2011

Edyta Materka

  • Doctoral Candidate
  • London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Picture of Edyta Materka

Project

Socialist Labor at the Frontier: Kombinacja, Social Credit, and Other Agricultural Labour Arrangements in Poland's Recovered Territories, 1945-Present

Program

Dissertation Fellowships in East European Studies

Department

Geography & Environment

Abstract

This historical ethnography of 12 villages in Poland's Recovered Territories identifies the tension between state-sanctioned, forced labor (e.g. corvees) under socialism and worker-peasants' own widespread, non-organized, illegal practices (e.g. kombinacja, social credit) of extracting and distributing state resources. Worker peasants expressed redistributive and spatial justice via the deterritorialisation of state resources and construction of a counter territoriality embedded in agricultural labour arrangements. The reproduction of these socialist-era values and expressed spatial-justice challenges the implicit socialist/non-socialist, socialist/post-socialist binaries of post-1989 rurality.