Proletarian Consciousness Research Articles

The Civil Code of the RSFSR 1922: features of birth and happy fate

Is dedicated to identifying conceptual legal problems related to the conditions and prospects of “revolutionary expediency” in the process of developing the provisions of the Civil Code of the RSFSR of 1922. The legal paradigm of that time was subjected to a profound transformation based on the ideas of “national property”, “class interest”, “Soviet power”, etc. Understanding the historical, socio-political and cultural processes allows to analyze the norms of the so-called proletarian law. It is established that the adoption of the Civil Code of 1922 was preceded by many years of titanic work of a huge number of highly professional pre-revolutionary lawyers who had drafted the Civil Code of Russia by 1914; later, the norms were lightly powdered with the class proletarian consciousness and taken as the basis (more than 400 of them in total) for the Civil Code of the RSFSR of 1922. The provisions of this code effectively operated until 1964, when the new Civil Code of the RSFSR was adopted. It was the code of “victorious socialism”, that have survived the abolition of the NEP (the New Economic Policy), industrialization and collectivization of the country, Constitution of 1936, Great Patriotic War and, finally, building of socialism in a single country. Thus, the adoption of the Civil Code of the RSFSR in 1922 became an epochal event in the life of the peoples of the multinational country, which, in terms of significance of its impact on Russian civilization and the entire world, can be compared with “Corpus iuris Romani”.

The Lumpenproletariat and the Itinerary of a Concept: Some Literary Reflections

Abstract In their theory of class formation and social revolution, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were scathing about the lumpenproletariat, condemning it as anti-revolutionary, morally bankrupt, and a bribable tool of the bourgeoisie, a view that remained influential well into the mid-twentieth century. Not until Frantz Fanon appropriated the term lumpenproletariat in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and applied it to what he saw as a whole class of people waiting to be brought into and redeployed as the vanguard of a new revolutionary proletarian consciousness did it shed its negative connotations. The changed trajectories of the proper place and role of the lumpenproletariat can be seen in working-class literatures of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which constitute an important stage upon which to refine Marxian and Fanonian understandings of the lumpenproletariat. This essay examines three novels written in the last thirty years: Herbert, by Nabarun Bhattacharya, written originally in Bengali and published in 1993; How Late It Was, How Late, by Scottish writer James Kelman (1994); and Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra (2006). Read contrapuntally, these works provide a literary platform for the exploration of the representational shift in the role and function of the lumpenproletariat in the twenty-first century.

The Participation of Non-proletarian Population in the Establishment of Agricultural Labour Communes in 1918 (with Reference to the Maryinskaya (Maklinskaya) Commune, Kaluga Province)

This article discusses the history of establishment of an agricultural labour commune in Kaluga Province in 1918 by a private landowner with the involvement of individuals who had had a privileged position prior to 1917. The author describes the way in which the most well-educated, enthusiastic and well-off representatives of the population of Maloyaroslavets district established the commune and their interaction with the new local authorities. Among the members of the commune, there was a private landowner, a son of a nobleman and landowner, a member of the Uyezd Land Department, a former financial Commissioner of the Uyezd Commission, a former hereditary honorary citizen, a granddaughter of a large landowner, etc. Referring to archival materials, the author reveals that the factor which had a dominant role in the decision on the establishment of the commune was the desire to find an adaptation survival model for the non-proletarian strata of the population within the new socialist reality. It is established that the reason for the elimination of the commune as a “counterrevolutionary organisation” was not only its inconsistency with the proletarian doctrine of the new government, but the use of old communicative practices and patterns by the founders of collective farms, as well as their desire to restore the former financial prosperity through a new form of economic organisation and their unpreparedness for hard peasant labour. The latter caused a collision of personal and material interests among the members of the commune (which had informal connections with some local managers with a low level of proletarian consciousness) with representatives of the Bolshevik government and led to open conflicts, which were not ideological debates, but personal and social hostility, greed, and often actions of criminal nature.

