and the class inequalities it had produced. At present, one can even say that critical class analysis has become a mainstay of teaching and research in some top sociology departments and has shaped the thinking of a new generation of journalists, community organizers, literati, artists, and the expanding ranks of a highly educated intellectual precariat surviving on translations, short-term grants, and odd jobs. It is to these developments that I now turn. Sociology and the Rediscovery of Social Class It was not until the second half of the 2000s that social class became the object of systematic research and teaching in academia. The trailblazers were the sociology departments in major universities and the Institute for Research on the Quality of Life, a public think-tank affiliated with the Romanian Academy.13 They were soon followed by the work of a younger generation of sociologists who embarked on systematic empirical investigations. Today, courses on social stratification in sociology departments take seriously all approaches taught in Western universities. There is one important cleavage: between a predominantly liberal stratification research developed at the University of Bucharest and the more critical class analysis prominent at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj.14 Although it is not monolithic,15 the Bucharest sociological research is steeped mainly in approaches that explore problems of social stratification for market development. Some, such as Dumitru Sandu and Ioan Marginean, have largely stuck close to the World Bank–funded agenda that looks, for example, at the relationship between stratification, migration, political values, and entrepreneurship. For others, the focus is on explaining the formation of the new capitalist class as a derivative of the process of elite recomposition after 1989. Thus, Cătălin Augustin Stoica’s original work on the formation of the Romanian capitalist class explains the conversion of the organizational and network resources of Ceauşescu-era cadre into capitalist entrepreneurs.16 Similarly, Octavian-Marian Vasile’s attempt to map out all social classes in 2000s Romania endorses the thesis that by the mid-2000s, postcommunist Romania had developed in urban areas a class structure that is not altogether different from that of advanced capitalist systems. The researchers at the Bucharest-based Institute for Research on the Quality of Life have been more interested in poverty and social inequalities, yet they also eschewed critical class analysis in favor of the better-funded policy studies approach. In contrast to the University of Bucharest sociologists, their counterparts at the equally prestigious Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj boast their use of critical class analysis perspectives in research and teaching. These scholars rely more heavily on neo-Marxist and Bourdieusian class analysis frameworks. For them, the empirical focus is on the top and the bottom of the social class pyramid. Some of the scholarly class analyses done by the Cluj group includes Norbert Petrovici and Florin Faje’s work on nationalism, class and urban spaces;17 the research of Gabriel Troc on Roma ethnicity, class, ethnicity, and migration; Anca Simionca’s work on the managerial class;18 or Nicoleta Bitu and Enikő Vincze’s attempt to blend feminism, class analysis, and work on racism.19 Cristina Rat,’s work on the class implications of welfare state reform has probably been the most internationally visible achievement of the Cluj group.20 Since 2010, the opening to more critical approaches to class analysis in the academic sociology practices in Cluj has been accompanied by the emergence of class analysis outside of academia, among a new generation of journalists and civic activists. The main consequence of this shift has been that debates over social conflict and distribution are now complemented by incipient discussions concerning conflicts of production. One can safely say that critical discourse on the politics of class stratification in the age of neoliberalism has earned its own space in the Romanian public sphere. Class Analysis Outside of Academia: The Emergence of Intellectual Left Romania By the 2000s, Romanian cultural debates experienced the challenge posed by a generation of academics and cultural activists steeped in the large tent of Left traditions, from left liberalism to Marxism. The users of these new discourses were typically young, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic as well as divorced from (and contemptuous of) the networks and ideas of national-Stalinism. Many of them received graduate training in Western universities, thus making interest in class issues just another facet of political Westernization. This generation of academics, journalists, and civic activists defined their identity against the prevailing anti-Left consensus in the cultural and political establishment. Moreover, since 2010 they have been able to gain the semblance of a national profile by creating their own alternative media, publishing houses, civic organizations, and mobilization platforms, however fragile their financial situation. Bloggers and civic activists coming from these networks are currently regularly hosted in TV shows and the editorial pages of prominent national newspapers. This genuine “refoundation” of the Romanian left-leaning intelligentsia was made possible by the convergence of endogenous and transnational