Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the ways in which the idea of “hidden reserves of productivity” – fundamental expression of socialist accumulation – was constitutive to mechanisms of knowledge production, fields of expertise, and technologies of making the factory shopfloor visible.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the politics of quantification that underlay the idea of "accumulation" at the implementation of planning in early socialist Romania. More concretely, I investigate the ways in which the notion of "hidden reserves of productivity" was an integral part in the calculation and anticipation of economic growth, and was constitutive to mechanisms of knowledge production, fields of expertise, and technologies of making the factory shopfloor visible. Subjecting the emergence, evolution, and unfolding on the ground of this notion to the interpretative gaze that STS provide allows me to shed plausible light on how centralization and planning were achieved in state socialism.

"Hidden reserves of productivity" encapsulated the idea that at the moment of planning, the true capacity of a worker, factory, or of the economy as a whole could not be assessed by planners or factory managers because there were always yet-undiscovered ways to push their limits into uncharted territories of efficiency and organization. Thus, the very possibility of economic growth in early socialism was predicated on elusive units of planning whose real possibilities had to be discovered, nurtured, and harnessed. Based on factory documents, political speeches, and technical debates in the 1950s, I argue that the political imaginary in which these efforts took place was defined between three conflicting temporal horizons of socialist construction: the time of modernization and historical catching-up, the linear time of workers' discipline and factory management, and the transcendent time of a revolutionary outcome.