Cannon Fodder for the Revolution: The Russian Proletariat in 1917

According to Marxist theory, the working class represents the principal dynamic force of the revolution because of its important intrinsic qualities--namely, its discipline and capacity to organize, its sense of solidarity and collective spirit, and its ability to engage in collective action. The workers' most important quality, however, is their supposed understanding and mastery of the socialist creed (simvol sotsialisticheskoi very), which is itself understood to be the direct result of their class consciousness. A true proletarian understands the difference between capitalism and socialism, between bourgeois and socialist revolution, and he knows the path ahead. He also appreciates the leading role he is expected to play in the necessary destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism, fully aware of his calling as the obvious dominant power (gegemon) and vanguard of the revolution. According to the tenets of Soviet historiography, the formation of the proletariat as a class in Marxist terms had been effectively accomplished in late tsarist Russia by the 1880s. By that time, workers were fully conscious of themselves as proletarians, which was regarded as the necessary proof that the class itself had come into being as a social formation. By 1917, this established social class was primed to carry out a socialist revolution and therefore readily assumed its appropriate leading role in the revolutionary movement. Following the end of the USSR in 1991, the problem of how the Russian working class actually became mobilized to do this predictably lost some of its urgency. Certain studies, however, continued to engage the topic and offered at least a partial revision of the standard Soviet position, suggesting that the workers coalesced as a class not in the 1880s but later, during World War I. (1) As for historians writing outside the country, there has never been a Soviet-like consensus on the problem of the Russian working class. However, an influential school of social historical research nonetheless agreed that a bona fide working class had effectively formed by 1917 and that, by then, a significant share of workers had begun to self-identify as proletarians. Scholars from this school of thought acknowledged the legitimacy of the revolution based on the framework of modernization theory. The workers and the soldiers represented the driving force of the revolution, after all, not the Bolsheviks. (2) Soviet historians reached their conclusions by combining deductive reasoning with Marxist definitions of the proletariat and socialist revolution. By contrast, non-Soviet specialists based their views on inductive reasoning drawn largely from empirical analysis. The logic of Soviet historians was straightforward: if the workers were the social group that played the most active role in overthrowing the monarchy and later the Provisional Government and were the most ardent in displaying their revolutionary fervor, then, naturally, they possessed a proletarian consciousness. Using deductive reasoning to resolve historical questions, however, does not work. This is especially true when the original theory at issue is itself subject to serious doubt. The use of inductive reasoning, however, also has its limitations. The empirical material on which historians have drawn to support their conclusions about workers during the revolution, for example, rests solely on assessments of the workers' exterior involvement in revolutionary events. By contrast, their interior motivations, incentives, and self-reflections as to how and why they engaged in revolution have generally been overlooked. Yet it is precisely such interior questions that are critical to understanding the extent to which workers endorsed socialist doctrine. The mere fact that a deviant act occurs is not enough to describe it as a One has to determine criminal intent, the offender's awareness of the criminal nature of his/her intent, and his/her participation in the crime. …

Nakanishi Inosuke and Chungsŏ Ijijo: Realism and Authenticity in Early Proletarian Literature

This article discusses the reception in Japan and Korea of the works of Nakanishi Inosuke, a leftist writer in the 1920s whose experiences in Korea formed the basis for much of his work. Two novels in particular, Sprouts from Red Earth and Behind You, were widely praised for their realistic representation of life on the peninsula, especially their depiction of Japanese imperialist activities and the anti-colonial pushback from Koreans. How exactly these novels were to be interpreted varied according to audience, however, giving rise to competing images of Nakanishi. Some critics considered him to be an advocate of a newly emerging international proletarian consciousness while other readers, including many Koreans, looked on Nakanishi (whom they called Chungsŏ Ijijo, the Korean reading of his name) as a supporter of colonial nationalism. Still others contested his claim to authenticity altogether. In tracing the development of these interpretations of Nakanishi from these early works up until his participation in the founding of the Korean Artist Proletarian Federation (KAPF) in August 1925 and after, the article argues that his works' ability to successfully navigate the period of a dawning proletarian cultural movement through to its collapse lay (and continues to lie) in their ambiguity, an ambiguity that has facilitated a continual reinterpretation of him from the 1920s to the present day.

Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan Helen MacNaughtan (bio) Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. By Elyssa Faison. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007. xiv, 227 pages. $39.95. Elyssa Faison has written a very interesting book on Japanese female textile workers during the interwar period. She focuses on the discourse and [End Page 231] counterdiscourse between employers and workers and the systems of management utilized by large textile companies that aimed to define women workers primarily by their gender in an attempt to dissuade women from organizing and striking as workers. She frames her discussion within key themes of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism and locates it more broadly in a dialogue with the tensions surrounding the social (and economic) roles of women in a modernizing Japan. In chapter 1 Faison relates how women entered the modern textile work force during the Meiji period and notes the emergence of paternalistic labor ideology and the passage of the 1929 Factory Law. In chapter 2 she describes how the industry focused on keeping these women workers busy and "out of trouble" after night work had been abolished (by the 1929 legislation). She describes how textile managers were fearful that increased free time would incite young female workers to sexual depravity (leading to pregnancy or prostitution) or that they might have more time to devote to organizing themselves into collective action. Certainly the latter fear was well founded, as she depicts in her later chapters discussing textile strikes. But in some respects I would have liked Faison to delve further into the legitimacy of fears that these women were "dangerously close to falling into prostitution" (p. 51). For example, how founded does Faison think this fear was for textile managers? While such fears (real or otherwise) no doubt provided some motivation for managers to provide educational and other structured activities for their young female workers, there were also other motivations for this, including (as she notes) a preference for a more "holistic approach to the management of workers" (p. 33). In chapter 3 Faison takes a look at "cultivation groups" and the role they played in gendering both men and women in Japan. In particular she looks at the concept of shūyō (cultivation or self-cultivation) and how textile employers used this as a basis for compulsory programs of learning and activity for their female workers, again in an attempt to limit worker time and thereby preempt activism (p. 54). Her account of the Shōjokai (Young Women's Association) and its interest in female workers in this chapter is valuable, as is the discussion of the tensions inherent within the image of the factory girl as a model of filial piety. The Shōjokai wanted to intervene and protect female factory workers from the "polluting influences of modern machinery, the industrial process and urban life" as well as cultivate them in the "womanly arts and improve morals" (p. 63). Faison also describes how the shūyōdan (self-cultivation units) were keen to provide factory girls with training—primarily calisthenics, cleaning (she provides an interesting description and image of the "dust rag dance" [pp. 73–74]), and etiquette-based programs—to fill their nonworking hours. The tensions between the shūyōdan, textile management, and textile unions are palpable (pp. 78–80) [End Page 232] and it would have been interesting to have gained a clearer sense of how these tensions played out between them during these years. Chapter 4 changes tack somewhat in that it focuses on two women: Tatewaki Sadayo, a labor activist who founded a worker's school for women, and her friendship with the proletarian writer Nakamoto Takako who wrote extensively (in semifictionalized form) on the T ōyō Muslin strike of 1930. In this chapter, Faison describes the events of the T ōyō Muslin strike itself, discusses the indirect association of these two women with this strike, and broadly places this narrative within the textile industry's rationalization efforts, the relocation of production to Japanese colonies, and the rise of proletarian consciousness and labor unrest in Japan at this time. Faison then turns again to this very interesting discussion on the sexuality of...

Blue-Collar Aristocrats? General Motors Autoworkers and Oppositional Class Consciousness

Postwar social theorists (Goldthorpe, Lipset, Giddens, Hout, Brooks and Manza) have typically portrayed members of the Western industrial working-class as accommodative and suggest that an affluent proletariat has seen its oppositional working-class consciousness subverted and transformed by the ‘cash nexus’ into various forms of social integration. With reference to Mann's (1973) measures of class-consciousness I explore expressions of proletarian consciousness among organized workers at one of Canada's largest industrial union locals, the Canadian Auto Workers Local 222 of General Motors, Oshawa, Canada. Here I tested for the existence and degree of working-class imagery, proletarian identity and oppositional working-class consciousness using a survey questionnaire (N=102), in-depth interviews and participant observation. I found a shared view of class relations as primarily characterized by conflict, a clear working-class self-identification and measurable forms of oppositional working-class consciousness among this group. My findings confirm the hypothesis that Oshawa autoworkers' relative material advantage is insufficient to completely transform their proletarian consciousness. In this context I discuss the 1996 Oshawa plant occupation as an example of elevated oppositional class consciousness among Oshawa autoworkers.

