The Accidental Proletariat

Walter Connor shows how the seven decades since Stalin launched the First Five Year plan have changed Soviet workers from a disorganized mass of unskilled ex-peasants into something very much like a class--not the working class intended by Lenin and Stalin but a new and powerful "accidental proletariat," produced by forces partly beyond the state's control. Does this new "proletariat" threaten glasnost and perestroika? To address that question, Connor examines the growth of the new "class" and its role in the crisis-ridden politics of Gorbachev's USSR. In this book, as in his earlier works, Connor focuses on the interplay of social and political forces. Do workers support economic reform, he asks, or oppose it? Are they beneficiaries or victims of Gorbachev's policies? Can a Soviet state already under severe ethnic and economic strains accommodate an emergent working-class politics? Connor probes these issues in a work that is essential reading for students of Russian politics, government officials faced with the uncertainties of a new Russia, and people seeking to do business in any economy previously isolated behind geographical, military, and institutional barriers. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A study of contemporary politics in Russia, assessing the attempted transition from totalitarianism to liberal democracy. It shows that although liberal institutions have been tentatively established, the weak social and cultural supports threaten the success of Russia's liberal project.

Draws on documentation released since the fall of the Soviet Union to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century.

Looking for the Proletariat is a contribution to understanding the implosion of the Marxist Imaginary. The implosion is staged in terms of the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 to 1957. It explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie was the only Marxist organization interested by worker experience and how the group’s anti-Leninist position on organization led it to privilege first-person worker narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities. Using the only first-person accounts of working-class experience in French industry of the 1950s, the book explores the disintegration of collective investment in the Marxist Imaginary that unfolded at Renault’s Billancourt factory in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution and the contexts that shaped it.

The danwei, or work unit, occupies a central place in Chinese society. To understand Chinese politics demands a better understanding of this system. This volume provides a systematic study of the danwei system and addresses a variety of questions from historical and comparative perspectives.

This volume examines the social history of oil workers and investigates how labor relations have shaped the global oil industry during the twentieth century and today. It brings together the work of scholars from a range of disciplines, approaching the social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of oil. The contributors analyze a number of key oil producing regions, including the Americas, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Europe and Africa.

In post-Soviet Russia’s transition to new political and economic systems, few issues are as important as labor. Although the “worker’s paradise” may have been largely imaginary, the loss of job security and benefits that has accompanied marketization could well become a catalyst for yet another political upheaval. In this timely book, Walter Connor explores how the Yeltsin government attempted to avoid this pitfall of system change. Connor examines Russia’s emergent labor politics in the critical first years of the post-Soviet period, focusing on the problems Yeltsin encountered in attempting to adopt a “corporatist” solution to the conflicts of interest that have arisen between labor, employers, and the state. With many employers still heavily dependent on the state, while others are already beyond state control, the corporatist effort has been sabotaged, Connor contends, by the lack of distinct interest groups found in more mature market economies. He concludes with an analysis of what these recent developments may portend for Russian politics and government in the future.