Tag Archives: autonomy

The neoliberal compact and the loss of autonomy for Russia’s middle class

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milton

Milton: “…I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire… “

This is my third and final post about the papers presented as part of a panel on Class formation in Russia at the BASEES Uppsala conference, Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956.

The third paper in this troika is by Mikhail Chernysh on ‘The structure of the Russian middle class’. Chernysh begins by examining the Russian government’s development programme “On the concept of the social and economic development 2008-2020” which aims to increase “the intensity of growth of the human capital and the middle class”. The policy paper is useful to get an idea of the government’s way of defining a middle class. These are individuals with incomes over six times the minimum. On this measure the ‘middle’ rises from 30% in 2010 to 52-55% by 2020. Chernysh remarks that it is symptomatic that the self-employed or small and medium entrepreneurs don’t really figure in this equation. The middle class is defined mainly by improved consumption linked to income.

It is striking here how modest this definition is in money terms. If ‘minimum income’ here refers to the МРОТ, then a ‘middle-class’ income equates to around 60,000 Rubles per month or 750 Euros a month. Here’s a discussion of the ‘minimum’: https://www.gazeta-unp.ru/articles/51943-mrot-v-rossii-s-1-yanvarya-2018-goda-qqq-17-m08. Going back to Markku Kivinen’s paper on linking middle-class to the classical idea of a propertied bourgeoisie, it is interesting that this amount is not enough to build assets over any meaningful period in most circumstances in Russia. People (including dual-income couples with no, or one, child) on this income typically resort to micro and meso short-term loans and mortgages. There are many stories of bad debt, ruined relationships and moonlighting among this segment of the so-called ‘middle-class’. In this income bracket I see people give up or downgrade their automobiles (to Russian or second-hand models bought for cash), whereas in the ‘noughties’ they bought new on credit. Similarly, while people nudging 1000 Euros, or so, could previously holiday now and then in Europe, now they are turning to domestic destinations, or those in the CIS (witness the boom in Armenia/Georgia tourism).

Chernysh then reports on an interesting discourse analysis by E. Balobanova which examines how Russian presidents have used the phrase ‘middle-class’. [E. Balobanova 2011.  Analiz ponyaita “srednii klass” v poslaniakh presidenta Federalnomu sobraniu RF. Political Linguistics. 2(36). For Yeltsin this phrase meant primarily ‘the bureaucracy’, echoing discussion in other papers about the ‘state’-focus of class and caste. Under Putin and Medvedev there was rather inconsistent rhetoric about raising what we might call the neglected technical intelligentsia up to the middle class. It’s interesting that again, entrepreneurs are nowhere in sight and neither are the ‘core’ intelligentsia of teachers and lecturers.

work

Chernysh then traces the controversial debates in sociology about the middle-class – from being seen as a myth, to the current (politicized?) promotion of Russia-specific ways of counting a middle-class that would produce figures higher than 10% or 20% (see my previous post). Chernysh remarks that this led to the rather unconvincing result of an income of 220 Euros-equivalent allowing entry to the middle class – 44% of the population!

Chernysh then goes on to discuss what he sees as the neoliberal compact in Russian society – particularly with regard to its effect on the state-sector middle class. In return for large increases in salaries, doctors, teachers and others had to sacrifice job security (austerity cut backs) and autonomy (increased monitoring, loss of control over job processes). This strongly parallels my findings among working-class cohorts in the same period. Also important for Chernysh is the actual intensification of work for these groups. The positive part of the deal – increased pay – is at least partly illusory. This is because of intensification but also because much of the pay increase is based on discretionary awards – premiia/nadbavka, etc. This also finds strong echoes in my work with caregivers like teachers and kindergarten employees. They complained after 2009 that they weren’t really better off as so much of their pay was subject to these ‘tricks’ (see p. 62, 64). Chernysh speculates that these factors may influence the current negative evaluation of the government by these groups.

Based on a number of datasets, particularly focusing on responses to questions about what people struggle to afford (durables, more expensive purchases like cars, etc), Chernysh finds that coupled with an occupation approach, the Russian middle-class is less than 20% of the population and more likely less than 15%.

Following Erik Olin Wright’s definition of the middle class as those working in jobs where autonomy is possible, Chernysh analyses autonomy as a variable in a group of respondents with middle class consumption patterns and a university degree.  He finds a significant fall since the 1990s in this category. This is important in the historical context of the necessity, even under totalitarianism, of a ‘moderate level of work autonomy’ in Soviet professions. (I argue, along with the sociologist A. Temnitskii, that this was true of blue-collar workers as well).

