Giftwork: Proletarian Debt after Yugoslavia

by

Ivan Rajković (University of Vienna & CEU Institute of Advanced Studies)

Date: 27 March 2025 at 2 p.m.

Venue: Meeting room of the Institute for Minority Studies 1097 Budapest, 4 Tóth Kálmán (T/1/40)

Why would a neoliberalizing state support a failing car manufacturer? And why would the workers remain unthankful for that? Combining archival data and ethnographic fieldwork, this talk traces the conflicting politics of redistribution after socialism. It follows the Yugoslav industrial giant Crvena Zastava, which, having been idled through transnational debts, wars and inflations, dragged on a massive state coverage. As seven decades of this turbulent history show – from times of Partisan construction to the post-industrial politics of “buying social piece” - employment is never about productivity only. Rather, for both the state planners and the rioting workers, those dreaming of socialist liberation and their liberal opponents, jobs have always united the poles of gift and labor, reciprocity and exploitation in hotly contested ways. Centering on the value dilemmas that the situation of prolonged unproductivity create, this lecture explores new forms of hierarchy lurking in contemporary redistribution policies, where the very employment comes to be seen as a form of debt that the worker can never repay.

A szeminárium a Függőségi kapcsolatok morális dimenziói a financializáció korában (FK 143543) című NKFIH projekthez kapcsolódik.