processes in the culturally dissident milieus of the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj. The first movers were a group of students of the philosophy department informally known as the “Cluj Group.” Backed by three professors (Ciprian Mihali, Adrian T. Sîrbu, and Claude Karnoouh), they launched a student-run philosophy review, Philosophy and Stuff, which engaged with critical theory. Later, they enjoyed the sponsorship of Timotei Nădăşan, a former arts department professor–turned successful entrepreneur in the printing business. The members of the group launched Balkon, later renamed IDEA arts + society), which has managed not only to survive since 2001 but also to become the most internationally respected Romanian cultural review.21 It is in this publication that the first offshoots of a local left-leaning group can be noticed. To turn these early forms of intellectual dissidence into a full-blown intellectual offensive, Nădăşan also established a publishing house that has churned out some of the most interesting references of the contemporary Marxist and critical poststructuralist thought.22 Touched by transnational influences, the Cluj Group benefited from the French and North American graduate experiences of local philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists. The shift in thinking also owes a great deal to the mentorship of French and Hungarian Marxists with strong connections to Cluj, particularly Claude Karnoouh, a former CNRS researcher and French Communist Party member who made his career doing anthropological studies on the Romanian countryside, and G. M. Tamás, a Hungarian philosopher, journalist, and leftist politician, today one of the luminaries of the European radical left, born and raised in Cluj. Traditionally a site of flamboyant ethnic nationalism, Cluj by the mid-2000s had become the chief site of leftist internationalism in Romania, with the theoretical predisposition to examine class more critically. Following the Great Recession, some of the members of the Cluj Group founded CriticAtac (www.criticatac.ro), an online platform that brings together left-liberal, social-democratic, and (neo) Marxist ideas and discussions. Since 2010, with the financial support of the German social-democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FEF), the Bucharest-based CriticAtac has become the main media source of the emerging left-wing intelligentsia.23 It provides daily, in-depth, theoretical, empirical, and normative texts dealing directly and indirectly with issues of class and social inequality. The impact of CriticAtac has been significant. Its dozens of contributors and affiliates publish substantive, heavily annotated analyses challenging the policies and theories of austerity, privatization of public services, rents extracted by the banking system, and the deregulation of labor relations. Costi Rogozanu, the group’s most prominent journalist, has transformed such analyses into bi-weekly editorial interventions in mainstream media outlets as well as a book.24 A PhD student in sociology at Central European University, Stefan Guga’s critical analysis of labor market deregulation and anti-union legislation adds academic gravitas to these demarches.25 Returning to Bucharest with a PhD in sociology from the same university, Florin Poenaru became the exponent of the most explicit form of Marxist class analysis on CriticAtac. Poenaru applied this approach to explain the internal dynamics of key social institutions such as political parties, with a focus on the economically liberal turn in the powerful Social Democratic Party.26 In normative terms, while some of the analyses published by CriticAtac falls squarely on the side of moderate socialdemocratic aspirations, others reach into the political ideas associated with contemporary Marxism. During the protests of 2012 and 2013, some of the figures associated with CriticAtac organized a distinct leftist group that confronted the conservative youth groups also prominent in the protests. Between 2010 and 2014, the CriticAtac group stressed that Romania’s class cleavages were not simply the manifestation of domestic political pathologies traceable to the communist past. Instead, while acknowledging the importance of local political and economic dynamics, the group has analyzed them as the consequences of the capitalist mode of production and the global distribution of power in the global economy. It has looked deeply into the links between neoliberal political mobilization and working-class economic consequences. It has argued, for example, that the interests of the upper class and of select sectors of the emerging middle class have been articulated in such a way as to increase the intensity of economic dispossession among the working class and the most marginalized members of society, such as the long-term unemployed and the Roma. Critical in this regard have been exposés and case studies focused on the intensifying exploitation of low- and medium-income wage earners through withheld wage payments, the suppression of unionization drives, or the practice of not paying for overtime work. Similarly, it is in the archives of CriticAtac that one can find the most elaborate analyses of the deleterious consequences for Romanian citizens of the defunding of basic social services and the repressive legislation against trade unions. The CriticAtac network spans the social fields of academia, journalism, and civic