Market Dreams: Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic

MARKET DREAMS

Elaine Weiner

Market Dreams Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2007 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2010 2009 2008 2007

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weiner, Elaine, 1968– Market dreams : gender, class, and capitalism in the Czech Republic / Elaine Weiner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-472-09988-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-472-09988-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-472-06988-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-472-06988-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sex role—Czech Republic. 2. Czech Republic—Social conditions—1993– 3. Czech Republic—Economic conditions—1993– I. Title. hq1075.5.c94w45 2007 305.48'9623094371090511—dc22

2006038424

For my mother, Wanda Weiner

Contents Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

ix 1

2 Two Logics, One Life

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3 A Velvet Vision

41

The Economic Liberalization (and Liberation) of the Czech Republic

4 Rational Economic (Wo)Men

69

Market Mantras and Managers

5 No (Wo)Man’s Land

95

The Postsocialist Purgatory of Czech Female Factory Workers

6 Conclusion Appendix: Sample Demographics References Index

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Acknowledgments Writing this book has been a long journey. Many people supported me during the various phases of this project, and I am certain that without their sustenance and forti‹cation, I would have never reached this journey’s end. All of them thus warrant my sincere gratitude. This work started as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and now ‹nishes as a book published by the University of Michigan Press. In a wonderful way, it has come full circle. It is truly a product of this exemplary institution. It would not, however, have ever come to fruition without the many individuals there who enlivened my “sociological imagination” and provided the necessary intellectual guidance as well as nurturance. Above all others, Michael Kennedy deserves my deepest thanks. During our ‹rst meeting in September 1996, he promised to be a good mentor to me. His generosity of spirit and its constancy indeed made him a good mentor, but his capacity to see and show me the way past obstacles that hinder many people made him more than that—a great mentor. His vision transformed mine, and I am truly grateful for this enlightenment. My appreciation also goes to Alford Young, in whom I found a methodological comrade. He taught me a great deal about qualitative research methods, patiently tolerating my sometimes unrelenting queries about the hows and whys of qualitative research. Sonya Rose receives my sincere gratitude for steering me back on track simply by recommending that I refamiliarize myself with my data. I thank Abigail Stewart for rightly demanding that my representations of Western feminists and feminism(s) be fair. I hope they are. I am also indebted to Margaret Somers, who played a pivotal role in shaping the ideas advanced in this book. Her theoretical insights on narratives inform much of this work. Another member of the faculty at the University of Michigan who merits special thanks is Zdenka Brodska, who spent countless hours, with un›agging patience, teaching me

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the Czech language—Dek& uju Vám! I also thank the members of my dissertation support group—Jessica Charbeneau, Louise Dobish, Julica Hermann, and Susan Lee—for helping to keep me “sane” during my ‹nal year of graduate school. Finally, I thank the University of Michigan Press and especially Jim Reische, who offered enthusiastic support for this book. Since the fall of 2003, McGill University has been my institutional home. I thank my colleagues and students for making it a supportive and stimulating place. In particular, I appreciate those who took the time to read and comment on portions of this book, especially Natalie Carlino, Kathleen Fallon, Juliet Johnson, and Suzanne Staggenborg. In the wider academic world, I thank Kristen Ghodsee for her invaluable advice and generous support. I also thank the reviewers for University of Michigan Press, who provided incredibly positive and helpful feedback. This work also bene‹ted from the comments of audiences at the many forums where I presented various parts of it, including the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic; the 2001 George Klein Symposium at Western Michigan University; the 2002 Junior Scholars’ Training Seminar cosponsored by the East European Studies program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the American Council of Learned Societies; the Placing Gender in Postcommunism Conference held by the Havighurst Center for Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University; the 2002 National Convention for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies; the Gender and Transition workshop held at New York University’s Center for European Studies; the McGillCopenhagen workshop at McGill University; the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women seminar series; the Gender and the Post–East-West Divide conference at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania; and the National Science Foundation’s workshop on the Cultural Politics of Globalization and Community in East Central Europe. I was fortunate to receive ‹nancial support for the many facets of this project—language training, ‹eldwork, analysis, and write-up— from a variety of organizations and institutions. The American Council for Learned Societies provided a grant for in-country intensive language training in 1995. In 1997, I received, for similar purposes, a summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship funded by the U.S. Department of Education and administered by the University of Michi-

Acknowledgments

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gan, Ann Arbor, Center for Russian and East European Studies. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship funded my ‹eldwork. A Predoctoral Fellowship, Dissertation Fellowship, and a one-term Dissertation Grant from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, provided support during the analysis and initial writing phases of this project. The Gender and Labor Markets division of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic provided institutional af‹liation and support during September 1999–October 2000, when I was in Prague to collect data. I am especially indebted to Marie Có ermáková for making these arrangements possible. Lenka Veselá, Markéta Vorosová, and Anna Komzaková served as my research assistants at various points during my ‹eldwork. I am immeasurably grateful for their tireless work. Monica Janochová taught me to speak Czech fearlessly. She is unequivocally one of the most gifted teachers I have ever met. This book would not, however, have come to fruition without the seventy-four Czech women who shared with me their personal stories about their postsocialist everyday work and family lives. I am forever touched that these women entrusted me with their private thoughts and permitted me to give them a very public voice. I am also appreciative of the many individuals—academics, trade union representatives, ministry of‹cials, and others—who helped me to understand the broader structural landscape of Czech women’s lives. Throughout this project, my family has shared in the intensity of its tribulations and triumphs. My mother warrants particular mention as she has been one of my greatest advocates, one of my toughest critics, and an indefatigable editor. I also thank many friends for their encouragement. Special gratitude goes to W. Carter Smith and Samantha Stone for their unceasing can-do attitude and for their willingness to review the many iterations of this work. Their friendship is one of my life’s great treasures.

1 Introduction

In 2003, two Czech film students, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, used a state grant totaling 1.5 million Czech crowns (as well as other funding) to promote the opening of a ‹ctitious hypermarket in Prague.1 Klusák and Remunda documented the hoax in their ‹lm Có eský sen (The Czech Dream), which became a box of‹ce hit when it reached Czech theaters in 2004. While the media and politicians condemned the ‹lm for wasting public money, Czech ‹lmgoers ›ocked to see it. Remarkably, Có eský sen played in Czech theaters for over a year. While the novelty of its genre, billed as a reality show on ‹lm, captured Czechs’ attention, it was arguably the absurdity of its story that truly captivated them. Klusák and Remunda employed the services of a top advertising agency, visited style consultants at Hugo Boss for their makeovers as “directors” of the hypermarket, and invested in psychometric tests aimed at gauging consumer preferences. For two weeks in May 2003, the opening of the supposed hypermarket was advertised via a teaser advertising campaign with brightly colored slogans on billboards such 1. Three-quarters of costs were covered by placing advertisers’ logos in the ‹lm’s credits. The remainder of the funding came from the Fund for the Support and Development of Czech Cinematography, Czech Television, and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (www.czech-dream.com).

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MARKET DREAMS

as “Don’t Go There,” “Don’t Spend Your Money,” “Don’t Stand in Line,” “Opening May 31st at 10 A.M.!—Where? You’ll ‹nd out soon,” and a chorus-sung jingle with sarcastic lyrics like “If you don’t have the cash, get a loan and scream, ‘I want to ful‹ll my dream!’” In Klusák and Remunda’s words, the strategy was built on “suspense” and “mystery.”2 TV spots as well as two hundred thousand ›yers advertising ridiculously low prices further tantalized Czech consumers. The lures worked. On May 31, 2003, more than a thousand people—young, old, ‹t, and disabled—showed up at the Letany fairgrounds in Prague for the hypermarket’s grand opening. The advertisements had promised a “surprise” for everyone who came on opening day, and that is indeed what they got. What from a distance appeared to be the front of the hypermarket painted in the eye-catching colors of its advertisements was in actuality just a ten-meter-high, one-hundred-meter-wide billboard sitting in a green ‹eld. After realizing that they had been tricked, the “customers” had a variety of reactions. Some cursed the student ‹lmmakers. A few even threw stones at the store’s faux facade. Several chuckled at the wellexecuted ruse. Others noted the irony in having been duped. As one would-be “customer” commented, “I thought the era of lies was over, but it’s not.” While most obviously, this ‹lm is a treatise on consumerism gone wild, its meanings—for Czechs as well as for other Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) citizenries more broadly—go much further. The timing of this scam coincided with the Czech government’s campaign for a “yes” vote on accession to the European Union (EU). In Có eský sen’s closing sequence, Klusák and Remunda signal this wider signi‹cance by inserting a short segment on Czech politicians’ campaign to convince Czechs to vote favorably on EU accession, thereby intimating that marketers and politicians vying for Czechs’ purchasing and political verve similarly exploit an array of verbal and visual ploys. For Czechs, the ‹lm’s connotations speak not only to the continuities between marketers’ and politicians’ manipulation of consumers’ and citizens’ minds but also to the parallels between slogans of the socialist past and those of the postsocialist present. Albeit in different guise, the “propaganda” associated with the socialist past exists in the present. In Có eský sen, the convergence of more than one thousand “cus2. Taken from an interview with the ‹lmmakers posted on the ‹lm’s Englishlanguage Web site (http://www.czech-dream.com).

Introduction

3

tomers” at a market’s opening day and ‹lm shots of many running across the Letany grounds toward its supposed entryway is testimony enough to Czechs’ enthusiasm for the market. But, while Có eský sen is about Czechs’ mania for a particular market, it might also be read as a parable about Czechs’ fervor for and encounter with capitalism. Seventy-seven percent of Czechs voted in favor of EU accession—to becoming in effect a part of Europe’s common market. In 1989, a mere fourteen years earlier, Czechs had radically changed course, rejecting the Communist Party’s command economy regime in favor of a freemarket economy. These processes of marketization are not unique to the Czech Republic; many countries across the CEE region have followed a similar path. However, Czechs’ attitudes toward their socialist economic past (negative) and their anticipated capitalist future (positive) have been more pronounced than the attitudes of their CEE counterparts (Rose 2001; Rose and Haerpfer 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998). While Có eský sen shows Czechs rushing toward an imagined market located in a Prague ‹eld, the race toward the market more broadly understood is an underlying subtext. Có eský sen reminds Czechs about the power not only of ideas but also of those notions that fallaciously buttress the market. Even some of the hypermarket’s prospective customers in the ‹lm acknowledge this irony, which thus cannot escape the audience’s notice. Có eský sen compels Czechs to think about the market’s meaning for them and more profoundly to re›ect on how easily they can be convinced of its “dream.” As I watched Có eský sen in the Sve t( ozor Theater, located just off Prague’s Wenceslas Square, during the summer of 2005, I was struck by the realization that Czechs were engaged in recognizing the market not merely as a set of practices involving the trading, buying, and selling of goods and services but also as a constructed image or set of ideas. For more than a decade, my scholarly attentions have focused largely on questions of marketization and in particular on its meaning in the Czech context and in the postsocialist world more generally. My engagement, informed by my feminist inclinations, has been somewhat more limited, centering principally on marketization’s implications for women. Nonetheless, my understanding of the ideological workings of the market is certainly akin to the insights wonderfully embodied in Có eský sen. In this book, I explore how free-market economics as a discourse penetrated postsocialist spaces—speci‹cally, the Czech Republic—and

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MARKET DREAMS

how political elites discursively mobilized the free market to legitimate a new economic order in the decade following socialism’s overthrow. This discourse manifests as a grand narrative—a metanarrative—in which capitalism vanquishes communism and frees the “captive” populace.3 In the most fundamental sense, it is a constructed story about good conquering evil. In this compelling metastory, the neoliberal market is the ever-moral hero and the state the almost-always-immoral villain. The free market ‹ghts the impoverishing (communist) state for economic growth and ultimately prosperity. In Czech neoliberals’ telling of the tale, no compromises in the form of market socialism, reform communism, or a socialist market economy are viable. Only a neoliberal market can truly free the populace from its communist con‹nement, allowing citizens to leave an uncivilized place and return to the civilized world—that is, Europe. To reach this tale’s triumphal end, however, those held captive must help with their own release. This entails forsaking their “bad,” irrational behaviors (irresponsibility and dependence) and assuming “good,” rational behaviors (self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence). According to Czech political leaders, Czechs’ national character as a talented, able and clever people renders this adaptation possible. In return, the people can end the punishing deprivations of their socialist past and reap the copious rewards of a capitalist present and future. At the time of this tale’s telling, free-market economics is globally hegemonic. At this historical moment, the “invisible hand” of the free market is deemed the most economically functional route, and state intervention is seen as dysfunction. This metastory is further set in a space with a distinct past, marked by nearly half a century of state socialism—the Czech Republic. In its postsocialist present, this place has encountered fewer tribulations and more triumphs than other postsocialist countries have in restructuring its economy. In this particular time and place, this meta-tale has taken root, with national and international political elites actively contributing to its cultivation. Their careful and crafty nurturance has resulted in a strong, steady, and ultimately quite convincing metastory. 3. Although the capitalist conqueror is dressed in neoliberal guise and communism is only partly clothed in socialist attire, this does not detract from the overarching storyline.

Introduction

5

At its core, however, this book focuses on how a postsocialist populace interprets this conveyed “dream” of the free market in which capitalism now promises a “radiant future.” More concretely, the book concerns how seventy-four Czech female managers and factory workers stay true to its transposed logic despite the incongruities between their “reality” and the “dream.” Regardless of the inclusivity of the market metanarrative’s promise, many scholars expected that women and workers would walk away from the free market empty-handed—capitalism’s losers—much like the would-be customers in Có eský sen. In fact, Czech female managers have found their way in, reaping the market’s promised gains. Czech female factory workers, in contrast, have remained outside, with the free market’s rewards out of their reach. Experientially, these two groups of women have traveled very different postsocialist paths. Yet interpretively, in their personal postsocialist parables, members of both groups conclude that their path ends with liberation. For the managers, this release from socialism’s strictures is immediate and ubiquitous, affecting every facet of their lives as workers, citizens, wives/partners, and mothers. In trading their socialist misbehaviors for a “market” mode of comportment, they count themselves among transition’s success stories. The factory workers’ losses are just as profound as the managers’ gains—if not more so. In the postsocialist era, the workers have been pushed to Czech society’s economic and social margins. However, they interpret these deprivations as temporary; their descendants will partake in capitalism’s promised bounty. In their understandings, the “radiant future” will belong to their children and grandchildren. The conclusion of Có eský sen makes apparent the mismatch between reality and dream. The ‹lmmakers admit the hoax, and there is no escaping the knowledge that a billboard and some scaffolding do not make a hypermarket. In contrast, the free market’s propagators acknowledge no such ruse; they will not discredit the “dream” of capitalism. Moreover, no credible alternative seems available. For this postsocialist populace, socialism is now their nightmare, and capitalism has become their dream. Consequently, female managers and factory workers strive interpretively—either altering their own experiences or modifying elements of the market metanarrative—to preserve their faith in capitalism and to avoid a Kafkaesque state of being. In so doing, they both empower and disempower themselves, sometimes quite unwittingly.

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MARKET DREAMS

Market, Meaning, and (Meta)Narrative An important precondition for the analysis presented in this book is that the market is not solely construed as the trading, buying, and selling of goods and services. In contrast to this market realist conceptualization, scholars have argued that the market also functions as a mental model informed by particular cultural and political referents (Carrier 1997; Dilley 1992). I locate my theoretical take on the market largely in the latter theoretical camp, as do other scholars who conceptualize the market as a discursive form. I extend the theoretical and empirical agenda of market modelers and discourse analysts in considering the workings of the free market as a discourse in the postsocialist milieu (Dilley 1992). I suggest, however, that the market does not merely represent an ideological manifestation expressed via discourse but also takes shape as a narrative—more speci‹cally, as a metanarrative.4 Metanarratives are not only grand or all-encompassing stories but are distinct from other narratives in their naturalization; this naturalization occurs when social phenomena are naturalized (Somers 2001). Put more simply, when stories are grounded in “that which is designated as ‘given’—unchanging, spontaneous, voluntary, natural, God-given, lawlike”—they achieve metanarrative stature (Somers 1999:144). Thus, when narratives go meta, they derive an authority that is profoundly dif‹cult to dislodge. However, as Elliot Mishler asserts, metanarratives “conceal patterns of domination and submission” (1995:115). During moments of social turmoil, narratives become “at least partly externalized,” making them all the more ready for both their propagators and protagonists to enact (Hart 1992:635). Instrumentally, these narratives can become a mobilizational resource for political leaders who manipulate them to persuade their addressees to adhere to a desired course of action (Hart 1992). In the aftermath of the CEE citizenries’ revolutionary retaliation against the socialist state in the late 1980s, the market metanarrative came to the fore in much of the region as a formidable resource for political leaders. Free-market economics underpins a potent, publicly espoused metastory aimed at convincing CEE citizenries of the merits of the free market. The metanarrative embodies a very particular rather than universal set of values that, 4. Thompson claims that “ideologies tend to assume a narrative form” (1984:11).

Introduction

7

treated as natural and thus taken for granted, go unexamined. While counternarratives can undermine such stories, this event is unlikely in the postsocialist milieu (Mishler 1995). Socialism’s collapse has created an ideological void. For CEE populaces, the communist counternarrative has been discredited, leaving the metanarrative of the free market not only hegemonic but unrivaled. In an otherwise uncertain and ambiguous postsocialist world, the free market has been “elevated to the touchstone of certainty” (Dilley 1992:22). Furthermore, the market is not something “out there” but rather is integrated into the very self, often unconsciously. The principal way in which humans are understood to make sense of their lived experiences is through narratives (Jameson 1981; Kane 2000; Mishler 1986; Personal Narratives Group 1989; Somers 1994). As Laurel Richardson explains, “People make sense of their lives through the stories that are available to them, and they attempt to ‹t their lives into the available stories. People live by stories” (1990:129). Individuals effectively seek to integrate their experiences, past and present, by invoking prevailing stories—public, social, and/or cultural (Somers and Gibson 1994). In addition, individuals not only appropriate narratives in the act of sense making but also articulate their resulting reasoning in narrative fashion. In other words, people cognitively and orally engage their world through stories (Richardson 1990). Out of this synthesis of lived experience with available stories emerges who individuals are and what they do. As Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson elaborate, to do otherwise “would fundamentally violate their sense of being at that time and place” (1994:67). Two types of stories lie at the empirical core of this book: a metanarrative about the free market of public currency, and seventy-four personal narratives. I look at how a portion of the CEE populace— twenty-six Czech female managers and forty-eight Czech female factory workers—engage with a constricted narrative universe dominated by the story of a free-market economic order. I demonstrate how these two groups of women have anchored their experiences—what has happened and is happening to them—to this metanarrative. Most apparently, this book describes the role of a metanarrative about the market in a postsocialist space. More importantly, it speaks to how a publicly articulated narrative’s structure and context can empower the story so that it de‹nes “what is possible and intelligible” (Chase 2005:667). The delimiting capacity of such a story, however, can transpire in radically different ways.

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MARKET DREAMS

I explore the market’s meanings from the vantage points of two overlapping groups of its supposed losers: workers and women. While the metastory of the free market is told to all, many scholars never expected it to become a reality for all. In the systemic trade-off between socialism and capitalism, many—but not all—stood to gain, to win in terms of power and prosperity. Some people were expected to slip in their social and/or economic foothold, becoming losers in this economic game guided by a wholly different set of rules than those of the previous forty years. The anticipated losers included women and workers as well as pensioners and a multitude of others, including former state bureaucrats, peasant farmers, the disabled, and the unemployed (Greskovits 1998; Mate(ju¡ 1995, 1996; Pollert 1999; Róna-Tas 1996; Sachs 1993). Many imagined that such losers, angered by a “radiant future” that they were denied, would challenge the move toward the free market with “radical collective protest, anomic movements, massive strikes, and political violence” (Greskovits 1998:69; see also Ágh 1991; Jowitt 1992; Sachs and Lipton 1990). However, during the 1990s, this expected backlash from women and workers across the postsocialist world never ensued. Why not? Many scholars certainly have attempted to explain the quiescence of women and workers in the postsocialist world. Such explanations generally have attributed this inhibition along gender and class lines to institutional and ideological holdovers from the socialist past. These accounts have evolved largely separately, with little attention to the linkages between axes of difference such as gender and class. Substantial tensions among gender scholars of postsocialism are founded in this disregard for the potential overlay either among the assumed losers (e.g., women and workers) or between the supposed losers and the alleged winners (e.g., women and managers). The dif‹culties of treating these various social groupings marked as losers as discrete and homogenous have gone virtually unrecognized among scholars principally preoccupied with the class dimensions of economic reform. This mutually exclusive regard with respect to gender and class engenders ambiguities in both bodies of literature. The question of how to discern “loss” further confounds these literatures. Women Dis/Content Throughout the 1990s, gender scholars of postsocialism debated extensively whether women were the losers of CEE economic (and political)

Introduction

9

transitions.5 This dispute fractured most visibly along geographic lines—West versus East.6 Western scholars, for the most part, portrayed CEE women as the losers, claiming that reform processes further diminished these women’s “already tenuous hold on resources” (Molyneux 1994:293; see also Einhorn 1993; Einstein 1996; LaFont 2001; Moghadam 1993, 1996; Spencer 1996; Watson 1993). At the same time, many CEE scholars charged their Western counterparts with producing a homogenized rendition of the victimized “CEE woman.” Furthermore, they challenged Western scholars’ valuations of women’s gains (e.g., selfdetermination) as well as losses (e.g., guaranteed employment) (Côermáková 1995; Havelková 1993, 1996; Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk 2000; Šiklová 1994, 1998, 2000; Štast’ná 1995; Szalai 2000; Tóth 1993; Veš( ínová-Kalivodová 1998). For some Western scholars, such as those with Marxist/socialist feminist leanings, the incursion of capitalism into the formerly socialist world was enough to cause alarm. In their understandings, the source of women’s oppression lay in part if not in entirety in capitalism; socialism, in stark contrast, was seen as an emancipating force. They looked with envy on the high levels of female labor force activity attained in the socialist states, fostered and facilitated by an array of social protections accorded to mothers and families. For example, in socialist Czechoslovakia,7 women made up 46.2 percent of the total active working population in 1980 (Kroupová 1991). They also received twenty-eight weeks 5. Transition is a term frequently invoked in reference to the systemic changes transpiring throughout the postsocialist world in the aftermath of state socialism’s overthrow. Many scholars have suggested that the word problematically presumes a particular teleology (i.e., from Communist Party rule to democracy, from planned to free-market economy) and embodies an implicit set of values (i.e., modernity). Some have wondered whether the label transformation better captures the processes of change in the CEE region. Both of these terms, however, remain in currency, and they are often used as though they were interchangeable. In my use of these labels, I subscribe to the contingency and open-endedness of change in the postsocialist world. 6. My intent is not to essentialize “West” and “East.” They are merely heuristic devices useful in illuminating differences. They are in no way absolute distinctions; variabilities within and commonalities between them prevail. 7. Czechoslovakia was a single nation between 1918 and 1993. On January 1, 1993, the country split into two independent states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. My references to the country as Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic shift accordingly.

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of maternity leave after the birth of a child and 90 percent of their net wages during this period. The state subsequently provided a family allowance and protected leave from their jobs until the child reached the age of three.8 These “achievements” were crucial facets of long-pursued feminist agendas in the West. The collapse of Communist Party power in the CEE countries was thus read as a major setback for women. Other Western scholars based their apprehension less in the distinctions between socialism and capitalism’s relationship to women’s subordination and more in the particular variant of capitalism making inroads into CEE—that is, a capitalism of neoliberal predisposition. As Barbara Einhorn describes, the “dominant neo-liberal paradigm” posits that the market is the “sole and suf‹cient regulator of economic and social development” (1995:2). Many Western scholars saw this relinquishment of the economy to the “invisible hand” of the market as placing CEE women’s needs and interests in jeopardy. Their assumptions were not unfounded; a considerable body of scholarship, commonly known as women in development or gender and development literature, had already evinced neoliberalism’s largely negative effects on female populaces, most especially in Latin America and Africa but also beyond (Beneria and Feldman 1992; Deere et al. 1990; Sparr 1994). In the minds of many of these scholars, neoliberalism, with its globalizing propensity, had trespassed the borders of yet another world, the Second World, to the detriment of its female populace, a by-now-predictable victim. And a reliance on gender-disaggregated statistical measures and an observance of social policy reforms offered empirical con‹rmation of the parallels in the shape of deepening gender divisions in the economic sphere, the feminization of poverty, and the deterioration of women’s reproductive and legal rights (Dijkstra 1997; Dölling 1991; Einhorn 1993; Einstein 1996; Kiss 1991; Moghadam 1993; Nesporova 1999; Paukert 1995; Stamatel 1997; UNICEF 1999). In the swell of triumphalist proclamations about the free market and its bene‹ts for all citizens, regardless of their gender, these Western gender scholars of postsocialism were largely lone voices of dissent. With the underbelly of the free market exposed, they awaited CEE 8. For further details on social protections provided by CEE socialist states, see Hübner, Maier, and Rudolph 1993; UNICEF 1999.

Introduction

11

women’s expressions of dissent. To these observers’ surprise, however, CEE women appeared passive. Several Western scholars explained this lack of “feminist consciousness” as rooted in feminism’s leftist associations with communism as well as the socialist state’s attack on feminism (Funk 1993; Goldfarb 1997; Heitlinger 1996). Some observers further suggested that under socialism, the state/society opposition eclipsed the man/woman dichotomy (Snitow 1993; Verdery 1994). While CEE social scientists have generated similar explanations with respect to feminism’s connotations in the region and the overshadowing of gender identities by a state/society opposition under socialism, many have not agreed with Western scholars’ assessments of CEE women’s post-1989 status. While Western scholars readily observed a scenario of loss for CEE women, this depiction was less obvious to CEE social scientists, many of whom fervently contested their Western counterparts’ predictions and conclusions. This refutation came most vehemently from Czech scholars. Czech sociologist Jaroslava Štast’ná, for example, declared, “Since 1989, Western social scientists have largely driven debate and have transferred—often uncritically—their concerns and concepts of the role of gender in Western society into the context of Eastern and Central Europe” (1995:24). While Štast’ná’s contention is perhaps the most forthright, her challenge was not novel: CEE social scientists’ rebuffs of Western scholars date back to the early 1990s. For example, at a 1991 United Nations seminar on the impacts of political and economic reform on women’s status in CEE, Hungarian political scientist Maria Lado declared, The pessimistic views on [CEE] women’s prospects were based on historical and economic projections of situations completely unlike the current transition from a centrally planned economy to a market one. . . . [I]t is an over simpli‹cation to assume that the changes would have only a negative impact on the lives and economic activities of women. (United Nations 1992:46) Similarly, Czech philosopher Hana Havelková described a “diagnosis” of CEE women’s postsocialist situation based on Western women’s “theoretical and practical experience” as resulting in “an underestimating of the speci‹c historical experience of women in Eastern Europe”

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(1993:64–65). In the same volume, Hungarian sociologist Olga Tóth rebuked Western scholars for their “pity” and “trembling compassion”; in Tóth’s view, these sentiments stemmed from Western scholars’ “distortions” and misunderstandings about CEE women’s contemporary realities (1993:213). Czech sociologist Jir&ina Šiklová deemed Western scholars “insensitive” for behaving as though they “already know everything” (1993:10). Romanian sociologist Laura Grünberg (2000) described this as trying to build an “Eastern” house “with Western bricks.” Šiklová also articulated similar sentiments about miscalculations in Western scholars’ readings of CEE women’s postsocialist story: From the point of view of Western social scientists, the post communist block appears as an undifferentiated whole. But it is not homogenous. There always were and there still are big differences between the countries which are now collected under the term post communist. The economic and political situations in these states differ in essential ways, depending on the traditions and on the conditions of the country before World War II (1939), on how closely and for how long the country was economically and politically tied to the former Soviet Union, and on the ethnic and religious makeup of the country, both past and present. (1994:3) Essentially, CEE social scientists have perceived Western scholars as producing a one-dimensional, overly simpli‹ed rendition of the victimized CEE woman. This formulation left CEE scholars uneasy. Western scholars seemed to layer false universalizations about women’s experiences—globally, by assuming a similar terrain (theoretically and practically) between East and West; regionally, by treating the CEE nations as historically undifferentiated; and locally, by disregarding the salience of other social differences besides gender (e.g., class, ethnicity). While CEE social scientists’ efforts to draw attention to CEE women’s “differences” signal several shortcomings in Western scholarship on CEE women, this type of challenge to Western scholarship has emerged on other fronts as well: from Western women of color, particularly African Americans, and from non-Western, Third World scholars, often referred to as postcolonial (Flew et al. 1999; Minh-ha 1989; Mohanty 1988; Ong 1988; Sangari and Vaid 1989). Both have charged Western scholars with inadequately attending to the historical, cultural,

Introduction

13

and social variability of women’s experiences, resulting in the inaccurate composites of “women of color” and “Third World women.”9 Like the “Central and East European woman,” the “woman of color” and the “Third World woman” are solely victims of wider structures of exploitation such as capitalism. This assumption has riled CEE social scientists. Štast’ná proposed that CEE women may turn out not to be the losers in the transition from socialism to capitalism but contended that it has yet to be established because a “thorough and systematic” analysis of the gender dimensions of this shift remains to be done (1995:26). Like others before them, CEE social scientists seek to (re)measure loss as well as potential gain against the “constitutive complexities” of CEE women’s lifeworlds to accurately comprehend the market’s meaning in postsocialist venues, especially for its women (Mohanty 1988:53–54). Clashing modes of interpretation ultimately underlie these tensions between East and West. Relying on various quanti‹able indicators, Western scholars glean loss. And indeed, the status of CEE women relative to their male counterparts has changed in ways more inauspicious than not. These losses are, however, read as absolute—static, irrespective of place. For CEE social scientists, in contrast, the losses are relative—›uid, respective of place. Where Western scholars appear to have missed the mark is in understanding the meanings of these gendered outcomes as this capitalism of neoliberal predisposition was planted in postsocialist soils with distinct blends of historical, cultural, and social components. Nonetheless, while so many CEE social scientists have invested considerable energy in disputing Western scholars’ pessimistic readings, they have put forth little substantive evidence. More recently, however, several Western scholars seem to be heeding these calls for contexualizing CEE women’s free-market encounter (Gal and Kligman 2000a, 2000b; Haney 2002). And this contemporary scholarship, still small but growing, generates richly variegated accounts of CEE women’s experiences in the economic transition from socialism to capitalism. Kristen Ghodsee (2005), for example, illuminates how Bulgarian women employed in the tourism sector actually became winners in 9. Women of color have been more inclined to accentuate the social, while postcolonial Third World scholars have tended to place greater emphasis on the historical and the cultural.