First and Third Worlds in U. S. Literature: Rethinking Carlos Bulosan

1. Re-Imagining Class Struggle Much of criticism on Carlos Bulosan investigates dynamics of Third World writing in work, primarily focussing on poetry or, most predominantly, on novelistic collective biography of Filipinos, Is in Heart.(1) Bulosan has been defined and evaluated overridingly on basis of Is in Heart, widely considered his key work (Kim Such Opposite Creatures 45) and and most controversial work as well as the text of first-generation Filipino immigrant (Alquizola 211). Privileging Is in Heart in study of Bulosan's work, however, by extension also privileges a particular imagination or master narrative of class struggle, a definitive politicized interpretation of the first-generation Filipino immigrant experience, and, as Bulosan's aesthetic conveys revolutionary and revolutionizing concept of imagination as praxis (San Juan Carlos Bulosan 64), a particular strategy of proletarian and Third World cultural resistance.(2) Isolating Is in Heart as of both Bulosan's political and literary imagination and internal colonial experience of Filipinos in U.S. leaves incomplete unfolding tale of the evolution of a Third World socialist (San Juan Reading West 134). In this essay, I will trace this evolution beyond is in Heart through a study of Bulosan's re-imagination of class struggle in final stunning novel, The Cry and Dedication, which provides a fictional rethinking of interrelations of race, nation, culture, and class struggle. What most significantly distinguishes The Cry and Dedication from Is in Heart is Bulosan's recognition of need for liberation of internally colonized Filipinos in U.S. and realization that, in Amilcar Cabral's terms, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture (Cabral Return 43). If Is in Heart is a narrative of coming to class consciousness, The Cry and Dedication reworks that narrative and reconsiders content of class consciousness. Regarding class consciousness as the way in which [class] experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms (Thompson 10), we can see how American cultural terms would be inadequate for comprehending class experience of Filipino workers rooted in a history and international space distinct from that of a large percentage of U.S. workers. Bulosan's return to source in The Cry and Dedication constitutes a recognition that cultural domination reinforces and shapes class domination such that a genuine working-class movement can emerge only after cultural and racial equality are achieved; in short, that, following Frantz Fanon's thesis, it is at heart of consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows (248). In articulating paradox of America in Is in Heart, Bulosan wonders, Why was so kind and yet so cruel? Was there no common denominator on which we could all meet? (147). The Cry and Dedication, however, is not a search for a common denominator but rather a cultural nationalist affirmation which both articulates and enacts an anti-imperialist politics and program of liberation for Filipinos in U.S. through a cultural resistance that redirects and reimagines narrative of class struggle by realigning relations between history, culture, and class consciousness. In exploring Bulosan's creation of a Third World proletarian consciousness in The Cry and Dedication, I will discuss two major aspects of novel: 1) The trope of homecoming and recuperation of identity for Filipinos in U.S.; and 2) The sexual and literary politics of cultural nationalism. 2. Back to Future: Bulosans's Literary Homecoming While in writing Is in Heart Bulosan's attention was focussed on a U. …

The Labor Movement in Postsocialist Russia

In the countries of the classical development of capitalism the labor movement's essence is the struggle for better conditions for the sale of labor power. Hence in the West the labor movement and workers' social consciousness were formed mainly under the influence of the ideology of trade unionism. Of course, under certain conditions wage workers in these countries manifested an interest in solving sociopolitical problems; then labor parties became an element of the labor movement, and a specifically proletarian consciousness was formed. However, trade unions were always the foundation of the labor movement. They came into being earlier than parties and acted together with the latter in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century; they continue to function even now when the majority of former labor parties have dwindled to nothing or have become organizations reflecting the interests of the most diverse social categories. In some industrially developed countries,...

