Culture and Contradiction Before the End of History: From Socialist Legacies to Market Logics

Abstract In late-socialist Romania, the state sought to govern economic crisis by demanding market-like conduct from cultural institutions while continuing to bind them to the political structures of socialism. Drawing on archival planning reports, media accounts, and post-socialist recollections, this article traces the emergence of a “self-financing regime” that reorganized cultural production around revenue generation, entrepreneurial conduct, and managerial accountability. I argue that self-financing constituted neither a retreat of socialism nor an incipient transition to capitalism, but an experiment in governing crisis by relocating the burdens of economic survival onto institutions themselves. This shift generated a contradictory institutional world: cultural actors were compelled to pursue economic self-sufficiency and become self-optimizing subjects even as markets remained ideologically repudiated, socialist obligations endured, and nominal decentralization extended bureaucratic oversight. Yet contradiction did not simply signal the incoherence of late socialism. As these tensions became embedded in everyday institutional practice, contradiction provided the very means through which austerity was rendered governable. The Romanian case thus shows how market-like rationalities could emerge from within socialist crisis management and crystallize into historically distinct forms of governance. By situating these entanglements before the so-called “end of history,” the article unsettles teleological narratives of socialist-capitalist rupture and reconsiders crisis as a historically contingent site where seemingly opposed political-economic logics can be made and remade in practice.