Abstract
Class analysis has never gone out of fashion in Ukraine, but it has been conducted in ways that limit its effectiveness and ability to make sense of the world. It is marked by four aspects inherited from Soviet times: a focus on large-scale surveys offering only surface presentations of findings, a gradational rather than relational orientation to class, unwillingness to engage with subjective experiences of class, and a tendency towards functional legitimation of the existing order. Data showing significant transformation of social structure and high levels of inequality tend to be presented with little consideration of its meaning for people’s lives. The absence of serious theoretical reflection, deep ethnographic analysis, or studies of class relations and power constitute significant handicaps for Ukrainian sociology. A recently created group of young sociologists gathered around the journal and website Commons/Spilne has been seeking to overcome these limitations. Embracing “public sociology’s” aim of producing reflexive knowledge for academic and non-academic audiences alike, this new milieu, with its creators trained in western universities and engaged with Marxist social science and left-wing politics, has explored topics such as changing relations in work, the informal economy, independent unions, labor mobilization, and ethnographic study of workers’ life-worlds. Pressing work still needs to be done on the oligarchical business class, middle-class activists, class politics across regions, and the Maidan events of 2014 and the conflicts and violence that have followed.
Introduction
The fall of the Berlin wall meant for many sociologists not only the “death of communism” but also the “death of class.” Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens argued that class no longer plays a major role in contemporary societies, having given way to more reflexive, individualized identities. Individual life chances, they say, are no longer a function of relation to the means of production, or even stratification based on occupation, but are rather a consequence of the skills and education (“cultural capital”) necessary for a postindustrial knowledge economy. In a similar vein, in her 2005 textbook for university students of sociology, Olena Symonchuk, Ukraine’s leading scholar of social stratification, argued that “by the end of the twentieth century the working class had fulfilled its historical mission, giving leading positions to the middle class. . . . Bourgeoisie and proletariat—as major antagonists and bearers of the values of industrial society—no longer define the perspective or dynamics of social development. The main antagonism is now between those who possess knowledge and those who don’t.” 1
And yet, paradoxically, despite these claims about the “death of class” and irrelevance of class analysis, class has remained one of the key research areas for Ukrainian sociologists. Elsewhere, Symonchuk claims that conditions for scholars interested in class analysis are favorable, in particular thanks to Ukraine’s participation in the European Social Survey research (which also offers funding opportunities for cross-European comparative studies), and to the availability of SPSS programming to build alternative class schemes using the same data sets depending on the theoretical orientations of scholars. 2 “Social structure and social relations” is one of four major fields for PhD defense certified by the Ministry of Education of Ukraine (along with theory, methodology, and specialized sociological subfields), and almost every scholarly publication on social stratification uses some type of class scheme. Thus, despite the fact that for many social scientists in post-Soviet Ukraine, formulations like “working class” and “bourgeoisie” seem ideologically laden and associated with the Soviet regime, class analysis, in a broad sense, has remained an important field of study.
It is not so much the lack of research, but rather the overly descriptive nature of existing studies and their failure to problematize existing social relations that poses a problem. As I will argue in this article, class analysis in post-Soviet Ukraine is not dead, but is handicapped by being reduced to occupational categories, or used purely in a gradational sense distinguishing “rich” and “poor” (with a hazy construct of “middle class” in between). It is further handicapped by the replacement of class-based explanations of inequalities with the ideologically laden terminology of individual adaptation. The aim of this paper is to explore developments and weaknesses of class analysis in Ukraine, and discuss the recent emergence of critical responses to this trend among younger and politically engaged social scientists.