Chernysh concludes by drawing parallels with H. Balzer’s Russia’s missing middle class : ‘Middle class consciousness is contradictory, it is not only critical, but also individualistic, showing limited capability of concerted action in defense of group’s rights and class positions. It looks like a revival of historical pattern dating back to the pre-revolutionary times. Balzer’s analysis of the tsarist Russia middle class showed that it was too small and disorganized to effect tangible influence and possibly revert the negative tendencies that weaken existing economic and social institutions’.

Returning to the panel as a whole, the organizer, Jouko Nikula, recently published an interpretive summary based on a broad survey dataset ‘Social Distinctions in Modern Russia’ (SDMR), which some of the papers also made use of.

Nikula points out the ‘decreased opportunities employees have to influence their working pace or work tasks’, particularly among professionals and in the public sector, with a narrowing too of flexibility on working hours. Unemployment has been low despite the two recessions endured by the country – one in 2009, the second in 2014. This because of a persistence of the Soviet practice of labour hoardings and paternalism, at the cost of low wages and furlough, as well as the foregoing of bonuses, which as we discussed earlier, make up an increasing proportion of the real take-home wage.

All in all then, a provocative set of papers from the Uppsala conference. To conclude I would ground them in the reality of my ethnographic fieldwork (albeit partial and unrepresentative). I note the following from my own fieldwork: the least satisfied people from my research were always those that experienced the least autonomy (or a perceptible fall in it over time) – but this was true both of working-class (forklift drivers, packers and sorters in the carplant), and middle-class jobs (teachers and child-psychologists, whose work became increasingly monitored by metric evaluations over the 2010s). Who was most ‘satisfied’? Those with the most or least – well-paid entrepreneurs in high-barrier-to-entry areas like data-gathering and bespoke services, and at the other end, those informal taxi-drivers and grifters who answered to no one and could always ‘withdraw’ to the burrow of the garden plot (at least in the summer) and other strategies of informality.

What makes a Russian (or Chinese) middle-class?

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Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears

The discreet charm of the late-Soviet petite bourgeoisie, or rather the ‘protected’ technical managerial class, as seen in the film ‘Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears’.

This autumn I was asked by colleagues to discuss a panel of papers on Class formation in Russia at the BASEES Uppsala conference, Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956.

The three papers were Markku Kivinen, ‘Specificities of Middle-class Structuration in Russia’; Mikhail Chernysh, ‘The structure of the Russian middle class’, and Harri Melin, ‘Working life and the myth of precariat in Russia’.

All the papers are part of a book project. I’ll try to summarise them in turn, starting with Markku Kivinen.

Kivinen sees a lack of clearly identifiable class interests in Russia, and therefore a commensurate lack of class-based action or agency. Interestingly, he takes his discussion back to the very idea of what we mean when we talk about a ‘bourgeoisie’: “After more than 60 years, entrepreneurial groups have been revived with the process of privatization. The discussion here focuses on the middle class which in the West is traditionally known as the new middle class (managerial and profes­sio­nal groups), but which in Russia is ‘old’ in the sense that it has inherited its locations from the Soviet era”, writes Kivinen. Suspicious of bare structural accounts, Kivinen argues for class ‘situation’ as well as ‘structure’. This entails some kind of shared rationality or consciousness. From here Kivinen observes that in Russia there is still only a small middle-class in terms of professional wage earners and that corresponding professional organisations are weak. So for him such a class lacks the ‘autonomy’ of a middle class in the West.

Kivinen hypothesises that micro politics of labour control have grown during transition. Given that in the past the ‘inheritance’ of economic resources was insignificant (i.e. even among the elite there was an unwritten rule about limiting the ‘leg up’ effect, and the material intergenerational transmission of resources was not widespread), today, in contrast to economic differences, cultural distinctions of class probably remain important.

