Where is the Post-socialist Working Class?

Abstract

In reflecting on two recent popular representations of Poland’s working-class communities and ongoing work in one particular community in southern Poland, this article explores a range of literatures that locate working-class communities in both socialism and post-socialism. It draws attention to the dualities of representation of these working-class communities and seeks to explain these representations, connecting the specificities of the post-socialist world to wider social and economic shifts. Building on the ‘new working-class studies’ and other recent interpretations of working-class lives and cultures, it invokes alternative accounts of working-class lives after socialism, which move beyond the dualities identified, and seeks to reinscribe class as important in the discourses and materialities of post-socialism, East and West.