14

MARKET DREAMS

Bulgaria’s transition to a market economy primarily by using their cultural capital in strategic fashion.10 These latest accounts suggest that multiple scenarios are at play in the CEE countries, rather than merely a single scenario of loss.

Worker Dissent or Consent While the postsocialist status of CEE women has been hotly debated, there has been no comparable contestation among scholars about the status of workers in the postsocialist world. All observers would concede that for the most part, any “worker’s paradise”—communism’s promise—was now undeniably out of workers’ reach (Kubicek 2004). In addition, most observers expected that workers would exert the greatest resistance to capitalism’s incursion (Crowley and Ost 2001; Greskovits 1998). Nonetheless, the working class in the CEE countries (as well as more globally) was marked as a class in “dissolution” and thus received less scholarly attention in the early 1990s outside of predictions of worker protest (Stenning 2005b:988). While Simon Clarke and his coauthors (1993) would worriedly ask What about the Workers? their postsocialist plight was largely overshadowed by a preoccupation with the emergence of “new” classes—more speci‹cally, with the task of quantifying and categorizing these groups (Böröcz and Róna-Tas 1995; Evans and Mills 1999; Eyal, Szélenyi, and Townsley 1998; S¼omczynski and Shabad 1997; Szelényi 1995; Szelényi and Szelényi 1995). Furthermore, this disregard for the working class following socialism’s demise has extended well beyond academic literatures. CEE public discourse contains little discussion of the working class’s postsocialist circumstances (Kideckel 2002). Only when the anticipated social explosion from workers failed to materialize by the mid- to late 1990s did interest rejuvenate somewhat in workers, in the working class, and in workers’ political inactivity.11 10. Cultural capital (also known as human capital) refers to an individual’s education, skills, and experience. It also includes, as Ghodsee explains, the “acquisition of ‘good taste.’ . . . This kind of cultural capital is also referred to as symbolic capital, because an individual’s public ‘performance’ of these discerning tastes symbolizes personal ‘success’ to others in her social milieu” (2005:13). 11. A few exceptions to this pattern of worker inactivity in the CEE region have occurred—for example, Romanian miners in the Jiu Valley (Kideckel 2002).

Introduction

15

Scholars have offered a range of explanations for workers’ lack of dissent. David Ost (1995) attributes worker passivity in the postsocialist world to a mix of factors, including a communist history of antagonisms rooted in a state/society opposition rather than class difference, anticommunist and Cold War ideologies, personal experience as illegal workers in the West,12 and the discrediting of socialism. Béla Greskovits (1998) points to a lack of structural, institutional, and cultural correlates for collective action. According to Stephen Crowley (1998), the “interdependencies” between management and workers with respect to the distribution of goods and services foster worker quiescence. Sarah Ashwin (1999) contends that con›ict manifests primarily within enterprises as a consequence of structural barriers to workers’ mobilization as well as of the relational dynamics operating between enterprises and labor unions. She also contends that workers perceive enterprises as allies, united in their mutual interest to survive. In a comparison of labor weakness across the postsocialist world, Stephen Crowley and David Ost conclude that the “crisis of socialist ideas itself is a key factor,” as is the “rise of a pro-market narrative” (2001:229–30).

The Macro, the Micro, and Modernization Theory Much of the literature on the implications of capitalism’s entry into CEE spaces has offered up a bleak portrayal of a suffering and struggling working class passively responding to its marginalization and exclusion (Emigh and Szele&nyi 2001; Kideckel 2002; Stenning 2005a, 2005b). However, as Alison Stenning rightly contends, this is a partial depiction in which the “lived experiences of class” for workers in the postsocialist era are underinvestigated (2005b:988). In many ways, this de‹cit re›ects a wider trend present in much of the 1990s literature on CEE transitions, in which theorizing the macro dimensions of the CEE countries’ new economic order achieved primacy. Toward the end of 1990s, a number of scholars sought to alleviate this shortfall by directing their attentions at transition’s “micro worlds” (Berdahl, Bunzl, and Lampland 2000; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Hann 2002). As Michael Burawoy and 12. According to Ost, such experience meant that “capitalism appeared as a system in which labor has no rights yet gets good pay for a hard day’s work” (1995:193).

16

MARKET DREAMS

Katherine Verdery claim, “A focus on the day-to-day realities of postsocialism reveals a more ambiguous account of the transformation announced with such fanfare” (1999:6). Indeed, such investigations into the everyday complicate the assumed future proffered by economists; these scrutinies of the micro worlds of postsocialist populaces reveal transition’s often unintended and unexpected consequences. These works have not only highlighted a critical dimension of economic transition that was largely ignored during its initial decade but have also countered portraits of passive victimization by ‹nding emergent, innovative modes of resistance in CEE citizenries’ responses. These works serve as valuable new methodological departure points for an analysis of the market’s meaning as individuals experience it. Recent trends in gender and postsocialist scholarship also re›ect the in›uence of this bottom-up approach to looking at transition (e.g., Ghodsee 2005; Haney 2002); however, its relevance is certainly more widespread. Accountings of the postsocialist predicaments of both women and workers largely re›ect loss and passivity. These characterizations have tended to treat loss as an objective rather than subjective state of being. For example, rising female unemployment and workers’ social marginalization are construed as losses. Indeed, these outcomes are readily observable and in absolute terms are losses. However, undergirding many of these early readings of women’s and workers’ postsocialist plummet were a set of assumptions about CEE transitions that were reminiscent of many of the fundamental tenets of modernization theory.13 Accordingly, many observers presumed the CEE states to be transitioning from a lesser to a more advanced stage and ultimately to be progressing toward a democratic and capitalist end. Many observers thus saw the losses of women and workers as an inevitability—a given— and the mobilized resistance of these two disenfranchised groups seemed a logical sequitur as the region advanced along what was presumed to be a close-ended course. The modernization approach applied to CEE transitions has not gone unchallenged; a number of scholars have suggested that social changes in the postsocialist world are better understood as path-dependent on institutional and ideological legacies from the past and are 13. As Blokker points out, classical modernization theory was developed in the 1940s and 1950s but was “thoroughly discredited” by the 1970s (2005:504). However, some of its assumptions have reemerged in studies of postsocialism.

Introduction

17

therefore sui generis (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Eyal, Szelen& yi, and Townsley 1998; Gal and Kligman 2000a; Kennedy 2002; Stark and Bruszt 1998; Verdery 1996). This alternative is a far more contextually contingent, open-ended route that can simultaneously embody regress and progress (Burawoy and Verdery 1999). The true promise of this approach lies in its power to decipher postsocialism’s paradoxes—for example, the passivity of women and workers. By understanding the speci‹cities of the past, those of the present, and their interplay, postsocialism’s incoherences become coherent. This call for sensitivity to context certainly manifests in more recent scholarship on women’s and workers’ immobilization with an array of institutional and ideological remnants from the past identi‹ed as explanatory factors. Overall, however, these literatures have problematically assumed rather than questioned loss. In other words, their principal task has been to account for objectively deemed loss without exploring its conceptual meaning in the CEE milieu.

Subjectivity: Standpoint as Starting Point Whether and how individuals understand their experiences as losses and, perhaps even more importantly, act on them relies on contextually contingent, subjectively constructed sensibilities. While this book offers yet another explanation for women’s and workers’ apparent consent to a capitalist course, this work’s novelty lies in part in its destabilization of “loss.” In reconsidering marketization as it is lived, I consider how losses (and gains) are subjectively recognized. I further shift the focus away from the past to consider the workings of an ideological manifestation of the postsocialist present—that is, a metanarrative about the market. This book is theoretically founded in an understanding of social life as storied and one in which the narrated self involves drawing on, often unconsciously, narratives that are seldom of individuals’ own invention. Further in›uencing the stories individuals tell are their social locations—for example, gender and class (Veroff et al. 1993). At the center of this book are two groups—factory workers and managers—that constitute opposing poles on transition’s socioeconomic spectrum of winners and losers. Managers, viewed as the major players in the postsocialist pursuit of pro‹tability, stood to reap transition’s winnings both symbolically and materially. In sharp contrast, in a world where

18

MARKET DREAMS

“workers’ states” have collapsed, workers had much to lose (Crowley and Ost 2001). Complicating this simple dichotomy is gender: all of the subjects in this study are women. Are female factory workers then doubly losers? And, in contrast, are female managers only quali‹ed winners? This book is signi‹cantly in›uenced by feminist standpoint theory, which advocates using women’s experiences as a starting point for inquiry (Harding 1991; Harsock 1987; Smith 1987). This perspective is premised on the notion that knowledge is socially situated. While feminist standpoint theory grants primacy to women’s experiences, standpoint theory’s invocation extends much further, encouraging inquiries whose point of departure is from the standpoint of those marginalized, thereby permitting insights into the workings of societal inequalities. I start, in part, from gender’s periphery. Other particularly relevant in›uences include postcolonial and African American feminist scholarship, which have argued that gender’s interplay with other social locations such as class and race complicates a ready characterization of women as solely dominated (Collins 1990; Mohanty 1988; Ong 1988; Spellman 1988). In the intersection of these axes of difference, women can simultaneously be oppressor and oppressed (e.g., as white women) or multiply marginalized (e.g., as women of color). In the case of the postsocialist CEE countries, existing literature on workers and/or women, albeit somewhat suggestive, does little to make visible the way in which the interplay of various social hierarchies dictates the “appropriate stories to tell and the reasons for telling them” (Orbuch 1997:467). In this book, I make evident these connections.

Making Sense of Marketization The market frenzy depicted in Cóeský sen was not the ‹rst in the Czech Republic. With the 1989 Velvet Revolution,14 Czechs overthrew their communist regime. The eradication of the communists’ grip on power had political as well as profound economic implications. Czech citizens rejected not only the Communist Party but also its planned economics, in which the state determined the production and distribution of goods 14. The Czech media quali‹ed the 1989 revolution as “Velvet” to connote its bloodlessness and the ensuing ease of its political reform.

Introduction

19

and services. Czechs instead welcomed democracy and the free market. Czechs’ readiness to embrace the free market and to relinquish the command economy outstripped that of most CEE citizenries (Rose 2001; Rose and Haerpfer 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998). While some CEE populaces—reluctant to let go of the long arm of the socialist state— hesitated to reach for the market’s hand, others took hold but nevertheless stumbled. For Czechs, however, the market seemed to offer a sure and steady grip. And Czechs seemed to reach back with staunch conviction in their grasp. Out of this seemingly assured and mutual embrace came the star of CEE economic transitions—the Czech Republic. For much of the 1990s, it held this stature. Nationally and internationally, the country was deemed a best-case scenario, with Czechs’ seemingly strict adherence to neoliberal mandates receiving much of the credit for the success. While in the late 1990s, Czechs’ conformity to neoliberal dictates came into question, the market’s ideological and practical foothold in the Czech Republic appeared very solid throughout much of the decade. What would this macroeconomic success mean for marketization’s supposed losers? Between September 1999 and October 2000, I interviewed seventyfour Czechs in an effort to provide some answer to this question. Those I interviewed were members of a generation that had spent their entire childhoods and a portion of their adult lives under Communist Party rule. In the midst of their adulthood, they suddenly faced new and unfamiliar economic terrain. All were employed in manufacturing enterprises in Prague—an industry historically and currently of massive proportions in terms of its labor inputs and productive outputs. In the aftermath of 1989, some of transition’s greatest dramas played out in the manufacturing sector as its enterprises shifted from state to private ownership. As ownership con‹gurations changed, so too did enterprises’ demands for labor, pushing some groups out and pulling others in. Managers are no longer economic pawns in the socialist state’s economic game, merely carrying out state dictates. Now, they are players in their own right, responsible for ensuring enterprise viability and pro‹tability. Meanwhile, workers’ privileges have largely been stripped away. While the socialist state worked hard to foster socioeconomic equality via mechanisms such as wage controls, the new market economy does not seek this end; such control mechanisms thus have largely been eliminated. A vast socioeconomic chasm consequently opened up between managers and workers. The disparities could not be much

20

MARKET DREAMS

more dramatic. Managers earn salaries that place them among the Czech Republic’s top earners, a “new elite”; workers have become part of the “new poor.” However, all of the managers and workers I interviewed are women. As discussed earlier, many Western scholars construed a commonality to CEE women’s postsocialist experiences, viewing the entire cohort as losers. However, in the socioeconomic shakeup of the Czech Republic, all Czechs have not landed in the same location. Some now sit at the top of the economic hierarchy, a few make up the middle strata, and a majority have ended up in the bottom tiers (Róna-Tas 1996). Does this socioeconomic footing matter for how these seventy-four women make sense of marketization with respect to their day-to-day lives? In this book, I maintain that it does so in ways that at ‹rst glance may be somewhat surprising but on closer examination prove quite understandable. I demonstrate how these female managers and workers draw on the logic of the market metanarrative to construct their own narratives. Out of this appropriative act comes an interpretation of the free market as a source of liberation for both groups. Two very different liberatory tales result, however. Czech female managers identify as “winners.” And in recounting their rise to the top, they attribute their success principally to knowing how to take advantage of their abilities. This act involves adopting a market-mandated set of behaviors—self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence. The market’s transformative power affects every aspect of their lives, reshaping their roles not only as workers but also as citizens, wives/partners, and mothers. However, making market sense means marking some experiential aspects as nonsense. For Czech female managers, this involves discounting their gender because “woman,” as a social category of constraint and difference, is not readily interwoven into a metastory whose core tenet is opportunity. History and culture also appear irrelevant in their sagas of success, in which instrumental rationality constitutes a core emphasis. In the interpretation provided by these managers, liberation is available to any individual with abilities, at any time and any place, as long as one assumes the free market’s behavioral requisites. For Czech female factory workers, economic vulnerability, a dependence on the state, gender-based discrimination, and exploitation by employers de‹ne their daily experiences in the postsocialist era. These women are acutely aware of their marginalization. They have not shared in the free market’s promised

Introduction

21

prosperity. This dissonance is not, however, met with a disenchantment with the free market. They construe this failing as a consequence of their own “bad” behaviors. In their interpretations, socialism has sullied them. Born and raised under capitalism, their future generations will possess the “proper” behaviors and will therefore prosper. Capitalism’s promise of a “radiant future” thus remains unbroken. Future generations will win.

Routes and Roots This book sees the market as more than just a set of practices in which goods and services are bought and sold; the market manifests as a discourse, metanarratively expressed. And, in this manifestation, it proves of formidable force in shaping individuals’ identities and actions. Empirically, this book focuses on a speci‹c postsocialist situation, but it speaks more broadly to the challenge posed by the descent of one of the “metanarratives of modernity,” communism, and the ascent of its counternarrative, capitalism (Dilley 1992:xi). In the Czech milieu, this development leaves capitalism’s imputed losers without an alternative. And thus, in complex and sometimes counterintuitive ways, they meld personal experience and public story together, yielding both empowering and disempowering rami‹cations. Here, the market’s mutability in terms of its routes and roots is made apparent, revealing both causes and consequences that are not wholly familiar. To comprehend the present logic of Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ lives necessitates some understanding of its past order. Toward this end, in chapter 2 I outline how the socialist state’s revolutionary ideas about gender and class heavily structured these women’s lives. I devote particular attention to the salience of manufacturing in the socialist state’s pursuit of industrialization and for the proletarianization of women. I go on to illuminate how the post-1989 overhaul of the manufacturing sector mirrors a larger cosmos of transformations in the Czech economy. I then turn back to the managers and factory workers and to the methodological challenges of ascertaining where they stand—in their estimations—on this shifting economic terrain. In chapter 3, I detail how marketization took shape in the Czech Republic during the 1990s, both in practice and in ideological discourse. Here, I focus especially on the major contours of the Czech Republic’s eco-

22

MARKET DREAMS

nomic transition tale. In chapters 4 and 5, I recount the collective stories of Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ lifeworlds. These collective renditions are stitched together quite differently, but they weave in the same liberatory threads of the market metanarrative. Out of these mergers of personal experience with a metanarrative of public articulation, Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ identities and actions are constituted in ways that until now have not been fully recognized or understood. In chapter 6, I move from the immediate implications of these mergers for Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ empowerment and disempowerment to the larger implications of this study.

2 Two Logics, One Life [The revolution] seemed so strange to me. . . . All of a sudden there was a “Hrrr,” and that was it! —Dáša, Czech factory worker

It would be impossible to understand the meaning of the free market in the present for Czech female managers and factory workers without some understanding of the past that the Velvet Revolution disrupted. For Dáša, the Velvet Revolution was ‹guratively like a loud roar, suddenly and unexpectedly disrupting the hush around state socialism. Indeed, while political dissidents existed in socialist Czechoslovakia, no organized opposition existed, as had been the case in some other Communist Party–ruled states. And, while the Communist Party in several of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had loosened up its political and economic reins in the 1970s and 1980s, the Czechoslovak Communist Party had maintained its tight hold. In retrospect, 1989 represented a major turning point not only for Czechs but for the whole of the CEE area. In 1989, the hush was broken in Czechoslovakia. This interruption, while shocking to Czechs, was not, however, unique. The sounds of revolution reverberated across the region. In February 1989, Poland’s communist leadership had entered into talks with the opposition, known as Solidarity. By April, the Polish Roundtable Agreement ushered in major changes in the country’s political power structure. The agreement opened the door to democracy in Poland with a noncommunist government sworn into of‹ce the following September. A month later, Hungary’s parliament followed suit, 23

24

MARKET DREAMS

adopting a package of democratic reforms (e.g., free elections, trade union pluralism). On November 9, the Berlin Wall fell in East Germany, and twenty-four hours later, the Bulgarian Politburo forced Todor Zhivkov out as the country’s leader, and citizens ‹lled So‹a’s streets, demanding further reforms. In Czechoslovakia, what began on November 17, 1989, as a student demonstration commemorating the death of Jan Opletal, a student killed in a 1939 anti-Nazi demonstration, escalated into popular protest for regime reform. At the outset of the Velvet Revolution, many Czechs failed fully to appreciate its historical magnitude. Most, like Dáša, initially reacted with bewilderment at what they construed as “so strange.” Julie, then age twenty-nine, thought that it was a communist “trick” that would be used to justify tighter controls and price increases. Others were reminded of the 1968 Prague Spring,1 when Czechoslovakia’s efforts toward a more humanized socialism led to a Soviet invasion that quashed the country’s reform movement. Remembering the “great euphoria” and subsequent “enormous disappointment” of 1968, some Czechs, like then thirty-six-year-old Ru¡½ena, reacted with fear, anticipating a similar outcome. Twenty-six-year-old Irena and others who were bolder and more hopeful, rushed out into the streets to join in. So‹a, then in her mid-twenties, recalled the “enormous joy” at “what you didn’t believe [could happen] . . . suddenly happening.” For Czech female managers and factory workers as well for Czechs more generally, the Velvet Revolution provoked a range of emotions, including bewilderment, disbelief, fear, and hope. The moment would ultimately prove not only to be ‹lled with strong, con›icting emotions but also to be a de‹ning moment that radically altered their lives’ logic. The socialist state’s revolutionary ideas about gender and class had heavily in›uenced the script of their lives prior to 1989, yielding a common plot. In this chapter, I outline the ideological and practical facets of this socialist script. I pay special attention to the importance of manufacturing in the Czechoslovak socialist state’s quest to industrialize its economy and to proletarianize its citizenry, particularly women. The 1. This was a period of economic, political, and cultural reform between January and August 1968. Economic reforms “involved a partial move towards the market with a greater role for pro‹ts as an indicator for success, a convertible currency and much larger wage differentials” (White 2001:32). Political restructuring entailed a democratizing of Communist Party activities. At the same time, the relaxation of “ideological barriers” rejuvenated cultural life (Pokorný 1994:34).

Two Logics, One Life

25

ongoing importance of manufacturing and its postsocialist restructuring—a microcosm of the country’s macroeconomic reform course— are used to justify my focus on its female labor force. I conclude with a discussion of my own methodological laboring in gathering and retelling stories, public and personal, told in the wake of the roar that brought socialism crashing down and capitalism rushing in.

Equality Enforced All of the seventy-four Czech female managers and factory workers whose postsocialist lives take center stage in this book were born between 1944 and 1965.2 With the Communist Party’s assumption of power in 1948, their childhoods took place against a socialist backdrop. Before assuming the work-family juggling act, nearly all of these women watched their mothers and in many instances their grandmothers couple domestic duties with full-time jobs. Indeed, between 1948 and 1988, female labor force participation as a percentage of Czechoslovakia’s total active population increased from 37.8 percent to 47.3 percent (Kroupová 1991).3 The proportion of working-age women employed in Czechoslovakia rose from 53.1 percent in 1950 to 62.1 percent in 1985 (Fong and Paull 1993).4 By the mid-1980s, Czechoslovakia had among the highest rates of female labor activity in the world. Why? In part, the Czechoslovak state mobilized female labor to meet one of socialism’s preconditions, an industrialized economy. Faced with the depletion of the male workforce as a result of World War II and low labor productivity, the socialist state turned to women to meet its labor needs. This was not the only factor pulling women into the labor force, however. A 2. The only exception is Štepanka2, who was born in the early 1980s. She is included only because she attended (and participated in, although in quite limited fashion) a focus group at her factory along with her mother, Štepanka, and several of her coworkers. 3. The accuracy of statistical data collected during the socialist era must be viewed with some caution. It was at times distorted, with certain ‹ndings either exaggerated or downplayed. This manipulation served various sometimes competing interests—that is, not only the state’s interest in self-preservation but also those of individuals. For a fascinating discussion of information management in “Bolshevik-type party states,” see Szakolczai and Horváth 1991. 4. “Working age” includes those between sixteen and sixty-four.

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far more complex process was at play involving the socialist state’s ideological commitment to social justice in which women’s emancipation was critically implicated. This commitment was most explicit in the 1948 Czechoslovak Constitution in which Chapter 1, Article 1, stated “Men and women have the same position in family and in society and the same access to education and to all positions, of‹ces and ranks.” In all of the socialist states, Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) constituted of‹cial doctrine regarding the origins and remedies of women’s subordination. Many of Engels’s ideas about women’s status originated with Karl Marx. After Marx’s death, Engels put these ideas on paper (Scott 1974:32). While other ideologues such as August Bebel, Vladimir Lenín, and Josef Stalin also weighed in on the “woman question,” none had as great an in›uence on the socialist states as did Engels. The core argument of The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State linked women’s subordination to three causes founded in industrial capitalism: women’s limited or complete lack of property ownership, their material dependence on men, and the con‹nement of their labor to the home. Having established the reasons for women’s oppression, Engels set out the means necessary to emancipate women: The emancipation of women will only be possible when women can take part in production on a large social scale and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insigni‹cant amount of time. And only now does that become possible through modern large-scale industry which does not merely permit the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends toward ending private labor by changing more and more into a public industry. ([1884] 1972:221) Put more simply, the elimination of private ownership, the incorporation of women into wage labor, and the socialization of domestic work constituted the three criteria for women’s emancipation. In Czechoslovakia, as well as across the CEE region, Engels’s ‹rst criterion—the abolition of private property—was accomplished as socialist states lay claim to most privately owned property. Doing so entailed nationalizing industry, collectivizing agriculture, and instituting “directive economic management” (Porket 1981:243). This effort represented a step not only toward gender equality but also toward

Two Logics, One Life

27

Marx’s vision of a classless society. However, common ownership and political rule—that is, by the people—were deemed the real bases for classlessness. As Paul Kubicek notes, “The party-state, despite its pretensions to the contrary, was not ‘by, for, and of’ the workers” (2004:22). The Czechoslovak Communist Party, like others across the CEE region, became a self-serving new class that enjoyed many privileges denied to ordinary citizens, such as traveling abroad and access to foreign goods (Djilas 1957). Socialist states generally condemned the accumulation of personal wealth, which was seen as accentuating class difference; instead, they placed much of their ideological and practical emphases on the building up of societal wealth. Toward this end, the Czechoslovak Communist Party prioritized heavy industry. Manufacturing, especially heavy manufacturing, achieved particular primacy in Czechoslovakia as a consequence of its “assigned” role as a “manufacturing economy” in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (more commonly known as COMECON or CMEA) among Eastern Bloc states (United Nations Industrial Development Organization 1992:xxi). Consequently, Czechoslovak manufacturing took on massive proportions in terms of both labor inputs and material outputs. This drive to expand industrially compelled the state to look for alternative and available laborers—women. The integration of women into production—conveniently, Engels’s second criterion for women’s emancipation—was accomplished using three main strategies. The ‹rst strategy involved eliminating the family wage, making two incomes necessary for family survival. Recalling this dynamic in socialist Czechoslovakia, Emílie commented, “Women worked because we had to work, because a man’s wages weren’t enough.” This did not, however, mean comparable compensation. Women typically earned on average nearly one-third less than their male counterparts, even when they held the same job. But the socialist state’s egalitarian class philosophy generally meant little wage discrepancy between employed citizens overall. The prevailing wage differentiation favored manual over nonmanual laborers. These “premiums for brawn rather than brain” largely re›ected the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s proworker pretensions (Scott 1974:121). The second tactic entailed linking social bene‹ts and protections to employment. As Marie recollected, Czechoslovak socialism provided various nonmonetary “social advantages” to employment, including a monthly voucher for a haircut, summer camp subsidies for her child,

28

MARKET DREAMS

and a free liter of milk every day. Employment could also offer more substantial bene‹ts, such as housing, which was frequently distributed through enterprises. This particular incentive should not be underestimated, given the housing crunch that typi‹ed socialist Czechoslovakia. According to a 1963 survey by the Czechoslovak State Population Commission, the housing shortage would force 60 percent of the 1,866 young urban couples who had applied for marriage licenses to reside with one set of parents immediately after marriage, while another 20 percent would have to continue to live apart for as long as several years (Scott 1974:107). Criminalizing unemployment constituted the ‹nal stratagem. Magda explained that abdication of one’s “responsibility” to work was deemed “parasitism,” a crime for which “one was locked up.” For the socialist state, drawing women into the labor force necessitated enhancing women’s educational prospects. As a whole, Czechoslovaks were a remarkably literate people. During the mid-1950 and early 1960s, illiteracy hovered around 23.5 percent in Yugoslavia and 11.4 percent in Romania but amounted to only 1 percent of the Czechoslovak population (cited in Wolchik 1978:22). Differences between male and female literacy rates were negligible in socialist Czechoslovakia, but substantial disparities prevailed between men’s and women’s choice of ‹elds. Female students tended to end up in nontechnical ‹elds such as education and the humanities; males inclined toward technical areas such as agriculture and engineering. This gendered separation in educational paths eventually translated into gendered segregation in the labor market. The Czechoslovak state generated far more mixed accomplishments with respect to Engels’s third condition, the socialization of domestic work. The state developed and improved services (e.g., public laundries, public day care) to facilitate women’s labor force participation. For example, the number of day nursery spaces increased nearly sixfold between 1948 and 1953 and then tripled again by 1979.5 However, while promoting the “New Socialist Woman,” the Czechoslovak state simultaneously and somewhat schizophrenically promoted motherhood through an array of social policies designed to allow and encourage women to ful‹ll their “natural” role as mothers. As previously mentioned, women were eligible for twenty-eight weeks of maternity leave, during which they received 90 percent of their net wages. At no point 5. Day nurseries cared for children between six months and three years of age.

Two Logics, One Life

29

did the Czechoslovak socialist state ever call for a more equitable division of domestic labor. The “private labor” of which Engels wrote only partially became “public industry”; the rest remained primarily women’s responsibility. In the mid-1960s, estimates showed that Czechoslovak women spent an average of approximately 40.7 hours per week on household chores, while men spent only about 15.1 hours per week on such tasks (United Nations 1991). While the Czechoslovak socialist state made women’s participation in production mandatory, it ultimately failed to fully meet Engels’s third condition. The demands placed on women for reproductive labor,6 far in excess of their male counterparts, very likely rendered them less competitive and, for some, perhaps less wanting in the productive arena and thus may account for some of the gendered strati‹cation as well as segregation in the labor market. One interesting example of these gender-skewed outcomes emerged in pediatrics. Although the ‹eld was 79 percent female in 1989, women occupied only 22 percent of the leadership posts in this branch of the medical ‹eld (Šiklová 1994). As Hilda Scott noted, CEE employers saw women as unreliable employees who “if they were not out on maternity leave or home with a sick child, were off somewhere standing in a queue” for basic foodstuffs (1978:192). Yet another factor shaping the trajectory of women’s lives under socialism in Czechoslovakia was their association with the Communist Party. Parents’ party membership in›uenced children’s educational possibilities. Eliška wanted to go to “hotel school,” but because neither of her parents was a party member, she was refused admission to the school despite her good grades. Lucie described a similar scenario. Despite being at the top of her class at age fourteen, she got no further than a secondary school specializing in training students to work in the dairy industry because her parents were not members of the Communist Party. While having a parent in the party was advantageous, it did not necessarily open wide education’s doors for a child. As Líza recalled, her father joined the party for the sake of his children’s education, but “it didn’t have any in›uence on me because I didn’t have such good grades in school.” Party membership could also help adults gain access to certain resources, such as housing. For example, Dáša, her husband, and their 6. “Reproductive labor” refers to those activities implicated in the upkeep of a household on a daily basis.

