The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956

Review

"Following on the path of questioning that Lampland laid out in The Object of Labor (1995), The Value of Labor delves deeper into the technopolitical history of the commodification of agrarian labour in Hungary. . . . In The Value of Labor, she follows the expert and policy debates in 1930s work science, and points out their continuities with the institutionalization of the work unit in the Stalinist phase of collectivization, contradicting the Cold War concept of Stalinist modernization as Soviet models imposed from scratch." ― Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe"Consequently, the book opens up comparative work not only across time (Lampland outlines striking parallels between agricultural transition in the early 1990s, when she started reading materials for this book, and the Stalinist agricultural transition she was reading about), but also geographically and across production systems." ― Hungarian Geographical Bulletin"This book’s outstanding insights spring from the author’s knowledge and skillful use of an enormous variety of published and unpublished sources, including local newspapers and archival collections. As her previous works have already proved, she is one of the leading experts on modern Hungarian history." ― The Journal of Modern History

Review

“The Value of Labor is a work of history that takes in, along with peasants and workers, the accounts by which their labor was organized. Routine little things like infrastructure, standards, and calculations of work and productivity are almost always enveloped in too much cunning and resistance to remain boring. Humor is one of Lampland’s specialties, and she deploys it brilliantly as she explains the evolving economic logic of rural Hungary in a period of intense tumult. Her work reveals that the ironies of socialist accounting were not least among the contradictions that brought down East European socialism.” -- Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles