ABSTRACT
Romania's creation as a nation-state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was accompanied by the expansion into former Ottoman and Hapsburg lands of capitalist commerce and investment. Romania's position in the world system was changed profoundly by communist rule and Soviet domination. Some idea of the magnitude and direction of social change in Socialist Romania can be derived from a few statistics. The pattern of rural-based workers who commute to cities to work is a well established aspect of Romanian modernization and is an outgrowth of the logic of primary socialist accumulation. Every facet of life in modern Romania, including the pursuit of domestic economic goals, requires interaction with the national bureaucracy. The personal use of machinery, the private appropriation of material and the deployment of paid farm labor on personal resources all infringe on socialist agricultural production. Romanian planners anticipate that the process of primary socialist accumulation will be phased out during the 1980s.