30

MARKET DREAMS

child spent three years sharing a two-bedroom apartment with seven other family members. Her husband’s ‹rm encouraged him to join the party to get a one-bedroom apartment. Olivie’s employer made her advancement to management conditional on her Communist Party enlistment. She refused and consequently remained on the factory ›oor as a worker. With resource accessibility tied to party af‹liation, membership became more about resource acquisition than about ideological allegiance. In its ideology, the Czechoslovak socialist state was a gendered and class emancipatory project. In practice, only pseudo-emancipation was possible. As Jacqui True rightly observed, “The gender regime that emerged under socialism . . . effectively homogenized women’s lives and distinguished them from men’s” (2003:30).7 At the same time, the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s expropriation of virtually all private property and its leveling of incomes worked to quell class differences in the broader populace, but its economic heavy-handedness accentuated class differences between the party and the broader populace. Simultaneously and paradoxically, the socialist state played down and up gender and class differences. Life under state socialism for Czech women, according to Emílie, ultimately was “not some great favor.” For the generation of women on whom this book focuses, life under state socialism was demanding, with few possibilities. All were employed, most full time, as were their spouses. For many, association with the Communist Party played a role in determining their educational paths and subsequently their employers and the nature of their employment. Work contracts were often lifelong, and job mobility was by and large quite limited. Because travel outside of the Communist bloc countries was seldom allowed, they were further con‹ned to a life behind the Iron Curtain. Czechs frequently relied on Có edok, the state-owned travel bureau, to organize their travels—a trip to the Black Sea beaches or a ski week in the Tatra Mountains were typical holiday offerings. The majority married young—in their early twenties—and gave birth to their ‹rst child shortly after. As mentioned earlier, most married couples had to wait as long as several years to procure an apartment from the state or their employer. 7. For further elaboration on how the socialist state simultaneously accentuated and downplayed gender differences, see Fodor 2002.

Two Logics, One Life

31

In the interim, they resided in tight quarters with extended family. The allocation of housing often coincided with the birth of a second child. Accommodations were often provided on Prague’s outskirts in one of the many housing estates known as panelák, “high-rise multi-story blocks of ›ats constructed of pre-fabricated, pre-stressed concrete panels” (Hanley 1999). These small, nondescript ›ats became do-it-yourself projects for most Czechs, whose “key impulse” was “to create their own private worlds” (Hanley 1999). Beginning in 1973, the state provided young couples with low-interest “newlywed loans” of up to thirty thousand crowns that enabled people to purchase furnishings for their new abodes.8 However, the Czechoslovak socialist state, focused on economic growth via rapid industrialization, did not prioritize consumer goods, so, despite Czechs’ efforts to individualize their homes, a largely unavoidable uniformity of household items prevailed. More generally, the socialist state’s compression of wage differences coupled with its orientation toward industrial rather than consumer goods meant that Czechs could purchase few items beyond their basic needs. Nonetheless, Czechs tried to satisfy their unmet material wants and to distinguish themselves from one another. In Dáša’s perception, the CEE countries were “gray” and the “West” was “colorful.” To brighten up their lives, some Czechs bought smuggled goods or used their social networks to procure items of limited availability. Many traveled across intra-CEE borders to obtain better-quality goods, often at substantially lower prices. According to Háta, Lipska in Poland and Dresden in East Germany were popular destinations to which Czechs drove to buy children’s clothing and shoes. Some Czechs procured raw materials— sometimes bought, on other occasions stolen, typically from an employer—and produced items themselves. Háta and her husband, for example, used their newlywed loan to purchase a sewing machine (among other household goods), and Háta taught herself to sew so that she could make her own clothes. At that time, the patterns were available in a German magazine, in a magazine for women. . . . This magazine was available from only one store in Prague. On the day the magazine came out, there was a line all day. It was about three hundred meters long on Jungman8. At the time of its introduction, this sum was more than ten times the average monthly wage (Kantorová 2004)

32

MARKET DREAMS

nová Street, four people deep. . . . Sometimes the police intervened [because the customers] would scream about who was there ‹rst and who had shoved in front of who. For each child they bore, Czech couples also received a monthly monetary sum from the state to aid with child-rearing costs. During the ‹nal two decades of Czechoslovak state socialism, this “child bene‹t” totaled one-third of the average monthly wage for a family with three children (Kantorová 2004:63). The birth of each child canceled out part of the newlywed loan—two thousand crowns for the ‹rst child and four thousand crowns for each subsequent child (Kantorová 2004). Josephina characterized life under state socialism as “comfortable,” requiring little thought because “everything was given.” In Sabina’s view, having few choices made life “simpler.” With so much speci‹ed by the socialist state, many Czechs had predictable lives. In the constraining climate of Communist Party rule, little was left to the imagination; Czechs understood that the logic of their lives depended little on their own agency. Life, as Josephina put it, was about “necessity” (what one was compelled to do) rather than opportunity (what one chose to do or was able to do). Socialist states worked hard to cultivate work as the “basic unit” of individuals’ lives (Ashwin 1999). Around this state-structured social reality, individuals con‹gured the other areas of their private lives. For women, family was the remaining realm. Thus, family marked their youthful reveries. Both Elena and Máša recalled that as adolescents, they wanted nothing more than the “comforts of a home”—a “good man” and “children.” As Julie explained, she and the other members of her cohort had little else to ponder.9 Imagining a vibrant picture of the future proved dif‹cult with so few colors on the palate. Since a husband and children were among the few grati‹cations available, few women chose to delay marriage—in Eliška’s words, women were in a “headlong rush to get married, have children.” Waiting, she and others contended, 9. The Prague Spring brie›y invigorated the imaginations of those coming of age in the mid-1960s. For example, forty-six-year-old factory worker Ru¡z&ena reminisced about her teenage dream of being a professional musician but acknowledged, “around ’68 it was a little freer. . . . I thought perhaps I will go somewhere and look around, perhaps even abroad because our school had a friendship with a school in Dijon [in France].” But with the 1968 Soviet invasion, “everything was different, and the borders were closed.”

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33

did not occur to them. In a world in which the socialist state abrogated so much, family was a sacred preserve. Here, Czechs strove to curb the profane state’s incursion into their lives. The Czechoslovak socialist state was like a domineering paternal ‹gure, forever trying to compel its “children” to behave; these children resented their overbearing “father’s” dictatorial style (Verdery 1994). Indeed, this dynamic fostered an unrelenting antagonism between Czechs and their communist system that largely, albeit inadvertently, supplanted gender and class tensions.

The Primacy of Industrialization and Proletarianization The generation of women to which these seventy-four Czech female managers and factory workers belong faced an extraordinary circumstance, unlike both the preceding and succeeding generations. In midadulthood, the political and economic regime that ordered their lives was overturned, opening up social cleavages that the Czechoslovak socialist state had long tried to quell. This book focuses on women employed in manufacturing because of its tremendous economic importance both before and after 1989. As table 1 shows, the manufacturing industry as an employer, both of women and men, has historically and contemporarily far outstripped all other industries. By the mid-1980s, manufacturing employed an estimated 799,650 women (32.7 percent of all employed women). During the 1990s, economic restructuring resulted in some ›uctuation of manufacturing’s labor inputs, but not enough to threaten its stature as the country’s leading employer. Many enterprises, in the throes of contraction or collapse, laid off laborers; some ‹rms—mainly startups and those undergoing expansion— hired labor. According to an International Labor Organization study on women’s employment in the CEE countries, between 1990 and 1993, 46.6 percent of Czechoslovak manufacturing ‹rms decreased their female workforce, while 18.7 percent increased their female workforce (Paukert 1995:62). As table 1 illustrates, the overall result was a reduction of manufacturing’s labor pool, with a more pronounced decline for women than for men. Despite these substantial decreases, manufacturing has remained the largest employer of men and women in the Czech lands. A correct accounting of the sector’s material output of the manu-

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MARKET DREAMS

facturing sector under state socialism proves more dif‹cult to ascertain. Elizabeth Dunn explains that socialist accounting systems were “notoriously unreliable . . . the result of intense social negotiations, interpersonal relationships, and political pressures rather than depersonalized representations of actual transactions” (2004:42).10 Nevertheless, there table 1. Employment by Industry in the Czech Lands (in thousands of persons) 1985

1993

Women

Men

Women

Industry

846.5

1,245.9

628.3

Manufacturing Only

799.7 1,025 (32.7%) (36%)

Agriculture, Hunting, and Forestry 249.9 Fishing .5 Construction 57.5 Wholesale and Retail Trade 354.8 Hotels and Restaurants 60 Transport, Storage, and Communication 118.8 Financial Intermediation 18.2 Real Estate, Renting, and Business Activities 169.5 Public Administration and Defense 50.8 Education 207.7 Health and Social Work 210.5 Other Community, Social, 101.7 and Personal Service Activities Total 2,446.4

1999

Men 1,036.1

587.3 883.7 (27.8%) (33.3%)

Women

Men

569.4

945.6

535.8 (25.3%)

839 (32%)

374.7 1.8 346.4

116.4 .4 52

208.2 1.5 394.4

71.8 .4 41.7

149.4 1.6 353.7

147.2 29.3

358.5 63.5

253.4 49.2

363.1 88.6

349.9 71.2

229.6 5.9

120.7 49.7

236.5 19.4

114.2 57.4

233.1 30.1

202.9

132

172.7

182.9

216.4

37 80.7 51.5 95.5

84.5 240.3 203 67

56.9 82.4 58.1 88.3

107.9 228.1 213.7 75.8

76.2 77.9 54.5 69

2,848.1

2,116.3

2,657.6

2,110.5

2,628.6

Source: Data from Czech Statistical Office 2002b. Note: The Czech Lands include Bohemia and Moravia.

10. According to Dunn, socialist accounting systems were “designed for the convenience of state planners, not for enterprise managers, investors, or regulators. They produced a different kind of knowledge, which was used for a different kind of corporate discipline. Because soft budget constraints made it unnecessary to control costs or worry about pro‹ts, many enterprises used ‘net accounting.’ That is, they reported only the ‹nal results of their budgetary cycles—increases or decreases in inventories, ‹nished goods, and work in progress. Data was often reported in national units (e.g., jars of jam) rather than in monetary value, because central planners were more concerned with allocating material resources . . . than in how much pro‹t a company was making” (2004:41–42).

Two Logics, One Life

35

is little question that the manufacturing sector’s material output was quite considerable—somewhere around 50 percent of all material outputs (United Nations Industrial Development Organization 1992). Under state socialism, central planning meant the “elimination of competition between ‹rms in an open marketplace” (Dunn 2004:15). Stateowned and -run enterprises did not concern themselves with creating a pro‹table product. The scarcity of raw materials meant that manufacturers competed with each other not for buyers but for suppliers so that they could meet their “plan” (Dunn 2004; Kornai 1980, 1992; Verdery 1996). Effectively, quantity rather than quality was of central concern. Since 1989, the constraints on production have dramatically shifted. CEE manufacturers must now play a global game with capitalist rules. Winning over buyers now determines survival, and wooing these consumers rests heavily on product quality. Largely as a result of this transposed emphasis, manufacturing’s material outputs have shrunk. Nonetheless, manufacturing still makes up the largest share—more than one-third—of the Czech Republic’s economic activity.11 Regionally, as ‹gure 1 illustrates, the greatest contribution to manufacturing’s outputs has historically come from Prague. Aside from the sheer volume of workers and goods that the manufacturing sector pulls in and puts out, respectively, this sector constitutes a smaller-scale version of the wider spectrum of economic transformations incurred in the Czech Republic’s move toward the market. In manufacturing, what were once all state-owned ‹rms are now of mixed private ownership—many Czech, others foreign, some a combination of the two. Many are downsized pieces of formerly socialist— unwieldy and inef‹cient—larger enterprises. Furthermore, some aspects of entrepreneurialism and foreign investment that were forbidden under Czechoslovak state socialism are now permitted, resulting in some new manufacturing enterprises—again, many Czech, some foreign. These joint ventures, multinational buyouts, and startups blur the boundaries of (socialist and postsocialist) time and (national and international) space. The tidiness of public ownership is gone, replaced by an untidy array of private ownership arrangements. Nonetheless, all share the same goal of economic viability in the new market economy, and 11. For exact ‹gures, see the Czech Statistical Of‹ce 1994, 1999, 2002a, available online at http://www.czso.cz.

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MARKET DREAMS

fig. 1. Industrial map of Czechoslovakia.

(From United Nations Industrial Development Organization 1992.)

achieving this end now necessitates conforming to a capitalist rather than socialist mode of production. The Czech economy—and more speci‹cally, manufacturing—has pushed (out) and pulled (in) Czechs, requiring the shedding of excess labor and the introduction of new, decentralized management. In the new market economy, factory workers have exceeded their demand; in contrast, managers are in short supply. At the same time, the state has released much of its regulatory grip on wages, resulting in new valuations of labor. In manufacturing, consequently, wages for factory workers have stagnated or fallen, while managers enjoy high salaries. Without the socialist state to counteract class divisions via wage controls, a new socioeconomic chasm has opened up among Czechs. The gap prevailing between factory workers and managers is but one example of such rifts. Signi‹cantly, the seventy-four women in this book are all acutely aware of this socioeconomic schism. As Josephina, now a manager, stated, before 1989, “we were all equal; now we’re no longer all equal.” In Háta’s recollection, “a wide, distinct middle class existed

Two Logics, One Life

37

which reached across practically the entire spectrum. Only a small margin were a very rich class, people who had access to and the possibility of everything. And then [there was] a very small class of people who really happened to be somewhere at the bottom.” In her perception, this has changed since the revolution: “The middle class is getting smaller and smaller—it’s narrowing—and the spectrum at the margins is expanding.” The result, in her terms, is a “polarized” society. Many people ‹nd these differences unsettling. According to Heda, they are “awfully visible.”

Methodological Labor: Gathering and Retelling Stories For forty years, the Czechoslovak Communist Party variably harnessed and subdued gender and class disparities. In 1989, it released its reins, turning them over to the market. Czechs have exchanged the givens of a coercive and controlling socialist state for laissez-faire capitalism. The market is now Czechs’ supposed liberator. In ideological terms, this is a liberation for all—an unbiased freedom. In practical terms, haves and have-nots prevail. For women, this surfacing of socioeconomic difference has washed away the socialist semblance of sameness, producing one of economic transition’s immediate and most visible trade-offs. This book focuses on the market’s meaning for women—twenty-six managers and forty-eight factory workers—scattered across manufacturing’s topography. For these two cohorts and certainly for many others throughout the CEE region, the socialist economic logic of their lives was unexpectedly dislodged and replaced with a new capitalist order. Their roles as workers, citizens, wives/partners, and mothers have taken shape in the con‹nes not of one world but of two—one socialist, the other capitalist. What does this economic reordering mean to these seventy-four women? In this exploration of the role of market in the everyday work and family lives of Czech female managers and factory workers, my data come from four key sources. First, Czech mass media serve as the basis for gleaning the structure of the market metanarrative. I rely primarily on newspaper articles, speeches by and interviews with political elites, radio and television programs, and books written by political elites pertaining to the country’s economic reform. All of these documents were written or produced between 1990 and 2000. The newspaper articles

38

MARKET DREAMS

were pulled primarily from four of the six major news dailies of popular consumption in Prague during randomly selected months over the 1990s—Mladá fronta DNES, Lidové noviny, Právo, and Svobodné slovo.12 Second (and third), I draw on the personal narratives of Czech female managers and female factory workers, conveyed through focus groups and interviews conducted between September 1999 and October 2000, about the impact of marketization on their day-to-day lives. Fourth, I draw implicitly on nineteen interviews I conducted with an array of individuals—labor union representatives, government ministry of‹cials, academics—who helped me to understand the broader structural landscape of Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ postsocialist lives.13 I interviewed twenty-six Czech female managers and conducted eight focus groups and nineteen interviews with female factory workers.14 Virtually all were between thirty-‹ve and ‹fty-‹ve years of age, a generation required to adapt to new economic conditions over the course of their working lives (see the appendix for sample demographics). I recruited most of these individuals by calling companies. In addition, several managers I interviewed referred me to others. Managers were easy to contact directly via phone or e-mail. Gaining access to factory workers proved to be a more complicated undertaking that involved gaining the trust of their gatekeepers (e.g., factory supervisors, labor union representatives). I most easily accomplished this task with a phone call or an e-mail followed up by a fairly brief face-to-face meeting with a gatekeeper. Sometimes the mere sight of me proved suf‹cient. In one factory, for example, all I needed was a quick handshake with a supervisor in the factory’s entryway. In another instance, the human resource manager required a detailed explanation of my project. In one factory, at the close of my ‹rst meeting with a manager and without my solicitation, she volunteered contact with the workers. I conducted most interviews with managers in their of‹ces, more formal-feeling spaces saturated with work. This formality pervaded managers’ demeanor at ‹rst, but as interviews progressed, so too did 12. Hospodarské noviny was not included because it is an economic daily; its readers are primarily entrepreneurs, diplomats, civil servants, and academics. Blesk was ruled out because of its tabloid status. 13. A native Czech speaker assisted me during all interviews with “experts.” 14. A native Czech speaker transcribed all interviews, which I then coded using ATLAS-ti software.

Two Logics, One Life

39

their affability. My initial encounter with workers took place within the con‹nes of a focus group held at their job site—at their or the factory’s behest. The presence of coworkers provided an ease to their dialogue. These focus groups seemed to encourage an informality that later spilled over into their interviews. I interviewed most workers in their homes, a more informal realm ‹lled with the markers of family. Amid the interruptions of phones, faxes, coworkers, spouses, and/or children, I questioned these women about their work and family lives since the Velvet Revolution.15 I posed an array of open-ended queries and probes about their pre-1989 recollections of work and family, memories of the Velvet Revolution, post-1989 expectations, work history, work motivations, desire and ability to change jobs, experiences with ‹rm privatization, employer/state/family supports, state policy, household labor, adolescent hopes and dreams, perceptions of women’s versus men’s advantages and disadvantages, and hopes for and concerns about the future. These seventy-four women created a storied order to their lives, making sense of themselves. For some, their story unfolded in ‹ts and starts. A few related their tale as though in a mad dash, putting my Czech to the test as I struggled to keep up. Others were more paced in their telling. Voicing their storied selves kindled not only their thoughts but their emotions. No single emotion marked a story; instead, there were many. These emotions ›itted across their faces and at times inundated their bodies. For most of these women and certainly for me, this sharing of self was inescapably intimate. We met for one to three hours on multiple occasions. For managers, this meant two individual interviews. Factory workers began their narratives in a focus group made up of their coworkers. From the larger pool of forty-eight focus group participants, I conducted individual interviews with nineteen women. I interviewed a few only once but met with most twice. In interviews, most hospitably offered up a káva (coffee) or voda (water). Many indulged me with a sweet, most often a sušenka (cookie) but on some occasions a slice of a Czech dort (cake) featuring poppy seeds or fruit. With focus groups, however, I offered the beverages and an assortment of chlebicky & (open-faced sandwiches), a popular Czech snack. I think most of the women found me, a Czech-speaking American, 15. During focus groups, a native Czech speaker assisted me by acting as a moderator.

40

MARKET DREAMS

novel. Very often, their ‹rst question was about my language skills. Most assumed that I had some Czech background and were surprised to discover I had none. The women occasionally inquired about my life. Managers, most of whom had university degrees, asked about my studies. I answered all of their questions simply and directly. The next three chapters present a collection of stories articulated internationally and nationally, publicly and personally. The ‹rst is a metastory about the market that I am merely retelling by drawing on various mass media from the 1990s. The remaining two stories are mergers of the individual narratives of female managers and factory workers, respectively—that is, their collective stories, articulated ten years after the collapse of Communist Party rule. The managers told their stories to me; the factory workers began telling their stories together and ‹nished them individually. Over countless hours, these seventy-four Czech managers and factory workers shared with me their storied selves. In my retelling of these three stories, I reveal their construction, context, and connectedness.

3 A Velvet Vision The Economic Liberalization (and Liberation) of the Czech Republic There is today in the world a dominant discourse. . . . This dominant discourse often has the manic, jubilatory and incantatatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like an animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism! —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx For a neoliberal discourse is not a discourse like others. . . . [I]t is a “strong discourse” which is so strong and so hard to ‹ght because it has behind it all the powers of a world of power relations which helps to make it as is, in particular by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relations and so adding its own—speci‹cally symbolic—force to those power relations. —Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance

In the immediate afterglow of socialism’s downfall, no population in the postsocialist world embraced free-market ideology with greater fervor than the Czechs. Their enthusiasm appeared to be well rewarded, with a development trajectory hailed internationally throughout much of the 1990s as exemplary. While the majority of postsocialist states encountered substantial logistical dif‹culties and popular resistance to economic liberalization, Czechoslovakia (and subsequently the Czech Republic) seemed able to successfully traverse the complexities of this process and concomitantly to maintain public support for its economic reform strategy. Even the Czech Republic’s 1997–99 recessionary woes 41

42

MARKET DREAMS

did not derail the country’s commitment to a capitalist course or the public’s con‹dence in it. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, many observers attributed the relative social peace of the Czech(oslovak) transition to the discursive ef‹cacy of its political leaders, especially Václav Klaus (the main strategist of the country’s economic reform plan), in engaging the broader populace with the imperatives of marketization. For example, in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) occasional paper, Biswajit Banerjee and colleagues reported that the Czech “government has been remarkably successful in building and maintaining proreform consensus among the population” (1995:24). In its 1996 World Development Report, the World Bank highlighted the Czech government’s exceptionality in effectively communicating to its citizenry the “reasons for change” and the “progress to date” (1996:11). In these initial stages, the institutional bastions of neoliberalism (e.g., the IMF and World Bank) as well as many observers, international and domestic, construed the practice of economic reform in the Czech(oslovak) case as wholly neoliberal in design. These observers saw an adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy as typifying the discourse and practice of the country’s economic transition. In these early assessments, the country’s success in quelling popular resistance was ascribed to the conjoining of an ardently neoliberal discourse with an assumed neoliberal practice. Here, discourse and practice appeared to align, with the latter reinforcing the former. More recent analyses have exposed a disjuncture between these two dimensions, citing an unquali‹ed neoliberalism manifest in discourse but a hybrid of neoliberal and social democratic measures employed in practice. In such later appraisals, it was practice—in the form of a quali‹ed neoliberalism—that worked to mitigate the social effects of economic transformation which deserved the major credit for insuring popular consensus (Danger‹eld 1997; Elster et al. 1998; Orenstein 2001; Stark and Bruszt 1998). While earlier and later interpretations of Czechoslovakia’s (later the Czech Republic’s) economic transformation signi‹cantly diverge in their readings of its practicalities, they converge in their common understanding of the neoliberal nature of its discourse. In neither instance, however, have the workings been fully explicated; the salience of this discourse in cultivating Czechs’ consent also has not been suf‹ciently considered. This chapter seeks primarily to consider the

A Velvet Vision

43

contours and centrality of this discourse in generating Czechs’ allegiance to the free market. In this chapter, I draw on a variety of discursive materials (e.g., speeches, newspaper articles) in public circulation during the 1990s to reveal the composition of discourse that manifests as a metanarrative about the market. With socialism’s demise, the countries of Central and East Europe (CEE) “fell into a world dominated . . . by neoliberal discourse” (Orenstein 2001:1). As this discourse penetrated postsocialist spaces, political elites mobilized it to legitimate a new economic order. In this mobilization, it achieved metanarrative stature. I argue that this metastory in the Czech milieu is fashioned to appeal to the cultural aspirations and historical sensitivities of the Czech people. At its core is a primordial story about good overcoming evil. Anchored in the Czech context, the consequent rendition is a potent tale whose persuasive power extends well beyond the country’s national boundaries to an international audience. Much scholarship on the Czech(oslovak) transition has not fully grasped the fortitude of this market metanarrative. Its early appraisers, I suggest, fell prey to it, and consequently had dif‹culty seeing particular facets of the Czech(oslovak) transition. While later assessors saw beyond this transition tale, they failed to comprehend that this interpretive distance was not available to all—that is, to the Czech populace. Here, I retell this transition tale, making apparent its practical and discursive contingencies and complexities. In this rendition, Czech exceptionalism is solidly girded but signals the potential power of the free market, metanarratively rendered, not only in the postsocialist world but well beyond.

Global Referents In its global assessments, the systemic communist-capitalist rivalry typifying much of the twentieth century had given way to a new unipolar reality with capitalism victorious. Francis Fukuyama boldly declared the “end of history” in light of the “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to economic and political liberalism” (1989:3). While Fukuyama’s apocalyptic declaration was perhaps too extreme, his work reveals the prevailing mind-set at the end of the twentieth century. Market triumphalists reveled in communism’s defeat. Lacking any other

44

MARKET DREAMS

“serious theoretical contender,” capitalism rose up to ‹ll the void created by communism’s demise (De Boer-Ashworth 2000:1). It was not, however, just any capitalism that conquered communism; rather, it was a neoliberal brand of capitalism with grand aspirations of self-regulating free markets. In Michael Kennedy’s words, “transition . . . anchored a new liberal hegemony in the world” (2002:1). Heavily propagated by the Reagan administration in the United States and the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom, neoliberal orthodoxy reigned hegemonic during the 1980s. In its advocacy of market-led rather than state-led development (i.e., liberalism rather than statism), it revolutionized development economics. For more than a quarter century, British economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the necessity for state interventionism in economic processes to ensure economic growth held sway in the West. In the late 1970s, however, with the perceived inadequacy of economic growth in the United States and the United Kingdom, interest shifted away from Keynesian economics and toward the ideas of Austrian economist Fredrich A. von Hayek. While Keynes viewed the interventionist state as the “engine for market forces,” neoliberals, drawing on Hayekian economic theory, viewed states’ economic involvement as antithetical to market progress (Hersch and Schmidt 1996:14). The neoliberal agenda—with its goals of state deregulation and market liberalization—fundamentally rede‹ned the guidelines of Western capitalism, informing not only the mandates of (Western) advanced industrialized nations but also the mandates given to Third World developing nations by international ‹nancial and trade organizations such as the IMF and World Bank. For these lending institutions, neoliberalism translated into a formulaic, tripartite development strategy of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization that achieved wide currency in the Third World during the 1980s.1 When neoliberalism failed to be the “panacea to the problem of Third World development,” neoliberalism’s disciples deemed countries’ application of and adherence to neoliberal mandates ›awed rather than blaming the policy prescriptions’ neoliberal underpinnings (Corbo 1991; De Boer-Ashworth 2000:43). For a postsocialist populace that attributed communism’s failure in 1. In some cases, a fourth element, stabilization, is included.

A Velvet Vision

45

part to the excesses of government interference in the economy, neoliberalism had, as Jacques Hersch and Johannes Schmidt suggest, “natural appeal” (1996:9). While some scholars argue that the command capitalism of East Asian nations (e.g., Singapore, Hong Kong) was better suited to the CEE countries, the allure of neoliberal theology coupled with the CEE region’s “European” and thus Western identi‹cation resulted in only marginal consideration of the East Asian variant of capitalism. After 1989, neoliberal reformers ascended to the echelons of power throughout the CEE states, instituting reform plans that relied heavily on the council of Western economic advisers and international ‹nancial and trade organizations that offered up neoliberal reform packages akin to those formerly applied to the Third World. Despite inter- and intraregional disparities, proponents saw the neoliberal template, with its four mandates—stabilization, liberalization, privatization, and deregulation—as having virtually universal applicability. Although the mandates did not vary, the neoliberal reformers emphasized the need for rapid privatization as a consequence of the institutional and ownership particularities of postsocialist enterprises (Banerjee et al. 1995; Corbo, Coricelli, and Bossak 1991; Gelb and Gray 1991). The elaborate mix of economic measures requisite to reform included (1) “tightening ‹scal and credit policies for governments and enterprises and addressing imbalances created by a monetary overhang or large bank losses”; (2) reforming prices as well as banking and ‹nance systems, liberalizing wages and trade, and making housing reforms; (3) “clarifying public ownership rights (and separating them from the regulatory functions of government) and implementing more effective control over the management of existing ‹rms [and] establishing secure private property rights and facilitating the growth of new ‹rms [and] enterprise restructuring”; and (4) “reorienting the role of the state . . . towards an indirect regulatory role that promotes adjustment and private economic activity” though a series of legal and “economic management” reforms (e.g., taxation) and social policy revisions (Gelb and Gray 1991:7–9).

Pre-1989 Economic Conditions According to Martin Danger‹eld as well as many other scholars, Czechoslovakia’s initial economic conditions were among the key

46

MARKET DREAMS

“ingredients” that made Czechoslovakia a “climate conducive to neoliberalism” (1997:453). The industrial legacy of the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) originated during the Austro-Hungarian empire (1867–1918), when the region generated “two-thirds of the industrial output of the whole empire” (Myant et al. 1996:96). In 1918, with the empire in decline, the industrious Czechs joined with their agrarian-oriented neighbors, the Slovaks, to form the Czechoslovak nation. Despite the fusion of regions with quite disparate economic infrastructures—that is, large-scale industry and small-scale agriculture—the new nation remained a strong international competitor. By the end of the 1930s, several Czechoslovak producers—e.g., Škoda (armaments) and Bat’a (shoes)—had achieved international reputations, and Czechoslovakia ranked ‹fteenth in the world in per capita gross domestic product. In 1946, the Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia massively and destructively disrupted its economy. Under communist rule, Czechoslovak trade was rerouted from the West to the East, and its industrial orientation narrowed to focus principally on heavy industry. At ‹rst, the economy grew, but by the 1960s, stagnation had set in. Mid-1960s reform efforts restored the country’s economic prowess but were quickly suppressed by the Soviets. With economic potential largely sti›ed in the twenty-year interim between the late 1960s and the Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia’s economic growth slowly declined. Instead, it became one of the most “orthodox” communist-ruled countries of the Soviet bloc, with the Communist Party wielding sizable economic and political control (Danger‹eld 1997:439). In 1971–75, the growth rate was of‹cially reported to be 5.7 percent; by 1981–85, it had dropped to 1.8 percent; and by the end of the 1980s it was at 1.0 percent (cited in Lavigne 1999:58). These of‹cial ‹gures were likely exaggerations of economic performance; the reality was probably even worse (Lavigne 1999). By 1989, the Czechoslovak economy was grossly maldeveloped. It was skewed toward heavy industry, with a technologically outdated and therefore inef‹cient and uncompetitive infrastructure (Kaiser 1995; Myant 1989; Myant et al. 1996). Despite the magnitude of the economy’s distortion under Communist Party rule, Czechoslovakia fared better than many other Soviet bloc nations. In 1989, Czechoslovakia had low in›ation, a low budget de‹cit,

A Velvet Vision

47

comparatively low foreign debt,2 and a highly skilled, well-educated workforce. Côestmír Ko½ušník aptly captured the pretransition state of the Czechoslovak economy when he stated, “Despite some recurring gaps, the shelves of our stores were not empty, in›ation was moderate, foreign debt was bearable, employment was full and the standard of living rather stagnated, and to the extent that it declined, this was not alarming” (cited in Adam 1993:628). Czechoslovakia’s economic conditions and market heritage from 1919 to 1948 positively primed the public’s palate for neoliberal ideas. Danger‹eld adds two less apparent precedents: a lack of “‘reform fatigue,’”3 manifest among the Polish and Hungarian populaces, and the pristine entrepreneurial potentialities (1997:453). Taking the Turnpike I would say that we in Czechoslovakia, or at least some of us, have already understood a rather sophisticated concept called the Turnpike Theorem, which de‹nes the fastest way toward achieving an optimal situation. Instead of using a winding road of half-measures, of pseudosocially motivated concessions, delays, ideological errors, and prejudices, one should endeavor to follow a wide and straight ideological and economic turnpike as soon as possible, even at the expense of some short-term losses. . . . This turnpike, if I may use the term, does not include the third-way thinking known from the Prague Spring of 1968. . . . This turnpike de‹nitely does not include the perestroika way of thinking and the perestroika way of squaring the circle, so well-known in Eastern Europe and especially in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 80s and nowadays. —Václav Klaus (1991e)4

In many of the postsocialist CEE nations, neoliberal reformers situated themselves among the power elite, but their theoretical dispositions and 2. Estimates vary regarding the amount of Czechoslovak foreign indebtedness in 1989. Kaiser 1995 claims it amounted to $6 billion, while Adam 1993 (citing Kouba 1991) estimates the number at $8 billion. Other estimates fall within that range. In comparison, Hungary’s foreign debt was estimated at $20.4 billion and Poland’s external debt was thought to be $41.5 billion (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1994). 3. See Batt 1994 for elaboration on “reform fatigue.” 4. Virtually all of Klaus’s international public oratories are reproduced in print and/or electronically (http://www.klaus.cz) in Czech for the consumption of the Czech populace.