The Legacy of Soviet Sociological Traditions
Large-Scale Surveys and Statistical Data
In the Soviet Union, sociological research on class was for the most part limited to party-sponsored surveys of the lifestyle, family composition, and work and leisure of the “non-antagonistic classes” of peasants, workers, and intelligentsia. (Technically, the latter were not considered a class but a “stratum,” as they were not involved in “productive labor.”) This research was not about inequalities, but about differences related to the division of labor in Soviet society (about social differentiation rather than social stratification). It excluded the question of class relations, looking instead at classes as discrete social categories. The current research that is the closest to this Soviet tradition is Kuzmuk’s work using Esping-Anderson’s approach identifying occupational categories in various sectors of the economy. According to this scheme, the Ukrainian class structure at the turn of the twenty-first century is defined as a Fordist one, with more than half of all employed Ukrainians working in traditional sectors of the economy such as production, transport, or construction, about a third in the smaller postindustrial sector (services and information technologies), and the remaining 10 percent in the primary sector of agriculture, fishing, and forestry. 3
These studies were and remain descriptive. Most information on “class composition” today, carried out in this Soviet tradition, can be obtained from the State Statistical Service of Ukraine (SSSU), successor of Soviet Ukraine’s Republican Statistics Committee. Although they use traditional Marxist categories of workers (proletariat), capitalists (bourgeoisie), and self-employed or small-scale entrepreneurs (petite-bourgeoisie), these studies are only nominally Marxist, as they do not pose the key questions of antagonistic class relations that would define Marxist research. For instance, among the categories of economically active citizens defined by SSSU (capitalists, self-employed, and workers), “workers” made up 81.5 percent of the population in 2009 (a slight decrease from 89.6 percent in 1995 with a concomitant growth in the number of self-employed) and included all those who were employed, as well as the registered unemployed—irrespective of their qualifications, sector of the economy, or self-identification. This category has little sociological meaning, as these 81.5 percent of the population share neither similar material conditions, nor common self-identification, nor potential for class-based collective action. 4
The neo-Weberian EGP scheme (named after its founders Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portocarero)—the most widely used classification scheme in Ukraine—has also been relatively easy to adopt for sociologists coming from a Soviet background, as it is mainly used to produce data on class composition for instrumental purposes. The availability of large databases, collected by SSSU as part of the European Social Survey (ESS) and International Social Survey Program (ISSP), and freely available for use by scholars, makes this scheme even more popular. Financial and academic support for such studies from being included in Western-based research projects has also promoted the use of such work.
Industrial Sociology at Enterprises
A second specificity of Soviet “class analysis” consisted in the Communist party sending industrial sociologists to enterprises to conduct research on performance-related issues such as job motivation, satisfaction, and the transition from school to work. Questions were framed in a way to make criticism of the state or the particular enterprise impossible (“Name the three leisure activities that you have engaged in most frequently during the past month,” or “Which of the social benefits offered by your enterprise have you benefited from in the past month?”), and were mostly gathered for annual enterprise reports. Occasionally, these data would be used to inform policy making (for instance, the promotion of non-monetary job motivation, or introduction of university entrance quotas for children of workers and peasants), but they did little to promote critical research.
The industrial sociologist Andrei Alexeev’s four-volume study of a Leningrad factory serves as a notable exception. Conducted in 1980–1988 while Alexeev was working as an industrial worker at “Lenpoligrafmash,” a manufacturer of printing equipment, but published more than a decade after the break-up of the USSR, this work brings together description, analysis, field notes, interview excerpts, and personal correspondence in a masterly synthesis of work-life in the late Soviet Union. 5 With its innovative approach of “observant participation” (privileging participation instead of observation), use of a variety of field note styles and techniques, more than eight years of sharing the workers’ lifeworlds on a daily basis, as well as documenting their experiences of the last years of stagnation and first years of perestroika, it remains a singular case of critical ethnographic research in an industrial setting conducted by a Soviet sociologist.
Apart from this, however, Soviet industrial sociologists did not take advantage of the opportunity to conduct fieldwork at the enterprises to which they were sent, or at least to record in-depth interviews with workers. Today, ethnographic studies, which usually presuppose a more reflexive and critical approach, remain virtually non-existent, seen as less “scientific” than descriptive statistical analysis of class structure. As Varga notes with regard to studies on labor published in the journal Sociologia:
While most studies focus on social structure, there are no studies of the consequences of market reforms for workers’ lifeworlds, a remarkable fact given that we are talking of a reduction by ten million in eleven years (1990-2001) in the number of formally employed workers (counting all worker categories, not only industrial workers). . . . The lack of ethnographic studies of workers [is striking].
6
Today, the state no longer sends sociologists to conduct workplace studies, but some former industrial sociologists have joined departments of sociology at various universities and continue their research on topics such as job motivation, school-to-work transitions, and work safety. The latter is now a separate subject at universities, where students are taught legislative norms concerning the requisite number of square meters per office worker, the required frequency of open windows for ventilation, the role of physical exercise in preventing industrial accidents, etc.
Even this research, however, occupies a marginal place in Ukrainian sociology. A search on “Google Scholar” for scholarly papers on “job motivation” results in works appearing in university journals of polytechnic, industrial, or mining universities; no publications on this theme appeared in the general sociological journal Sociologia. 7 “Sociology of work,” meanwhile, is listed only as a “specialized subfield” in the categorization of acceptable sociological PhD topics, rather than as part of the “Social structure and social stratification” category, indicating that research on work is not perceived to be related to “class analysis” in a significant way. Just as in Soviet times, questions of exploitative work relations or potential conflicts between workers and employers tend to be avoided in current sociological writing.
