Alienating Labour

Eszter Bartha begins her book by telling us that there are not enough studies of the role played by the working class in the collapse of Communism in East-Central Europe. Her contribution to remedying this shortage consists of a detailed examination of two case-studies: the Rába factory in Győr, Hungary, and the Zeiss factory in Jena, East Germany. Starting her account in the late 1960s, she charts the decline of the Communist system and the transition to capitalism as it was experienced by ordinary workers, party functionaries and managers in two large socialist enterprises. There is much to commend in her book. Bartha has conducted a meticulous trawl through relevant archives, supplemented by interviews with former workers at the two plants. Through the wealth of evidence that she presents, the reader gets a vivid sense of the everyday lives of workers, not just on the shop floor, but in the crowded, rickety buses that took them to work, and in the dingy and overcrowded accommodation where many of them lived. There were also, Bartha tells us, brighter sides to life under the regimes of Erich Honecker and János Kádár. East German and Hungarian workers alike spoke nostalgically of the community spirit which had been lost during the transition to capitalism. Many of the Hungarian interviewees (though none of the East German) even said that they preferred life as it had been under Communism

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