Beyond Nostalgia? Class identity, memory and the Soviet past.

1. Central and Eastern European Employment Relations in Perspective – History, Geography and Variegation30th January 2015, University of Greenwich, Hamilton House Beyond Nostalgia? Class identity, memory and the Soviet past. Claudio Morrison, Middlesex University Business School, London (UK)

2. Session Overview • Post-socialist nostalgia and class memories: existing approaches • Anatomy of a concept: nostalgia and memorising • The loci of the concept: memory in the workplace • Limits and potentials of the concept: post-socialist utopias and dystopias

3. Why studying nostalgia? • Familiarity with the field show that it is a widespread feeling and a publicly debated topic • It is viewed with suspicion if not open hostility by dominant groups and intellectuals • It is genuinely contradictory and requires problematizing • It holds as many potentials as risk for hegemonic struggles in the social and political arenas

4. Nostalgia: a multidisciplinary field, complex concept, a controversial subject • post-socialist anthropology, new working class studies, poststructuralist approaches as well as memory studies • Public and private narratives, official mythologies, everyday remembering, intellectual biographies • “Often the label ‘nostalgia’ is a pejorative one, suggestive of at best sentimental attachment and at worse falsification of history” (Strangleman 2012: 415) • A critical understandings by ordinary people of the present grounded in their lived experience of the socialist period (Morris 2014: 6) • Classed conception of the superiority of the Socialist social contract but as also immanent critique of past society

5. Nostalgia: anatomy of a concept The evocation of a better past: a complex and potentially critical emotion or false consciousness, but also a more critical attempt by workers to understand what was happening to their work now. Three types of nostalgia identified : Basic or simple (pejorative, sentimental) Reflective or reflexive (critical but passive, akin to mourning) Restorative (active, dialectical engagement with the present in Strangleman or reactionary, active resistance to change in Boy) (see Strangleman 2012: 414-5, 23; also Boym 2001; Davis 1979)

6. The act of remembering: affective, moral and oppositional A cognitive process revolving around culture and ideas in textual-orientated approaches A physical moral and affective ‘reasoning’ which encompasses ideas and material, spatial dimensions (Morris) It sustains a moral order or ‘lay normativity’ which produces an ethical disposition to evaluate the present with shared past values. (see Morris and Strangleman) It is prompted by physical and relational encounters It can translate in hostility, criticism and opposition It provides ‘mnemonic resources’ to sustain a shared culture and retain a classed point of view.

7. Nostalgia and working class morality ‘If the rioting crowd acted according to any consistent theoretical model, then this model was a selective reconstruction of the paternalist one, taking from it all those features that favoured the poor . . . in one respect the moral economy of the crowd broke decisively with paternalists: for the popular ethic sanctioned direct action, whereas the values of order underpinning paternalism emphatically did not.’ Thompson, E. P. (2001). ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’. In D. Thompson(ed.), The Essential E.P. Thompson. New York: New Press.

8. Class nostalgia as a ‘Weapon of the Weak’ ‘The subordinated classes engage in a ‘clash of ideas’ with the dominant élites, using elements of the past ideological order to challenge the capitalist transformation of class relations.’ Scott, J. C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press: New Haven/London.

9. Nostalgia, Post-communism and class:a view from the workplace Here cases of workplace ethnographies in the FSU in the last 15 years: Provide memories from and about labour relations in the workplace Reveal classed and gendered narratives around the ‘superiority’ of socialism Explore relationship between oppositional narratives and actual workers’ resistance agency Raise further questions about the oppositional potentials risks and limitations of such critiques

10. Class and nostalgia in the workplace Rita was a committed unionist but also a paternalist soviet bureaucrat who had unwillingly to confront the onslaught of privatisation turning soviet factories into multinational sweatshops: ‘The old generation feels nostalgic: their minds are inhabited by a constant conflict between these opposing thoughts: ‘I am working class; yet, here you are just a hired worker’. (trade union leader, Moldova 2006)

