This is an excellent book. Planning Labour constitutes a major contribution to the study of labor and class in the early years of socialism in Romania, and by extension, to our understanding of the first decades of east European socialist regimes more generally. It is theoretically ambitious and ethnographically rich, a well-written and engaging narrative. Alina-Sandra Cucu's analysis situates the transition to socialist state planning and factory production within a larger social framework of neighborhoods, suburbs, and rural communities that fed and sustained the new socialist enterprise, specifically in and surrounding Cluj/Kolozsvár. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, as well as a masterly command of an extensive secondary literature, Cucu illustrates how core principles of the socialist project—socialist accumulation and centralized state control—clashed with the challenges the country faced in modernizing the economy and transforming its inhabitants into well-disciplined socialist citizens. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's notion of nonsynchronicity, Cucu argues that Romanians were having to reconcile a future-oriented vision of socialist society promoted by the new Communist Party regime with the vagaries of everyday subsistence one faces in a poorly-developed national economy, the social conditions of which are strongly mired in the historical constraints of previous decades. In short, she insists that the local, everyday practices of the people in Cluj and its environs were just as crucial to the history of socialist transformation as the political projects devised by new elites.

Cucu makes important interventions in several theoretical debates, notably questions of ethnicity versus class in Romania and the nature of state power in socialism. She acknowledges the recurring salience of ethnic relations in Romanian society, but argues convincingly that class is the structuring principle we must attend to. Her attention to the local dimensions and spatial configuration of class and ethnic relations, particularly in the contrast between city and countryside, demonstrates the ways that people's interactions are woven through complex histories but grounded in class inequalities. Cucu's analysis of the socialist state also departs from earlier work that emphasized its over-powering control. She offers an alternative interpretation: a convincing portrait of a fragile state that was caught between its grand plans for future development and its reliance on factory workers and villagers to make the plan a reality day in and day out. Surveillance from above was an insufficient means of knowing what was happening on the ground, and an ineffective means of controlling how the state's agenda would be implemented. Though she is strongly influenced by Mark Pittaway's study of Hungarian industrial workers in the 1950s, she distinguishes her work from his by emphasizing the productivist core of the socialist state rather than its legitimacy. Cucu's analysis of production processes as characterized by chaotic rhythms that hindered coordination and planning is particularly insightful.

Cucu's analysis is firmly grounded in the dynamics of capital accumulation and class formation, a welcome change from the common focus on political transition during this period. She provides us with a thorough review of the literature on primitive accumulation and development—from Karl Marx and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii to David Harvey—to guide us through the analysis. The first three chapters of the book describe the processes of incorporating private industry into the institutional structure of the new party-state, and demonstrate the difficulties in recruiting labor and maintaining a stable work force by focusing on two companies: 1) a long established leather and foot-ware factory, and 2) a factory producing domestic and industrial faucets and fittings that had been cobbled together in 1948 from three private workshops in the city. Unsurprisingly, the labor force was characterized by classic patterns of ethnic segmentation—skilled industrial workers being Hungarian, unskilled city and rural inhabitants primarily Romanian—creating significant problems for management in training workers and fostering community. Large segments of the labor force prioritized their commitments to families in rural agrarian communities, leading to huge seasonal fluctuations in available man power. The second three chapters focus on the dynamics of work on shop floor: the incessant push to increase productivity, difficulties with factory discipline, and the strange temporal clashes between a future socialist imaginary and a lagging economic reality. The lessons to be learned from this astute study extend far beyond the east European socialist periphery to the history of capitalist development worldwide.