Narration And Representation Of Class Discourse

After the liberation of Shanghai, accompanied by the socialist transformation , the social structure has undergone tremendous changes. In this condition, the status of different estates of the people substituted one another, and in the meantime, the lifestyle of the urban people also encountered extreme turbulence.Through observing the content and mode of the discourse narration of Shanghai working class in the 1950s, in a cultural-sociology vision, this thesis has revealed the regional cultural experience of working class, and the interrelationship between the individuals or groups of working class and the State or society in the new system as well.The symptoms relations between the new ideology discourse production and class practice emerged in virtue of social mobilization mechanisms of the grass roots. The cultural campaigns which took literacy as its center improved the workers cultural capacity, awakened their self-awareness and enhanced their social status. Energetically fostering the working class intellectuals in cultural, scientific, artistic and other fields made the workers demonstrate their wisdom and creativity in the process of production. Following the development of socialist construction, the population of the female workers gradually increased in Shanghai, and so did the proportion of it in the total number of workers. Besides, the employment of them was extended to almost every field. Though the political movements frequently oppressed the real gender consciousness, their enthusiasm in the public domain was quite extra-ordinary. The function of the labor union changed, too. In the 1950s the labor union of Shanghai, which had a single and centralized macro-structure, played an irreplaceable role in organizing the workers to accept education, participate in production and carry out the government's policies. And accordance to the demand that the administration and the labor union should cooperate closely, mobilizing the workers to work hard was a primary mission. The unprecedented bureaucratic organization structure symbolized that the whole economic system was steady. In this structure, a factory can be regarded as a little part in the overall planned economy. So, some new human relations emerged in the society and the factories in addition. In the new human relations, conflicts appeared frequently among individual discourse , authoritative discourse and communal discourse .The strong and flexible expression forms of the class discourse, came from the reality, and meanwhile maintained the order of the reality. Through interpretting the social relations, these forms modeled the workers' mentality, value and belief in which they should exert themselves into social practice self-consciously. But, the process of the nationalism concept bringing the class discourse into its own system was full of contradictions and tensions, because the continuity of the historical tradition to some extent safe guarded self-characteristics of worker culture.