48

MARKET DREAMS

reform tactics faced challenges. In Czechoslovakia, heated debate occurred within the government about how to proceed with economic transformation. At the core of the debate were two factions—the “gradualists” and the “radicals”—with different notions about how to reform the economy. To a signi‹cant extent, this division transpired along ethnic lines, with Slovaks tending to favor a slower, more social democratic route and Czechs more inclined toward a rapid, neoliberal course. The gradualists and radicals disagreed not only about the pace of transition but also—and more strongly—about the methods of reform. Although their dispute centered on logistical disagreements regarding how to transform Czechoslovakia’s economy, in its popular manifestation it appeared to be an “ideological battle” about the character of the economy (Greskovits 1998:30). What seemed to be at stake was free-market capitalism or a hybrid of capitalism and socialism variably referred to as market socialism, reform communism, or a socialist market economy (Batt 1994; Greskovits 1998). The radicals postured themselves as righteous neoliberals and implicated the gradualists as errant market socialists (and therefore, statists) who irresponsibly “preach[ed] . . . social utopias” (Klaus 1991a). In Klaus’s characterization, free-market capitalism required constant defense against a socialist opposition that lay in wait, ready to take advantage of any weakness: Opposing forces—old-style socialists as well as other irresponsible people who were in the past seduced by decades of comfortable paternalism—are always there waiting for our effort, drive, strength, and enthusiasm to falter. They are waiting for us to make mistakes as well, but we will not give up, we will not let them win. (1991b) As Polish sociologist Jerzy Szacki explains, only by condemning all “moderate positions as ‘socialism’ in disguise . . . could doubts resulting from the existence of any capitalism be dispelled” (1994:151). And indeed, gradualists’ ideas, which, as Mitchell Orenstein explains, “›uctuated between those of reform communism and economic liberalism,” lacked the ideological purity intimated by their radical counterparts (2001:68). Despite the actualities of the gradualists’ ideas, in the public discourse, neoliberalism and market socialism were polarized. Market socialism, commonly referred to as the “third way,” invoked not only Czechoslovak historical correlates but also the “bungled reforms”

A Velvet Vision

49

of Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union during the 1980s (Blanchard et al. 1991:2; see also Batt 1994; Greskovits 1998).5 Although he never in fact used the term market socialism, Polish economist Oskar Lange is credited with its theoretical formulation, which was ‹rst published in two parts in 1936 and 1937.6 According to Lange’s model, Individuals may freely choose which goods and services they want to consume, and which job they want to do in which work-place. Prices of the consumer goods, as well as wages, are determined by the supply-demand mechanisms. The incomes are the sum of the wages paid by the enterprises and of a “social dividend” allocated by the state; this yields the aggregate demand. The means of production are owned by the state. The Central Planning Board (CPB) is informed of the consumer preferences (through the demand prices), of the total amount of productive resources (which it controls), and of the feasible technological combinations of factors. The managers of the public-owned enterprises are instructed to choose the combination of factors which minimizes their average cost, and to increase their output to the point where marginal cost is equal to the price of the product. In doing so, they use market prices for goods and labor and “accounting prices” ‹xed for the means of production by the CPB. (Lavigne 1999:268) In the 1960s, Czechoslovakia attempted to introduce market reforms akin to those in Lange’s model of market socialism. These reforms, however, were never explicitly identi‹ed as market socialist since the use of such terminology was “taboo” (Lavigne 1999:269). Instead, the reforms emerged in the guise of “socialism with a human face,” with Ota Šik, a leading Czechoslovak economist and Central Committee member, their foremost advocate. Šik, along with a number of other Czechoslovak economists, sought to alleviate the country’s economic problems by loosening the Soviet management’s stronghold on the Czechoslovak economy and opening the economy to the world 5. Accounts frequently depict the 1960s Czechoslovak “market socialism” and the reforms elsewhere in the region during the 1980s as ideologically equivalent. However, Greskovits contends that they “represent two different views of socialist market reforms” (1998:31). 6. Observers consider Hayek the main critic of Lange’s theory (Lavigne 1999).

50

MARKET DREAMS

market. Such reforms were, however, short-lived. Fearing a counterrevolution, the Soviets refused to tolerate the Czechoslovak marketization (and democratization) of socialism, and in 1968 troops from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia and quashed the country’s efforts at economic and political liberalization. A return to prereform conditions—a period known as normalization—ensued. Meanwhile, many of the instigators of Czechoslovakia’s socialism with a human face were forced to resign from their academic posts. Those allowed to remain were required to con‹ne their scholarship within strict “ideological parameters” (Danger‹eld 1997:441). In spite of its negative associations, the Czechoslovak government’s early post-1989 penchant was for a gradualist solution. In particular, of‹cials favored its “social democratic sensibilities” and promotion of a “managerial approach to economic reform” with measured privatization (Orenstein 2001:68). The radicals, led by then Minister of Finance Václav Klaus, with their neoliberal inclinations, initially drew limited government support. Deputy Prime Minister Valtr Komárek’s inability to draft a gradualist reform plan, however, weakened the gradualists’ political grip. Komárek was replaced by Václav Valeš, who devised a plan. By this time, however, the government’s con‹dence in the gradualists’ ability to guide Czechoslovakia’s economic transformation had waned. Their stumblings, coupled with public pressure for rapid change, meant a victory for the well-prepared radicals, but not without some concessions to secure the government’s backing. To a great extent, the radicals’ reform scenario adhered to the “Washington consensus”;7 it deviated, however, in its incorporation of the gradualists’ social policy program. This compromise received limited domestic emphasis and consequently little international notice. In the international arena, Czechs were viewed as “sticking to the game plan” (Taki 1995). Orenstein credits the oversight of such discrepancies to Klaus, neoliberalism’s “leading propagandist” in Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic), who “consistently downplayed their importance, and, once they were established, either reluctantly accepted them in the name of ‘pragmatism’ or fought to dislodge them” (2001:76). Czech political sci7. The phrase Washington consensus is frequently used to allude to the considerable agency of the U.S. government, the IMF and World Bank, and U.S. research and policy institutes in the “promulgation” of neoliberal development doctrine (MacEwan 1999:5).

A Velvet Vision

51

entist Aviezer Tucker and his colleagues claim that Klaus’s “‘Thatcherite’ and libertarian rhetoric hides more than it reveals the policies of his government. Since Klaus’ rhetoric was far better publicized and known than his policies, political scientists are not always aware of the gap between them” (Tucker et al. 1997:399). In the Klausian conceptualization, Czechs were traveling down a neoliberal turnpike. On January 1, 1991, Czechoslovak leaders of‹cially implemented the radicals’ macroeconomic reform strategy, although they had already unof‹cially begun laying the groundwork for a market economy by establishing a two-tier banking system, creating unemployment compensation, eliminating the Planning Commission and Prices Board, and ceasing the state’s monopoly on foreign trade. New laws permitting private enterprise were introduced, and the 1988 law on joint ventures was amended. As of‹cially executed, the radicals’ strategy involved instituting a large set of reforms “before strong opposition” could coalesce—a technique that has come to be referred to as “shock therapy” or “big bang” (Gelb and Gray 1991:12). The country’s shock therapy consisted of two basic overarching goals—the stabilization of the economy and the creation of a competitive economic climate. Initial tactics involved the liberalization of prices and the establishment of internal currency convertibility as well as tax reforms designed to contain wage growth, the institution of import surcharges, and a strengthening of social protections. The strategy also strove to limit in›ation by enacting strict budgetary controls and a “tight monetarist policy” (Danger‹eld 1997:442). Trade among the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) member states was reformed, with world market prices now to be used and payments to be made in convertible currencies (Illner et al. 1993; Sojka 2000; Svejnar 1995). From the neoliberal viewpoint, market liberalization and macroeconomic stabilization would act as the impetus for enterprises to assume market rational behavior. A critical contingency of such an outcome was, however, rapid privatization. Alan Gelb and Cheryl Gray explain the neoliberal logic behind the imperative for speedy privatization: “When the vast majority of enterprises are publicly owned, the institutional and competitive framework that stimulates ef‹cient behavior is missing. Socialist ‹rms in essence have no owner to defend the interests of capital and actively demand a good return on investment” (1991:21). Czechoslovakia opted for a voucher method of privatization that was seen as a quick and equitable approach. All adult citizens were eligi-

52

MARKET DREAMS

ble to purchase one booklet of vouchers at a cost of 1,035 Czechoslovak crowns—a sum estimated to be less than one-quarter of the average person’s monthly earnings. The vouchers could be used to purchase company stock shares or to invest them via funds. This privatization scheme was implemented in two waves, the ‹rst of which began in May 1992 and ended the following December; the second ran from December 1993 through November 1994. In both waves, most participants—72 percent in the ‹rst, 64 percent in the second—opted to invest their voucher points through investment funds (Kotrba 1995). While Klaus and his team in the Ministry of Finance oversaw the macroeconomic aspects of the Czechoslovak economic transition, they left the formulation and instigation of social policy to social democrats in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs whose social policy program had two main objectives: attending to social issues arising from transition, and establishing a welfare system “based on Beveridge-style state minimums supplemented by social insurance programs” (Orenstein 2001:73).8 Among the short-term policies devised to grapple with social issues emergent in the transition was the use of credit, subsidy, and/or customs policy to ‹nancially bolster large ‹rms in jeopardy of economic failure. In addition, cash compensation to all citizens was designed to cope with the loss of state subsidies to the producers or providers of utilities (i.e., heat, gas, electricity), transportation, and basic foodstuffs (e.g., bread). An array of long-term labor market interventions included the elongation of secondary schooling by one year; the institution of a job creation system as well as unemployment bene‹ts, wage controls, rent controls, and a minimum wage; and the continuation of a range of universal social bene‹ts such as the child allowance (Orenstein 2001; Pehe 1991). Despite Czech radicals’ social policy concessions, friction between Czechs and Slovaks persisted. While tensions between the Czechs and Slovaks have a long history, the fact that post-1989 Slovak unemployment nearly tripled that among Czechs fueled Slovak discontent (Kaiser 1995). Slovak political elites pressed for a decentralization of power to the level of republics, but the Czechs deemed this demand unacceptable. In 1992, in his new capacity as prime minister, Klaus issued an ulti8. Elaborating in a footnote, Orenstein writes, “William Henry Beveridge’s Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942) formed the basis of the British welfare state” (2001:147).

A Velvet Vision

53

matum of a strong federation or no federation. Despite a constitutional mandate, no public referendum issue on this proposed separation occurred, and such a referendum would have been unlikely to have passed, since citizens favoring a split were a minority in both republics (Orenstein 2001). Instead, political leaders orchestrated the Velvet Divorce, in which Czechoslovakia was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The two separate countries of‹cially came into being on January 1, 1993. This division allowed Czech radicals, especially Klaus, to gain even greater command of the Czech economy. At this point, Klaus’s ambition to create a “market without adjectives” became a possibility; toward this end, Czech neoliberals initiated the dispensation, albeit gradual, of many of their social policy concessions.

1991–1996: A Story of Success By 1994, the Czech Republic was internationally as well as nationally predicted to be the success story of the CEE countries in transition. In 1994, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, described the Czech economy as “in a strong position” and “promising” (64, 94). In October 1994, the IMF praised the Czech Republic, averring that “in the group of countries with the most advanced reforms, the Czech Republic stands out as the only country that has pursued tight ‹nancial policies and bold liberalization while avoiding a sharp rise in unemployment” (1994:65). A November 1994 headline in the British newspaper The Guardian touted Klaus as the “Prince of Prague,” adding that “international plaudits are rolling in for what bids fair to be Europe’s greatest success story since Ludwig Erhard’s German boom in the 1950s” (Traynor 1994:T4). These international commendations reverberated domestically with headlines in Czech newspapers such as “The Czech Republic Is Becoming the Model of a Successful Transformation” and public speeches declaring the Czech Republic’s exceptionality (Nikolski 1994). By 1995, Czech success was no longer just a prediction. For example, a December 15, 2005, Washington Times article carried the title, “The Czech Republic, Living the Post-Communist Dream,” and stated, “By everyone’s account the Czech Republic’s transition from . . . 100 percent state ownership to a free market economy, is the real success story in a region from which we tend to receive only bad news” (Polgar 1995). In a

54

MARKET DREAMS

1995 collection of papers on the economies of East-Central Europe prepared for the U.S. Congress, the Czech Republic was deemed to have “achieved a measure of success in terms of positive economic indicators” (Kaiser 1995:506). Banerjee and his coauthors outlined the reasons for the country’s accolades: In›ation has been reduced sharply and is close to single-digit levels. Economic recovery is well under way. A robust balance of payments has made it possible to build up substantial foreign exchange reserves. . . . [which] has enabled the government also to repay early the entire amount it owed to the International Monetary Fund. . . . The unemployment rate is the lowest in the region and also below that in many countries in Western Europe. The ‹scal strains arising from the transformation program have been contained, and the government budget was in surplus in 1993 and 1994. The privatization program is virtually drawing to a close, and with the completion of the second wave of privatization, about 80 percent of the assets of the economy are in private hands. The credit rating of the Czech Republic in the international capital market has been progressively upgraded and is much higher than that of any other transition economy. (1995:24) By 1996, assessments of the Czech Republic’s economic transition had taken on a tone of con‹dent certitude. The U.S. Agency for International Development characterized the Czech Republic as “producing successful results” in the shape of “macroeconomic stabilization, extensive privatization, low unemployment, and a balanced budget” (1996:1). Some international appraisals even suggested that the Czech transition had been completed: the OECD issued a report that declared, “The Czech Republic has managed the process of transition from a centrally planned economy towards a market economy very successfully. . . . In terms of the basic legislative framework and most aspects of economic policy, it can indeed be said that the transition is complete” (1996:99). In the same year, the OECD accepted the Czech Republic as the group’s ‹rst formerly socialist member nation. A February 1996 article in the Toronto Sun headlined “Czech Economic Miracle Has Flowered” and deemed the OECD’s acceptance of the Czechs a “seal of approval” (Francis 1996:12).

A Velvet Vision

55

Consenting Czechs Among the main challenges facing all of the countries in transition was the generation and maintenance of popular support for economic reforms. Gelb and Gray highlighted the importance “in the years ahead to maintain political will, patience, and a long-term perspective” (1991:7). In their IMF paper on the “‹rst stage” of the transition, Bijan Aghevli, Eduardo Borensztein, and Tessa Van der Willigen concluded, “The challenge facing the Czechoslovak authorities now is to persevere with reform without losing the support of the public. This task will require political leadership capable of explaining the process and of containing the aspirations and impatience of the population” (1992:28). Unlike the experience of the majority of other postsocialist nations during the ‹rst half of the 1990s, no public backlash occurred against marketization in the Czech lands; to the contrary, Czechs manifested strong and steady support of the economy’s recon‹guration. According to the New Democracies Barometer (NDB),9 Czechs’ promarket inclinations from transition’s outset signi‹cantly surpassed those of citizens of other CEE nations; between 1991 and 1995, the portion of the Czech population favoring the free market grew steadily, a phenomenon rivaled only by Poland (see ‹g. 2). The NDB also revealed Czechs to be far more disapproving of their past economic system and far more hopeful about their economy’s future prospects relative to their postsocialist counterparts (see table 2). A Transition Tale: Klaus’s Vision Vision, it must be positive (not just negative); it must speak to the hearts of men and women who have spent much of their lives under a spiritually empty communist regime. It requires clear words, biblical yeses and nos; it must be stated in an ideal form (which needs “extreme” terms because compromises belong to reality, not to images or visions); it must explicitly reject all “third ways,” which are based on incompatible combinations of different

9. A survey of most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the NDB was launched in the early 1990s by the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and the Paul Lazarsfeld Society in Vienna, Austria, to monitor mass response to the transformation of the economy and polity in the CEE states.

56

MARKET DREAMS worlds. . . . It requires us to address the people, to argue, to explain, to defend, it requires permanent campaigning. —Václav Klaus, 1993

According to Margaret Somers, “At the heart of every narrative is a crisis or ›ash point that cries out for a solution” (1999:137). In an inversion of Marx’s long-awaited crisis of capitalism, for Czechs as well as for the CEE populace as a whole, the crisis was instead socialism. In the Czech case, a charismatic Klaus and his neoliberal acolytes strove passionately and publicly to construct a public imaginary—a market metastory—to legitimate a new economic order. While the “slavish” adherence of the Czech(oslovak) media to Klaus’s agenda deserves some credit, Klaus’s prospects for the public’s persuasion were greatly enhanced by his possession of a public platform and his “exceptional rhetorical skills” (Saxonberg 1999:406; Stroehlein et al. 1999). Prior to 1989, Klaus was largely “hidden behind the walls” of the Institute for Forecasting—“unknown to the general public” and in little contact with “dissident circles” (Saxonberg 1999:391). Only in November 1989 did Klaus ‹rst appear on the Czechoslovak political landscape by becoming an economic adviser to the anticommunist coalition, Civic Forum. When the country’s ‹rst noncommunist government was fig. 2. Attitudes toward Economic Change in Postsocialist States, 1991–2001 (percentage of total populations with promarket reaction).

(Data from Rose 2001; Rose and Haerpfer 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998.)

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57

formed in early December 1989, Klaus was appointed ‹nance minister. In 1991 the Civic Forum splintered, and Klaus led the new Civic Democratic Party for the remainder of the decade.10 He served as prime minister from 1992 to 1997. While many observers have viewed Klaus as an “unimaginative technocrat,” others hailed as extraordinary his power to persuade not only the “rank and ‹le” but the “public at large” (Kraus 2003:52; see also Cóulík 2000). Klaus’s vision was all inclusive—a shared future for all Czech(oslovak)s. He portrayed himself as resolutely optimistic, with an un›agging belief in his country’s resourcefulness in the face of reform. In a March 1990 article, “Why Am I an Optimist?” he played on Czech notions of traditional cultural traits: “I believe in the wealth of our country, which is the wisdom, skill, capacity for action, and adaptability of 15 million Czechoslovak citizens” (1990e:1). Summoning up the image of “golden Czech hands,” Klaus and other free market advocates further appealed to Czech nationalist sensibilities (Kubánek 1992). As Ladislav Holy (1996) explains, such metaphorical hands referred to Czechs’ talent, table 2. Attitudes toward Economic Systems in Post-Socialist States (percentage of total populations approving of old system and future system) Former Non-Market Economy

Future System (in five years)

1991 1992 1993 1995 1998 2001

1991 1992 1993 1995 1998 2001

Czechs

42

44

42

41

47

31

86

83

86

87

62

83

Slovaks

61

64

74

71

64

61

77

73

73

72

45

49

Hungarians

69

73

74

69

70

68

72

69

63

53

69

87

Poles

44

56

52

37

41

n/a

58

57

71

86

70

n/a

Bulgarians

48

59

66

73

58

57

71

63

56

72

69

58

Romanians

50

57

60

51

40

55

77

67

66

60

44

62

Slovenians

42

46

50

48

55

64

74

83

72

75

54

71

Croatians

n/a

27

44

40

53

n/a

n/a

71

71

58

51

n/a

Source: Rose 2001; Rose and Haerpfer 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, and 1998. Note: This data is based on a collapsing of responses from the following questions: Here is a scale for ranking how the economy works. The top, +100, is best; the bottom, –100, is worst. Where on this scale would you place: (a) the socialist economy before the revolution of 1989? (b) our economic system in five years?

10. Klaus also served as deputy prime minister in 1991 and as chair of the Chamber of Deputies from 1998 to 2002.

58

MARKET DREAMS

ability, and cleverness. Under state socialism, “little golden hands completely got lazy, overslept, and lost their self-assurance” (Kubánek 1992:1). The establishment of a new social contract signaled the revitalization of these long dormant national characteristics. Although Klaus was not anticommunist, he used anticommunism as a “potent source of legitimacy,” with a dichotomization of communism versus capitalism largely underlying his market mantras (Cóulík 2000) (see table 3). While this set of constructed oppositions extends across the postsocialist world, Klaus was remarkably clever in his discursive mobilization of it. For Czechs, the market became a “mythical ‹gure” tied to sacri‹ce and “transcendental hopes” (Kabele 1999:16). This new messiah—the free market—seemingly offered Czechs, to invoke the words of Karl Polanyi, a “secular salvation” (1944:135). The market metanarrative essentially was fashioned around an older story about good and evil, with capitalism as the virtuous hero who combats communism, the sinful villain. Appropriating parts of a neoliberal discourse already in global circulation, Klaus became infamous for his public pursuit of a “market without adjectives.” While most emphatic during the 1990s when trying to rally popular support for his reform strategy, this phrase became his trademark. As publicly portrayed, the free market meant a new social order characterized as normal and natural, in contrast to the abnormal and unnatural “experiment” of central planning. In an August 1990 Literární noviny article, “The Chimera of Equality,” Klaus stated,

table 3. Underlying Logical and Normative Oppositions of Communism and Capitalism Planned Economy • Evil • Failure • East • Past • Constraint/Captivity • Premodernity/Uncivilized • Stagnation/Regression • Abnormality/Artificiality • Human Design • Irrationality • Immorality • Collectivism

Market Economy • Good • Success • West/Europe • Future • Opportunity/Freedom • Modernity/Civilization • Development/Progress • Normality/Naturality • Human Nature • Rationality • Morality • Individualism

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After an entirely unsuccessful forty-year experiment with an economic (and social) system that prioritized sharing as opposed to the creation of wealth, we want—at least some of us—to return to the normal order. . . . This system is a market economy without any other adjective before the key word market. Any such adjective renders the word market suspect. (1990a:1) Throughout the 1990s, both in the domestic arena and on the international stage, Klaus dogmatically deemed the free market as Czechs’ sole hope, rejecting any prospects of a third way. He repeatedly espoused the dangers of state economic interventionism and railed fervently against his supposed rivals—market socialists and “perestroika men” (Klaus 1990e, 1992, 1994a, 1994b). In Klaus’s conceptualization, only an “unconstrained, unrestricted, full-›edged, unspoiled market economy” emerging from “spontaneous . . . unplanned and unorganized human interaction” would yield success (1992:26; 1995b:5). By Klaus’s estimations, the “transformation of an entire society isn’t an intellectual exercise or the technical work of the government” (1995b:5). Quali‹ed, statist-inclined versions would only prolong the “agony” (1992:26). In a December 1990 Obcanský & deník article, “New Years’ Thoughts about the Basic Conditions of Successful Economic Reform,” Klaus claimed that the “weaker bureaucracy is, the better the hope for success” (1990c:1). Despite little political or personal af‹nity between Czech(oslovak) president Václav Havel (1990–2003) and Klaus, the two men concurred in their public sentiments about the meanings as well as the means of achieving a market economy. As Havel wrote in Summer Meditations (Letní pre& mítání), Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy. . . . It is a system in which complete independence and plurality of economic entities exist within a legal framework, and its workings are guided chie›y by the laws of the marketplace. This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that re›ects the nature of life itself. . . . The attempt to unite all economic entities under the authority of a single monstrous owner, the state, and to subject all economic life to one central voice of reason that deems itself more clever than life itself, is an attempt against life itself. (1992:62)

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In reference to the question of gradual versus radical reforms, he added, The only way to the economic salvation of this country . . . is the fastest possible renewal of a market economy. . . . It is in our common interest that the reforms be fundamental and quick. The more half measures we take, and the longer they drag on, the greater the sacri‹ces will be. . . . I am certainly not in favor of “softening” or slowing down the reforms. (63–65) The move to the market offered not only a “natural” redirection of society but also the recovery of an order in which individuals’ moral worth as “action and responsibility for action” was linked to their material well-being (Preston 1992:60). In “The Chimera of Inequality,” Klaus condemned the socialist system for its immorality, writing that the worst of the past system was “that all these advantages (and disadvantages) were to a considerable extent independent of how someone contributed to the created wealth in a material and spiritual sense” (1990a:1). In its metanarrative rendition, the market promised to free Czechs from socialism’s shackles, but not without some penance for past transgressions. In what Gil Eyal characterizes as the “post-communist spirit of capitalism,” reformers did not see Czech society as a “tabula rasa” on which the market mechanism could be inscribed (2000:55). Rather, society bore the polluting contaminants of the socialist past. Contemporary cleansing “required individuals to break their attachment to those most corrupted elements of themselves” (55). By Havel’s decree, such penance would have to be exacted from Czechs sacri‹cally: We lived [under socialism] as frequently and properly pointed out, at the expense of the future. Now the bill for all of this is being presented to us, in the form of sacri‹ces. They are considerable and great ones await us. The size of this debt is directly proportional to the depth of silence with which we accepted the communist exploitation of the future. (1992:64) For Czechs, these notions of pollution and sacri‹ce lacked novelty but rather hearkened back to dissident discourses under socialism (Eyal 2000). In Klaus’s framing, economic transition would involve some

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“pain,” as he indicated in a March 1990 article in Literární noviny, the weekly supplement to Lidové noviny: “The transformation of our economy into an effectively functioning market system is not going to be painless” (1990e:1). In practical terms, such sacri‹ce and pain involved an estimated ‹ve- to seven-year ‹scal “belt-tightening” (Drábek 1991:2). In a more ‹gurative sense, this transformation required Czechs to cognitively and behaviorally readjust. Free-market freedom further necessitated that Czechs forsake their dependence, passivity, and irresponsibility in favor of self-reliance and responsibility. Reminding Czechs of their lack of freedom under state socialism, Klaus declared, We lived in a falsely paternalistic state that decided for us, about us, without us about all human activities. . . . It wasn’t our state because we didn’t even have the slightest possibility of in›uencing its decision making and because our experience demonstrated that its decision making was based on preferences and priorities that were entirely different from the preferences and priorities of the overwhelming majority of us. (1994a:107) Many articles, including a September 1995 piece in Lidové noviny by Jirí& Jonáš, then Czech delegate to the IMF, extolled the imperative for responsibility: “The creation of informal norms of behavior necessary in a society of free citizens is, above all, the responsibility of every one of us” (15). Responsibility further meant rejecting socialism’s collectivist tenets and assuming capitalism’s individualist principles. As Klaus explained, The individualist ideal was long forgotten here. . . . Old ideology for us so often con›ated individualism with egoism and sel‹shness that we are almost afraid to say that everything new and better, that which is changing the lives of us all, society and state, comes from the activity of industrious individuals. (1991g:1) Instilling a sense of personal responsibility in Czechs involved constant reproaches as well as assurances. In a February 1991 Literární noviny piece, Klaus chastised, “We wanted freedom terribly . . . [but] we don’t want to accept our new degree of responsibility,” adding, “at every

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step we would like to receive a guarantee” (1991f:1). Reminding Czechs of their desire for this new social order, he averred, “We made the Velvet Revolution” (1994a:107). For Czechs, marketization signi‹ed not only the institution of a normal and natural economic order but also a return to a presocialist civility and rationality disrupted by state socialism. In Czech economic journalist Petr Fejtek’s framing, Czechs’ return set them on the “road to reason,” traveling back to “a world where they play by the rules” (1990:3). This return of civility and rationality embodied both temporal and spatial restorations by which they would “return to history” and “return to Europe.” Both tropes, frequently deployed by the Czech(oslovak) government throughout the 1990s, strongly appealed to Czechs’ industrial and European identity, which state socialism had long subdued. Marketization implied restorations in both time and space.11 Declared Klaus in early 1990, “As the slogan of our ‘gentle revolution’ we choose ‘the return to Europe’” (1990d:1). Moreover, in a March 1990 article in Literární noviny, Klaus contended, “We gave up the most precious social values created as the fruits of thousand of years of evolution, embodied in institutions, in the rules of behavior, in the regulation of the market, in language, in morality, in the structure of settlements” (1990e:1–2). In this future regress, marketization reconnected Czechs with their presocialist past and its civilized values and reaf‹rmed their sense of belonging to a civilized, reasonable Europe. In the words of Czech economist Lubomír Mlc&och, state socialism “shunted us [Czechs] off . . . toward some kind of Orwellian Eurasia” (2000:74). As deputy ‹nance minister (1990–92), Dušan Tr&íska published a Lidové noviny article that professed, “The attempt to return to Europe is, for a liberal economist, above all, an attempt to restore traditional, civilized institutions” (1990:5). Czechs’ spatial dislocation under state socialism, as Ladislav Holy explains, resulted in Czechs’ conceptual reformulation of their identity to distinguish themselves: The Czechs use the concept of kulturnost (a noun derived from the adjective “cultured”) to construct a boundary between themselves and the uncultured east into which they were lumped after the communist coup d’état in 1948, and they see their proper place 11. This is an extrapolation of Stukuls’s (1999) theorization of spatial and temporal normalization (in Latvian political narratives) to the Czech context.

