Reconsidering Class Struggle in Everyday Life: Labour Protests and Mundane Resistance in Contemporary Russia

Strengthening of the authoritarian trend results in emerging barriers and restricted opportunities for labour and open protests. This makes working classes and wider groups of ordinary people with restricted resources invent safer ways of overcoming life difficulties caused by constellations of inequalities and become engaged in everyday struggles in their workplaces and places of residence. Drawing on the creative ethnography of working-class communities in Russia, I suggest reconsidering the concept of class struggle understood in terms of a labour conflict and extend it towards everyday struggle operating at the intersections of class, gender and ethnicity/race in mundane domains.

The paper focuses on the changes of the repertoire of collective actions throughout the period between the 2010s and the 2020s marked by the evolution of the Russian neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime. I will start with the cases of workers’ participation in labour strikes and collective protests and explain how these actions were replaced by the creative forms of mundane resistance to inequalities and oppression manifesting themselves in involvement in alternative economies, grassroots urban gardening and clean-ups of gentrified mixed-tenure neighbourhoods.

It is argued that the creative forms of mundane resistance entail moral-symbolic counter-hegemonic acts characterised by multiplicity, decentration and sometimes anonymity. Producing affective cumulative effects, these counter-hegemonic acts, help workers and ordinary people constitute themselves as moral subjects, create temporary sites of counter-power and re-shape the fabric of everyday life in a long-term perspective. I suggest discussing the questions about to what extent everyday struggle is an effective tool of social change; what advantages and limitations it has; and whether it is a ‘Russian’ phenomenon or it can also be found in other countries. The paper develops the arguments and ideas from my book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle (Manchester University Press, 2024).