ABSTRACT
Ruling communist parties seek socioeconomic "development" through public policies, in part, because their Marxist roots require building and maintaining the "objective conditions of socialism". Recognition of conflict between policy and polity in communist states is critical to an understanding of communist systems' political futures. Romanian leaders and its economic planners argue that their nation is "developing" as opposed to "developed." Socioeconomic change in Romania was rapid and fundamental for most of the 1960s and 1970s, The transformation of an agricultural economy and largely peasant society into an industrial and urban system was a political decision by the Romanian Communist Party, as was the strenuous effort to become identified as a "developing" state. Worker-Party conflict thus occurs against the backdrop of much wider and ongoing processes of change. Neither Solidarity nor the nascent grievances of Romanian labor can be viewed in isolation from developed socialism.
