Małgorzata Mazurek - Jumping the Line: Family Self-welfare and the Waning of Communism

This talk discusses the moralities of consumption in late communism to understand how practices of “jumping the line,” which people understood as a form of family-centered self-care clashed with official norms of social justice and the communist welfare state. In the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, conflicts over provisioning and equal access to consumer goods increasingly moved from an ideological crusade against private trade to everyday confrontations between consumers, shop assistants and the state. Waiting lines became depoliticized, but not for long. During the world economic crisis of the 1970s, which gravely affected Eastern Bloc, family-centered resourcefulness became the key norm of distributive justice. In the case of communist Poland, Mazurek argues, internalized norms of self-welfare contributed to dismantling of the socialist welfare-state and set the stage for post-communist transformation well before 1989/1990.
Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University in New York. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish studies. She published “Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland” (Warsaw, 2010). Her current book project “Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism” 1918-1968 revises the history of developmental thinking by centering east-central Europe as the locality of innovations in economic thought in post-imperial Europe and the postcolonial world.