Au fost artiștii ca minerii? Narațiunea grupelor de muncă în competiția intelectualilor cu lucrătorii industriali. (Romanian)

Especially after the fall of communism in Romania, Romanian theatre artists were referring nostalgicallyvindictively to what they considered to be a recognition of the importance of their own activity: the inclusion of actors/performers in the categories of hard or harmful labor, just like miners, in the 1950s and generally before 1977. The legend of the similitude between actors and miners is, in fact, part of the symbolic competition with the industrial working class, in which intellectuals felt engaged especially in the 1980s and which played an important role then and in the following decade (a subject which I elaborate in a larger research). This paper investigates the factual basis of this narrative of State legitimation of cultural labor, starting from the legal codification of the miners' central position in the ideology and public discourse of the communist regime and exploring the wage and retirement conditions of (theatre) actors from 1948 until 1989, including through the lenses of their non-public positions, as reflected in the archives of the secret police. Part of a larger framework of the intelligentsia’s antagonism and lack of solidarity with the working class, which has been analyzed at length in post-communism but which tends to not include the specifics of the performing arts in the general cultural framework, it examines the foundations of the persistent discourse placing theatre artists (alongside writers, filmmakers, etc.) as the righteous beneficiaries of the post-1989 transition, aiming to replace miners at the center of the new, capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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