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alongside the civilized, cultured and educated nations of Western Europe. (1992:233) Czechs’ return to Europe does not simply imply a shifting of the boundary lines; rather, asserting their autonomy and individuality, Czechs recognize themselves as Central Europeans who are located beside Western Europe.12 The reinstatement of proper temporal and spatial orders—of longlost civility and rationality—fundamentally entailed Czechs’ “adoption” of a tried and true economic system—that is, capitalism (Klaus 1990c). As Klaus averred, “The adoption of capitalism by the ‘civilized world’ . . . shows that despite all its shortcomings that a better arrangement of economic relations does not exist” (1990d:1). By Havel’s estimation, in contrast to the forty-year failed experiment of state socialism, capitalism “is a system of economic activity that has been tried and found to work over centuries (centuries? millennia!)” (1992:65).

1997–1999: The Fall from Grace Central Europe’s top economic model has gone to seed. Once acclaimed as the post-communist ideal—the face of the future—the formerly vigorous Czech economy has turned sluggish. —Marianne Bird (1997:36)

In 1996, both international and Czech observers optimistically anticipated a successful conclusion to the Czech transition. However, in 1997 a major macroeconomic crisis hit the Czech Republic, and shock and dismay replaced these eager anticipations. Both capital and labor productivity slowed. The country experienced disproportionate wage growth, unemployment increases, an exchange rate and ‹nancial market crisis, and the corruption of the capital market with fraudulent practices (Andor and Summers 1998; De Boer-Ashworth 2000; Mlco& ch, Machonin, and Sojka 2000; OECD 1998, 2000; Turnovec 1998). Some economic analysts identi‹ed declining export demands, poor enterprise management, and/or overly protective social policies as the culprits behind the Czech calamity. However, most observers concurred that 12. According to Holy (1996), Czechs view Slovakia as the frontier of the uncultured East.

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inadequate legislative and institutional restructuring of the banking and industrial sectors during the privatization process had spawned the two-year recession and subsequent slow recovery (Dlouhý 2001; Kapoor and Harris 1999; Myant 1997, 2000; Stroehlein et al. 1999; Turnovec 1999). Although well-intentioned in its motives, unanticipated dif‹culties plagued the Czech voucher privatization scheme. During the ‹rst wave of privatization, investment funds acquired nearly three-quarters of the total voucher books issued, thereby putting most large-scale enterprises in the hands of investment funds. In need of capital, investment funds then turned to the banks, which remained under state ownership. By loaning capital to these investment funds, the state-owned banks acquired control over the companies supposedly undergoing privatization. The result, in the words of Czech economist Lubomír Mlco& ch, was a “Kafkaesque route that led from public ownership back to public ownership” (1998). The situation was further exacerbated by banks’ provision of soft loans that worked to sustain many underperforming companies and to delay their restructuring (Johnson 2000; Kapoor and Harris 1999; Mlco& ch, Machonin, and Sojka 2000; Nellis 1999; Stark and Bruszt 1998). In a 1999–2000 economic survey of the Czech Republic, the OECD explicitly blamed “state-controlled banks that provided relatively easy access to credit, largely unregulated capital markets and confused corporate governance” (2000:9). This created what Czech philosopher Jan Sokol describes as “gangster liberalism” (1997). Of particular concern both internationally and nationally was the discovery of massive corruption in the privatization process, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in enormous public losses. This corruption, termed tunelování (tunneling), entailed the “large-scale liquidation of the capital and holdings of a company, bank or investment fund” (Altshuler 2001:116). Remarkably, although such tunneling unquestionably constituted shady business, it was technically not illegal. Despite the economic turbulence, Klaus maintained that the Czech economy remained in good shape. A March 1997 article quoted him as saying that the “groundwork for the reconstruction of the economic system is de‹nitively already behind us and before us is only its ‹ne tuning” (Balcerová and Hanz&lová 1997:1). Another March 1997 piece bore the headline, “The Prime Minister Refuses to Talk about Failure” (Martínková 1997:2). At the same time, many Czech economic commentators directed the blame at societal rather than economic miscal-

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culations, chastising Czechs for their naïveté: “Like many times in history and this time, Czech society tried to get out of a very dif‹cult situation without a scratch,” without “having to pay for the long period of communist devastation” (Steigerwald 1997:8). In “Disillusionment,” an April 1997 Lidové noviny article, Czech journalist Bohmil Pec&inka admonished, “Years ago, a lot of Czechs exchanged a communist caretaker state for Klaus, and after that they waited with their ‹ngers crossed for prosperity to come. It didn’t come because there was no easy way for it to come. Neither Klaus nor [Social Democratic Party Chair] Zeman can help with that” (1997:1). In another April 1997 article in the same newspaper, Czech journalists Michale Achremenko and Zdena Balcerová concluded, “The general, optimistic expectations resulting from the post-November euphoria were built upon inadequate assessments of the state which we inherited. . . . Transformation is much more painful than we were able to admit” (1997:8). Determined to change Czechs’ blbá nálada (a term coined by Havel and popularized by the Czech press to characterize the populace’s 1997 foul state of mind), Klaus remained con‹dently upbeat and continued to af‹rm the free market as the means to freedom and prosperity. In 1998 he wrote, The majority of people—it seems—don’t long just for freedom but more for the wealth that a free society produces. . . . They know that freedom brings wealth (and at the same time insecurity). . . . Meanwhile, a lack of freedom, as communism convincingly revealed to us, brings poverty (with a strange and false sense of security and an unpunished lack of output). (11) He concluded cheerfully, “It seems evident that there are an enormous number of people who have accepted the market and who know there is no other way. This is precisely the source of my optimism” (11).

Myths and Misgivings While other stars have come and gone across Central Europe . . . Klaus has endured. In no small part, that success has ›owed from the former prime minister’s ability to construct myths that large segments of the Czech population take as given truths. —Jeremy Drucker and Chris Walker (1999)

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Despite his resolute optimism, even Klaus proved unable to elude the taint of corruption. In late 1997, Klaus resigned as prime minister after being implicated in a party ‹nancing scandal involving “kickbacks from privatization” (Orenstein 2001:63). In the midst of such turmoil, Czechs faltered slightly in their economic optimism, with approval rates for their economic future dropping from 87 percent in 1995 to 62 percent in 1998 as measured by the NDB (see ‹gure 2 and table 2). Nonetheless, despite being in the throes of an economic recession, the majority of Czechs still saw capitalism as their future. Even in 1998, Czechs’ freemarket partiality exceeded that of all other postsocialist nations except the Poles. By 1997, Czechs had effectively “‘bought’ the positive vision of Václav Klaus” (Sojka 2000:240). Despite the country’s economic tribulations, the public intimation was that Czechs’ expectations of marketization were “unrealistic,” not the free market itself; Czechs’ optimism was “excessive” (Dubský 1999:3). Prosperity’s lack of an easy arrival constituted part of its public articulation. The notion of suffering ultimately to become well formed part of the market metanarrative’s original plot structure, present from its early recountings. Such elements strategically worked to maintain the overall coherence of the metastory in public currency, overriding Czechs’ misgivings about the value of their purchase. In Mlco& ch’s words, “For part of the Czech population, this attractive [market] ideology has remained a kind of substitute for religion” (2000:60). The Klaus-inspired faith in the free market was well instilled in Czechs by 1997, making the prospect of a public backlash, despite the country’s economic troubles, unlikely. By the late 1990s, the political landscape of the Czech Republic had changed dramatically. Dissent emerged within existing parties, resulting in fragmentation and volatility in interparty coalitions in the Czech Parliament. The country’s 1997 economic downturn revealed economic frailties and propelled political instability. Ironically, Klaus seemed to predict this development, writing in a 1994 edition of the Cato Journal, As a result of the high and unpleasant transformation costs, the former euphoria evaporates. The nationwide unity (mostly in a negative sense) is lost and the scene is gradually dominated by con›icting positive visions of the future. This con›ict results in an enormous degree of political atomization and increasing political instability. (1994c)

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However, much as the economy turned about, so too did Klaus’s political career. Reelected head of the Civic Democratic Party, he returned to the political limelight in 1998. And, by 2001, with economic recovery well in sight, Czechs’ economic dispositions had nearly returned to prerecession levels (see ‹gure 2 and table 2). In an even more dramatic twist, Klaus emerged victorious in the third round of the country’s 2003 presidential election by a margin of one in the parliamentary vote. Although the election provoked a crisis in the Czech parliament when parliamentarians proved unable to elect Havel’s successor by a majority during the ‹rst and second rounds of voting, public opinion did not mirror this indecisiveness. To the contrary, public opinion polls indicated that a majority of the Czech populace supported Klaus’s election (Asiedu 2003; Horacková 2003). Despite the recent political turbulence, Czechs’ commitment to Klaus and perhaps even more strongly to his “velvet” vision have endured. Michael Kennedy rightly claims that “narrative elements” are a tool of “transition makers” used in the recon‹guration of normality and deviance in countries undergoing transition (2002:97). In the Czech case, however, two factors further bolstered the supremacy of Klaus’s approach: the seeming success of the Czech economic transformation, and the coupling of neoliberal and social democratic policies. When combined with Klaus’s charisma, the consequence was a narrative of such fortitude that the majority of its Czech audience was convinced of its logic in spite of revealed incongruities with their lived realities. The next two chapters reveal how Czech female managers and factory workers interpret their postsocialist experiences through the “velvet” lens of the market. These two groups offer very different accounts: managers recount their ascent, or how they became members of a “new elite,” while factory workers describe their descent, identifying as part of the “new poor.” However, the hegemony of the market metanarrative means that their stories share the same causal emplotment in which socialism is seen as the source of their problems (their oppressor) and capitalism is deemed their means of resolution (their liberator). As a result, absolute loss is an incongruity and opposition is thus unnecessary.

4 Rational Economic (Wo)Men Market Mantras and Managers Every one of us has the chance to seek out comparatively new advantages and to realize the limits of one’s possibilities. —Václav Klaus (1995c:5) Before [1989], people had relatively equivalent incomes and everyone had pretty much the same possibilities, which were quite minimal. Of course, after the revolution, people seized the various opportunities—one started a business, another wasn’t so aggressive and remained in a state-owned enterprise, another took the management route, another began working in a foreign ‹rm. —Heda, a thirty-four-year-old communications manager

In socialist Czechoslovakia, enterprise management was a heavily centralized, top-down undertaking with the state assuming primary responsibility for the establishment of production mandates. Within enterprises, individuals known as re& ditele (directors) and vedoucí (managers) were charged mainly with the task of insuring the implementation of the state’s directives regarding production. As Elizabeth Dunn explains, “It was the central planners, not the enterprise managers, who were supposed to decide what goods would be produced, how much raw material was needed, and how the material would be transformed into the desired product” (2004:14). In the postsocialist era, these occupational titles—re& ditel/ka and vedoucí—remain in currency, but they have taken on new meaning.1 In the new market economy, management 1. In Czech, the gender of the subject is commonly distinguished by in›ectional endings on stems (e.g., re& ditel = male director, re& ditelka = female director). A lack of alteration (e.g., vedoucí = male manager) re›ects a traditionally gender-speci‹c—in this case, male—association. 69

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has become decentralized; it is now carried out at the corporate and/or individual enterprise level. Ró editele and vedoucí are no longer the state’s lackeys, required to obey its dictates; instead, they have become analysts and strategists whose primary objective is to insure and grow enterprise pro‹ts. In the transition from a command to a market economy, management has become qualitatively different. It calls for unfamiliar kinds of behavior (i.e., initiative rather than obedience) and knowledge (i.e., how to foster pro‹tability). For Czechs as well as for Central and Eastern Europeans more generally, management, in its capitalist sensibilities, is a new concept. Indeed, the term management—directly co-opted from English into the Czech language—is a postsocialist novelty. A slavicized version of manager (manaz&er/ka) has been added to the repertoire of occupational titles. At the outset of the economic transition, few individuals possessed any training in this style of management. During the early 1990s, foreign management courses such as Dale Carnegie Training and degree-granting programs such as those run by the Czech Management Institute quickly established themselves locally in the rush to ‹ll the knowledge gap. However, the need for managers was immediate, especially for newly arrived multinational corporations. Unable to wait for the ‹rst MBA cohort, enterprises sought out individuals who could learn to manage on the job. Windows of opportunity consequently opened, enabling certain individuals to access positions of power and wealth. Enterprises relied heavily on human capital to determine an individual’s quali‹cations for management. In greatest demand were university-educated individuals with a knowledge of English, French, and/or German. With a nearly 3:4 ratio of female to male postsecondary enrollment by the mid-1980s in socialist Czechoslovakia and with females overrepresented in the humanities, many women were well positioned to enter through these windows. Indeed, virtually all of the female managers whom I interviewed accessed their manufacturing management posts through these sudden openings generated by the economy’s reform. Enterprise ownership histories and the nature of goods produced (e.g., cosmetics versus textiles) varied, as did the type of management (e.g., communications versus human resources) and the level at which these women managed (i.e., middle versus upper). These women are, however, experientially similar in their points of entry into management. These women not only have gained a footing in the upper echelons of corporate power but

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also are among the new socioeconomic elite in the postsocialist Czech Republic. Twenty-one of these twenty-six managers earned gross incomes2 of more than 25,000 crowns per month,3 more than 93.95 percent of the Czech populace and 99.47 percent of Czech women in 1999 and 92.28 percent of the wider population and 96.41 percent of women in 2000 (Czech Statistical Of‹ce 2000b, 2001).4 In an economic system in which power and money are revered as symbols of success, these women are marked as transition’s winners. In this chapter, I detail how twenty-six Czech female managers draw on the market metanarrative in making sense of their success in the new market economy. While each of these women possesses an individual biography, their appropriation of the market metanarrative yields a commonly shared understanding of why they are winners rather than losers. As metanarratively promised, in their interpretations, the market has empowered them. Again and again, these women echoed free-market-con›ated mantras of public origin, such as freedom and responsibility. In their assimilation of this metastory, their postsocialist triumphs become meaningful to them. Among the critical consequences of this invocation, however, is the muting of their gender consciousness. “Woman” as a category of constraint and difference is seemingly incompatible with a market metanarrative embodying the opposing neoliberal logic of freedom for every individual. In addition, in the reconciliation of the market metanarrative’s ideological tenets with their personal experiences, history and culture are rendered seemingly extraneous. In Czech female managers’ articulated perceptions, individuals’ behavior in the free market is principally an outcome not of historical legacies or cultural mechanisms but of a self-interested rationality.

Moving In and Up For Czech female managers, the events of 1989 dramatically disrupted their work and family lives: impossibilities suddenly became possibili2. Net wages (take-home pay) range between 70 and 80 percent of gross wages. 3. Of the remaining managers, one refused to report her earnings, three reported monthly wages in the range of 12,000–15,999 crowns per month, and one reported earning between 16,000 and 20,999 crowns per month. 4. Based on individuals who worked seventeen hundred or more hours per year.

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ties. Forty-four-year-old business manager Sabina’s comments well expressed the radical nature of this historical moment: “1989 meant such a major break in a person’s life because all of a sudden new possibilities opened up for you, and all at once you could see that it’s possible to ‹nd something in a completely different environment, in another dimension. . . . A person’s idea of their future life completely changed.” As thirty-four-year-old sales manager Herma explained, “Before 1989, with the same education and the same knowledge, opportunities were few. Now we have lots of opportunities.” Forty-two-year-old human resource (HR) manager Emílie used a metaphor to describe the post1989 opening up of employment opportunities: “After the revolution, they removed the lid from the pot, and some suddenly had the opportunity to move up, and some really did move up.” Many of those occupationally ascendant in the aftermath of 1989 saw themselves as getting “on the train at the right moment.” Not just anyone, however, could climb aboard. Many observers acknowledged that buying a ticket required people to know one or more international business languages and to have a university education. In the “right place at the right time,” in Emílie’s words, and equipped with the right human capital, the potential to move in and up occupationally and industrially became a reality for some Czechs. Of the twenty-six female managers in the manufacturing industry I interviewed, a mere seven had any experience in their current industrial arena prior to 1989. Of these seven, three remained at the same enterprise at which they were employed before 1989, although two had advanced from nonmanagerial to managerial posts during the privatization and restructuring process. The other four held similar occupational statuses pre- and post-1989, although their roles changed signi‹cantly. Company closure and merger had compelled two of the women to change companies, while the other two made self-initiated lateral moves in a quest for new challenges and better advancement prospects. Only forty-one-year-old ‹nance manager Dora had not made a move. By Western standards, nineteen of the twenty-six female managers had joined management’s ranks in quite unconventional ways. And indeed, most Czech female managers were well aware of the atypicality of their move relative to Western norms—in Emílie’s words, her promotion from executive assistant to HR manager was “once in a lifetime; it normally wouldn’t happen.” These women effectively jumped from

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an internal or external job location into a management post. An internal jump typically involved a move within an enterprise from a lowlevel position to a mid- or upper-level management job during the company’s expansion in which the individual (1) jumped over several rungs of a single job ladder or (2) jumped across and over the rungs of indirectly connected or entirely unconnected job ladders. While an internal jump is de‹ned in part by an existing toehold in an enterprise, an external jump originates from outside in either (1) an already established professional career (e.g., doctor, lawyer) or (2) an unrelated job family5 and/or industrial sector. Irena’s, Margareta’s, and Heda’s detailed work histories help to illustrate more concretely the nature of these jumps. Irena: From Administrative Assistant to HR Manager (internal jump) After completing her education at the University of Economics in Prague, Irena began working at a research institute in 1987. She gave birth to her daughter in 1989 and was on maternity leave at the time of the Velvet Revolution. Although she had not exhausted her maternity leave, Irena decided to return to the labor market in 1990. Because her employer was legally obligated to allow Irena up to three years of maternity leave and to guarantee her the same or an equivalent job upon her return, she could have returned to her former job at the research institute. Irena, however, decided that she wanted to put her English-language skills to use in the changing economic environment. She responded to a newspaper job listing for an administrative assistant for a newly established multinational enterprise. The ‹rm grew quickly, and Irena was offered her choice of managerial posts. She opted for the position of HR manager. Margareta: From Editor in Chief to Communications Manager (external jump) Margareta also completed her education at the University of Economics in Prague, where she studied foreign trade. According to Margareta, women had little “chance” to work in that male-dominated ‹eld under state socialism, so she began working as a reporter. Shortly before 1989, she changed newspapers to receive slightly better wages. She soon became its editor in chief and remained in this post until 1992. At this point, she began to re›ect on her “value” in the new market 5. Job families refer to groupings of jobs on the basis of similar characteristics.

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economy, and at age forty-two she began taking courses in communications and marketing and, with the assistance of a recruitment agency, began interviewing for jobs. Margareta interviewed for twelve positions and received several job offers. She ultimately chose a position as a communications manager for a large food manufacturing company that had existed before 1989 but was bought out by a multinational corporation during privatization. Heda: From Transport Coordinator to Personnel Coordinator (external jump) Heda graduated from the University of Economics in Prague in 1989 and took a job involving the arranging of transportation for various goods to be exported. Heda found the physical conditions of her job at the transport company unpleasant—the air quality was poor because of the exhaust emitted by the trucks. In addition, her English- and French-language abilities were incommensurate with the transport company’s need for a German speaker. After a year, she came across an advertisement for a job as a personnel coordinator at a newly established multinational company specializing in the production of computer technologies. She applied and was hired despite knowing “nothing at all” about human resources. While Irena’s and Heda’s jumps can be easily understood under Western norms as occupational progressions, Margareta’s case is less clear. Indeed, six other managers initially pursued professions in law, medicine, or academia. Thirty-four-year old Josephina began her career as a physician working in radiation oncology; during the mid-1990s, she went to work in the pharmaceuticals industry as a manager of her company’s oncology business unit. After nineteen years of teaching at the University of Economics in Prague, Ester, now in her mid-forties, opted out of academia and into a management job at a newly established multinational enterprise specializing in the production of computer technologies. In most Western capitalist societies, their actions would likely be seen as an occupational step backward rather than forward. Lawyers, doctors, and professors working in the capitalist West generally command greater prestige and status than managers. However, the (re)hierarchization of occupations in the transition from a command to market economy is not necessarily the same as that which exists in much of the Western world. Moving into management is perceived as an advancement to greater social status, in›uence, and remuneration.

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Managers are among the most well compensated individuals in the postsocialist world in terms of both monetary remuneration (e.g., wages, bonuses) and nonmonetary bene‹ts (e.g., company car, cellular phone). In addition, those employed by multinational ‹rms can earn more bene‹ts than those working in national enterprises, and in most instances, these women left professions such as medicine and law that became heavily feminized during the socialist era, resulting in their social and ‹nancial devaluation. In state socialism’s aftermath, the health and education sectors have been plagued by privatization and restructuring complications. As a result, they have lagged well behind others in the ‹nancial revaluation of their occupations. In 2000, a physician working a sixty-‹ve-hour week received an average monthly compensation of 23,832 crowns, including overtime pay and bonuses (Kubek 2000). In contrast, physicians turned managers Josephina and Herma earned more than 56,000 crowns each month, not including bonuses. As Herma explained, “Women [in medicine] are condemned for life to being a sekundárk& a [i.e., second-level doctor].” While women may dominate the medical profession, internal strati‹cation means that men occupy much of its top tier (Šiklová 1994). A management position in a multinational enterprise manufacturing health products offered a way for Herma to move up. The conditions, both social and ‹nancial, for these professional women to stay put ultimately fail to rival the enticements offered by a job in management.

Free-Market Freedom In a free society, my success (and in close correlation the living standard of myself and my family) depends in no way on my hypothetical capabilities, knowledge, or skills but solely and exclusively on how I take advantage of these abilities. —Václav Klaus (1994a:122) The possibilities are even greater today, and not everyone knows how to take advantage of them. —Heda

The economic restructuring of the heavily orthodox Czechoslovak command economy resulted in a dramatic opening up of economic opportunities. Taking advantage of these opportunities, much as Klaus

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and Heda suggest, is about knowing how to mobilize one’s abilities— principally, one’s human capital, sometimes called “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984). This type of capital comprises an individual’s education, skills, and experience. In its broadest sense, human capital denotes knowledge. While under state socialism, social/political capital in the shape of one’s social networks was the principal means of achieving personal gain, what you know now proves far more valuable than who you know (Eyal, Szelényi, and Townsley 1998; Ledeneva 1998). Czech female managers’ postsocialist success is based not only in a desirable mix of university education and international business-language skills but also in their “learning” of a free-market-appropriate set of behaviors, including self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence. This knowledge is derived from their calculated reading of the market metanarrative. Among the ‹gurative threads of this metanarrative is the imperative for individuals to renounce the sinful ways of their socialist past to achieve their capitalist redemption. By Klaus’s estimations as well as those of many free-market proponents, Czechs could not circumvent their past free of blame. In “The Market, Government, and Citizens,” 1968 émigré and economist Jirí& Sláma writes, “Neither businesses nor citizens are without fault for state paternalism. . . . Today there is no longer this dependence on our government in place. We have to stand on our own feet and take the future into our own hands” (1990:2). In a September 1995 Lidové noviny piece, “Between the Present and the Future,” Klaus reminded Czechs that “communism wasn’t a coincidence, nor was it a one-time event that fell upon guiltless individuals without their fault” (1995b:5). Reaching the “radiant future” that capitalism promised demanded that Czechs atone for their past. Dispensing with their immature, infantilized socialist habits and assuming mature, adult behaviors deemed requisite to success in and the success of the new economy would move Czechs beyond the limbo of economic transition. According to mathematician Marek Boguszak and sociologists Ivan Gabal and Vladímir Rak, their fellow Czechs needed to “‹nally start to ‘behave like adults,’ to take responsibility for one’s life and to make decisions about it independently” (1990:2). Miloš Zeman, who was elected chair of the Chamber of Deputies in 1996 and was appointed prime minister in 1998, af‹rmed in “From Poverty to Wealth” that “in the process of economic reform we are ‹rst and foremost trying to change the economic behavior of individuals” (1990:4). Again, ‹guring

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prominently among the necessary behaviors are self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence. According to the market metanarrative, such behaviors would at the very least enable Czechs and their country to get on course, to reroute themselves away from poverty and toward wealth. In their narratives, Czech female managers pull on this strand of this larger narrative. By their estimations, they understand its logic. In the hierarchy of values, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence take primacy; socialism’s behavioral referents are no longer of real value and thus must be discarded. In Klaus’s terms, the time has come for Czech citizens to “begin to rule over their own lives” (1995a:7). In these women’s conceptions, they have cast off the unproductive waste of irresponsibility and dependency. Individual as well as societal success is contingent on the assumption of more productive comportment. Czech female managers view themselves as representing this success and its privileges. This self-perception is both articulated and implied. The women I interviewed frequently classi‹ed their behaviors in opposition to a categorical and marginal “Other.” This socially constructed polarization enables them to identify who they are and are not. Underlying this system of classi‹cation is a larger interpretive schema about who succeeds and who fails. In her study of changing management techniques in the postsocialist privatization of a Polish factory, Dunn similarly discovered Polish managers to engage in a “variant of Orientalism” in which they constructed themselves as “›exible capitalist selves,” in opposition to workers, the “marked and denigrated other” (2004:93). Czech female managers often openly stated this perceived difference. For example, ‹fty-‹ve-year old Lucie, a sales manager in a dairy enterprise, claimed, “There are people who can’t get used to [capitalism and democracy]. . . . They were used to always having someone lead them. I’m happier when no one is leading me. I am doing what I want, but I have to take care of everything.” Personnel director Zdenka dismissively declared, “I think that few people have this feeling of responsibility . . . I have a strong feeling of responsibility, personal responsibility. This is that I’m responsible for myself.” Many managers deemed this de‹cit in responsibility as a “problem” or “handicap” that holds back individuals and the wider Czech society. As economic director Tylda, who is in her early forties, claimed, “The entire logic of this society” has changed. She agreed with Klaus’s popular saying that

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“Everyone must take care of themselves.” Emílie contended, “The problem in this society is that everyone relies on the state solving everything, or someone, something that will resolve everything. There isn’t enough of this feeling of responsibility for one’s life, like with me.” Fifty-yearold Margareta’s sentiments mirror those of Emílie: “For a lot of people, it’s dif‹cult to live because they haven’t forgotten the past in the sense that before, the state resolved everything for them.” She later added, “I don’t receive anything from the state. . . . I feel good that I’m responsible for myself and my family.” In thirty-nine-year-old HR manager Julie’s words, people have to “unlearn” their socialist ways: In the past, the state was like a mangy hen that took care of everything in its own way. . . . People weren’t required to take care of themselves, and of course this was bad. It really wasn’t good at all. But at that time, people were really taken care of, whereas today, understandably, that care for you isn’t there. You have to take care of yourself. Julie emphasized the imperative for Czechs to “change”: “People want the gains of capitalism, the advantages,” she maintained, but “have not changed” and remain “lazy.” Heda expressed her belief that “competent, healthy people should have to work and should have to take care of themselves and not want help from the state.” The subtext of these remarks is that independence and personal responsibility are good/superior/of value and that these managers believe that they possess these qualities. To lack these qualities is bad/inferior; others are de‹cient.

