Social Distinctions in Contemporary Russia

Waiting for the Middle-Class Society?

Jouko Nikula, Mikhail Chernysh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032336343
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000037593
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses social change in Russia, in particular the development of a middle class, one of the most important social and political projects of Putin's administration.

Using unique survey data collected in 1998, 2007 and 2015, the authors make extensive and theoretically justified analyses of the changing social distinctions in Russia over the past 20 years. Offering a sophisticated analysis of classes and class they acknowledge that in class analysis there are different phases, requiring different concepts. The first phase is the analysis of class positions; the second is the study of the work and reproduction situations of class groups and the final step is the analysis of class interests. While acknowledging that there are a number Russian-specific factors that seriously complicate traditional class analysis, the authors maintain that the basic tenets of class analysis still hold true.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, political science, transition studies, social policy and Russian studies and anyone who wants to understand the internal divisions and organization of the middle class in Russia.

1
Specificities of middle-class structuration in Russia

Markku Kivinen

Introduction

Social classes are large groups of people with a similar position in the structure of a society. In a very fundamental sense, managers resemble other managers, workers resemble workers, doctors resemble doctors, and farmers resemble other farmers. Largely, all modern societies are also quite similar. There is no society that offers long-term career prospects to factory workers or cashiers and not to holders of Master’s degrees. There is no society where labourers live longer than managers. Life opportunities and perspectives are related to social status.

Globally, the differences are immense: at one end of the scale, there are the super-rich, who manoeuvre billions of dollars. The wealthiest individuals’ assets are worth more than the Finnish state budget. At the other end of the scale, an illiterate Indian person is living in the middle of a roundabout, selling roasted chestnuts to stay alive. The population of the world is around seven billion. According to statistics, around one billion people are living in relatively wealthy societies, where the annual income per capita is around EUR 6,000. Five billion people are living on an annual income of less than EUR 1,000. In the middle of the scale is the middle class, around one billion people globally, with the largest groups being the middle classes of Eastern Europe, the growing China, and Russia. Global inequality should be kept in mind, even though social classes do not play a role at the global level.

At the national level, however, social classes have played a significant political role. ‘Bourgeois parties,’ ‘agricultural people,’ and the ‘labour movement’ are traditional concepts of the Finnish political scene. ‘The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing,’ Communist books used to proclaim.

In classical political economy, all fundamental social divisions were closely tied in with basic economic categories, with land ownership, capital, and wage labour: these were the categories that formed the basis for the main social classes. Class analysis was an integral part of economic analysis. For Marx, social classes appeared as bearers of different economic categories, but of course in Marx’s case this analysis unfolded into a critique of political economy (Marx 1974). In Marxist theory, the capitalist mode of production is based on an indirect form of societal labour and on the exploitation of the working class. Labour is indirectly social because social needs are always mediated by the markets. The working class is exploited because it generates surplus value that at once makes possible the production of capital and the reproduction of class relations. The working class shall be a new revolutionary class, showing the way in the process of social change towards the abolition of the capital relation. From this point of view, economic classes were also key categories of political analysis: class interests determined the nature and dynamics of political processes.

As well as ruining the ideological appeal of Marxism in the eyes of Western intellectuals, the collapse of Soviet communism effectively undermined the ideological significance of the concept of class. Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters (1996), for instance, suggest that the ideological interest on the political right has turned towards moral and ethical questions, while on the left the focus has shifted to questions of gender, ecology, citizenship, and human rights (Pakulski and Waters 1996). They argue that class analysis must now be thrown overboard and replaced by studies of status positions and their underlying cultural meanings. Postmodern society is a status bazaar where people can choose between a wide range of different identities based on cultures and consumption (Pakulski and Waters 1996: 114–131; see also Pahl 1989).

This chapter challenges the view arguing for the death of classes and deals with class analysis as a sociological research programme. Investigating the structuration of classes in contemporary Russia, it shows the relevance of class research. On the other hand, the chapter proceeds to discuss the role of the welfare state for class research. My intention is to show anomalies and problems in class analysis as well. They do not ruin the research problem, but they underline the relevance of a multilevel scope logic of class analysis for showing the explanatory power and the limits of class research.

Classes and class analysis

Traditional class research rhetoric revolves around different kinds of contrasts: Marx versus Weber, class differences in grade versus qualitative differentiation, class struggle versus co-operation between classes. Our theoretical approach challenges such an approach, and the main argument is that the traditional rhetoric of contrasts is misleading. It is mainly a distinction strategy within the field of class analysis itself. From this perspective, nothing appears definite and undisputed. Rather than starting from traditional contrasts, we want to show that there are many significant and solid empirical results on which everyone can agree. Furthermore, the field of class analysis is open to conceptual innovations and new results from other sociological research programmes. This does not mean to say that there are no theoretical disagreements, unsolved problems, or anomalies.