Ideological Role of Social Sciences
The third aspect of Soviet sociologists’ work was to help ideologically legitimate the socio-economic order. For instance, among archival material available at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, one may find sample surveys commissioned by the Soviet Communist Party to legitimate the reforms of perestroika. Vladimir Yadov, director of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Science in 1988, had to supervise data collection, write reports to the party on the results, and even respond on behalf of Gorbachev to angry workers unhappy with perestroika. One of Yadov’s responses is archived in its draft form: with red pen corrections and a stamp of the Ideological Department of the Communist Party, he criticizes a worker for his “harshness, aggression and an extreme leftist position,” and tries to explain the “progressive” role of perestroika.
Today, many Ukrainian sociologists maintain this role of providing sociological data to support the legitimacy of the current order. In Soviet times, problems tended to be explained first as “remnants of the previous order” and then as “consequences of the transition” to communism, with the direction of the transition and the principles of the new order to be built left unquestioned. Today, the dominant ideology has changed, but we see a similar logic in explaining existing social problems. Although some Ukrainian studies on class stratification reveal important statistical findings (for instance, widening inequalities in educational opportunities, health care provision, housing, working conditions, culture and leisure), they either do not ask analytic questions (such as why the findings on class composition are as they are, what these numbers mean in real life for the people concerned, what mechanisms of reproduction or transformation are in place) or limit their analysis to “Soviet remnants” and a post-Soviet “transition period,” failing to consider the consequences of the transition to capitalism.
Problems of Contemporary Ukrainian Class Analysis
The Prominence of a Gradational Rather Than Relational Approach
Contemporary Ukrainian class analysis tends to reduce class to professional categories or economic inequalities, and fails to account for the relational nature of class. Of course, this gradational, occupation-based class research often reveals interesting tendencies that merit greater attention. We learn, for example, that in recent years there has been a decrease in the number of skilled manual workers in industry, and an increase of the unskilled labor force. What changes in the economy have led to this decreasing demand for a skilled labor force? Data on the age composition of manual workers reveal no evidence to support the stereotype about an aging working population. On the contrary, in the last two decades there has been an increase in the number of workers aged 18–30 from 17 percent to about one-fourth of all workers. 8 What is happening, then, to the growing number of working-class youth who enter the labor market as unskilled workers, despite their qualifications? Or to those aging workers whose skills and qualifications have become redundant following structural changes?
One answer is that they are becoming “self-employed.” Nominally Marxist studies that divide the population into capitalists, self-employed (“petite-bourgeois”), and workers show that between 1995 and 2009 the percentage of self-employed has increased from 10.2 to 17.1 percent. 9 Often presented in international studies as a sign of success, this work for many is simply a survival strategy following the closure of state enterprises. It is often an option of last resort, low-paid and without social benefits. As Drozhanova shows, self-employment strategies are linked to the widespread fear of job loss and to inadequate pay. In a 2000 survey, a full 86 percent said that losing their jobs was what they were “most afraid of.” Registering as “self-employed” seems to be a hedge against such a possibility. 10
The data also show that men are twice as likely as women to consider self-employment, or seek secondary employment (21 percent vs. 10 percent, not strange in a patriarchal society where men are still considered breadwinners). Such strategies are also common among older and middle-aged highly skilled workers, who are hoping to keep their low-paid but relatively stable jobs until retirement age, but need extra income. 11 Perhaps the biggest reason for the growth of “self-employment,” however, is employer desire to avoid taxation. When employers demand a service contract with a “private entrepreneur” instead of a work contract with an employee, many workers are simply forced into registering as “self-employed.”
As noted, these analyses, like much of Ukrainian sociology today, are nominally “Marxist,” with their specificity of a “working class,” “petite bourgeoisie,” etc., taken from the Soviet tradition. The problem is that their Marxism seems to stop with their lexicon. As with occupational approaches, the tendency of this literature is to merely count percentages of people falling into each of the pre-defined classes. They end up with a gradational account, and miss the relational aspect of Marxist analysis. In the latter, no class can be defined and studied in isolation from other classes; class is less about groups of people than about the positions they occupy in a particular relationship. A Marxist study cannot simply claim that “more and more representatives of the working class are choosing multi-employment adaptation strategies” (i.e., working two jobs) or that “half of all workers would like to start their own enterprise,” as it is never a matter of free choice by isolated individual agents and their personal preferences. What’s lacking is a broader look at the relational factors that produce “self-employment,” such as the desire of an emerging capitalist class to reduce its wage burden and heighten exploitation. The problem with this sociology, then, is that it uses Marxist categories without bringing in the class relations that shape their evolution.
