The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956

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Available in PDF Format | The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956.pdf | English
Martha Lampland(Author)

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Lampland is quite possibly the deepest theoretical thinker in the anthropology and history of Eastern Europe. One of her great accomplishments in this book is to reject the standard division of the region into pre- and postcommunism paradigms. Instead, she uncovers important continuities in the development of the science and economics of labor, offering a completely original, new view of Eastern Europe s sovietization process. --Katherine Verdery, Graduate Center, City University of New York"The Value of Labor is a work of history that takes in, along with peasants and workers, the accounts by which their labor was organized. Routine little things like infrastructure, standards, and calculations of work and productivity are almost always enveloped in too much cunning and resistance to remain boring. Humor is one of Lampland s specialties, and she deploys it brilliantly as she explains the evolving economic logic of rural Hungary in a period of intense tumult. Her work reveals that the ironies of socialist accounting were not least among the contradictions that brought down East European socialism. --Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles""Lampland is quite possibly the deepest theoretical thinker in the anthropology and history of Eastern Europe. One of her great accomplishments in this book is to reject the standard division of the region into pre- and postcommunism paradigms. Instead, she uncovers important continuities in the development of the science and economics of labor, offering a completely original, new view of Eastern Europe's 'sovietization' process."--Katherine Verdery, Graduate Center, City University of New York"The Value of Labor is a work of history that takes in, along with peasants and workers, the accounts by which their labor was organized. Routine little things like infrastructure, standards, and calculations of work and productivity are almost always enveloped in too much cunning and resistance to remain boring. Humor is one of Lampland's specialties, and she deploys it brilliantly as she explains the evolving economic logic of rural Hungary in a period of intense tumult. Her work reveals that the ironies of socialist accounting were not least among the contradictions that brought down East European socialism."--Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles