Becoming Dangerous: Everyday Violence in the Industrial Milieu of Late-Socialist Romania

Abstract

In this article, I examine the extent to which everyday violence was a matter of public order in the 1970s and 1980s in Romania's ‘industrial milieu’. Starting from the assumption that public order is an integral part of a monopoly on the use of physical force, I analyse unexceptional, nonlethal violence because, as a borderline phenomenon with both public and private aspects, it can illuminate our understanding of the implementation of legitimating practices in late socialism. Focusing mainly on cases of violence among male workers in the 1970s in Călan, a ‘mono-industrial’ town whose economy was dominated by a metallurgical plant, I examine how everyday violence was dealt with by various institutions, including the law enforcement system (the police, prosecutors and courts), the plant administration and various levels of the party structure. In this context, everyday violence was apparently linked to the private sphere and to stereotypical male normalcy, along with alcohol consumption, and consequently it was not deemed a matter of public order. The situation changed progressively in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when, after the worker protests in Lupeni (1977) and Motru (1981), the authorities began to infer a causal link between everyday violence and protest.