Download Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working

Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class
Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal
Europe. Ed. Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai. New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. 222 pp. Index. Hardback.
Jeremy Morris, University of Birmingham.
Class is everywhere you look in the post-socialist world even if it does not speak its
real name. The media are awash with stories about aspirational yet ‘normal’ ‘European’
lifestyles and the desirability of gated communities. There is the endless discussion of
‘communist-era’ mentalities and outmoded concepts such as social justice and cohesion.
Popular culture is rife with trashy stereotypes of ‘low-lifes’ and track-suit-clad petty
criminals who serve as thinly veiled fantasies about the dangerous lumpenization of the postsocialist working classes. In Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism
and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe, Don Kalb, particularly in the
introduction to this book, undertakes a major intervention in refocussing the attention of
social scientists on the actual reasons for working-class disgruntlement. Given the resurgent
populist politics in Central East Europe the idea of workers as easy prey to populist neonationalist movements is criticised by Kalb. Downward pressure on the standards of social
reproduction for the working-class is highlighted as a major and ongoing process of
disenfranchisement a generation after socialism. In other words, ordinary people’s trauma
continues as capital – in various guises but usually in a technocratic mask - makes hay.
Kalb’s extensive introduction deserves more commentary, but before doing that I will
outline the relative merits of the rest of the book. Five chapters are devoted to the Central
East European (CEE) experience; two look at Italy; one Scotland. George Baca’s epilogue
reflects on the relentless breaking down of national barriers by neoliberal capital and the
‘capitalisation’ on this by right-wing political entrepreneurs. Overall, as an edited book, the
volume works pretty well, although the CEE-focussed work is strongest. In terms of
ethnographic depth and style the chapters are variable, but all emically engaged. Those who
like editors to enforce a predictable balance of empirical exposition with theoretical
engagement might find some unevenness, and some chapters are noticeably longer than
others.
Theodora Vetta insightfully deconstructs the myth of binary Serbians: progressive
versus nationalist. ‘Nationalism’ is in reality much more variegated in its appeal. In a sense
this chapter continues the contextualising approach of the introduction – highlighting
important points of relevance to any study of populism: the problem of an elite-focussed
literature, the black-box category of ‘spontaneous’ nationalist expression, and the ‘passive’
presence – at best – of ordinary people. Macroeconomic and institutional transformations are
always negotiated and embedded in some way. Vetta’s informants are surprising – middleclass and educated from an ethnically mixed city. The complexity of their sense of
victimhood emerges clearly. Materially and symbolically dispossessed, they support the
populist right because it is the only voice critiquing global capitalism.
Norbert Petrovici in the following chapter examines urban space and city politics in
Romania as expressing or appealing to class belonging. Despite deindustrialisation, an
imagined class community remains and is legitimized by ethno-nationalism. Petrovici also
engages provocatively with Rogers Brubaker’s cognitivist approach to identity, as does Kalb.
Florian Faje follows up with a chapter on the same city: Cluj. The emergent developing class
profiles of two football teams’ fans are shown to be more salient than ethnicity.
Anthropology of East Europe Review 34(1) Fall 2016
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Anthropology of East Europe Review 34(1) Fall 2016
Eszter Bartha and Gábor Halmai follow with two chapters on Hungary. The
Hungarian workers in Győr acutely feel that post-socialist transition is no substitute for social
guarantees of household reproduction under socialism. This aligns Bartha’s work with that on
workers emerging in other post-socialist contexts. Halmai shows how Viktor Orban built a
social movement of ‘Civic Circles’ in parallel to a traditional political party. He argues that
Hungary, even more than other cases, fits Jonathan Friedman’s model of ‘double
polarisation’ – exploited expertly by populists. Bartha’s chapter features extensive interview
transcripts whereas Halmai’s provides exhaustive historical and political context.
The mainstream marginalization of class discourse continues in post-socialist
societies, and influences perhaps most of all workers themselves, whose class consciousness
and identity remain ‘underdeveloped’ (in favour of ethnic identity in numerous countries).
Kalb argues that this ‘repression’ leads to unpredictable political effects such as neonationalist populism. Populism in Eastern Europe as a ‘return of the repressed’ anticipates
unresolved issues in the burial of class analysis in the West too, particularly since the 2008
global financial crisis. The ongoing trauma of the working-class experience in postsocialist
societies, in this sense, needs to be comparatively appreciated as just a more extreme, brutal,
and rapid version of the processes of labour disembedding in the West. Kalb links the
particularly rapid and extreme forms of ‘primitive accumulation’ and new class formations in
Eastern Europe with the rise of right-wing populism and a ‘displaced version of workingclass politics’ a lá Žižek (14-15). The newly exploited, ethnicized former working-classes are
now thoroughly dispossessed and left to their ‘depleted informal and sometimes criminal
shadow economies’ (18). They are too easily reimagined as the dangerous opponents of civil
society and democratization, thus justifying their absence in serious sociological inquiry,
despite the fact that it is workers – at the sharp end – who best provide an immanent critique
of new forms of marketized social relations. Kalb concludes, ‘Ironically, therefore, the postsocialist East allows us to tell the West about class again […] [T]his alerts us to the
possibility that other driving forces, more straightforwardly associated with the making,
unmaking, and restricting of class, may be the more fundamental ground from which
xenophobia as a politically driven process gets its support base in the West’ (2011: 18-19).
Overall then, the volume’s sensitivity to the experience of class and class analysis in
the East is instructive of the continued need and importance of a new working-class studies in
general while building a bridge to many of the concerns of political scientists working in the
region. Arguably the volume title underplays its contribution to the critique of neoliberal
transformation as it pertains to new labour relations and the lived experience of class. This is
a diverse and lively collection from which social scientists working on any national context
can benefit. The introduction and CEE-focussed chapters could well serve as undergraduateor graduate-level course material.
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