The Mayete as Object and Stereotype in Andalusian Proletarian Poetry

Fuenmayor is an agrotown of about 8,000 people located in the valley of the Guadalquivir River in southern Spain (Andalusia) about which I have written (Gilmore 1980, 1987).(1) Like most other pueblos in this comarca (Martinez-Alier 1971), Fuenmayor is sharply divided into extremes of rich and poor, landowners and laborers. A central feature of its social life under the Franco regime, indeed, since the mid-1800s, was class struggle between the latifundists (senoritos in the classic Andalusian usage) and the seasonally employed day laborers, or jornaleros (also called trabajadores, peones, etc., all signifying manual workers). For the most part, uniformly rich and powerful, the senioritos were politically reactionary, pious, and elitist, autocratically wielding the cudgel of statist power; the poverty-stricken workers were anticlerical, politically left-revolutionary (mainly socialist, with a sprinkling of anarchists), and ideologically egalitarian (Moreno Navarro 1972) in moral philosophy. Given the degree of hostility between the extremes of this sharply drawn class structure and the bitter history of violence in the region (Malefakis 1970; Brandes 1980; Maddox 1993), many observers regarded western Andalusian rural society as a two-class system, without a viable middle (see Bernal 1974; Calero 1976; Tunon de Lara 1978). This dichotomous view was common even though there was excellent evidence of much more complex systems of stratification in many areas, consisting of various intermediate strata of peasants, agrarian bailiffs, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats (cf. Luque Baena 1974; Guarino 1991). It was almost a scholarly tradition in the sociology of rural Andalusia to discount these petty bourgeois, especially small peasants who were often dismissed as (cf. Roux 1991), and to concentrate only on the more conspicuous extremes of the class system (cf. Martinez-Alier 1971; Artola et al. 1979). While many observers acknowledged the existence of middle strata, especially the commercial bourgeoisie (Driessen 1981; Maddox 1993: 130-31), few anthropologists spent much time examining social relationships between the agrarian lower and middle classes. There seemed little to say about the relations between the minifundistas and the landless laborers since their economic contacts seemed minimal (Luque Baena 1981; Maddox 1993 for a review).(2) Despite this neglect, these small-scale peasants were (and still are today) socially important, because they historically formed a social buffer zone between the oligarchs and landless laborers; they, too, had both social and economic ties with the jornaleros, figuring prominently in proletarian perceptions about society and labor. For the most part apolitical and self-sufficient, these subsistence peasants did stand somewhat aloof from the class struggle, yet were nonetheless drawn in involuntarily by forces beyond their control. In the following discussion, I describe the class subculture (Maddox 1993: 122) of the workers as this relates to perceptions of the agrarian middle class. The ethnographic present is the period from the Civil War to the early 1970s - the heyday of the Franco dictatorship. While increasingly obsolete in the mid-1990s, much of the class imagery discussed below still lingers on as an element in proletarian consciousness and folklore even today.(3) I conclude with a brief discussion of the relative weight of economic and cultural factors in the formation of class stereotypes and mythology. THE MAYETE CONCEPT: ETYMOLOGY AND STEREOTYPE In Fuenmayor and the surrounding region, small-holding peasants are not called by the standard Castilian appellations campesinos (peasants) or agricultores (cultivators), nor is the term minifundista used. Rather these farmers have their own linguistic label, attesting to a regional class formation of some longevity and salience. I speak here of subsistence peasants with access to land, either in private ownership or rent, and small-to-medium market-oriented irrigation gardeners (hortelanos). …

‘Bread with freedom and peace …’ rail workers in Malawi, 1954–1975

This article examines the relationship between the struggle for independence and the emergence of labour militancy in Malawi by examining the history of trade unionism among the country's rail workers. It concludes that the emergence of mass nationalism under the leadership of the Malawi Congress Party stimulated a greater proletarian consciousness which heightened the railway workers' expectations and ultimately led them to reject government ideology and strictures. Although the workers were unable to achieve their own ambitions in Banda's repressive Malawi, they nevertheless engaged in activities which were virtually unprecedented in independent Malawi. These incidents presaged the recent labour unrest which has gripped this country and indicate that labourers remain a potent force in any reorganization of Malawi's political environment in the post Banda era.