Lack of In-Depth Understanding of Workers’ Lives
A second significant drawback with existing studies is the absence of qualitative studies that interpret the statistical findings. What do the numbers mean for the people concerned? How do people experience inequalities, exploitative or discriminatory relations? What are the reasons for these developments? For example, all large-scale surveys confirm widening inequalities in educational opportunities, health care provision, housing, working conditions, culture, and leisure. Oksamytna showed that while chances to get higher education are better today than twenty years ago, this increase is most visible for children of managers, state officials, and specialists in the technical sphere, education, and culture and much more modest for children of industrial workers. Children of agricultural workers, meanwhile, have a lower chance to receive higher education than during Soviet times. 12 What are the underlying causes of this new stratification? Is it mostly about deteriorating standards of secondary school education in rural areas? Lower financial means of agricultural workers to provide their children with tutoring and after-school clubs? Diverging dispositions of parents from different social classes, with differing levels of cultural capital to pass on to their children? Studies offering such analysis of the data are sorely lacking.
Similar findings of widening inequalities are visible in studies that use subjective definitions of class. When asked by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine to place themselves on a ladder with ten steps, 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest, respondents produce a class structure that looks like a pyramid (unlike more egalitarian diamond-shaped structures), with the majority locating themselves on the lowest three rungs of the ladder. At the same time, when asked to compare with others, about half of respondents place themselves in the middle, as “average,” or “like everyone else” (seredniy in Ukrainian means both “middle” and “average”). 13 This contradiction is not analyzed in greater detail in existing studies. One possible explanation, of course, is that such self-classification is for many respondents an opportunity to make a political claim: Self-identifying in the lower classes draws attention of policy makers to experiences of poverty and social suffering, and constitutes a demand for greater equality and justice, while self-identifying in the “middle” is a way to resist marginalization and avoid association with an underclass.
Large-scale occupational studies also reveal status incongruity (following Weber’s distinction between prestige, power, and wealth as three components of social status), with people occupying relatively prestigious jobs (such as doctors or scholars) having some of the lowest incomes. It is perhaps no surprise that this became one of the leading themes of Ukrainian stratification research in the 1990s, for social scientists who tended to be employed as university lecturers or scholars in state institutions frequently suffered from this very phenomenon. Their studies tended to be filled with resentment, not so much against poverty and low salaries generally but against the inadequacy of the salaries of highly qualified, educated professionals. A more critical and interpretative analysis might have inquired into how sociologists’ own social position and ambivalent experiences of “transition” determined both the themes they were interested in and the theoretical frameworks used to explain them.
Ideological Bias and Lack of Reflexivity
This leads us to a third and final critical remark regarding the current state of class analysis in Ukraine. Although it would be wrong to say that analytic questions going beyond a résumé of statistical findings on class composition are completely absent, analysis is often replaced by ideological constructs, as in the case of research on status incongruity. This issue is not new. It has long constituted part of the intelligentsia’s opposition to the Soviet policy of “equalization” of life chances (uravnilovka), through which lower-prestige physically demanding work began to be better compensated than skilled non-manual labor. The question is also ideologically laden, as sociologists take it for granted that non-manual work is more prestigious, that the working class is somehow inferior to the middle class, and that a growing middle class is an indicator of socio-economic progress. 14
It is not a sociological problem that the majority of Ukrainians fall into the category of “working class” according to occupational approaches. It is not even a socio-economic problem, since the Ukrainian economy is largely dependent on manual labor in natural resource extraction, steel production, and construction. What constitutes a sociological problem is that despite the working class being such an important segment of society, much more attention and sympathy is dedicated to the emerging middle class, while research on labor is scarce. Sociologists are themselves professional public sector workers, since they are mainly employed by the state in higher education institutions and in the research institutes of the National Academy of Science. Yet they prefer to define their identity as “professional” rather than “public sector worker,” without reflecting on the consequences of such self-identification for the research questions they ask and the ways in which they answer them.
