Re-Assembling the “Working Class” Concept in Russian Social Science: Historical Memory and Contemporary Insights

The research is aimed at studying the origin, formation, decline, and re-assembling of the “working class” as a synthetic scientific-ideological concept. The objectives of the study are to substantiate the necessity of actualizing the class approach in the study of modern Russian social structure through the scrutinizing of historical narratives. It has been shown that today there remains a gap between Russian and western tradition in the study of social inequality and class interactions. In accordance with Marxist ideology, in Soviet sociology a working class was regarded as a protagonist of social change, and the “proletarian truth” of Marxism was contraposed to “bourgeois” stratification theories. Meanwhile, in western tradition, “classes" were historically a part of the stratification discourse in its various conceptual variants (K. Marx, M. Weber, T. Parsons). In post-Soviet Russia, there was a total rejection of Marxist terms, including working-class discourse, in a dominating sociology, and social differentiation has been described in terms of structural functionalism since the 1990s. Whereas in western research fields, different conceptual frames of class studies co-existed and developed in discussion and dialogue up to the late 1980s-1990s, when the crisis of class approach happened under the influence of neoliberal politics and postmodern theory. In today's mainstream Russian sociology, there is still misusing of terms (“middle class" is used in the sense of a stratum, "working class" is usually replaced by euphemisms like “basic layer,” etc.). We argue that there is a necessity to re-assemble the working-class concept under the conditions of a post-industrial society. We define the “new working class” as a group of employees engaged in all areas of material production and service sphere, whose work is routine, divided into standardized segments, amenable to algorithmization, not involved in management, and without any ownership in the organization where they work.