Working Class in Soviet and Russian Sociological Discourse

Abstract

The Object of the Study. The correlation of class and stratification approaches in Soviet and post-Soviet sociology.The Subject of the Study. New working class in Russian sociological discourse.The Purpose of the Study. The objectives are to substantiate the necessity of actualizing of the class approach in the study of modern Russian society social structure; identifying the signs of a new working class.The Main Provisions of the Article. In accordance with Marxist ideology, in Soviet sociology a working class was regarded as a protagonist of social change and a center of attraction for the forces of social change. The contemporary integration of workers into the capitalist system, the transition to the economy of the sixth order, the defeat of socialism, the global transition to a postindustrial society require to comprehend the «working question» from a new prospective. The authors actualize the problem of revealing the content and structure of the «new working class», traditional and actual methods of its theoretical conceptualization. The features of class and stratification approaches to the allocation of the working class in the structure of society have been studied. It has been shown that the excessive specification of criteria, non-critical declarative positioning of the middle class into the basis of the Russian society structure, led to a high degree of uncertainty in the model of the social structure of the Russian society of the early XXI century. The author's definition of the concept of a new working class has been given. Defining “the new working class of modern Russia”, we mean a group of employees in all spheres of material production and services whose content and nature of work are routinized and segmented; not participating in management and not having the property rights to the enterprise in which they work. Most of the times, these are workers without higher education. Power and control in the organization do not belong to them, their degree of freedom and authority in organizational structures are limited, they do not influence on the planning and control of labor