Furthermore, class relations end up being discussed in non-class terms, and structural barriers become conceptualized as individual qualities, in an unacknowledged denial of underlying class realities. Elsewhere I have criticized the “adaptation discourse,” widespread among Ukrainian sociologists, whereby class differences are presented as a consequence of individual adaptation potential — a set of psychological features like flexibility, entrepreneurship, internal locus of control, readiness to radically change jobs and lifestyles, etc. 15 Such discourse not only justifies existing inequalities but also produces new inequalities based on cultural differences and personal attitudes.
Western theories of social stratification have become incorporated into Ukrainian sociological research in order to explain emerging poverty and widening inequalities as a result of individual failure to adapt to market-oriented realities. Thus, concepts like “culture of poverty” and “underclass” are becoming prominent concepts in sociology textbooks, with the widespread criticism of the use of these concepts—often by those who coined them—largely ignored. 16 Another concept, “social exclusion,” has also become increasingly popular in the post-Soviet space in the last decade, particularly after the publication of Tikhonova’s 2003 study of this phenomenon in Russia. 17 Although Tikhonova acknowledges the structural factors that lead to social exclusion, those factors are taken as a given, as the necessary underlying social reality, while the excluded themselves are turned into the object of study.
The incorporation of concepts like “culture of poverty,” “underclass,” and “social exclusion” reveals the strong functionalist root of social stratification studies in Ukrainian sociology. Society tends to be seen as a coherent system, where negative social phenomena associated with poverty are mere “side-effects” that can be fixed through programs that support individuals in their efforts to adapt to changing social realities. Adaptation discourse is thus patronizing and medicalizing (this is also widespread in social work practice): individuals need to confess they lack the right kind of attitudes, express their willingness to be reintegrated into society (to become “included” rather than “excluded”), and allow professionals to assist them in this path. Whether this is a desirable kind of society is not questioned. Research on homelessness, carried out by this author, showed that although experts, social workers, and journalists are well aware of underlying structural factors such as lack of affordable housing, commercialization of the housing market, rising unemployment, low-paid precarious jobs, and labor migration, they nevertheless tend to discuss homelessness largely through individual stories of the unfortunate, focusing on family conflicts, alcohol abuse, and imprisonment. 18
All this leads to interesting paradoxes. On the one hand, classes allegedly no longer exist, but on the other hand, there exists an underclass. On the one hand, in post-industrial flexible and reflexive societies everyone has equal chances of achieving success, yet on the other hand there are some individuals who are somehow excluded. On the one hand, all cultures and identities are expressions of pluralism and democracy, but at the same time there is a dangerous culture of poverty. On the one hand, NGOs and grassroots initiatives are lauded as signs of a vibrant civil society, on the other hand independent trade unions are ignored as important civil society institutions. It is thus not surprising that scholars focus all the more not on class structure or class relations but on the “marginal” and “excluded” social categories, on those who are “lacking” something, whether work, housing, education, or citizenship.
Towards a Critical Understanding of Class
One may conclude that an approach that would combine structural analysis with a phenomenological understanding of lifeworlds is currently lacking in Ukraine. Existing studies follow the Soviet instrumental tradition of large-scale survey research and statistical databases, with no space left for articulated personal and political engagement. Most Ukrainian sociology thus serves as just one of the numerous fields where instrumental knowledge for the academic community is produced, constituting what Michael Burawoy has defined as “professional sociology.” 19
To respond to this state of affairs, two years ago a group (including this author) of scholars, journalists, artists, and union activists launched the initiative “Labor and the labor movement in Ukraine: archive and research” (http://laborarchive.blogspot.com), aimed at collecting and analyzing data related to the condition of the working class, and documenting changes in class structure and patterns of exploitation and resistance since the breakup of the Soviet Union. We aimed to take seriously Simon Clarke’s question “What about the workers?” 20 Workers, of course, did not disappear. They continue to make our clothes, to build our houses, to produce coal and steel. Millions of workers join the global workforce every year in India and China, while in the West many representatives of the so-called “middle classes” also experience proletarianization (the opposite tendency to the one described by Golthorpe in The Affluent Worker, 1969). What has changed is that academic sociologists, in Ukraine as elsewhere, do not think workers, or class divisions more broadly, are interesting as objects of study.
Apart from studying formally employed manual workers in traditional sectors of industry, this new initiative also studies labor migrants (both to and from Ukraine); street vendors and informal workers in bazaars, flea markets, and kiosks; workers in supermarket and fast-food chains; construction workers; precariously employed lower-rank office workers (including students in flexible part-time work or internships); “street-level bureaucrats” (schoolteachers, nurses, museum workers, librarians, and other lower-rank public sector workers); freelance workers in arts and sciences; and informal and illegal work in dangerous conditions.
