By drawing on Kideckel (2002) and Todorova and Gille (2010), this article seeks to (1) explore forms of workers’ new subalternity in the new capitalist regimes in East Germany and Hungary, and (2) argue that nostalgia for the socialist regimes functions as a means and claim of the “little man” to express social criticism. Under state socialism, workers constituted the emblematic class of the re...