ABSTRACT
Coal mining traditionally played a crucial role in the state socialist development model. The extensive regime of accumulation in which there was a continued process of expansion in the means of production (Pavlínek 1998; Smith 1998) relied on ever-increasing production of electricity, largely based on coal, to satisfy the growing energy demands of energy inefficient state socialist economies. The former Czechoslovakia was no exception. In 1989, the country derived 55 per cent of its energy needs and 78 per cent of electricity from brown coal (lignite) (Statistical Yearbook 1989:394). The largest brown coal deposits are located in the North Bohemian Coal Basin, which accounted for 74 per cent of Czechoslovak brown coal production in 1990. In turn, more than 50 per cent of brown coal produced in northern Bohemia came from the Most region, which has been a centre of coal mining in northern Bohemia for more than one hundred years (Figure 9.1). Mining (along with the chemical industry) constituted the heart of what I will call the ‘regional regime of accumulation’, by which I refer to the character of the long-term development in the relations of production and consumption within a regional economy based upon a particular sectoral structure, which in turn is embedded within the national economy with its own forms of aggregated production-consumption dynamics. Coal and chemicals were therefore critical elements in the state socialist transformation of the Most region; together they accounted for more than 90 per cent of industrial production and more than 80 per cent of industrial employment in the 1980s.