While we seek to document the conditions and “lifeworlds” of workers in Ukraine, we also focus on the relations of structural domination and exploitation of which they are part. Examples of this project’s research initiatives include video documentation of labor protests at bankrupt plants (such as a documentary film on workers’ occupation of a Kherson machine-building plant), 21 photo reports of life in dilapidated workers hostels (a consequence of corruption and neglect of direct obligations by municipal officials), research on street vendors following government efforts to replace street markets with shopping malls, and studies of protest campaigns launched by self-employed vendors against projected changes in the tax code. In all of these areas, workers stand in an unequal, discriminatory, or exploitative relation with their employers, municipal officials, or the state more broadly.
This research is done not in the tradition of professional academic sociology, described above, but rather that of public sociology, producing reflexive knowledge for both academic and non-academic audiences and done in cooperation between sociologists, artists, union activists, and journalists. It is worth noting that this type of research is undertaken by a younger generation of social scientists who grew up in independent Ukraine, received higher education in western universities, and became engaged with Marxist sociological analysis and left-wing politics in response to witnessing the economic and political transformations of the last two decades.
The creation of a journal of social critique—Commons/Spilne—is perhaps the most visible expression of this reflexive and politically engaged social science. A semi-annual print journal with thematic issues and a regularly updated website (http://commons.com.ua), a member of the Eurozine network, Commons/Spilne is dedicated, uniquely, to offering deep sociological analysis of class relations, with a focus on workers. Recent issues, including one titled “Class relations and class exploitation,” 22 have brought to Ukrainian readers such authors as Frances Fox Piven, Beverly Silver, Erik Olin Wright, and Michael Burawoy, all appearing for the first time in Ukrainian translation. Original research by Ukrainian scholars has also been published, with topics including the intensification of work, bonded labor, the informal economy, as well as new independent trade unions and cases of successful labor mobilization in recent years. Other thematic issues of the journal, such as on the political economy of racism, or gender and labor in the so-called “second world,” also have class analysis as an important component, with a focus on class not as a discrete category but as a relationship.
Conclusion
Sociological analysis of class in post-Soviet Ukraine has thus far been marked by four aspects inherited from the Soviet sociological tradition: a focus on large-scale surveys offering surface presentations of findings, a gradational rather than relational orientation to class, an unwillingness to engage with subjective experiences of class, and a tendency towards functional legitimation of the existing order.
The three major handicaps of class analysis in Ukraine are linked to three characteristics inherited from the Soviet sociological tradition. The first characteristic, the predominance of large-scale social surveys offering descriptive findings on stratification, leads to the first handicap, namely, a failure to problematize social relations. The second characteristic, the Soviet tradition of industrial sociology at enterprises without meaningful engagement with workers to learn about their experiences, has led to the second handicap: lack of in-depth understanding of workers’ lifeworlds. The third characteristic, or the ideological tendency to legitimize the existing social order, has led to the third handicap: ideological bias and lack of reflexivity when dealing with questions of class and stratification.
This paper has argued that existing academic studies under the rubric “class structure” in Ukraine are predominantly descriptive, theoretically eclectic, and generally fail to ask many important questions that arise from the data. The few sociological studies on workers that exist in contemporary Ukraine either avoid the question of class or reduce class relations to a simple hierarchy.
While the Commons/Spilne milieu tries to offer a different, critical, and less positivist approach in relation to workers (which, as noted, survey research tells us is still by far the largest social group), much still needs to be done to bring critical analysis to bear on other groups in Ukrainian society, such as the oligarchical business class, middle-class activists, and of course, those active in the Maidan events of 2014 and in the conflicts and violence that followed. A serious exploration of class politics across regions is also of obvious importance.
A more specifically class-related approach focusing on exploitation and life conditions is just getting underway, and can be expected to grow as a younger generation emerges. Increasingly, we need an analysis of social inequalities understood not just as “remnants of the Soviet past” or consequences of the “transition period,” but as consequences of a global capitalist economy.
The approach proposed here is not the only kind of class analysis that makes sense in contemporary Ukraine. Traditional, ongoing survey research has of course supplied a great deal of vital sociological data, and will continue to be important in the future. But given the strong identification in Ukraine of class analysis with survey research, the predominance of gradational over relational accounts, and the ingrained functionalist tendencies of research since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this more critical, Marxian class analysis seems to be most needed for understanding, and intervening in, the issues and conflicts that have left Ukraine reeling in recent years.