BOOK REVIEW: “The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956”, by Martha Lampland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 368 pages

Ágnes GAGYI; Tamás GERŐCS

Authors

Ágnes GAGYI Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, e-mail: agnesgagyi@gmail.com
Tamás GERŐCS Center for Economics and Regional Studies (MTA KRTK VGI), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, e-mail: gerocs.tamas@krtk.mta.hu

Abstract

Following on the path of questioning that Lampland laid out in The Object of Labor (1995), The Value of Labor delves deeper into the technopolitical history of the commodification of agrarian labour in Hungary. Previously, Lampland has maintained that the individualized concepts of time, money, and labour imposed by socialist collectivization bore continuity with pre-socialist agrarian modernization, and were instrumental to the transition to capitalism. In The Value of Labor, she follows expert and policy debates in 1930s work science, and points out their continuities with the institutionalization of the work unit in the Stalinist phase of collectivization. Such continuities contradict the Cold War concept of Stalinist modernization as Soviet models imposed from scratch. Targeting debates in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), history of economics, and Cold War history, Lampland draws three interconnected conclusions: 1) an emphasis on the role of markets in determining the value of labour obscures the historical construction of the knowledge, policy, and material infrastructures that perform its commodification; 2) performativity of economics should also be understood through the history of the material infrastructures of scientific intervention; and 3) the Cold War periodization that separates socialist and capitalist modernization does not stand in face of the historical continuity between pre-socialist and socialist infrastructures of labour commodification.

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