Years of Poems and Spirits

A really wonderful book. As enlightening as E.P. Thompson’s classic.

I remember Kent G asked us during class – what is “class consciousness”? It was then I suddenly realized, oh, it is not something that is always there!

Perry’s book really helped me to complete the intellectual journey started with this question. In my mind at least, there is no longer such a structural being called “class consciousness”. It is more organic, something grows out of a complex makeup of social soil.

Note, this is a second try. It failed last time when I tried to write a comprehensive review. It just didn’t work out. This book took me several month to finish on the 3rd try (ever since recommended by DS a year ago), it is not like while I was in school when I had to finish a couple of books a week. The memory faded by the time I started writing review but thoughts and inductions abound. It is really hard to write something concise that way.

I also thought about book reviews like those in the New Yorker. But they are more like literature reviews, each comes with broad references and, more importantly, a clear narrative of how a certain subject evolved. I am nowhere near being able to discuss Labor Study (or even Labor History in China) in that way. So I gave up writing last time.

I am grateful for this book because it helped me to recalibrate my view on Marxism. Its Historical Materialism still wield a heavy influence on my world view but at the same time I know it is just another theory among many. The difficulty is to escape my own myopia and put what brought me here in a proper lineup. I have been trying to do so for years. Finally, with help from this book, I found some kind of closure.

In the book, Perry developed two themes: First, different workers protest differently. Second, they become different as a result of their social relationship with each other. In general, Perry argues, the more skilled workers are more likely to engage in class struggle. The less skilled are more likely to be thugs (aka Lumpenproletariat in Marxist lexicon). In Shanghai’s example, it is the printing press mechanics, the managers in Postal service and so on, are the CCP-affiliated activists. The tobacco rollers and textile workers, on the other hand, are easy recruits of the GMD-controlled Green Gang members.

However, her second point is more subtle. Paraphrasing Charles Tilly’s words, “A worker’s skill is a type of social relationship”, Perry used the first half of the book to develop a narrative on how a worker’s native place can determine his political awareness. It makes total sense in the Chinese context where I grew up – people from Jiangnan are generally considered smarter, are quicker learners. They tend to get better jobs, which heightened their self-consciousness and political demand. All of this development was further nurtured by a strong native-place bondage, apprenticeship training and the existence of Habermas-ian public space.

There it is: class consciousness is not a uniformed, structural being. It is not the same in every culture, at different times, or even within the same “working class”. It is very much a product of socio-cultural environment–as much as that of the material-production relationship that Karl Marx thought was the defining character. In other words, class consciousness, like religion, it is not something everyone is born with, but rather a gift one may or may not receive somewhere in one’s life. No wonder Perry uses terms like “rise above” to describe the formation of class-consciousness. Here you go, Migdal, this is you exegesis.

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