Alison Stenning Geography, Politics and Sociology Newcastle University alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk

1. Working Class Lives in Post-Socialist EuropePaper presented to CEELBAS seminar, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 30th May 2008 Alison Stenning Geography, Politics and Sociology Newcastle University alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk

2. Making the Socialist Working Class • ‘movement to work’: industrialisation and urbanisation • remaking cities, workplaces and workers • centrality of work and the rhythms of work • ideological campaigns to identify and define a socialist working class • the economic and political construction of a working class always already a moral process too

3. Fragmenting Work • from a relatively stable and singular labour market, the post-socialist labour market is fragmented, diversified and dynamic • labour market segmentation • flexibilisation of labour market • emerging and persistent unemployment • ‘deactivation’ of workforce • neoliberalisation of labour market regulation • emergence of a working poor

4. Post-Socialist Subjectivities • denigration of workers (Kideckel 2002) • dominance of new forms of subjectivity, most especially the enterprising self (Du Gay 1996) • socialist subjectivities reduced to “dependence, passivity” (Weiner 2005, p.577), goaded into “drastic change in order to overcome a debilitating legacy” (Junghans 2001, p.390) • working class communities seen to be antithetical to revived capitalism • key motif of loss (of work, income, friends, homes, purpose, etc.) “Polish apartheid: 6 million citizens live in ghettoes of hopelessness”

5. Post-Socialist Challenges • end of work/end of class • decline of industrial work and old industrial regions • centrality of politics of representation (not redistribution) • end of socialism • ideological, institutional and material displacement of working class communities • particular discourses of enterprise, consumption and individualism • recourse/return to other spaces: the family, the Church, pre-socialist discourses of class

6. Domesticating Post-Socialism • diversifying working practices • multiple jobs; informal work; reciprocal labour etc. • negotiating change through social and kinship networks • access to work; consumption practices; financial stability • new spaces of labour activism • supermarket workers • Ogólnopolski Związek Bezrobotnych • labour migration

7. Migration and the Post-Socialist Working Class • migration increasingly figures as part of household work strategies • class shapes migration • dominant narrative in UK of young, educated middle class migrants • but considerable evidence – not only in the stereotype of the Polish plumber – of working class migrants (both skilled and unskilled manual workers) • and whatever their class position at home, most post-socialist migrants find themselves in low-paid, low-status employment

8. The Future: Working Class Lives in Post-Socialist Europe • declining (exported?) unemployment and rising wages • ‘the tide has turned’ on migration from east central Europe • or repeated waves of temporary migration? • ‘remittance’ of capital, working practices, skills and other resources from west to east • in-migration to ECE – from Ukraine, Central Asia and beyond: diversifying the post-socialist working class