Class and State in the Early Soviet Period: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay strikes this reader as a worthy introduction to an important theme in early Soviet history-the relationship between the embryonic Soviet state and the fluid working class of the revolutionary years. Regrettably it deals with the question rather superficially and somewhat polemically, and as it skims through major methodological and conceptual matters it fails to locate them in ongoing discussions. In treating the question of the social base of Bolshevism, I would suggest, there is something to be gained by engaging more consciously some of the insights afforded by three current debates in the social sciences-the divisive controversy over Marxism as a valid form of historical analysis, the debate on the state as autonomous actor, and the rich empirical and theoretical work on the formation of working classes. In the course of this short article Sheila Fitzpatrick manages both to reject Marxist class analysis and to smuggle it back in to prove her principal thesis. Presumably because Russian class structure was weak and underdeveloped, Marxist analysis was inappropriate to Russian social reality and led the Bolsheviks into false understandings of the maturity of the working class and the development of proletarian consciousness. Even in her rush to deny the validity of class analysis, something which in recent years has become something of a personal crusade, Fitzpatrick relies on a relatively crude notion of class as a statistically definable group. Classes here appear and dissolve as people change occupation, and the weak class structure that crumbled under the effect of war, revolution, and civil war caused the Bolsheviks a crisis of legitimation that even led to doubts about the vanguard class. In her suspicion about the utility of class concepts, Fitzpatrick hardly stands alone. Within Russian history scholars like Gregory Freeze and Alfred Rieber have questioned the use of the word class (even soslovie in the case of Freeze) as a useful category for understanding Imperial Russia, and few western scholars have employed class language in a rigorous way to describe the period after the civil war. More broadly the crisis within Marxist thought about the hard core of axioms to which the orthodox might subscribe, the retreat from the older base-superstructure model, as well as the poststructuralist challenge to key Marxist categories, have all contributed to a state of siege for Marxism in the academy at the very time when much of the most interesting work in social science is informed by and indebted to earlier work by Marxist historians and sociologists.1 Indeed Marxism has so deeply penetrated the vocabulary of social science that it may no longer be susceptible to surgical removal, as Fitzpatrick, despite her misgivings about Marxism, seems to demonstrate in her own essay. Given the heavy-handed practice of both western sectarians and many Soviet histo-

Peronism Yesterday and Today

The socialist content of populist mobilizations, the persistent efficacy of the urban guerrillas, and the contradictions that managing a dependent capitalist economy prod uces, are among the principal weaknesses of official Peronism today. The analysis of these phenomena is essential to an understanding of Peronism, especially as events sug gest that it is moving to a close. Alberto Ciria's essay provides background to Peronism. He is Associate Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Nan cy Hollander explores the background and ideology of Evita Perón and ties her analysis to Peronism today; she also examines the role of women in Argentina today. She teaches history at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Michael Dodson looks at the ac tivities of radical priests and their role in promoting the return of Peronism. He teaches political science at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth. Finally, the commentary by Argentine sociologist Juan Carlos Torre, appeared in Pasado y Presente at the end of 1973. It is one of the very few commentaries on current working-class struggles by a competent observer. It reflects how the class struggles have moved to the center of Peronism, within the working-class movement itself as a struggle between the rank-and-file and the union bureaucracies. Not only is income redistribution more difficult for Peronism than it ever was before. It is not enough in terms of proletarian consciousness at this stage of develop ment. The inability to control the labor movement by persuasion or force is likely to speed up the historical closure of Peronism and open up the prospect of a more advanced revolu tionary movement. Juan Carlos Torre is a research sociologist at the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. His essay was translated by Anna Marie Taylor of the Department of Span ish, University of Chicago.

The rural proletariat and the problem of rural proletarian consciousness

‘The rural proletariat’ has been employed as a sociological category to describe Caribbean populations for nearly 25 years, but confusion about such populations persists. Proletarianisation, the definition of rural proletariats, and the Marxist conception of consciousness, as applicable to such groups, are discussed in the following paper. The Cuban case is described to exemplify the European bias of some analysts, and the difficulties created by an uncritical transfer of western conceptions of class and of class consciousness to a colonial agrarian situation. A special effort is made to conceptualise the rural proletariat in terms of its relationships to the peasantry, and of the ‘concealment’ of landless workers in peasant communities.