Rational Economic (Wo)Men I do not doubt that East Europeans are part of the tribe called Homo economicus, for I am sure they react to the same incentives as their counterparts in Western countries. Our tremendous task, therefore, is to create an environment which will make it possible for all economic agents to behave rationally (in the economic sense). —Václav Klaus (1990b) I often say that Homo economicus rests in each of us who impatiently awaits his awakening. . . . I refuse [to accept] that, in us . . . a satis‹ed Homo sovieti-

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cus dominates who has grown accustomed to the conditions of the past and doesn’t want to be liberated from them. —Václav Klaus (1991c:21)

Forty-seven-year-old business manager Miluše describes freedom as “independence and . . . responsibility in everything.” If this is freedom, then indeed some individuals in the postsocialist world, such as the twenty-six managers in this study, are free. By their own self-assessments, they are independent and responsible. In the market metanarrative’s construction, liberation is accessible to all, without quali‹cation. In the free market, individuals’ behavior is determined by nothing more than rationality; past, place, and personhood (e.g., man or woman) have no bearing. With the right incentives in place, as Klaus espoused, all individuals will behave similarly, irrespective of time and space. The environment is irrelevant. In these female managers’ conformity with the contours of the market metastory, their stories of success lack much of the anchoring of history and culture. Moreover, any acknowledgment of the salience of their gender for their lives is lacking. To recognize that their gender mattered would disrupt the coherence of a metastory whose core emphases are opportunity and choice. To be a “woman”—a gendered category of constraint—is an inconsistency. Among the core assumptions of neoclassical economics in which the neoliberally in›ected market metanarrative ‹nds its ideological origins is that human nature is guided by a self-serving rationality. The rational economic man, Homo economicus, strives to maximize his personal gain in an ultimate quest for self-betterment. Accordingly, “Homo economicus is the personi‹cation of individuality run wild. ‘Economic man’ . . . springs up fully formed, with preferences fully developed and is fully active and self-contained” (Nelson 1996:30–31). For Czechs, Homo economicus’s individualism sits in stark and appealing contrast to the collectivist aims of state socialism. In their constructions of a postsocialist identity, the imagined self among Czech female managers is that of Homo economicus. They are genderless agents focused on enhancing their productive capacity as workers in an ultimate attempt to acquire more resources. One of the most intriguing expressions of this individualism is found in female managers’ co-optation of the terms kariéra (career) and kariérista (careerist). Prior to 1989, the concept of a kariéra existed in Czechoslovakia; however, its connotations were politically derogatory and overtly gen-

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dered. According to Emílie, kariéra was a “profane” term. In Ester’s recollection, a kariérista was “an individual who climbs over others’ backs,” exploiting party contacts to gain “key positions.” Such individuals, say the female managers I interviewed, were most often male. This self-serving conduct was seen as “indecent” and “objectionable” on both public and private fronts. Publicly, the prevailing “political climate” was “hostile to individual differences and . . . did not acknowledge individual achievement” (Ve&šínová-Kalivodová 1998:362). Under state socialism, the notion of kariéra was antithetical to the espoused values of collectivism and egalitarianism. As Sabina elucidated, for the many Czechoslovaks trying to “escape from the communist society” by retreating into the family fold, the political adherence to the Communist Party on which the kariérista’s ascent depended was personally aversive. Since 1989, however, the meanings of kariéra and kariérista appear to be undergoing some modi‹cation, as suggested by several managers’ use of these terms in describing their contemporary work trajectories and in their more general comments about the possibilities that the market offers for the wider populace. Sabina explained, “Before, the family was essentially the one possibility. A person had the prospect of building something that was only his. . . . And now, perhaps, it isn’t, because a person has the chance to build a career.” Irena said that it had become “the fashion to talk about career.” These remarks signal a shift away from negative understandings of kariéra. To be a kariérista is no longer dishonorable, and a kariérista is no longer necessarily assumed to be male. In an economy in which such self-seeking behavior is expected and desired in everyone, the kariérista has become respectable and can be either male or female. Kariéra and kariérista have also changed in terms of how they are accomplished. Whereas kariéristas previously drew primarily on their social capital to further their kariéra, Communist Party connections now have become largely worthless. Cultural capital is now the main means for individuals’ advancement. From the point of view of Czech female managers equipped with the right cultural capital, their climb is unimpeded. This sense of unrestricted possibility became especially manifest in their reactions to my questions about gender-based discrimination. Although they af‹rmed the existence of such discriminatory practices in the Czech Republic and in the former Czechoslovakia, most managers dissociated themselves from the experience. For these women, gender-based discrimina-

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tion is an obstacle that other women face. As Miluše responded, “I haven’t encountered it in my own life. I hear about it. In the news they write about it. On television they talk about it.” Forty-nine-year-old HR manager Háta complained that male colleagues often do not treat women as equal partners but quickly added, “I personally don’t feel this treatment, that someone would behave in a discriminatory way toward me because I’m a woman.” As Miloslava Umlaufová, president of the Associace podnikatelek a manaze& rek (Association of Female Entrepreneurs and Managers)6 explained, gender-based discrimination exists; however, “if this woman is capable, is effective, is a good partner with [men] in what she works with them on, then they don’t regard her as ‘You’re a woman.’ . . . They look at the work results as such . . . and they don’t notice that it’s a woman.” On the basis of Miluše’s and Háta’s responses, it might be surmised that female managers in the Czech Republic are somehow exempt from gender-based discrimination. Umlaufová’s comment, however, intimates a slightly different twist: she links gender-based discrimination with competence—that is, gender does not work against a woman if she is “capable.” From a quantitative standpoint, statistical ‹ndings challenge these qualitative claims. While an estimated 8 percent of all Czech working men hold managerial posts, only 3.5 percent of all Czech working women occupy managerial jobs (Kr&ízk& ová and Pavlica 2004). Moreover, as of 2000, male-female wage differentials were greatest in management positions; female managers earned an average of 54 percent as much as their male counterparts (Krí& zk& ová 2002). These data indicate that occupational strati‹cation and wage differentials exist along gender lines. With the associations among occupation, wages, and gender well established by the literature,7 the likelihood that these occurrences are the consequence of gender-based discrimination is strong. Whether occupational segregation is also at play in the management ‹eld is statistically unveri‹ed. With ten of the twenty-six female managers holding human resources/personnel management posts, the anecdotal evidence gleaned from this study is suggestive, however. An even larger number (‹fteen) are employed by multinational enterprises. The ques6. This nongovernmental organization was founded in the Czech Republic in 1990. As of August 2000, it had a base of between three hundred and four hundred members. 7. See, e.g., Reskin 1984.

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tion of whether corporate (inter)nationalization in the postsocialist world is gendered is, in statistical terms, uncharted territory. While Czech female managers are aware that gender-based discrimination exists, some observers, like me, may ‹nd these women’s assumption of invulnerability perplexing and perhaps naive. Their denial of personal disadvantage is not, however, a novel phenomenon. In research conducted more than two decades ago, Faye J. Crosby found this to be a common occurrence among employed women in the United States. Crosby theorized that the “notion of deserving” is ‹rmly entrenched in categorical conceptualizations. Because the reference of justice and therefore injustice is in essence to a “class” of individuals rather than to a single individual, claiming injustice compels individuals to recognize themselves as part of a larger categorical group (e.g., as women, as black) (Crosby 1982:162).8 As Crosby writes, One can sustain more easily the claim that a class of individuals have been denied their just desserts than the claim that a particular individual has not received her or his just desserts. When one asserts that a particular woman is the victim of sex discrimination, one treats the individual woman as a member of a larger class, woman. (162) Its quite plausible that the same mechanism is at work in the Czech context. Missing from Crosby’s explanation, however, is an identi‹cation of the wider narrative frame in which “justice” is embedded and of the notion’s conceptual linkages. In the postsocialist Czech Republic, this construct is situated within a metanarrative whose protagonist is the self-interested individual with freedom and opportunity his/her emplotted prospects. For Czech female managers, to acknowledge any injustice as “women” would signi‹cantly disrupt their capacity to reconcile the happenings of their lives with the market metanarrative. The constraints of their gender are antithetical to the market’s mantras. To construct an identity as “winners,” they cannot then be “losers.” In this complicity with the market metanarrative, gender consciousness is squashed. In their steadfast adherence to the structure of this meta-tale, 8. “The essence of justice,” says moral philosopher Chaim Perelman, “is that one must treat like alike” (quoted in Crosby 1982:62).

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the rami‹cations extend beyond an interpretive severance of the tie between gender and the economy to that between gender and the state.

Being a Good Citizen During the socialist era, the state generally dictated the economy’s workings, determining production, allocation, and consumption. In the postsocialist Czech Republic, the dynamic sought is quite the reverse. Supply and demand are now to be determined primarily by market forces. This dynamic is based on the assumption that economic ef‹ciency is best achieved when “market forces operate, and products and services are not subsidized, heavily regulated or produced by the government” (Sparr 1994:1). In one of Klaus’s many iterations of this belief, he declared, The government can only very little . . . take care of the framework of conditions for a functioning market, the stabilization of prices and the health of state ‹nances. The government should not want to know what is going on in individual enterprises and organizations, and it should in no way want to advise on what should be produced and to whom it should be sold. (1990e:2) Inhibiting the state’s controlling tendencies, as he reiterated again and again, requires that Czechs be responsible for insuring their freedom: “We know that it is our task to attack the expanding state, which was and still is a dominant tendency of the twentieth century, of the century of socialisms with a variety of confusing adjectives. . . . We want to demonstrate that it is possible to make a return to a liberal social order” (Klaus 1997:40). Yet again, freedom would be linked to responsibility for the Czech citizenry. Here, it would necessitate keeping the state at bay. The socialist state assured the common good by assuring a vast array of economic (e.g., guaranteed employment) and social (e.g., child bene‹t) rights. Although rhetorically framed as universal rights, social rights such as maternity leave and the family allowance were directed primarily at mothers and families. Entitlement to such rights was, however, conditional on one’s having worker status. As such, the state cre-

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ated a system of mutual and engendered reliance, with the system dependent on women to labor and women dependent on the system to mother. In the postsocialist Czech Republic, neoliberal proponents seek to sever this tie. Adhering to neoliberalism’s prescripts means allowing the market to determine its labor requisites and to meet laborers’ needs. In this shift, much of the rights previously meted out by the socialist state are now to be furnished by the market economy. In this scenario, the “good citizen . . . recognizes the limits and liabilities of state intervention and, instead, works longer and harder to become self-reliant” (Brodie 1994:57; see also Drache 1992). In this schema, citizenship—as a set of economic and social rights—is heavily subsumed by the market. The “good citizen” and the “ideal worker” are narratively imbued with the same behavioral correlates of self-reliance and responsibility. In this conceptual con›ation, being a good citizen effectively means being an ideal worker, and vice versa. As neoliberals so aspired, Czech female managers construe the ties among women, family, and the state as no longer viable. This interpretation becomes even more general (and gender neutral) as any and all ties between individuals and the state are deemed incommensurate with free-market freedom. As Josephina pragmatically explained, “We lived in debt. It wasn’t free. It had to come from somewhere.” Much as the market metastory says, this debt numbers among Czechs’ socialist transgressions. In female managers’ inferences, success in the present as well as the future requires righting these past wrongs. In their construal, this amendment involves a wholesale rejection of state economic and social supports. As Josephina put it, “It’s a fact that there were a lot of advantages. . . . But you know what? Everything that was before the revolution, I don’t like.” For Josephina and for other female managers making sense of their present privilege compels them to disdain the privileges of their past. Their denunciation is indiscriminate rather than con‹ned to those populaces’ enfranchised in capitalism’s wake. In their estimations, this is capitalism: as Zdenka explained, “It means you don’t get anything.” As Lucie articulated, the past had “de‹nite advantages. . . . There were family allowances and the like, but you know, it isn’t right. . . . I don’t expect anything from anyone. A person must be selfsuf‹cient, and they have to learn in life how to take care of everything. I don’t expect help from the state or anyone.” Julie similarly advocated a gradual but eventually total discontinuation of state social bene‹ts:

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I think that if I decide to have a child, I would know that I can take care of this child—that I’m economically strong enough. . . . In the transition from [the socialist] regime, you can’t cancel everything at once, though, because a lot of people would economically collapse. Nonetheless, I think that de‹nitely, gradually [the bene‹ts] should be canceled. Ester claimed to want only one thing from the state: “to create a legislative framework . . . for ‹rms that don’t have a chance of survival to ‹nally go bankrupt so that the economy is cleaned up to start growing. Because if there is growth, then of course the entire situation will be better.” Herma, Emílie, and Miluše declared themselves to have no expectations of the state. Dependence is implicated in socialism’s failure. In Czech female managers’ appropriation of the market metanarrative, given a chance at redemption, their task is to avoid repeating the same sins.

Rationalizing Reproductive Labor Czech female managers see themselves as having heeded capitalism’s calls for rational comportment not only as workers and citizens but also in their family roles. Their rationality pervades economic, civic, and family life. Rationalizing reproductive labor (labor requisite to the maintenance of the productive workforce, such as housework, childbearing, and child rearing) can been seen as their greatest interpretive challenge. Because the market metanarrative is silent on reproduction, they must ‹ll in this gap in the story. According to its storytellers, the self-regulating free market is the sole means of generating wealth. Outside the market, in the realm of reproduction, there is nothing to be bought or sold, no pro‹ts to be made. With no apparent monetary gain, reproductive labor is construed as empty of economic value and is thus immaterial to the market metanarrative.9 The only identity of real value in this metastory is that of the ideal worker. For Czech female managers, this identity conjoined with freedom warrants preservation. Gita Sen contends that “while market expansion in many instances builds on and 9. For feminist critiques of this assumption, see, e.g., Elson 1991, 1992; Waring 1988.

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reinforces preexisting gender relations, it may also destabilize such relations” (1996:826). In the case of Czech female managers, both processes appear to be occurring. These twenty-six women have an acute awareness that the values have shifted, as Irena conveys: “In ‹rst place [now] is knowing how to make money and knowing how to enjoy oneself and live well, but the family goes all the way to the back. . . . The ranking of life values has changed. . . . Before, in my opinion, the values were reversed. People were more oriented toward family, to family life.” Many Czechs saw the family as an “escape,” in Sabina’s words—a sacred space beyond the reach of a profane state. The burden or responsibility for this realm has fallen predominantly on Czech women since well before the socialist period, and state socialism only slightly alleviated the dynamic. Despite legislation enacted by the Communist Party and the constitution’s proclamation of “equality for all,” gender equality remained more de jure than de facto. As I discussed in chapter 2, while the socialist state’s professed ideology and legal directives appeared committed to women’s emancipation, the challenge to gender inequality was only partial and to a great extent was con‹ned to the public sphere. Czech women became supplemental wage earners, but their responsibilities as wives and mothers in the private sphere endured, with little alteration. For example, from a Western vantage point, the generous maternity leaves granted to women under state socialism appeared progressive. However, without comparable leaves for men, the practice reinforced women’s traditional parenting role. In its practical connotations, the home was unequivocally women’s domain prior to 1989. Despite the home’s burdensome nature, the perversions of state socialism also symbolically elevated the stature of the private sphere. Confronted by a state that “abrogated all prerogative in the public sphere,” Czechs came to view the private sphere as sacrosanct, as beyond the reach of a state with a seemingly ubiquitous presence (Watson 1998:9). As Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic´ explained, “An apartment, however small, however crowded with people and things, kids and animals, is ‘ours.’ To survive we had to divide the territory, to set a border between public and private” (1993:91–92). With the home sancti‹ed, the task of its preservation was worthy. Consequently, Czech women little resisted its “burden.” As Czech sociologist Jir&ina Šiklová described, Czech women were both

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“martyrs” and “saints.”10 In light of its practical redress and its symbolic salience under state socialism, gender equality was virtually impossible in the division of reproductive labor under state socialism. In the new market economy, the practical circumstances have shifted and the private sphere is no longer so highly esteemed. While the home was the sole preserve of individual autonomy during the socialist period, in the postsocialist era, independence de‹nes the public world of work. With the economic turnabout, emancipation in the domestic arena has become a possibility for some Czech women. The managers interviewed describe processes that simultaneously fortify and weaken existing gender relations in the home. Driving these paradoxical processes is the seemingly unbounded nature of market activity. In capitalism’s relentless pursuit of pro‹t, employers demand that workers of both genders provide virtually in‹nite time availability and ›exibility. These twenty-six women clearly understand these demands. In the socialist era, Heda recalled, time cards limited workers to 42.5 hours per week. Now that she is a manager, there are no time cards; she can come and go freely. However, this situation is not necessarily a bene‹t: she cannot go home until the work is done, and “the work is never done.” High time investment is further deemed a demonstration of personal responsibility and thus is one of success’ requirements. As Julie asserted, “If you want to achieve something, if you want to work in management, then it isn’t eight hours a day. It’s about responsibility.” Work has expanded not only in terms of time consumed but also in terms of the spaces it occupies. For many female managers, work has invaded the domestic sphere, ‹lling up not only evenings and weekends but living rooms and kitchen tables. To cope with the market’s temporal sprawl, however, those activities that take place outside of the market—that is, reproductive labor— must be contained. Here, the market metanarrative leaves off, and Czech female managers must create an interpretive bridge to grapple with the metastory’s silence. They deem their interpretive innovations “rational” responses, with two variations. In the ‹rst, they relinquish their household duties (e.g., cleaning) to lower-class women. This strategy to some extent subverts the public/private divide by converting nonmarket activities into market activities. However, this approach fails 10. Personal communication.

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to overturn the gendered nature of household work. Domestic labor remains primarily the province of women, although the emergent class hierarchy gives upper-class women the prerogative of hiring lower-class women to perform such tasks. Czech female managers, however, never verbally acknowledge this continued gendering of the responsibilities of housework, remaining silent about this contradiction. According to Mary Romero’s work on the “housework dilemma,” linking “the oppression of housework” to its “unpaid status” enables professional women to “deny that the burden of sexism has been shifted to another woman” (1992:168). In the second strategy, Czech female managers radically revise the division of labor in their households11 in favor of a more gender-equitable division.12 This tactic constitutes a remarkable destabilization of the long-standing status quo. In theoretical terms, this development appears to be largely consistent with Rae Lesser Blumberg’s (1984, 1988) theory of gender strati‹cation, in which relative male/female economic power is the principal determinant of intrahousehold strati‹cation. Put more plainly, the greater women’s economic power, the greater their say in household matters. The managers I interviewed conceived of this modi‹cation as a result of market demands rather than any exercise in gendered power. This interpretation enables them again to avoid the conceptual contradictions between gendered constraints and the market’s supposed lack of restraint. 11. The underlying assumption here is that the household contains cohabitors such as a husband or partner and/or children. 12. One additional rationalization of reproductive labor may be at work here, involving Czech women more generally opting out of childbearing or limiting themselves to only one child in the new market economy. As of 1990, the average age at ‹rst birth in Czechoslovakia was 22.5 years; by 2000, this ‹gure had increased to 25. Over the same period, the fertility rate dropped from an estimated 1.9 to 1.14 (Czech Statistical Of‹ce 2004). Such dramatic shifts very likely constitute a response to the turmoil of economic transition but also may be part of a broader pattern of child postponement found in Europe more broadly. This type of rationalization was not so readily apparent among the twenty-six women I interviewed. However, as of 1990, all of the female managers in this study were twenty-four years of age or older, and most were at least thirty years old. Thus, for most of these women, marketization may not have had a tremendous effect on their childbearing decisions because such decisions had already been made before the outset of transition. Nonetheless, it remains possible—indeed, probable—that this rationalization is occurring for a younger cohort of female success stories.

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For the Czech Republic, services such as cleaning, babysitting, and food delivery/take-out are a novelty, unavailable prior to 1989. Today, those households with adequate ‹nancial resources can pay members of an emerging class of service providers to take over many household tasks, such as child care and meal preparation. As thirty-‹ve-year-old marketing manager Irma af‹rmed, “Financial security and the like makes such things not so miserably dif‹cult.” The growing array of services “can now make life a little easier,” said thirty-‹ve-year-old HR manager So‹a. In many ways, So‹a exempli‹es how high-status Czech women are adapting to the free market by allocating many of their domestic duties to lower-status women. During the late 1990s, So‹a divorced her husband of ten years. At the time of the interview, So‹a had been involved with another man for a year and a half, and he had moved in with her and her eleven-year-old daughter ten months earlier. So‹a and her partner were working hard to compromise on the distribution of household labor. For example, her partner takes more responsibility in the kitchen since he enjoys cooking. They grocery shop together, although So‹a attributes this cooperation primarily to his ownership of the car. Her retired parents help considerably with the care of their granddaughter, taking her to and from school, for instance. So‹a bears responsibility for a wide assortment of household tasks, including vacuuming, dusting, mopping, laundry, and more general cleanup. She also assumes much of the responsibility for caring for her daughter—for example, helping with her homework. In the throes of pursuing an MBA while working full time, So‹a believed that it was “impossible to balance everything.” In 2000, therefore, So‹a and her boyfriend hired a woman to clean their home once a month: “I don’t have this woman so that I can lay out in the yard and get a tan. I have this woman because I have other work that I also must do. And this work she can’t do for me, nor anyone else, but that work [in the home] she can do for me.” So‹a hopes to eventually increase the cleaning woman’s visits to twice a month. She believes that such a move would be sensible but that her boyfriend would require some cajoling. The rationality of this transformation of reproductive into productive labor is less apparent for her partner and arguably for Czech men in general, who have reaped the advantages of reproductive work’s gendering. This long-standing arrangement where mothers, wives, and partners have done the bulk of the household labor has taken little away from men. Scenarios such as So‹a’s possess a ‹nancial cost. While these

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women try to play up social gains such as more quality time for their families, some men continue to struggle to come to terms with the perceived ‹nancial sacri‹ce. In Háta’s case, her husband was less resistant to the monetary outlay: When I began to have more responsibility at work, I realized that it isn’t in my power to balance [work and family] so that I might at least have some weekend because I worked from morning to night every day. On Saturday morning I went shopping, started to cook. In the afternoon I did the laundry, hung the clothes out to dry, and on Sunday I spent the entire afternoon at the ironing board because a man needs one or two shirts a day. And I said, “This isn’t a life,” because I felt like I’m tired. I went to work on Mondays completely worn out. Then we bought a cottage so that on Friday evenings perhaps we would go to the cottage. And, at home, I no longer really did anything in the household. That didn’t work. In 1994, Háta and her husband hired someone to clean their home and to do the ironing once a week. Her husband yielded easily. Never willing to participate physically in the maintenance of their home, this ‹nancial concession, according to Háta, was a form of “help,” albeit “minimal.” For Háta, having the maid is a “great relief.” “Without her, I think that it would be very dif‹cult to coordinate everything together because to be a perfect mother, a perfect employee or employer or boss, to have everything at home perfectly clean—it’s nonsense!” While many Czech female managers have attempted to cope with their domestic demands by hiring help in the form of cleaning women, nannies, and/or babysitters, several opted for an alternative approach that entails a pragmatic allocation of household duties among all household members. Emílie is married with two sons, ages nine and eleven. She began working as an administrative assistant in 1995 at a branch of a multinational enterprise that manufactures medical products. She wanted to work part time, but when she went to an employment agency was told that doing so would be a “problem.” An invalid, widowed male neighbor offered to help by taking her children to and from school and babysitting after school until she returned home. He also ironed and vacuumed. Eventually however, Emílie grew uncomfortable with this arrangement:

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My sons see that while they don’t do anything at home, there is an external person coming to the ›at and cleaning the ›at. And I felt it’s not a very good example for them. So I wasn’t so comfortable with that. And then he was sick, he had some problem again, this gentleman, and he told me that he doesn’t want to continue because he should relax more. . . . He was at least one and half a year or something like that coming to our ›at. And then since he stopped, the sons were already big enough, and I thought, “Jesus Christ, why should I hire an external lady to come cleaning when I have two sons who can do the vacuum cleaning themselves?” So I discussed with them, and that’s how it all started. And I told to my sons, “Look, if we get an external person”—because they knew that we had to pay to that gentleman—“I have to give part of my salary to that lady so it will in›uence the family budget.” And I told them, “Look, you want the in-line skates or whatever? We will not be able to go for a vacation every year to the seaside or something like that.” And I told them that if each of us will do a small part. . . . We are four people in the family, and we have a small ›at, and if we divide the job it’s fair enough. And they agreed that it’s fair enough. I have to say the elder son is much more willing to help. The younger son, he’s still got some problems . . . but the elder one is quite reliable, and now I even increase the level, I even ask them to switch on the washing machine, I put in the powder and everything there, so they switch it on and when the washing machine is done they can even hang the clothes. So we are one step further. So I am trying to—I don’t want to make cleaning ladies out of them, of course, but I want them to understand that something happens in between, as I say, from the time that you take a dirty shirt and put it in the bathroom until it appears, by some miracle, again washed and ironed, folded properly, in your shelf. So, I want them to understand that something is there and somebody has to do these things, and I really think it’s very good for life.13 Emílie’s heavy emphasis on responsibility weaves in one of the market metanarrative’s main threads. She claims that while her husband is 13. During this portion of the interview, Emílie spoke English; these are her words.

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“not very happy” doing household chores, he too recognizes the value of fostering such behavior in their children. Forty-nine-year-old ‹nance manager Anna also uses the notion of responsibility in her justi‹cation of a less gendered division of housework, but with a different reference: “I also go to work, and I have work that is virtually as responsible as his—I am basically on his level. And in that case, we have to divide that which concerns our home [life].” Her twenty-year-old son still lives at home, and she deems all three members of the household responsible for its operation, basing her rationalization primarily on available time: “The one who is home must do what [housework] is necessary.” For forty-nine-year-old HR manager Milada, the intensifying demands of her job meant less time at home. In her view, this change constituted legitimate grounds for insisting that her husband share more in the cooking and cleaning. He was reluctant to assume greater responsibility. While “teaching” him that the household is no longer solely her terrain to maintain, Milada used her sizable economic contribution to the family as her trump card, not only in justifying her abdication of some of the domestic duties but more strategically as an inducement to her husband to assume a larger portion of household chores. Miluše’s husband was “uninvolved with the household labor” prior to 1990—“he did nothing.” When she became part owner of a company producing dairy products, however, the demands on her time became so vast that she found herself unable to attend to many of the household tasks. As a result, her husband had to “take part of these concerns on his own shoulders.” The couple had been married for ten years, and the dif‹cult adjustment provoked a marital “crisis.” Over time, however, Miluše said, he had come to understand and accept this reallocation of domestic labor. As of 2000, a few female managers in the group interviewed had not instituted any mode of rationalizing their reproductive labor; however, many entertained ideas of its reform akin to those of So‹a, Háta, Emílie, Anna, Milada, and Miluše. Josephina was still “considering” whether to hire a cleaning woman. Margareta had been looking to hire a cleaning woman for a while but was having dif‹culty ‹nding someone trustworthy. For all of these women, the rationalization of reproductive labor had obstacles in the shape of disinclined husbands/partners, reluctant children, and unreliable domestic workers. Nonetheless, these women sought to overcome these impediments. Their rationalization of reproductive labor lent their postsocialist lives a sense of coherence. As they

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fused the personal, private happenings of their everyday lives with the public metastory of the market, the links between behavior and success/failure remained intact. The disruptions of gender constraints and class privilege went largely unrecognized. In the opinions of Czech female managers, the market made a bona ‹de offer of freedom.

Conclusion The establishment of new economic, social, and political relationships will offer greater individual responsibility, freedom, and even power. —Václav Klaus (1990e:1)

Czech female managers defy ready ascription as have-nots or as losers in the Czech Republic’s economic transformation. For them, the move toward the market has demanded that they become more self-reliant, personally responsible, and independent. In return, they have received the promised gains—status, prestige, and power—and the ultimate reward, freedom. In their interpretation, they have heeded the market metanarrative’s calls. To invoke one of Heda’s words, they have relinquished the “passivity” of their past. In their postsocialist present, they have embraced a behavioral repertoire that requires agency on their part. They have actively seized new opportunities and consequently have reaped hefty social and ‹nancial bene‹ts. In their estimations, the market is the source of their empowerment. Its transformative effects touch every aspect of their lives, recon‹guring their roles not only as workers but also as citizens, wives/partners, and mothers. Making sense of their postsocialist everyday lived realities is contingent on a logic that does not exist without its illogic. Here, making market sense means marking some experiential elements as nonsense. More speci‹cally, absent from their liberatory tale is any recognition of a social self as gendered. This inconsistency between liberation and oppression must be suppressed to maintain the sense of the metastory from which these women derive their personal sagas. Moreover, for these twenty-six women, making market sense leaves history and culture super›uous. In their interpretation, emancipation is available to all able individuals at any time and any place as long as they adhere to the free market’s behavior prescriptions. The experiences of Czech female factory workers, unlike those of

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Czech female managers, are not so easily reconciled with the emancipatory promise of the market metanarrative. These workers’ attempts to make sense of their postsocialist lifeworlds compel somewhat more arduous interpretive innovations than those made by female managers. Nonetheless, even for female factory workers, the market metanarrative remains a liberatory parable, albeit not immediate.

5 No (Wo)Man’s Land The Postsocialist Purgatory of Czech Female Factory Workers Socialism is a game with zero-sum gains (as forty years convincingly demonstrated). A market economy based on the principles of private ownership is a game with a positive outcome—wins and losses don’t cancel each other out. It is about a cumulative process leading toward the victory of all of us. —Václav Klaus (1991d:1)

According to the metanarrative, the market’s triumph was not merely for an elite few; to the contrary, it was a victory in which all Czechs would prevail. Czech female factory workers were, therefore, no exception. Infected with the fervor of the Velvet Revolution, Czech workers dared to imagine a “better world.” Forty-‹ve-year-old Lada, who both before and after 1989 worked on the production line in a Czech-owned factory that manufactures cosmetics and perfumes, recalled being ‹lled with revolutionary zeal. Like so many Czechs who rattled their keys as a symbolic protest during the demonstrations against the communist regime in Wenceslas Square during November 1989, Lada shook her keys “like a crazy person.” At that time she thought, “It’s going to be fabulous. . . . Finally we’re going to have it good, we’re going to have more money, we’re going to be able to travel. . . . Finally those of us at the bottom— because I am a worker—we’re going to have it better. Really, I believed . . . that it is going to be more fair toward ordinary” people. The velvet vision of prosperity and more generally of freedom was publicly and personally imagined as a dream “for all.” Lada’s thirty-nine-year-old coworker, Dáša, described her “sweet” dreams about a postsocialist An earlier version of this chapter was published in Social Problems 52 (4): 572–92. 95

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future, echoing those of Lada and those of most Czechs: “I imagined it like this: that they’ll increase my wages, that vacation won’t be such a problem for me, and that I won’t have to count every” crown. Czech female factory workers did not have lofty expectations. They merely wanted to “earn enough to live decently,” “have a foundation,” and attain a better standard of living. The market metanarrative stipulated, however, that monetary gains would not be instantaneous or painless. As I discussed in chapter 3, penance in the manner of pain and sacri‹ce would be the price exacted to gain freedom from socialism’s shackles. To invoke yet another of Klaus’s admonitions to the Czech populace, in a March 1990 Literární noviny article he cautioned, “The transformation of our economy into an effectively functioning market system is not going to be painless; we’re going to have to change a lot of our habits” (1990e:1). The workers heard policymakers’ demands for “belt-tightening” and readily accepted the speci‹ed ‹ve- to seven-year delay in ‹nancial grati‹cation (Drábek 1991). As Dáša declared, “I knew that it wasn’t going to be immediate.” Lada contended, “They said ‹ve years.” According to the market metastory, short-term pains would ultimately translate into long-term gains. For Czech female factory workers, this knowledge made the supposedly short-term ‹nancial squeeze palatable. Fifty-one-year-old Jirka recalled understanding from the beginning that it wasn’t “going to be easy.” Like her fellow Czechs, she believed policymakers’ promises of eventual betterment with the quali‹cation that it was not “going to be like the West. We didn’t believe that, but we thought that it would improve so that we would have the capacity to earn at least enough that we could live decently.” Forty-twoyear-old Eliška, similarly grappling with the publicly espoused connection between immediate but short-term hardship and eventual but enduring well-being, commented, “I thought that perhaps for a while, like what was said, we would tighten our belts. It would be for a while, but then the standard [of living] would begin to go up.” After a decade of waiting, however, their convictions had largely collapsed. As Lada expressed with dismay, economic hardship is “still going on today.” Disillusionment set in as initially anticipated ‹nite hardships became endless. As Dáša observed sadly, “I thought that after these ten years that we would truly be somewhere else,” later adding that she had “looked forward to [prosperity], and suddenly you discover that it isn’t in sight.” She described the situation using the Czech idiom Mazání kolem pusy, which literally refers to the spreading of

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honey all over one’s mouth and ‹guratively means a sweet but false promise. In this chapter, I illuminate how forty-eight Czech female factory workers draw on the market metanarrative to make sense of their postsocialist plummet. Pushed to the margins in both economic and social terms, they seem to be the losers in the new economic game. Indeed, their postsocialist predicament is not easily reconciled with the forecasted rewards of marketization. However, the hegemony of the market metastory renders it not so easily discarded. As a result, these women engage in an act of interpretive adaptation to ‹t together their lived experiences and the market metanarrative. Accordingly, they ascribe their postsocialist tribulations to their socialist upbringing. Their future generations, exempted from the experiential burden of the socialist past, will thus reap the rewards of economic reform. Capitalism’s promise of a “radiant future” consequently remains unbroken.

