Talkin' about Class Formation

Reading Boris Mironov's assessment of the role of workers in the 1917 revolution immediately swept me back to the 1970s, when an entire cohort of historians of Russia engaged with a broader community of historians of labor to reassess the prevailing view of Russian workers as "dark masses" (from the right) or "red masses" (from the left). Seeking to replace condescension with respect for individuals as well as for sources, we social historians sought to interrogate these generalizations, whether from the right or the left, whether about "irrational" peasant-workers or monolithic working-class armies.¹ In bringing these methods to the study of the 1917 revolution, this cohort—whether looking at workers, peasants, soldiers, or sailors—contributed to a new consensus that dispelled theories of revolution based on assumptions of conspiracies (German or Masonic) or coups d'états. If in our early writing, we confronted these interpretations each time we presented our evidence, after a while these old views of conspiracies aided by idiotic social forces became so discredited that we no longer needed to engage with them. Now the argument of "cannon fodder" is back, challenging a 30-plus-year consensus about the nature of the Russian working class in 1917.

"Class theory" has remained important to me and this broad cohort of scholars as a heuristic tool for analyzing the phenomena of revolution and worker experience. The work of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others led us to seek to disentangle "class," to search for divisions as much as commonalities.² Demographic data—especially from censuses and other forms of social surveys—were necessary but not sufficient to draw conclusions. Mironov acknowledges as much when he recognizes that "the proletariat was also distinct from other groups in terms of its multilayered social structure" (354). Their political views could be varied. But he rejects the distinction among "vanguard," "intelligent," and "socialist-minded" workers and the mass of backward, patriarchal, alcoholic, thieving workers. Even the "vanguard" was insufficiently advanced to act politically without mentors from the intelligentsia, he says. For Mironov, the primary attribute of "workers" is their low level of literacy (drawn from census aggregates), which meant they were unable to think critically or analytically. Thus he considers "workers" to be a mass of deplorables who did not really understand what they were supporting.

But let's take "multiple structure" a little more seriously. The more closely we look at work experience, the more we see many sources of difference and distinction. It is now well established for European, US, and Russian historiography that artisanal workers—laboring in small shops, possessing high levels of skills, proud of their ability to control their own working conditions—were the leaders of the earliest trade unions and other forms of labor organization.³ Contrary to Marx, the more complex organization of large factories did not predispose workers there to imagine parallel forms of labor organization. For labor historians, "skill" has become an important analytical tool. However imprecisely we can distinguish among "skilled," "semiskilled," and "unskilled," labor historians have shown how workers who share these attributes react to economic and political challenges in similar ways, precisely because the nature of their work shapes the way they see their world.⁴ Certain types of trades were more conducive to drinking on the job: one cannot track alcoholism along a straight line from "backwards" to "politically aware."⁵ Gender (a category of analysis that came late to labor history and that troubles Mironov not at all) and generation complicate these divisions and our ability to generalize about structure. Many skilled male workers refused to believe that women could acquire skills at all. The different social roles of men and women also led them to different forms of activism, not neatly measurable in trade union membership statistics or arrest records.⁶

Historians of Russian labor have long noted the distinctiveness of patterns of labor migration, with men leading the way to the cities and living in bachelor communities.⁷ But they have disagreed on the political significance of this phenomenon. Did having "one foot in the city and industry...