activism. Today it is essentially a household name for the intellectual left. Most of its contributors are based in Romania, but a consistent percentage of them do graduate studies or teach in West European and North American campuses. In a clear manifestation of internationalization, CriticAtac in 2013 established an English-language online media outlet called LeftEast (www.criticatac.ro/lefteast), which provides engaged analyses of socio-economic events and class relations in eastern Europe, with special focus on southeastern Europe and Ukraine. My own interviews with members of the CriticAtac network suggest that the Great Recession has been a critical juncture of the shift in the intellectual debate. The groundwork, of course, had already been laid in the growing perception of post-1989 socio-economic realities. Even before the crisis, Romania’s version of neoliberal capitalism delivered for too few people. The formation of the middle class, the normative guidepost of the neoliberal cheerleading for post-1989 politics, was a lot less robust than expected. During the economic boom that took place between 2000 and 2009, the new economic system relegated the majority of the population to working poor status, just as the share of the economy owned by a few hundred millionaires and billionaires grew at breakneck speed. Even so, it was only after the crisis that more people began to understand that such developments were not pathologies of the Romanian political economy but general trends in countries once advertised as textbook success stories for neoliberal development, such as Ireland or Estonia. The significance of the rise of the intellectual Left and its relevance for class analysis, whether academic or not, should not be overstated. Far from presenting a united front, the emerging Left is fragmented. CriticAtac’s efforts to forge a common platform among the Cluj and Bucharest Left groups in 2012 led only to further disunion. In 2014, CriticAtac itself hemorrhaged some of its most active members, including Ebert Stiftung–affiliated commentator Victoria Stoiciu. The hopes raised by the 2012–2013 protests did not come to fruition in terms of providing an effective massbased political or civic front against the neoliberal and right-wing populist elites, who remain as entrenched as ever. Moreover, some skeptics opine that critical class analysis in academia has not broken out of the corridors of the Cluj sociological school and the journalism of CriticAtac contributors. As sociologist Stefan Guga puts it, An articulated discourse in terms of class, or one that denounces the capitalist system even minimally, does not exist in Romania outside very small leftist circles, and even these circles did not manage to significantly influence the 2012/3 protest movements. These movements themselves were quite divided when it came to settling ideological disputes: the right vs. left problematique was quite visible in the case of the Roşia Montană protests, where the dominant discourse consisted of a combination of rightwing anti-corruption rhetoric, economic liberalism, and nationalism, while the left-wing voices remained relatively marginal. In the case of the 2012 protests, people were quite confused and it took a while for them to find a common ground. . . . Yes, Left discourse was galvanized by the crisis, which proved to be a kind of ideological watershed, but overall both the Left and its discourse remain tiny.27 Nevertheless, the taboo of not talking about class in public has been broken by the emerging new left intelligentsia, and it would be wholly unsurprising if future political formations could get organized around some of the issues raised by this critical cleavage of societies constrained by the mechanisms of the private capitalist economy. Arguments about class that were common on CriticAtac a few years ago are now increasingly used by mainstream journalists, visible activists, and left-leaning politicians. Their numbers may be too small to warrant exuberant applause from the supporters of progressive causes but at least one can no longer argue that Romania is uniformly barren land for the critics of the class cleavages generated by neoliberal capitalism. Conclusions Romanian intellectual life has come a long way in terms of engaging with class issues. After a decade of dominance of neoliberal ideas about state–society relations, the contentious politics triggered by the Great Recession have brought to the fore a robustly critical engagement with the ideological status quo that is clearly Leftoriented. This study addresses this intellectual transformation from the standpoint of the incremental return of class as an analytical category in academic and public discourse. Constituted by a young generation of new media journalists, social scientists and philosophers, this opposition has grown to have an important presence in academia, civil society, old and new media. Active and increasingly visible, the constituency for a sustained critique of class relations in Romania may be too small and ideologically diverse to morph into a social movement, a political party or a unionization drive in the immediate future. Nevertheless, it offers future intellectuals and political entrepreneurs the opportunity to critically engage with enduring questions about class politics and the boundaries of democracy. Their Berlin Wall moment was not 1989 but 2008, and this may yet change Romanian politics as we know it.