Class analysis consists not only of drawing maps of the class structure and of slotting people into different classes and counting the proportions they represent. This is merely the first step and certainly not yet sufficient to establish whether the classes only exist in the researcher’s typology or whether they actually exist in social reality. If class analysis were this kind of statistical exercise, it really would not have any relevance whatsoever (for an example of shallow critique, see Piirainen 1998).

The scope logic of class analysis, developed by the Finnish Class Project, represents an effort to create a comprehensive analytical strategy in class research. It draws from the class analysis by E.O. Wright, however taking it further by noting the importance of autonomy as a class criterion. The scope logic of class analysis also utilizes the Giddensian structuration thesis by applying it to the life-situations of classes and also takes seriously Bourdieu’s key ideas of class habituses when analysing the different aspects of social action by social classes (class interests, willingness to act). In this manner the levels of analysis are systematically taken into account. From this it follows that class analysis is a highly complex process that involves many different conceptual levels and research strategies. A very basic distinction that needs to be made is that between class position and class situation (Kivinen 1989; Blom, Kivinen, Melin, and Rantalaiho 1992). This distinction is implicit in all class analysis, but it has been tackled explicitly in the studies of the Finnish Class Project (cf. Wright 1990). Class position has to do with the relations of ownership and domination within production. The concept of class situation, then, refers to more concrete phenomena: the reproduction situation (income, education, labour market position) and working conditions. Studies of class organization and class consciousness cannot base their explanations on class structure without an analysis of class situation.

Class interests cannot be identified without taking into account class situation. For example, in order to analyse the potential interests of the Russian middle class today, we have to start out from its concrete and historical living conditions. Class interests are not objectively given within the structure of capitalist or ‘socialist’ societies. It is precisely the historicity and contextuality of interests that constitutes one of the biggest challenges to class analysis today.

Social classes have often been taken to represent not only their own specific interests but also the common, universal good. For Hegel, the bureaucracy that served the state was a universal class; for Marx the working class that bore the burden of universal suffering represented the future of the relations of production. The new middle class has been described as consisting of technocrats and bureaucrats but also as the intelligentsia. Thus, this group of people may be seen as representing either ‘good’ or ‘evil.’

Gouldner and the new middle class

Alvin Gouldner presents one of the most comprehensive interpretations of the new middle class. He observes that many social scientific grammars start out from the assumption that the powerful are good and the weak bad. However, Gouldner adds that moral goodness and power do not necessarily go hand in hand. There is good reason to ask what kinds of interests and moral endeavours the new middle class actually represents.

Gouldner identifies several different conceptions of the new (middle) class:

1. The new class as benign technocrats. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, views the new class as a new historical elite already entrenched in institutional influence, which it uses in benign ways for society. It is more or less inevitable and trustworthy (Galbraith 1967; Bell 1974; Berle and Means 1933).
2. The new class as master class. Old revolutionaries such as Mikhail Bakunin and Jan Wacław Machajski saw the new class as another moment in a long-continuing circulation of historical elites, as a socialist intelligentsia that brings little new to the world and continues to exploit the rest of the society as the old class had but now uses education rather than money to exploit others (cf. Shatz 1989).
3. The new class as old class ally. Talcott Parsons (1939) viewed the new class as a benign group of dedicated ‘professionals’ who will uplift the old (moneyed) class from a venal group to a collectively oriented elite and who, fusing with it, will forge a new genteel elite continuous with but better than the past.
4. The new class as servants of power. Maurice Zeitlin, Noam Chomsky and other critical sociologists understood the new class as subservient to the old moneyed class, which was held to retain power as it always did (Chomsky ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Specificities of middle-class structuration in Russia
• 2 The structure of the Russian middle class
• 3 The scale and dynamics of employment precarity in Russian society from 1998 to 2015
• 4 Social mobility: a theoretical and empirical perspective
• 5 The role of the state and performance of the welfare state in Russian people’s opinions: what lessons can be learned with respect to the welfare regime and class situation?
• 6 Working life in Russia
• 7 Housing the Russian middle class
• 8 Poverty and confidence in Russia
• 9 The structure of Russians’ values in the context of social modernization
• 10 Waiting for the middle class society?
• Index