by Vladan Jeremić and Rena Rädle The economic devastation after the break-up of Yugoslavia and almost complete deindustrialization of Serbia that followed represent one of the crucial problems today. Everything that could be privatized in Serbia has been privatized, the majority of factories and businesses have been dissolved and their estates sold. The import lobby of domestic comprador bourgeoisie has been working for the last decade on abolishing the local production and placing instead of it imported products that the citizens of Serbia should buy from credits, thus incurring more and more debt. In this hostile setting only rare companies …

by Valentina Iancu Karl Marx’s redefining of labor and its role in society entailed a symbolic glorification of the worker in the Marxist imaginary. “The reason for the ascent of labor in the modern age has been its productivity, and Marx’s seemingly blasphemous idea that labor (not God) created man, or that labor (not reason) set man apart from other animals, simply meant the most radical phrasing of a state of affairs which the entire modern age agreed on.[1] In this context, artists sheepishly reached out to social classes that had been ignored for centuries. The interest in physical labor …

by Nicolae Mandea The films which Nicolae Mandea analyzes in his essay – Răsună valea (The Valley Is Bustling – 1950, director Paul Călinescu), Puterea şi adevărul (Power and Truth – 1972, Manole Marcus) and 8 Martie (March 8 – 2012, Alexandru Belc) – focus on representations of the social repertoire of labor, emphasizing the accuracy of the details. The painting-like representations of the scenes of labor are usually rich in information about the characters, the spacial context, the world of objects and the typical attire. At the same time, the physical activities leave an indelible mark on the human …

by Mihai Lukács The Soviet director Vsevold Meyerhold employed theatre to consciously help the post-Revolutionary effort in the 1920-1930s Soviet Union and to manifest solidarity to workers and to the communist ideals. Radical changes in his (before and after the Revolution) theories prove the politically motivated development of  his theatre-making: by rejecting the pre-Revolutionary theatre and its bourgeois baggage based on oppression and inequality, the former theatrical knowledge was abandoned and un-learned, while at the same time new subject positions and a revolutionary theatre could emerge. By connecting his theatrical explorations with the popular scientific ideas of the time, Meyerhold …

by Mihaela Michailov Play-writing in the 50s and 60s centers on the image of the worker and on the new geography of labor in factories, enterprises and mines. The worker and work undertaken in often precarious conditions represent the themes of playwrights such as Lucia Demetrius, Mihai Davidoglu, Ion D. Sârbu, Maria Banuș etc., playwrights for whom the theatre functions as a means to mobilize class consciousness and create contexts in solidarity with the realities of the times. The workers in the plays of the aforementioned authors believe in the Communist ideals, in the value of the labor shared by …