Flip And Turn:Production Of The Worker's Class Identity

For more than a century,the study of the working class has become one of the important topics in the field of Chinese and Western social science.In the field of class analysis,there are two main theories:Marxist class theory and Weber's class theory.There are fundamental differences between these two theories,such as the connotation of class and its mechanism of formation,class consciousness,class action and the relationship between class community.With the emergence of "the Second Great Transformation" in 1990s,socialist state in Eastern Europe and East Asia transformed socialism into market economy.The change in the position of the working class in the social structure during the transition period of the socialist state and the reproduction of the class has aroused the interest of scholars at home and abroad.As for China,the problem of the exist form of the Chinese working class has also been a hot topic to scholars,and formed the laborer movement discourse,Pei Yili's "the second working class",the dissolution of the working class,the reconstruction of the working class,class differentiation,class stratification and other major explanations.The above points seem to be reasonable in some sense,and also reveal the multiple forms,transition and fracture of the practice of the working class in China.Therefore,on this basis we should question ourselves:what kind of laborers' class and identity status contributes to their existence in different period?How to switch between different forms?Is it the Marxist sense of the working class or the Weber sense of the working class?This paper takes an ordinary small state-owned enterprise in the Xiang city of China,factory Su,for example,starts from the perspective of the interaction between the state,the market and the laborers themselves,combines the history of the factory with the production and living of laborers and group identity transition,tries to answer how ordinary laborers became class status,and what kind of class status they have become?.That is,the existence form of the working class and its motive force in the private workshop,the unit organization,the production area and after its exit in the production area.In this process,what kind of identity status the industrial laborers have shown?How the laborers enter the political class category of Marx?And how the laborers tend to position-fate group in the Weber's sense?On the whole,there are different kinds of working class in different periods in China.The apprentices and hired laborers in Chinese traditional handicraft workshops have not been transformed into a working class in the identity transformation of the Chinese Communist Party.With the gradually fade out of class reformation,the market reappears and becomes an important field of shaping workers' identity,the laborers have not completely gone to the traditional meaning of Marxist or Weber's sense of the class,they used the unit as the identity line,transformed into the two-mixed position-fate community.The transformation of the Chinese working class and the self-identity shaping of the workers in the factory Su has been in progress.And because the factory Su has different condition of production and operation in different history periods,especially the laborers'self-practice in two fields of the country and the market,the self-identity of laborers,to a certain extent,deviated from the Chinese Communist Party's class identity transformation project.Especially the daily life experience,the individual's irresistible common experience,the collective traumatic memory constructed the laborers into a fate community,after the inefficacy of class discourse,their collective action aims to the local government departments rather than the market,or never points to the market.Laborers are still in the state of class production after their return to the community,but they are also threatened by the end of the class production.With the original young laborers prolonged from the unit community for a long time and the irreversibility of the end of the old laborers'lives,especially the disappearance of unit community,the elimination of class seems to be inevitable,the maintain of the position-fate community become a fresh problem.