2. Class Formation and the Labour Movement in Revolutionary China

Abstract

This chapter deploys Katznelson’s conceptualisation of class formation in order to explain the puzzle of the somewhat surprising strengths of China’s working-class movement, alongside its limitations in driving the Revolution more broadly. It argues both the proletarian movement’s political robustness as well as its inability to achieve hegemony are best explained by the complex structures and processes of working-class formation. Workers were, therefore, incorporated into a panoply of particularistic social and cultural relationships, both vertical ones that generally discouraged activism and horizontal ones that often encouraged it. Weak political institutionalisation and endemic political instability often encouraged spontaneous working-class protest locally, even while posing obstacles to extending proletarian power regionally or nationally. Both explanations have in common, however, is their reliance on broad configurations of class formation that highlight the overarching contours of their profoundly different labour movements, even as both failed to achieve hegemony. Keywords:class formation; cultural aspects; economic aspects; labour movement; political aspects; revolutionary china; social aspects; workers