Suffering and Struggle Most of the forty-eight Czech female factory workers I interviewed have spent much if not all of their working lives at the same factory. Obligated to work and granted job security by the socialist state, the majority of these women imagined that their work lives would end where they began, that they would hold the same jobs until their retirement. Now, however, the Czech state no longer guarantees its citizens jobs or ensures enterprise survival. As the market metanarrative asserts, the state’s paternalistic rapport with citizens and businesses has come to an end. Since the outset of the economic transition, these workers have struggled to maintain a foothold on an unstable, transformed economic terrain. Despite the many windows of opportunity created in the transition from a command to market economy, Czech female factory workers largely lack the human capital prerequisites—especially education— needed to pass through the windows. During the early stages of transition, the demand for educational credentials—speci‹cally, a university degree and a knowledge of English, German, and/or French—privileged some women, but not factory workers. Only one of the forty-eight workers in the sample attended university; the remaining forty-seven completed only elementary or most commonly secondary school. Many of these women work-

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ers mastered their requisite job skills during on-the-job/on-site training; the remainder trained in secondary school. As part of the curriculum, these women pursued an uce& bní obor (conceptually akin to vocational training or an apprenticeship) that involved specializing in a particular ‹eld, often over the course of several years. Employment in the same factory where one trained typically followed. Thirty-‹ve-yearold Marie, who works for a pharmaceutical maker, described her fouryear ucební & obor: That ‹rst year, we had practice in the laboratory, where we actually learned all about chemistry with test tubes. And then, in the second and third year, we went into production. . . . We had six days of school and then four days of work. And actually, we went straight to production to assist. What was necessary we actually did so that we could go through the factory and the job to get an actual idea of what one does. Forty-three-year-old Zuzana recalled her start as a sixteen-year-old at Polovodice& , a company that manufactured semiconductors: I wanted to learn window dressing because I liked to design and to display. . . . Everything with window dressing I liked tremendously. So, my folks enrolled me in a window dressing program, but I didn’t get in because they could have paved the street with them [i.e., applicants]. There were far too many. My dad wanted me to go into butchery. I really didn’t want to, and so I went to my schoolteacher and cried there that I don’t want butchery and that I want something else. They again came from Polovodice& [to my school]. They were hiring people, training them for their company as lab technicians. It really appealed to me, so I took it, I trained there. . . . As a lab technician it was half and half—a little chemistry and a little electronics. But in the end, I became an electronics ‹tter [on the production line]. I was there for about three years, then I got married at eighteen or nineteen and in two years I went on maternity leave. Marie’s and Zuzana’s trajectories were typical of many Czechs who, under state socialism, were routed into an ucební & obor during their sec-

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ondary school years and then were employed by the same enterprise in which they had trained. However, this seemingly secure course under state socialism left many Czechs, especially women, in an insecure economic position post-1989. The unemployment rate and risk for individuals with a secondary or lower level of educational attainment has been signi‹cantly greater than for those with a postsecondary education.1 Moreover, without postsecondary schooling, Czechs such as Marie and Zuzana never acquired English or other international business language skills; instead, they learned Russian. These women greatly lamented this language de‹ciency as a piece of the past ill suited to the present. A lack of human capital unquestionably renders many opportunities unavailable to Czech female factory workers. Where opportunities have presented themselves, these women workers generally identi‹ed the potential risks as too great. Although a new job carries the possibility of success in the new market economy, these women found that the likelihood of failure poses too much risk. Their experienced economic and social marginality in the new market economy has fueled an acute sense of vulnerability.

The “Hunt for Money”: Poor People, Beggars, and Gypsies In the move toward the market, Czech female factory workers’ economic grip has weakened considerably. Their real earnings have shrunk relative to their pre-1989 real earnings. As Czech sociologist Jirí& Vece& rník explains, only those in the top income strata have bene‹ted from the opportunities created by “private business, foreign capital, new management requirements, and the ‹nancial market”; meanwhile, those in the middle income range “have in no way pro‹ted from the transformation” (1996:65). Most of the female factory workers I inter1. For example, in the fourth quarter of 1993, the unemployment rates of women by level of educational attainment were 7.8 percent primary, 5.4 percent trade school, 4.2 percent secondary (vocational), 3.8 percent secondary (general), and 1.3 percent university (Czech Statistical Of‹ce 1994). In the fourth quarter of 1998, they were 16.7 percent compulsory school (without further education), 9.7 percent secondary (vocational), 8.7 percent secondary (general), and 3.3 percent university (Czech Statistical Of‹ce 2000a).

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viewed earned less than the Czech median wage in 2000. As table 4 reveals, a mere six earned more than the 2000 average gross monthly wage of 13,490 crowns. Because in›ation has outpaced their wage growth, these workers have struggled to stay ‹nancially a›oat in the new market economy. In their recollections of the socialist past, the factory workers summoned up impressions of relative economic equality among the Czechoslovak citizenry. In Jirka’s memory, “No one had it much better. . . . The differences were not so great. Rich people existed. They were called the top ten thousand, but these were people with whom one did not compare oneself. . . . They were a completely separate category of people.” Dašá contended, “Everyone got the same.” The factory workers recalled few if any extras or luxuries for the average person under state socialism. Nonetheless, in their estimations, everyone had “enough” income. These claims of minimal income inequality in socialist Czechoslovakia are not false memories. In a 1991 World Bank report, Alan Gelb and Cheryl Gray cited the relatively equal income distribution as “perhaps the major accomplishment of the socialist systems of Central and Eastern Europe” (56). Socialist Czechoslovakia’s Gini coef‹cient of 20.7 during the 1970s and 1980s was among the lowest of the socialist economies (e.g., Hungary = 24.4, Poland = 24.3) and was lower than the coef‹cients found in most “middle-income developing countries” (e.g., United States = 32.6) (Gelb and Gray 1991:53; see also Milanovic 1990).2 These women workers claimed that since 1989, however, they have barely subsisted from paycheck to paycheck. Jirka, like most of the other female factory workers, bemoaned her deteriorating ‹nancial circumstances: I can’t afford a vacation, which before I could afford. Before we could afford to buy a new car. Now it is absolutely, simply not possible any longer. . . . What I earn is enough for us, for the family’s subsistence and for the necessary expenses [i.e., electric, gas, phone] . . . and it’s enough so that the children can study, but in no way for anything else.

2. The Gini coef‹cient is the most common measure of income inequality. Its value ranges between 0 (total equality) and 100 (all income appropriated by one recipient).

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Several workers described their lives as having become a “honba za penez& ma” (hunt for money). As Marie emphatically stated, “When a person looks back, when one earned two thousand [crowns], that was money! When I brought in twelve hundred, that was a lot of money. Now, we earn ‹ves times as much and it isn’t enough.” Meanwhile, ‹ve of forty-three-year-old Štepanka’s paper factory coworkers nodded in agreement as she remarked, “I think we’re always in the red, but we’re alive.” In a focus group in a factory that produces baked goods and pastries, thirty-six-year-old Agáta and ‹fty-three-year-old Lota debated the correlation between wages and in›ation: Agáta: The fact is, wages increased once over, but everything’s gotten twice as expensive. Lota: Yeah, if only two times! Agáta: Fine, I say two times, three times. So you really are, in fact, still in the same situation. Even when you have more, everything still costs more. The factory workers see the in›ux of consumer goods as one of the few positive and tangible aspects of the economic transition. Indeed, both the availability and accessibility of goods have dramatically improved. They no longer wait in long lines in hopes of purchasing items. However, now they spend their shopping time going from store

table 4. Gross Monthly Income in Czech Crowns, 2000 (in percentages) Income Interval ≤ 5,000 Kc& ≤ 8,000 Kc& ≤ 12,000 Kc& ≤ 16,000 Kc& ≤ 20,000 Kc& ≤ 25,000 Kc&

Czech Female Factory Workersa 2.27 (1) 40.90 (17) 86.35 (20) 100.00 (6)

Total Population 0.56 9.74 40.67 69.81 84.59 92.28

Source: Czech Statistical Office 2001. Note: Calculations based on the wages of individuals employed seventeen hundred or more hours annually to eliminate the influence of part-time work and/or long-term illness on wage estimations. Gross wages do not constitute take-home pay, as a number of deductions are made from this total, including health insurance and social security. Net wages range between 70 and 80 percent of gross wages. a44 of 48 reported.

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to store in an exhausting effort to make the most of their limited monetary resources. As thirty-six-year-old Máša asserted, “The stores are full of everything that we would like, but we can’t buy it.” Forty-‹veyear-old Marta added, “If you want to buy something, you have to scrimp and save.” The rising cost of goods without a concomitant rise in real wages further limits factory workers’ ability to purchase items. The plethora of new goods is a postsocialist phenomenon in which female factory workers share little.3 In the new market economy, Czech female factory workers remain primarily producers rather than consumers. The “fall to the bottom” of the emerging socioeconomic hierarchy may be the most agonizing aspect of Czech female factory workers’ transition experiences. In the postsocialist Czech Republic, individuals no longer appear economically indistinguishable; instead, the differences have become increasingly apparent. Dáša characterized the country’s current economic reality as a dichotomy between the “positively rich” and the “downright poor,” with nothing in between. Jirka’s statement that “we’ve discovered that we are the poorest group . . . when we always thought we belonged to some middle group” epitomizes the shock of identity reconstruction for these women. As class difference replaces economic sameness, they are rede‹ned as “the poor.” The state has reinforced and continues to reinforce this identity in its efforts to eliminate universal social bene‹ts, especially the child bene‹t, in favor of a means-tested system in accordance with its neoliberal agenda.4 In 1995, the Czech government legislatively abolished the universal distribution of the child bene‹t, formerly provided to all families with dependent children.5 Ironically, the income caps set in 1995 for the child bene‹t enabled 95 percent of Czech families to remain eligible. In 1997, subsequent modi‹cations left 75 percent of Czech families eligible. As Leah Seppanen Anderson contends based on her extensive study of the devel3. For other examples of women’s celebrated consumer choice coupled with a realization of resource constraints on consumption in the postsocialist world, see Kennedy 2002; Petkova and Grif‹n 1998. 4. For an elaborate discussion of the encounter of the welfare state in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe with a neoliberal mandate (of global as well as local impetuses), see Haney 2002; for an abridged version, see Haney 1999. 5. In the Czech Republic, children are considered dependents until the age of eighteen, when they complete secondary schooling, unless they continue their education at the university level, in which case children may remain dependents until age twenty-six.

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opment of the Czech welfare state, the 1997 revision “sounded a fundamentally different rhetoric concerning the state and its responsibilities to families and paved the way for future decreases in child allowance expenditures, especially as household income becomes more differentiated” (2002:8). Despite the great inclusivity of the child bene‹t, as of 1999–2000, not all eligible Czech families were receiving it. Indeed, several of the female managers I interviewed opted not to apply for it, deeming this bene‹t negligible to their family income. For factory workers, who earn far less, the child bene‹t is a valued contribution, however. Jirka, a divorced mother with one child and a gross monthly salary between 8,000 and 11,999 crowns, received a child bene‹t amounting to 600 crowns each month in 2000. Although Jirka deemed this amount “nothing much,” it equaled between 5 and 9 percent of her take-home pay. While the child bene‹t is not insubstantial for Czech female factory workers, procuring it from the state is no easy feat in the postsocialist era. Workers recalled the simplicity under state socialism of ‹lling out one form that enabled them to “automatically” receive the monthly child bene‹t. Minimal direct contact between citizens and state welfare workers occurred. Since 1995, however, citizens typically must reapply for the bene‹t at a welfare of‹ce every three months.6 There, state welfare workers determine eligibility and allocation based on family income. Thus, these female factory workers must repeatedly and directly confront state welfare workers with the need for state assistance. While Klausian rhetoric attempts to instill a sense of oneness between Czechs and the state with public statements such as “We made the Velvet Revolution and the state became our state” (1994a:107), these female workers struggle to move beyond the state/society opposition of the socialist past, continuing to construe this antagonistic rapport with the state as still extant in some ways. Their visits to the welfare of‹ce serve as a constant, uncomfortable reminder of who they are in the new market economy—“poor,” “beggars,” “like gypsies.” Dáša described feeling like “an idiot,” “a beggar,” and “a swine running around the [welfare] of‹ces.” Intrinsically at stake here is not what these women workers can get from the state but rather how they must go about obtaining it. Going to the welfare of‹ce means going to “beg,” said forty-seven-yearold Bet& a. 6. If the applicant’s income does not ›uctuate, reapplication may only be required once a year.

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These workers manifest a marked sense of shame that is likely rooted in their socialist past. As a recent volume on postsocialist poverty and inequality explains, “Poverty [under state socialism] was largely regarded as a result of individual failing or deviance, since the state provided guaranteed employment for the able-bodied and assistance to those who were otherwise unable to work” (World Bank 2002:3). However, the market metanarrative’s explicit condemnation of dependence very likely also encourages this sensibility. These women workers are well aware of the market metanarrative’s exhortations of personal responsibility, and they do not reject the notion. To the contrary, most of the women I interviewed readily accept this idea in theory, although the practicalities of economic transition override its achievability. As ‹fty-year-old Berta elucidated, “If I earned a decent wage, what would I need from the state? If I was capable of taking care of myself and my family, then the state wouldn’t have to give me a single crown.” One of her coworkers chimed in, “I have the exact same opinion.” The implication in their comments is that if they earned enough to “live decently,” then they would no longer require support from the state. Thirty-three-year-old Líza, divorced with two daughters, declared, “It would be easier if a person didn’t have to go [to the welfare of‹ce] and would be able to manage normally from earnings, but that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because when a person pays everything to bills— it’s seven to eight thousand just in bills, and what remains isn’t enough to live on.” Indeed, Líza’s monthly take-home earnings total between 6,400 and 9,599 crowns, a sum on which it is virtually impossible to make ends meet.

The Disquiet of Insecurity Although economically and socially marginalized in the new market economy, the majority of these forty-eight women workers held the same jobs in the same factories from before 1990 through 2000. The fact that many of transition’s greatest dramas have played out in the effort to overhaul manufacturing’s outdated, inef‹cient, and uncompetitive infrastructure makes this employment continuity more remarkable. Processes of expansion and contraction in manufacturing remain ongoing. New foreign and local companies stake their turf, while others—

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predominantly local enterprises—collapse in entirety or fracture into smaller corporate bits. The companies employing these forty-eight women are no exception to these processes. In one company, restructuring resulted in the layoff of more than 50 percent of the workforce. In another, workers recalled “talk” of the company’s production operations moving to Hungary, where the labor was cheaper, and of their factory’s conversion to a more pro‹table warehouse. In yet another factory, workers recollected anxious periods during the previous decade when the company had no orders for its goods. However, contraction, fracturing, and collapse have to date occurred far more in the heavy industries (e.g., steel) rather than in the light manufacturing sector (e.g., food, textiles). Such crises are consequently more dire for male than female workers as a result of male/female segregation along a heavylight axis in manufacturing. This segregation may explain some of the continuity in the postsocialist employment history of the workers I interviewed. Despite having little experience with unemployment, these women fretted tremendously about its possibility. Indeed, they talked most about their loss of socialní jistota (security). During the socialist era, socialní jistota represented a range of assurances from the state, including job security, free dental/health care, housing for all, free education, child care, and so on; it now refers mainly to job security. For these workers, the insecurity of the market breeds psychological stress. In forty-year-old Lenka’s estimation, she and her colleagues were “calmer” in the past—unafraid. Fifty-four-year-old Elsa and several other workers used the word “afraid” to describe their contemporary sensibility. The reason for this fear, she explains, is that “every moment you hear, you read . . . they are laying people off here, they are laying people off there, there it went bankrupt.” According to forty-four-year-old Milada, ‹nancial fears have supplanted political ones and exert “far greater pressure.” Despite individual good fortune, these women have a strong sense that fortune is ‹ckle. In the new market economy, enterprise survival is now dictated by the demands of global and local markets rather than by the Communist Party, a situation the workers ‹nd far less predictable. In these uncontrolled circumstances, what is good can suddenly become quite bad. Although most of the women interviewed have avoided unemployment, many of their husbands have not. For example, Dáša’s husband

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was laid off twice after 1989 when his employers went bankrupt. The ‹rm where Eliška’s husband worked also went bankrupt. He was not paid for his ‹nal month of work, and he was unemployed for two more months before he found another job. Eliška found her stint as the family’s sole wage earner “awful,” a time she “wouldn’t wish on anyone.” Her mother and grandmother helped to pay her family’s bills, and Eliška does not know how else she would have managed. For many of these women workers, unemployment is not necessarily an individual experience but rather a familial one. These women seem to ‹nd little reassurance in either their own or their husbands’ reemployment following a job loss. Instead, the consciousness of their insecurity seems intensi‹ed, with frequent references to coping and survival strategies. For example, the trauma of a 1990 job loss exacted a personal toll from Milada: “Now when I’m working somewhere, I can no longer establish any relationships because it stays in a person’s consciousness that [a ‹rm] can go bankrupt at any time.” Zuzana strived for ›awlessness in her work performance “so that they don’t let me go, I work more and better . . . so that they think about me, that I don’t make mistakes. I have to prove myself and I have to concentrate more. I can’t chat with friends.” Faced with the volatility of capitalism, these women workers repeatedly voiced a wistful nostalgia for the calming predictability of their socialist past. Alison Stenning cites a “productivist ideology” in socialist states into which workers were “inculcated” via “the material relations of workplaces, communities and states . . . the education system, the media, and slogans on buildings and banners” (2005a:240). This ideology encouraged workers “to believe not only in the centrality of work, but their centrality within these regimes” (240). For workers under state socialism, work heavily de‹ned not only their daily lives but also their identities. In her work on the emergence of nostalgia (termed ostalgie) in eastern Germany, Daphne Berdahl writes, “In a society where productive labor was a key aspect of state ideology and where the workplace was a central site for social life, the high incidence of unemployment throughout eastern Germany has profoundly undermined people’s sense of self and identity” (1999:199). For Czech female factory workers, similar connections between work and identity prevailed under state socialism. This entanglement is embedded in Máša’s remark that without jobs, “we aren’t going to have anything.” In Máša’s interpretation, to lose a job is to lose everything.

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Too Young, Too Old: The Economic Impasse of the Working Mother All Czechs feel the loss of socialní jistota. However, women’s gender role as mothers in some ways renders this loss more acute for women than for men as motherhood has become grounds for their exclusion. In the transition from socialism to capitalism, the underlying cultural logic remains unchanged. Accordingly, a woman’s “natural” role as a mother limits her capacities as a worker. Czechs construe womanhood and motherhood as inexorably linked, as biologically given (Có ermáková et al. 2000). Employment merely quali‹es this identity (i.e., as working mothers). While motherhood is a constraint for female workers, male workers are culturally unmarked by fatherhood. Men are workers; women are working mothers. The workers interviewed locate the origins of this classi‹catory schema in the First Republic (1918–38), when the gendered division of public and private realms was both an ideological and practical reality. Czechoslovakia’s post–World War II labor shortage disrupted this gendered divide, compelling much of the female populace to enter the labor force (Scott 1978). Although the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which came to power shortly after World War II, professed an ideology of gender equality, it never challenged inequities in parenting between men and women. Instead, the party sought only to help women reconcile their productive and reproductive demands through a multitude of social policies (e.g., maternity leave, early retirement). Disproportionately burdened with reproductive responsibilities, women’s workplace contributions under socialism were inferior to the productive inputs or outputs of male workers. Such factors undoubtedly contributed to occupational segregation and strati‹cation as well as to wage differentials along gender lines. However, under socialism, socialní jistota enabled women to join the workforce, albeit with limited occupational access and ascent. In the new market economy, this gendered facilitation of access to employment is gone. Although few of the women interviewed had personal experience with losing a job, they perceived that women who lost jobs had more of a challenge ‹nding new employment than did men. The factory workers regard women as caught in an absurd impasse in which they are labeled by employers as either too young or too old and therefore undesirable. This topic arose in every focus group, often provoking impas-

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sioned discussion and ultimate consensus about the toll of mothering. In one focus group, several workers proclaimed virtually in chorus, Marta: [Employers] look at whether you have small children. . . . Léna: That happened to me. Lada: [Mothers] are completely written off. Máša: If there are small children, no one wants to hire them [i.e., mothers] for a job. We’re always going to be home with them sick, with the children. They [i.e., employers] don’t want it. We all know it. Members of the same group later added, Máša: After ‹fty, they also no longer want you. You’re going to be sick lots and you’ll do little. Marta: It’s dif‹cult. The don’t want young ones to marry, to have children. . . . Lada: It’s the same for older women in turn. According to these workers, employers see women age thirty-‹ve or younger as mothers or potential mothers whose childbearing and childrearing demands make them productively weaker than older and/or male workers. In addition, employers construe women forty-‹ve or older as soon-to-be retirees (since women are eligible to retire earlier than men) whose potential productivity is outstripped by that of younger and/or male workers. While the Czech government is in the process of raising the ages of eligibility for retirement from mid-‹fties to late ‹fties and early sixties, women will still be able to retire younger than men.7 The workers in this study made little mention of these changes, however, and their comments suggest that these modi‹cations matter little. As forty-eight-year-old Františka noted, “No one here wants a woman at this age—around ‹fty.” To a woman even nearing ‹fty, every employer’s response, in Olivie’s words, is, “You, no.” Lota 7. Prior to 1996, women with children were eligible for retirement at age ‹ftysix if they had one child; ‹fty-‹ve if they had two children; ‹fty-four if they had three or four children; and ‹fty-three if they had ‹ve or more children. Men were eligible to retire at age sixty-one. Since 1996, these ages of eligibility have been increased annually by four months for women and two months for men. The ages will stabilize in 2007 at between ‹fty-seven and sixty-one for women and sixty-two for men.

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claimed that employers will not even talk to women over forty-‹ve. Her coworker, forty-six-year-old Ru¡ z&ena, views herself as “unwanted” by employers despite the fact that she is not eligible for retirement for eight years. While gender-based discrimination is illegal in the Czech Republic, employers deploy falsehoods such as “The position is ‹lled” or “We don’t need you” to avoid hiring women younger than thirty-‹ve or older than forty-‹ve. Under socialism, the state guaranteed employment for its citizenry, and all able citizens were obliged to work. Although employers could still limit women’s entry, this form of socialní jistota to some extent weakened employers’ capacity to control women’s labor force activity. With these mandates no longer in place, employers have considerably more power to dictate who is in and who is out. Consequently, many of these Czech women workers see themselves as hanging onto jobs acquired before 1989, fearful that if they lose or relinquish them, they will be unable to ‹nd other employment.

Exploitation and (Little) Protection In many instances, these women workers have accepted manipulative and/or exploitative employer actions because of the real as well as perceived precariousness of their position as workers and as women workers. These actions include mandatory overtime, forced leave with docking of wages, forbidden unionization, and wage discrimination. Except for wage discrimination, all of these practices have arisen since 1989. Although not contractually required to work overtime at the behest of their employers, many of these women fear that refusal will result in the loss of their jobs. According to Eliška, who works in a factory manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs, “The way it looks with the job, you can’t say that you’re not going to do it. It can’t be done because they’ll say to you ‘So, good-bye.’” Brewery worker Františka complained, The foreman come to us with dread to say “Ladies, you stay here with me tonight” or “Get ready, tomorrow you’re going to stay longer” because people [i.e., workers] have had enough already. But again, they are afraid for their jobs. He [i.e., the foreman] could say, “Run to complain and you can take your identity card and go if you don’t like it.”

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Mandatory overtime poses a gender-speci‹c set of complications for mothers with children waiting at home. In another factory, workers detailed how, during a production slowdown, the company forced them to take a leave and docked their wages by 40 percent. In mid-2000, these workers were anticipating another forced leave with wage docking. For these women, already in an economically precarious position, these intermittent pay cuts constitute a source of anxiety and anger that is largely directed at an employer, whom they view as insensitive to their survival. In addition to the economic costs to workers, these acts exact other tolls. If a worker has available vacation days, for example, then these mandatory leave days replace vacation time. Workers from two other factories described being either discouraged or explicitly forbidden from unionizing. According to Jirka, who works in a factory that makes telecommunications products, management is “strongly against unions. It is the bogeyman to them, and they will not allow it in their ‹rm. . . . It is our [i.e., workers’] choice, but our choice rests on whether I want to work at this ‹rm.” In Marie’s factory, all of the workers were unionized prior to 1989; since then, however, the ‹rm has been privatized, and she contends that the new owner “pressures” workers not to join the union, suggesting that membership will jeopardize their jobs. Unlike mandatory overtime, forced leave with wage docking, or forbidden unionization, wage discrimination is a remnant of the socialist past carried over to the capitalist present. It is, furthermore, inherently gendered in its origins and enactment. In the postsocialist period, international actors such as the International Labour Organization, the United Nations, and the European Union have openly and actively criticized this wage discrimination. Nevertheless, the Czech Republic retains a 30 percent average wage differential between working men and women. Czech female factory workers subsequently retrieve and reiterate this discourse’s “social fact.” According to Máša, “Women here are always discriminated against. . . . If you take a male lawyer and a female lawyer, the man probably has a salary of about 30 percent more. They do the same work, have the same university education, and she probably had better grades, and he earns more. This is everywhere here.” Yet Czech female factory workers tolerate wage discrimination because they see no individual or institutional recourse to it or to the other maltreatments meted out by employers. In their inability to envision any resort, the market metanarrative’s explicit declaration of no alternative to the

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market resounds. To resist individually would virtually ensure the loss of one’s job; to resist collectively does not enter into the realm of imagined viabilities because transition substantially destabilized labor’s traditional advocate: unions. The workers interviewed retain vivid memories of the Revolucn& í odborové hnutí (ROH), the only labor union that existed under socialism. In both focus groups and interviews, workers recalled the ROH’s diverse offerings, including food supplements, recreational/travel discounts, holiday gifts for women and children, factory libraries, and monetary subsidies for children’s summer camp attendance. After 1989, the ROH fractured into separate unions by trade, and many of these functions disappeared. Membership is no longer mandatory, and many workers have abandoned the unions. The continued provision of summer camp subsidies for children motivates only a few to stay. For these women workers, unions appear to have lost much of their meaning since 1989. Marie contended that unions do not ful‹ll their functions but was vague in explaining what these functions are other than to say that the union should help workers with “problems.” Thirty-four-year-old Alexandra characterized unions as being “for nothing.” Lota, like many other women, chose to leave her union because “nothing happens there.” Lenka exasperatedly asked her coworkers, “What are these unions for? Tell me! What have they possibly done for you beyond you paying monthly dues?” Milada and Marcela answered that unions do help, citing the union’s response to massive layoffs ‹ve years earlier, when the organization helped laid-off workers ‹nd other employment. Františka questioned whether her coworkers thought that the union would still do so, to which Marcela replied, “I don’t know.” Františka then reminded her coworkers of layoffs two years earlier: “I didn’t hear that the union would stand behind a single person.” In an effort to code the union’s inaction not as failure but rather as sacri‹ce, Lenka drew on one of the market metanarrative’s behavioral imperatives—self-reliance: “I don’t believe in it, that someone will stand behind me. I believe in myself, that that which a person doesn’t arrange, doesn’t do, he won’t have. . . . You have to rely on yourself.” In Milada’s view, unions are weak players in an economic game in which the power is grossly skewed in employers’ favor: People don’t join . . . because everyone is afraid. . . . Take, for example, an employee having problems with his supervisor, and it per-

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haps didn’t involve just the supervisor but involved something bigger. So he’d go to the union and say, “Look, there’s this and that problem.” The union would have then to deal with the supervisor. Then the supervisor would ‹nd the employee, and he’d ‹re him. If an employee is going to complain, some loophole will then be found so that they can let him go. In the postsocialist world, much like these workers, postsocialist unions occupy a purgatorial place, neither here nor there. Emptied of most socialist objectives, unions throughout the region are struggling to resituate in a new economic climate. Anna Pollert identi‹es an array of organizational complicating factors particular to the postsocialist region, including inexperience in “dealing with the capitalist employment relationship and its increasingly sophisticated management techniques”; “a communist workplace tradition of atomization and individualism”; and “an enterprise bargaining system in which unions and managers were partners.” Unions’ equally formidable ideological challenges involve the “relegitimation of trade unions as organs of genuine worker-interest representation rather than Communist Party conveyor belts” as well as “carving a space between opposing the old system and ambiguously both supporting and opposing the restored market economy” (2001:14). Indeed, as David Ost points out, until very recently, local union activists in the postsocialist nations believed that the primary role of unions was to “promote marketization,” which would “help ‘the working class as a whole’” (2002:37). An additional complication particular to the Czech case is workers’ history of gains “largely delivered by the enlightened self-interest of governments” rather than by union action against capital (Pollert 2001:17).

A Postsocialist Purgatory The future de‹nitely has to be better. —Jirka

In Czech female factory workers’ original reading of the market metanarrative, they were among its protagonists. Its all-inclusive framing meant that they, like all Czechs, would share in the spoils of the market’s victory. They understood that grati‹cation would not be instantaneous.