Here I’m not sure I completely agree with Kivinen. Part of the ideological breakdown of consensus in the late Soviet period entailed the scramble for position, and the re-writing of those rules to enable the more savvy, including lower level insiders, to position themselves and their kids. To give an example, a 40-year-old Muscovite woman I know has never required a waged income because her parents (1980s Komsomol functionaries) were able to leverage Soviet structural position (partiinye posty) into post-Soviet position (state-org functionaries), then use the access to those state resources to accumulate capital (a private business run through the ‘front’ of a state job and resources) and then in turn into property assets. Now this family has a modest portfolio of flats rented out, allowing a significant consumption lifestyle without requiring anyone in the family to have a meaningful wage income. However, culturally, I don’t see any particular difference between this family and their working-poor neighbours. Both aspired to own a Mitsubishi Lancer and some questionable American kitchen interior design in the late naughties, and that was about it. The working-poor had to get credit for it. The ex-Komsomol bought for cash.

Combining class analysis with the sociology of work, Kivinen proposes a relationship between professional autonomy and mental labour in defining middle-classness.  This is in distinction to his view of working-classes who are always alienated due to a lack of autonomy (control over processes and planning). Then Kivinen engages with Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley, particularly on the different forms of capitalism that emerged in Eastern Europe (more cautious diffused institutional capitalism without ‘capitalists’), versus Russian nomenklatura take-over of resources (capitalists without capitalism – see my ‘petty bourgeoisie’ example above), and ‘entrepreneurial’ capitalism from below in China. Based on survey data, Kivinen concludes that there has been a major expansion in absolute terms of the middle class (from less than 40 percent in 1998 to now over 50 percent). From the data presented in the paper, it’s not clear what definition is being used of entry to the middle class (I am sure in the book it will be well covered). Interestingly, one aspect Kivinen links to this rise is the continuing propensity of all Russians to change their jobs frequently, known as ‘churn’, and something I’ve written about. Likewise, I’ve written a lot about autonomy among working-class people. (See the discussion from p. 72 in particular). The desire for autonomy cuts across classes, and niches are carved out in the most unlikely places.

Overall, my gut response is that a ‘counting’ approach to class remains problematic and perhaps even counter-productive (excuse pun). I’m sure Kivinen’s figures are robust, but how meaningful is it to say 50% of Russians are middle-class when certainly average disposable incomes, however counted, are tiny in comparison even to other middle-income countries? We will see this criticism repeated in my reading of the other papers.

But here I’ll end with a heuristic example: The average wage in Russia is, after tax, around 34,000 Roubles. That’s barely 500 USD. The same article linked to here is a good treatment, acknowledging that in Moscow the average wage probably is around 500 USD (but anyone aspiring to have any quality of life there on that wage would be extremely depressed by reality). In addition, the article notes that wages have fallen in real terms for the last 10 years! Outside the big cities (only 30 million inhabitants out of 145m) the ‘real’ average is likely to be around only 20,000 Roubles elsewhere. See here for a similar enumeration. This all chimes exactly with my ‘anecdotal’ research experience – most of my research participants struggle to make more than 20,000 Roubles. And remember this is among economically active people (less than 50% of the population) with full-time wages (a much smaller fraction).

Yes, a household on two average (20k) incomes, with no housing costs, can live better than the urban poor and pensioners, but that’s less than 50% of the population. The 34k income bracket is, for want of a better phrase, ‘upper-middle class’, or ‘affluent’ and seen as anomalous by most of those I research.  More importantly, even this putative middle group is going to severely struggle with unexpected bills, even running an old Russian car will be a stretch. Frequently they will resort to pay-day loans (there’s plenty of evidence of this in my research). Cognitively, they will not be inhabiting the mindset of any middle-class you can imagine. And that’s different from aspiring to own a jeep, go to Cyprus, or own a second home. An instructive comparison can be made with the ‘struggling middle’ in China at the moment (urban dwellers with middle-class aspirations) who on average earn around the same as the real average in Russia ( 3,000 yuan, or 480 USD a month). However, unlike in Russia, meaningful consumption is possible on this income (discretionary spending), including on taxi rides to work, investment in stocks, luxury imports (gourmet cat food!).

And to finish with a thought about autonomy. James Scott, interestingly, also links middle-classness (or rather the classical petite bourgeoisie subsection of it) to autonomy in his book Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Like my former Komsomol leaders, many people in history have aspired to become small property owners due to the perception that this confers autonomy (and social standing). Scott argues that the petite bourgeoisie play a role in the development of a modern capitalism that is socially tolerable in that important social and civil functions are delegated to them (land stewardship, public safety, public action). On the other hand a more conventional leftist tradition would see in ‘middle-classness’ only the reactionary, whether cultural or social. One can see the short distance from here to the debates about civil society in Russia. However, so far I remain to be convinced both in economic and social terms about the meaningfulness of talking about a Russian middle-class.