Making of Modernity in the Vernacular: On the Grassroots Variations of Finnish Socialism in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

The article scrutinises the concept of socialism at the grassroots of the Finnish labour movement during the early twentieth history. Primary sources consist of three handwritten newspapers, produced by industrial workers, housemaids and the rural proletariat. While factory workers could adopt the orthodox formulation of socialism from The CommunistManifesto, the socialism of the housemaids had a more existential function for it gave them a political voice to articulate a greater meaning in life that stood in sharp contrast to the silent servility demanded by their mistresses. The concept of socialism gained most explanatory breadth among the rural proletariat in north-eastern Finland, where it was usedas an indicator of inequality locally, as a weapon in national elections and as a direct linkage to the international labour movement. The examples demonstrate that vernacular socialism was more multidimensional than what the contemporary critics and later researchers have suggested. The concept of socialism was one of the main tools in the making of proletarianmodernity: it was used to claim political subjectivity in the public sphere, to imagine a gap between the old world left behind and the new coming world, and to extend their spatial horizons beyond the local community.