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However, in the decade since this metanarrative’s original articulation, these women have abandoned their anticipations. Economic vulnerability, dependence, discrimination, and exploitation mark their day-today experiences in the postsocialist era. Their problems are not easily reconciled with the forecasted rewards of marketization. However, the fortitude of the market metanarrative and perhaps even more importantly the lack of an alternative render it not easily discarded. As a result, the workers adjust the market metanarrative to reconcile the happenings of their lives with it, an act that enables them to ‹nd comfort in circumstances over which they have little control. In their postsocialist plunge down an expanding socioeconomic ladder, the workers I interviewed have become acutely conscious of their identity as “women workers” and verbally rail against the state and employers. Socioeconomically, they are the new poor, a sensibility reinforced by their rapport with the state. Although the feminization of light manufacturing may have moderated their risk of job loss as the sector underwent restructuring, the advantages accrued by women workers in the transition end here. Their gender—and more speci‹cally, their gender role as mothers—is not a new liability, but it has become greater in the new market economy. Under socialism, employment was mandatory for all citizens, irrespective of gender. Now, under capitalism, employment is no longer obligatory or guaranteed and therefore holds the prospect of the exclusion of some, with women among the likely candidates. Motherhood intensi‹es an already precarious postsocialist class position as workers, yielding a double jeopardy. In the early years of marketization, Czech women workers construed economic transition’s hardships as delimited within their lifetimes. In other words, they would receive capitalism’s rewards in the long term, but still in the course of their lives. As Lota readily acknowledged, policymakers “told us” and “we believed it”: Czechoslovakia’s “ordinary people” would live a “better life.” By 2000, after a decadelong wait and a two-year recession from which the country was just beginning to recover, these women had given up their expectations of recompense for their sacri‹ces. However, although much of their suffering and struggle began with the introduction of the market, these fortyeight women workers did not and arguably could not hold capitalism accountable for their predicament. In its potent metanarrative construction, Czechs bear the burden of adjusting to capitalism, not vice versa. Moreover, the rejection of capitalism’s communist alternative

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after a forty-year trial, coupled with the unremitting incantation of a “market without adjectives,” inhibits Czech female factory workers’ ability to envision any other societal order (Mann 1973). As Jirka put it, the capitalist “course is going to go unstoppably forward.” Thus, according to the women interviewed, their disenfranchisement did not discredit the market metanarrative. The overarching trope of the market metanarrative—from captivity/poverty into freedom/prosperity— remains intact. However, the workers have modi‹ed its plot to resolve the disparity between their personal experiences and the metanarrative’s ideological claims. These women perceive injustice as enacted by the state as well as their employers but direct ultimate blame for their postsocialist deprivation internally (i.e., toward themselves) rather than toward external mechanisms (i.e., the capitalist system). In keeping with the market metanarrative’s foundational script, they see themselves as ›awed— passive, dependent, and irresponsible. However, according to the metanarrative’s original rendering, they are inherently adaptable and thus should be able to overcome their de‹ciencies. They therefore change this element of the story to alleviate the tension created. In their revision, this is not a trait shared by all; rather, it is generationally bound. In both interviews and focus groups, these women workers mocked themselves as generationally “rotten,” “stupid,” and “idiotic.” Their fundamental problem is their “socialist” disease, not its “capitalist” cure. They are “infected” by socialism, unable to escape its contamination. Olivie stated that my selection of her “age group” for research was a “bad” choice because their encounter with marketization was the “worst.” In her assessment, the systemic change toward capitalism is “good,” but as a generation born and raised under socialism, her cohort is “bad.” According to Lota, “We didn’t have to be [responsible for ourselves], someone else was always responsible for us, and that, unfortunately, is still in us. . . . We were puppets. Someone gave us an order and along we went.” Her generation is “tainted.” Ru*ze& na espoused the dif‹culties in changing the cognitive and behavioral correlates of a socialist upbringing that had been “pounded into” them. Milada recounted how the Czech transition experience has been metaphorically compared to having “landed in the jungle” after having spent forty years in a “zoo.” Having grown up within the con‹nes of the socialist zoo, the women are accustomed to the comforts of a secure and pre-

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dictable albeit restricted existence. Now they ‹nd themselves beyond its walls in a capitalist jungle that is uncomfortably insecure and unpredictable, though free. In their metanarrative adaptation, atoning for socialist sins will now completely subsume these women’s postsocialist lives—a lifelong sacri‹ce. Although Czech women workers have forsaken their imagined future of a “better life” for themselves, they have not relinquished their conviction in a capitalist course. Victory is beyond their grasp but not that of future generations.8 Here, the workers retrieve “sacri‹ce”—for the well-being of their families—from the socialist past. As Máša implied in her invocation of the familiar Czech idiom Bez práce nejsou koláce& (Without work, there is no cake), success does not come easily, but it will come. Even the most cynical of workers, such as Bet& a, who caustically announced during a focus group session that the revolution had not improved her life and had in fact made it worse, still admitted that the changes begun in 1989 “will help the young people.” The women in this study differed in their opinions as to when exactly victory will be achieved, giving answers ranging from one to four generations. Most agreed, however, that a better life is within future generations’ reach. As forty-two-year-old Hermína voiced, “There is de‹nitely going to be something better.” For these women workers, the question is not whether but when. Jirka stopped “believing” in the prospect of betterment in her own lifetime but af‹rmed that “improvement will one day happen here. . . . It’s a question of two generations.” In Máša’s view, “It’s all in the time.” Lota elaborated, “It’s going to take a long time. It’s probably going to take two or three generations, but it is going to be good. We have to believe it; otherwise it won’t happen. But I believe it.” The women insist that time will bring about the necessary cognitive and behavioral changes. Playing on the Czech idiom Proutek se má ohýbat, dokud je mladý (A twig should be bent while it is still young), fortythree-year-old Štepanka mockingly remarked “Se starej strom ohýbá” (An old tree bends). Her coworkers laughed but understood the contrary ‹gurative intimation in Štepanka’s wordplay—they are old dogs 8. Some might argue that such a belief was common in state socialist countries (i.e., that socialism would ultimately bene‹t either the people or future generations). However, in the Czech case, I believe that the August 1968 Soviet-led invasion largely eradicated any such shared conviction.

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who cannot learn new tricks. In Lota’s estimation, the cognitive and behavioral remnants of socialism “will remain for two generations”: “it can’t be so rapid. . . . It simply won’t work. This is development, and development takes time.” According to Be(ta, “With time, people will start to live differently, to think differently.” Similarly, Marie stated that the thinking must “completely” change. In Czech female factory workers’ revision of the market metanarrative, the social order—along generational lines—ruptured along with the economy’s disruption. They now expect only a future restoration. By their own interpretation, Czech female factory workers are in purgatory, a “no (wo)man’s land.” They have rejected their socialist past but are unable to lay claim to a capitalist present or future as its victors. Economic transformation has become, in Marie’s words, “more complicated” than originally expected. Nonetheless, these workers believe that they have passed the point of no return. When asked whether she wanted to go back to socialism, Marie answered vehemently, “No, no, no, no!” The other women interviewed shared this sentiment. The socialist past is not their desired destination. However, they must travel a convoluted course to deliver their children (and children’s children and so forth) to its capitalist conclusion.

Conclusion For these forty-eight female factory workers, making sense of their lives now rests on a singular logic in which a neoliberal capitalism bodes only good fortune, with prosperity as the reward for sacri‹ce. They see no such recompense in sight; capitalism’s promise remains unful‹lled. However, because the metanarrative naturalizes the free market and lacks a credible alternative, these women cannot easily resist it. Consequently, they transform it, providing “new in›ections . . . without contradicting the main points of the metanarrative spine” (Steinmetz 1992:503). They interpret their postsocialist tribulations as resulting from the shortcomings of their socialist upbringing. They claim to construe their suffering under capitalism as a prerequisite for future generations’ pro‹t. In this way, they suppress the apparent contradiction between their lived experience and capitalism’s pledge. In her book on nostalgia in postcommunist cities, Svetlana Boym aptly characterizes

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economic transition as a “lost revolutionary teleology . . . found again, only this time it was not Marxist-Leninist but capitalist” (2001:64). Ironically, while having escaped the perversions of Marxist-Leninist communism, these women workers have become, in an inverting sequencing of the Marxian tale, the prey of capitalism’s ideological prowess.

6 Conclusion

On a dreary winter afternoon in late February 2000, I sat across from Bet& a in her two-bedroom panelák abode. She shared this small space with her husband, her two daughters, her grandson, and a dog. On this particular afternoon, Be&ta and I sat alone, in the quiet of her living room. This calm, however, was quickly broken when I asked to hear her story: “Jesus Mary! Story? What story? What? Thousands of other women . . . go to work, have children, have families,” she responded incredulously. Bet& a wondered where the story was. Did she have a story? In my view, lived experiences—whether of jobs, childbearing, or family—do not exist outside of stories. Life experiences are narratively constituted. Individuals think about and talk about what has happened and is happening to them in storied form. This is people’s main mode of making meaning out of their life experiences. Indeed, as Roland Barthes long ago contended, “There does not exist, and there never has existed, a people without narratives” ([1966] 1977:14). Therefore, I told Bet& a, everyone has a story. In her initial interpretive impulse, Bet& a would acknowledge that she was like “thousands of others” for whom the responsibilities of a job,

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childbearing, and family lend a common structure to their lives. This is true not only for Czech women but for many women more globally. In Bet& a’s intimation, however, these contours seemed to take shape irrespective of time and place. On the contrary, I argue that stories are embedded in time and place. Put more simply, when and where people are—historically, culturally, and socially—matters signi‹cantly for how people narratively apprehend their lives. What renders Be&ta’s remark especially astonishing is that her lifeworld has taken shape within the context of a radical revisioning of her country’s larger political and economic order in its transition from socialism to capitalism and democracy. Personal stories do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are entrenched in—enabled and constrained by—their historical, cultural, and social settings. In this sense, women’s lives are far more contextually contingent than Bet& a acknowledged.

A Triumphant Tale What is happiness like? What makes a dream full? How can anything be bright When the day is so dull? You see what you want No need to idealize Life lasts but a second, So want truth, not lies. We’re just a tiny land We’re just a little place But we can take nothing And build castles up into space. . . . The earth becomes Shangri-la . . . —Có eský sen theme song

After 1989, a neoliberally informed capitalism attempted to enfold the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) into its globally expansive embrace. Many observers awaited its social rebuff, especially from women and workers, for whom loss and victimization would purportedly de‹ne their free-market encounter. A decade later, women and

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workers had yet to spurn this new economic order. In the Czech context, the market, metanarratively expressed, subverts an oppressed sensibility, supplanting it with a liberated one. With its lodestones of naturality and normality, this metastory proves of irresistible allure to a populace worn out on the socialist experiment and longing “to be normal” (Kennedy 1994:4). After forty years inside a socialist penitentiary, they now stand outside its walls in a world that they have long imagined as the antithesis of their socialist cell. The notion that they have left one prison only to enter another is incomprehensible. In this postsocialist environment, capitalism’s corollary is freedom. It is the “alternative to the ill-discipline, corrupt morality and ill-conceived rationality of planned state socialism” (Dilley 1992:19). And although people may have a “predilection for alternatives,” few, if any, exist at this time and in this place (Said 1983:247). Whether perhaps only a ‹ctional tale or utopic reverie, the market metanarrative is a formidable force. The market as an ideology is not a “›oating epiphenomenon”; rather, it “‹lters down to the repertoire of interpretive schemata held by social actors,” providing a mode of sense-making (Dilley 1992:21, 23). Scholars have tended to overlook or downplay this ideological prowess. With communism’s metanarrative now in disrepute, the market’s metanarrative has subsumed much of the resulting ideological space. The Czechs’ promarket attitudes and their country’s distinction as an oasis of economic success in the CEE region for much of the 1990s arguably intensi‹ed this already skewed ideological balance of power. For Czech female managers and factory workers, the supremacy of Václav Klaus’s vision and its undeclared sustenance with a neoliberal–social democratic blend of macroeconomic practices displaced any alternative to the market metanarrative. Faced with an otherwise uncertain and unclear future, they have looked to this market metastory for certitude and clarity.1 It offers a “means of coming to terms” with everyday experiences and constitutes an “explanatory device for their failures and successes” (Dilley 1992:23). And this ‹gurative gaze fosters their compliance.

1. As Dilley notes, “The paradox here is that the market is elevated to the touchstone of certainty in a world in which changes were wrought under the very banner of the market” (1992:22).

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Constrained (Self-)Consciousness and (Im)Mobilization Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this triumphant tale is how Czech female managers and factory workers have appropriated it. Members of neither group sing a doleful song, with loss and victimization its refrain. To the contrary, managers happily chant the market’s mantras, while factory workers intone an expectant tune with an improvised chorus of “Pain for a future generation’s gain.” While the experiential distance between these two groups is vast, their creative interpretations of their lived experiences narrow the gap. Bridging this experiential divide are the liberatory links of the market metanarrative. Their lived experiences are refracted quite differently through the lens of the market metanarrative but share the same vision. Both groups metaphorically see a free market that augurs good rather than bad fortune. Managers’ stories defy the generalizations of a gendered misfortune in the economic transition. Many scholars, looking so determinedly for gendered adversity, have failed to consider such an alternative. Indeed, a heterogeneity of women’s experiences exists in the CEE countries. In the workers’ sagas, the suffering and struggle created by capitalism’s arrival are to be endured rather than resisted. In their in›ection of the market metanarrative, they are investing for future pro‹t. The factory workers’ experiences appear to represent the fruition of the apprehensions of many gender scholars. The workers have lost and are victimized, but scholars have not grasped how these women interpret their tribulations. Moreover, the explanation for workers’ political inactivity here extends well beyond institutional and ideological inheritances from their socialist past to an ideological manifestation bequeathed to them in the postsocialist present. Whether for women or for workers, loss and victimization are not as readily given as many scholars would have them. For both managers and factory workers, the possibilities of the market metanarrative do not exist without the impossibilities. Managers perceive that their postsocialist journey has led to economic and social success—that is, money and power. Their ability to travel this road has involved abandoning a set of “socialist” behaviors—that is, irresponsibility and dependence. To make their way, however, they have assumed an alternative “market” mode of comportment that includes self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence. By their calculations, this behavioral swap bears the lion’s share of the credit for the fact that they are winners rather than losers. This exchange

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has affected every facet of their lives—public (e.g., as citizens) and private (e.g., as mothers). They portray their postsocialist paths as unimpeded. More speci‹cally, the identity of “woman” does not block their course. Gendered oppression does not easily square with the market’s promise of liberation. Because of the market metanarrative’s seeming intractability, they “tailor ‘reality’ to ‹t” with the market metastory (Somers and Gibson 1994:61). Their virtually wholesale denial of gender-based discrimination is perhaps the most egregious insinuation of this adjustment. Another example appears in a rationalization of housework in which they escape its gendered exploitation but in so doing foist its oppressive drudgery on to lower-class women. In their interpretive co-optation of all labor—productive and reproductive—into the market, they seek to quell these contradictions. To acknowledge this perpetuation of a gendered inequality in which they would be implicated as “women” would likely generate an irreparable rupture in their narratives. For them, such a constraint is seemingly irreconcilable with market freedom. According to Margaret R. Somers and Gloria Gibson, “some of the outcomes of an inability or powerlessness to accommodate certain happenings” include confusion, despair, and even madness (1994:74). To avoid such ends, they suppress the inconsistency. Moreover, their abdication of reproductive labor’s state support contains no expression of a gendered solidarity that would counter the divisiveness of class privilege. For these twenty-six women, accepting the market also means rejecting the state. In their understandings, the market metanarrative pledges an unquali‹ed liberation for all who are able. Their own “liberation” is founded in a complete adherence to the metanarrative’s neoliberal subtext according to which state intervention is villainous. As these members of a new elite tell it, their postsocialist story is solely an empowering one. They conceive of their postsocialist present as the “radiant future.” And, they conclude, this future can belong to anyone. In Czech female factory workers’ recounting of their postsocialist travels, they have embarked down a road in which their mobility is limited to the economic and social peripheries. Their appropriation of the market metanarrative leaves them intensely conscious of their marginalized identity as “women workers.” They lack the human capital that has propelled female managers’ occupational mobility. Unlike their managerial counterparts, who hold university degrees, factory workers seldom have obtained any postsecondary schooling. Moreover, they

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lack any foreign-language ability that would enable them to communicate in the global marketplace. Economically, they are struggling to merely maintain their foothold on the lower rungs of the rapidly lengthening ladder of remuneration. There is no climbing up; holding on proves enough of a challenge. In addition, state support—a luxury the managers can afford to turn down—is a necessity for factory workers. As class inequality replaces the economic pseudo-equality of state socialism, they self-identify as members of a new social category—the “poor.” They hear the market metanarrative’s invocations for selfreliance, personal responsibility, and independence, but employers’ unwillingness to pay a “decent” wage, these women contend, impedes their ability to heed such calls. Although the feminization of light manufacturing may have curbed their chances of a job dismissal, the bene‹ts of being a woman end here. Their gender—more concretely, their gender role as mothers—is not a new levy, but it has grown in the new market economy. Without the socialist state’s mandated inclusion of all able citizens into the labor force, exclusion is now a possibility. Women, long deemed “unreliable” workers, are among the more likely candidates. A socialist legacy in which work took center stage in individuals’ lives, providing not only “collective survival” but also “individual status,” acts to intensify their angst about such a loss (Offe 1996:235). The perceived instability of their postsocialist standing along both gender and class lines renders them tolerant of employers’ abuses such as forced leaves and docking of wages. In Czech female factory workers’ telling of their postsocialist lives, the losses seem to abound. Yet they perceive these sacri‹ces as necessary for a greater good. According to its metastory, the market will enfranchise all. In this new economic game, everyone wins. There can be no “losers.” Such an identity is an incongruity. Consequently, they “adjust” the market metanarrative to “‹t their own identities” (Somers and Gibson 1994:61). To cope with the illogicality of their losses, these forty-eight workers interpret their adversity as temporary and direct their reproach inward: born and raised under state socialism, they are unable to wipe off socialism’s stain. This is a solely a generational dilemma. Future generations will start with a clean slate and thus will reap capitalism’s rewards. These women have no apparent sense of the “totality” of the “wider structure” of their exploitation (Mann 1973:13). According to the market metanarrative, capitalism will bring salvation rather than condemnation. Thus,

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capitalism cannot be the cause of these women’s social and economic dislocation. While elements of oppression, loss, and victimization are present, they go unrecognized or are deemed irrelevant from the subjective standpoint of these seventy-four managers and factory workers. The interpretive frames that many—mostly Western—scholars assumed do not necessarily exist in a postsocialist milieu. Those subjugating aspects of capitalism that may appear continuous across West and East are nevertheless understood quite differently in the two regions. Beginning from a subjective standpoint ultimately enables comprehension of an unexpected endpoint. This bottom-up examination proves vital to solving the puzzle of Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ passivity. Through their microworlds, the signi‹cant intersections of global and local, public and personal, as well as their implications for social (in)equality become apparent. In the decade after socialism’s collapse, these seventy-four women encountered a constricted narrative universe in which the communist metanarrative has been eclipsed. In their postsocialist country, the market metastory has come to the fore. These Czech women seem to have no conceivable alternative.2 Their interpretive schemata are resolutely entrenched in a metanarrative about the market. And thus, in complicated and sometimes counterintuitive ways, they integrate their personal experiences with this hegemonic public metastory about the free market. Out of this accomplishment comes what it means for them—its empowering and disempowering consequences. Female managers have been able to forgo state supports. However, as Susan Gal and Gail Kligman conclude, “Selling one’s labor without . . . social bene‹ts is not necessarily emancipation” (2000a:116). Many of these women have also been able to afford to relinquish some of their reproductive labor to an emerging occupational stratum of maids, nannies, and babysitters. Some female managers have destabilized the gendered division of domestic labor, negotiating a more equitable allocation. However, their “individuality run wild” hinders any sense of common interests, especially along gender lines (Nelson 1996:30). In their appropriation of the market metanarrative, they are unable to rec2. Consistent with Mann 1973, alternative here refers to the ability to envision another social order.

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ognize themselves categorically as “women” and are thus unable to conceptualize themselves as having common—gendered—interests. Without this collective perception, gender-based discrimination in the labor market goes unopposed. Here, the effect is not only a collective disempowerment of women but also very likely an immediate (and longterm) disempowerment of these individuals. Moreover, their indiscriminate rejection of the state undercuts gendered or familial claims-making on the state for social rights.3 Their class location moderates any prospect of its implications being felt personally. Nonetheless, the rami‹cations are societal; the managers are implicated as part of society. For better and for worse, for the managers, self-interest holds sway in the new market economy. In female factory workers’ assimilation of the market metanarrative, gendered and class senses of self are less squelched. The litany of injustices done is too great to ignore. They have not been enfranchised in the move toward the market; instead, they must “hunt for money,” having “fallen to the bottom” of the Czech economy. These women must put in laborious hours of shopping to maximize their spending power and must endure humiliating visits to state welfare of‹ces to have their income tested to determine their eligibility for state supports. How fast and how far they have fallen has shattered their sense of sameness in class terms. The intensity and the state’s regular reminders of this socioeconomic disenfranchisement have heightened the factory workers’ class-based sense of self. They grapple with the angst of insecure jobs and an awareness that their childbearing and child rearing mean that they have two strikes against them in employers’ eyes. Female factory workers cannot counter gendered exclusion as readily as female managers can. The workers’ limited human capital restricts their job prospects. Here, gender is perceived as a probable impasse, and the identity of “woman” is a shared subjectivity. Its perils arguably intensify rather than weaken this sensibility. Fearing that any de‹ance of an employer would constitute a third strike and that they would be cast out, these women endure employers’ misbehavior without open complaint. For Czech female factory workers, the bad effectively far outweighs the good. 3. Social rights refer to “the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (Marshall 1950:11).

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Unfreedom and Freedom For forty years, the Czechoslovak Communist Party held tight rein over these women’s lives. The party in›uenced their educational and occupational prospects as well as that of their spouses and their children. It determined where they could travel and much of how they would live. Life was unequivocally unfree. They could not act at will. Having lived through socialism, these seventy-four women could not deny its constraints. The market metanarrative tells them that the free market is their way out of this con‹nement. In the face of What now? this metastory provides an assurance that a “radiant future” is coming. Furthermore, the metanarrative seems to give the women back their individual autonomy, setting new “parameters of action” (Burawoy and Verdery 1999:2). The market metanarrative suggests that the will of the state no longer decides these women’s fate; rather, individual will does so. People will be rewarded on the basis of their merit. The market will return the control that the state con‹scated. As these women understand the metanarrative, it gives them power. For these women who lived through state socialism, its passing is irrefutable. Indeed, this lived experience arguably renders the market metastory even more gripping. In the wake of state socialism, they ‹nd it dif‹cult if not impossible to turn away from the market’s comforting metastory and its happy ending—freedom and prosperity for all. In the market metanarrative, unfreedom and freedom are systemically tied. Socialism is correlated with the former; capitalism with the latter. Disempowerment and empowerment are systemically exclusive. In other words, capitalism only empowers. For female managers and factory workers, any disempowerment they experience challenges the ideology of the metanarrative. This challenge does not, however, compel them to cast their narrative gaze elsewhere—they seem to have virtually nowhere else to look. The communist counternarrative has been discredited and lies in tatters; the capitalist counterstory, however, appears intact. To avoid a Kafkaesque state of being, they interpretively overcome any incoherencies. These adaptations enable them to ‹nd solace in circumstances they cannot wholly control. In 2003, William Rosenberg lamented the way in which the contemporary telling of the Soviet bloc’s past and future “has so easily ›attened complexity, and crude political reductions obliterate the portentous social meanings of loss and deprivation” (3). Indeed, this

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›attening of the complexities of lived experiences manifests in the Czech female managers’ and factory workers’ postsocialist parables. They interpretively process their past, present, and future by drawing on a “politicized narrative” in which the systemic correlates of the captivity-into-freedom trope are reversed (3). In their past, capitalism was “genuine evil” and communism was “inherently good” (3). Now, capitalism is deemed natural and moral, while communism is marked as unnatural and immoral. This metanarrative’s appropriation subdues elements of the lived experiences of Czech female managers and factory workers. In their understandings, the market metanarrative commands conformity to its plot. They fashion their identities around the contradictions between experience and the ideological assertions encoded in this meta-tale. Of even greater importance are the implications of the metanarrative’s accommodations for their actions. Czech female managers turn away from even those state supports for which they are eligible, choosing instead to rely on themselves. Furthermore, some of these women command greater equity in the home. However, the metanarrative silences their antagonism with respect to gender-based discrimination. Meanwhile, Czech female factory workers wait. They believe that their loss and victimization are not determinants of the future. Thus, they tolerate what they might otherwise see as intolerable. Their motivation to resist capitalism is sti›ed. However, should coming generations not reap the free market’s promised rewards, the ground might become more fertile for the development of a gendered and/or classmobilized opposition.

The Power of Stories According to Karl Mannheim, “There are modes of thought which cannot be understood as long as their social origins are obscured” (1936:2). The ideas that de‹ne and “motivate people” do not originate in them alone; thus, the critical task is to discover and make visible their origins (2). As Laurel Richardson explains, this is a challenge for ordinary people who make sense of their lives most often “in terms of speci‹c events” and seldom voice how larger social and historical factors have impacted them (1999:130). According to both Mannheim and Richardson, sociologists have the capacity to break this narrative silence. Indeed, what C. Wright Mills (1959) termed the “sociological imagina-

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tion” has the capacity to make visible the larger context in which individuals’ lives take shape. As a sociologist, I have sought in this book to reveal how the identities and actions of seventy-four Czech female managers and factory workers are market metanarratively constituted. Doing so has required me to become a nomad of sorts. I have traveled back and forth not only between their lived experiences and interpretations of them but also between their personal narratives and a public metastory about the market. To truly apprehend who these women are, what they do, and most importantly why they opt for these modes of being and acting in lieu of others requires such migrations. In its broadest theoretical and methodological sensibilities, this book concerned stories. More precisely, it dealt with how different kinds of stories—international and national, public and personal—are put together and the consequences of this composition for social identities and actions. Empirically, this work focused on the Czech Republic’s encounter with the free market. I make no claims regarding the overall generalizability of Czech female managers’ and female factory workers’ means of making sense of marketization. Both in practice and in ideology, the Czech Republic’s post-1989 economic journey makes the country rather distinctive in the postsocialist world. Nonetheless, marketization is not an isolated phenomena. Over the span of more than two decades, a capitalism with neoliberal leanings has gone global. In its penetration of postsocialist spaces, it found an audience eager to escape the prison of the socialist past in favor of the promised freedom of the free market—ready to trade a Marxist-Leninist destiny for a freemarket fate. These seventy-four women are among the many people not only in the postsocialist world but in a more global world in which a neoliberal capitalism looms—omnipresent and omnipotent—with few if any apparent alternatives. Experienced or not, Czech female managers and factory workers interpret capitalism as liberatory in the ‹rst decade after socialism. The managers have accrued considerable gains, while the workers’ losses have proven equally immense. Nevertheless, both groups consent to this capitalist course, attributing its downside to individual faults and ›aws. For postsocialist populaces like those who lived through socialism, its defeat is an unassailable conclusion. Their survival of socialism is what arguably renders the market so captivating. Indeed, the variations of time and place might differently inform the workings of market discourse; disparate contexts may alter its meanings. But only by comprehending the power of its story can the expan-

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sion of individuals’ real freedoms become a possibility. Most immediately, those under study can be empowered by equipping them with knowledge that enables them better to decide their own fates. And ultimately, new means of social transformation might be found that are more inclusive, not only across the CEE countries but around the globe as well.

Appendix: Sample Demographics MANAGERS

Name

Age

Education (highest level attained)

Marital Status

Child (one or more)

Anna

49

University

Married

Yes

Dora

41

University

Divorced, Yes currently cohabiting with boyfriend

Emílie

42

University

Married

Ester

47

University

Háta

49

Heda

34

Average Firm Type Monthly (ownership) Earnings (in Czech Management crowns) Field

Product Type

>46,000– Privatized, 56,000

Medical (e.g., surgical)

Never Married

No

>56,000

University

Married

Yes

>56,000

University

Married

Yes

>56,000

Founded post-1989, Multinational Human Resources/ Personnel Founded post-1989, Multinational Education/ Communications Founded post-1989, Multinational Human Resources/ Personnel Founded post-1989, Multinational Human Resources/ Personnel

Electronics

Electronics

Electronics

Electronics

131

MANAGERS

Name

Age

Education (highest level attained)

Marital Status

Child (one or more)

Herma

34

University

Married

Yes

Irc&a

38

University

Divorced Yes

Irena

36

University

Divorced, Yes currently cohabiting with boyfriend

Irma

35

University

Married

Ivana

45

University

Divorced No

Ivona

49

Secondary

Married

Josephina

34

University

Julie

39

University

Divorced, No currently cohabiting with boyfriend Divorced Yes

Karela

54

Secondary

Married

Yes

Yes

Yes

Average Firm Type Monthly (ownership) Earnings (in Czech Management crowns) Field

Product Type

>56,000

Medical

Founded post-1989 Multinational Sales >56,000 N/A, Multinational Finance/ Accounting >56,000 Founded post-1989 Multinational Human Resources/ Personnel >56,000 Founded post-1989, Multinational Marketing >25,000– Privatized, 56,000 Founded post-1989, Multinational Business >36,000– Privatized, 12,000– Privatized,

Diversified Technology

Medical

Glass

Electronics/ Telecommunications Chemical/ Pharmaceutical

Food

Food

12,000– Privatized, 25,000– Privatized, 56,000 Privatized, Multinational Education/ Communications >56,000 Founded post-1989, Multinational Human Resources/ Personnel >46,000– Privatized, 16,000– Privatized, 56,000 Founded post-1989, Multinational Business >56,000 Founded post-1989, Multinational Human Resources/ Personnel >25,000– Privatized, 12,000– Privatized, 56,000 N/A, Multinational Marketing

Product Type Food Food

Electronics/ Telecommunications

Food Chemical

Medical (e.g., surgical) Electronics/ Telecommunications

Food

(Small) Wood Products

Chemical/ Pharmaceutical

133

FACTORY WORKERS

Name

Age

Average Education (highest level attained)

Agáta

36

Secondary

Married

Yes

Alexandra

51

Elementary Married

Yes

Amálie

54

Secondary

Yes

Barbora

42

Berta

Marital Status

Child (one or more)

Monthly Earnings (in Czech Firm Type crowns) (ownership) >12,999– 8,000– 5,000– 5,000– 8,000– 5,000– 8,000– 8,000– 8,000– 8,000– 5,000– 12,000– 5,000– 5,000– 5,000– 8,000– 8,000– 5,000– 8,000– 8,000– 5,000– 5,000– 5,000– 5,000– 12,000– 8,000– 8,000– 8,000– 12,000– 8,000– 8,000– 8,000–

Privatized,

8,000– 5,000– 5,000– 5,000– 5,000– 8,000– 8,000–