11. Nostalgia and agency: soviet legacies and post-soviet resistance Soviet era workers have resisted speed-up, worsening conditions and harsher discipline: ‘Strained relations have turned into conflict within the labour collectives themselves, because employers prefer the young to the old skilled workers who retain a soviet mentality.’ (trade union leader, Moldova 2005)

12. Nostalgia in the workplace: a case ofdivided memories Tanja is a decorated soviet worker and a ‘troublemaker’ organising petitions, stirring up fellow workers: ‘Before the union was better. Nevertheless there was a time when they lowered our wages but norms stayed put. We all agreed to go to the trade union central committee. We went and complained that first it was 80 [soviet roubles], then 70, then again 60. We asked them to come over and sort it out. They rebuked us that we should not go during working time. After that they immediately raised our wages up to 150’. (seamstress Moldova 2006)

13. Nostalgia and agency: soviet legacies and post-soviet resistance Nadja set up the best example of militant branch unionism skillfully combining old soviet rituals with innovative anti-management tactics: ‘I talked to him [German Director] about summer holidays for next year — this year they did not give them — but he said we should not put much hope in that. I told him that this is a women’s collective, to which he replied: ‘In Germany we do not recognise women as a special category’. (Trade Union enterprise committee president, Moldova 2007)

14. Class and memory: what workers really think…. Gregory is ‘ethnic’ Moldovan, worked on a collective farm as tractor driver, in the 1990s emigrated to Moscow to work in construction: ‘Before the collapse [of the Soviet Union] it was just another world (…) We had a famine in 1946 but from then onward everything went smoothly. Now it’ is chaos!’ (Moldova 2010)

15. Class and memory: what workers really think…. Vitja was a cadre worker in a large textile mill, loyal to his superiors and contented with factory work. Left to construction sites in Moscow when he felt his job autonomy threatened by privatisation and managerial interference: ‘there are those who physically make and remake the world with their bare hands and those above simply sitting back and talking people round.’ (Russia 2001)

16. Memories in space: nostalgia ofpost-soviet migrants ‘There is hostility from Russians – we are competitors. Russians show different attitudes.....the elderly and youth have negative attitudes: “go away”. The middle aged behave differently, they have been brought up in the USSR, a different mentality.’ (Moldovan builder, Moscow 2010)

17. Nostalgia, Post-communism and class:findings from workplace ethnography • “Before, it was better”? Different memories, different nostalgia • Nostalgia exists with workers and peasants as a form of class memory. • A selective memory: identifies aspects of the past system that were favourable to them, differing from that of those occupying different social roles. • A reflexive nostalgia: no escapist look at the past, it is fixed on the present and helps to understand it. • Empowering memories: serves to furnish their claims to fairness, to sustain resistance rather than breeding passivity

18. From classed memories to socially engaged historiography • If the past is mobilised to critically engage and act on the reality of the present then is not possible to consider these world views as static. • They better be conceived as dialectically evolving in their engagements with the present. • Innovative engagement with the past can feed liberating utopias but also but also engender manipulating dystopias • Future research projects should favour the reconstruction of total historic narratives to sustain the latter

19. Risks and realities of Post-soviet dystopias • ‘Slavic communalist imperative that harbours dangerous myths of organic community and class conformity’ (in Morris) • The ‘NovaRossja’ political laboratory described by Alexander Buzgalin. • The right wing populist and nationalist tendencies channelling social unrest in CEE observed by Guglielmo Meardi

20. The weakness of ‘everyday history’ weapons Workers’ narratives appear de-politicised and non-ideological. They can avoid mythological depiction of the soviet past in public discourse but fail to produce a counter narrative. J.C Scott Gramscian analysis shows how in ‘normal’ circumstances the battle of ideas by subaltern groups must accept dominant values and avoid open challenge. everyday history approach privileging personalised memories discounts the risks of manipulation and fails to appreciate the need for the subaltern to develop an autonomous world view A socially committed research programme should alternatively aim at reconstituting a macro narrative which (at least ideationally) raises these memories from their state of minority.