Marx’s Theories and Beyond: Understanding Working-Class Solidarity in China

Marx’s Theories and Beyond: Understanding Working-Class Solidarity in China

Working-class solidarity was a classic theoretical question in sociology from the 19th century until the latter part of the 20th century (Fantasia, 1995; Touraine, 1983; Voss and Sherman, 2000). Today, it has long been neglected or forsaken except a few excellent attempts made by scholars such as Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss (2004), and Richard Sennett (2012). Trump’s populism has reawakened this long-forgotten issue of working-class solidarity. ¹ There are good reasons to dismiss the issue of working-class solidarity as one of the core sociological questions. The Western working class has not played the revolutionary role Marx and others assigned to it. As David Gartman (1988) rightly puts it, the post-industrial society literature defeats the issue of solidarity by arguing, ‘The industrial working class did not only fail to remain revolutionary, the new faith professes; it never really was revolutionary’ (p. 473). No one has delineated the failure of the working class as clearly as Andre Gorz (1997 [1982]): ‘In fact, capitalist development has produced a working class which, on the whole, is unable to take command of the means of production and whole immediate interests are not consonant with a socialist rationality’ (p. 15). Studies of post-industrial society (Bell, 1974), consumer society (Edsforth, 1987), and risk society (Beck, 1992) also are theoretically prone to pronounce the end of working-class solidarity by deeply situating it in a Western context of social transformation.

Social theories of the Global North hence highlight the absence of an active role of the industrial working class in transforming the society in Western countries. The working class is either too divisive or too weak to create social change. The dim and unpromising working-class future is often demonstrated by the low unionization of workers and its rapid decline in membership in the neoliberal period. The issue of working-class solidarity becomes a false hope, if not a false consciousness of the class (see also Lukács’, 1971 [1920], discussion in a different sense). When the research interests of working-class solidarity remain in the sociological field, they are reduced to a sub-field of labor studies and are no longer deemed as significant as they once were; most labor studies indeed highlight the division of the working class instead of undertaking the empirical studies supporting solidarity.

Recent debates on the precariousness of labor globally and the prevalent application of the concept of the ‘precariat class’ has further precluded sensible discussion of the solidarity issue of the working class (Standing, 2011, 2017). The creation of his concept of a ‘precariat class’ further emphasizes the vulnerability, fragmentation, division, and divisiveness of the working class, which pre-empts the exploration of the potential of collective action (Smith and Ngai, 2018). Standing uses the market situation and employment flexibility to define the precariat both in the class structure and in its relationship to the state, which produces a conglomeration of part-timer, casual, temporary, seasonal, agency, or self-employed workers, student internees, volunteers, and many others with casual connections to an employer. Given this vast precarious employment situation, working-class solidarity looks like a mission impossible.

By bringing in experiences in the Global South, especially those of China, this paper revisits Marxist theories on solidarity and re-engages the debate by rebuilding a macro–micro nexus of working-class solidarity and discovering its validity in everyday practices. The paper situates this analysis in China’s vocational training schools because they are very significant sites that produced the biggest working class in the world, for both the local and global labor markets. In other words, through the experiences of working-class youth, that is, through the lens of class, we can concretely capture the most intense labor politics and explore the possibility of working-class solidarity in contemporary China. Vocational training schools are the cradles of new working-class subjects and serve as multi-sites for collective organizing and solidarity. The logic of solidarity is rescued through a multiplicity of working-class youth’s behaviors both in school and in the workplace, demonstrating their collective identity and potential for collective organizing.

This paper strives to develop a micro-foundation of working-class solidarity, while still retaining a central tenet of the class-based perspective drawn from Marxist tradition. Marxist scholars have looked into the issues of separation and division of the working class inherent in the logic of capital in which hierarchy and difference of the workforce is crucial to the management and the extraction of surplus value (Hanagan, 1988; Lebowitz 2003: 179–180) as well as the tactics of capital and technology to contain workers’ power once laborers are organized and united (Aronowitz, 2014). However, as the concept of collective worker stands, these issues of fragmentation, separation, and division among aggregate workers composed of different work positions and statuses would not pre-empt the necessity to explore the contradictions of capitalism and potential of solidarity and labor movement (Silver, 2003). Theoretical amnesia on working-class solidarity is a failure of critical sociology. We formulate the concept of working-class solidarity in two layers of analysis: the first layer is a more macro structural approach driven by class conflicts, social grievances, and economic crisis directly connected to the social transformation of the neoliberal market economy; and the second layer looks at micro processes of cooperation and mutual support at the level of everyday practice, that is, the collective-emotional environment that creates agency and a soft solidarity base for building bonds among the working class youth. These two layers are interconnected and interdependent: the more class conflicts and social grievances are embodied in the interplay between the economic system and the state, the greater the tendency to experience strong emotional support and collective organizing in the community. At times of economic crisis or social conflict, the soft solidarity base could, in theory, turn to strong collective-emotional bonding supporting collective actions, depending on the strength of solidarity and the capacity for mobilization and organization.

Research Methods

Build on a lengthy theoretical review on Marx’s theories and beyond, this paper is driven by an attempt to conceptualize parts of the research findings from a large-scale research project in China’s vocational schools (2016–2019), in which we attempt to study the ‘becoming process’ of working-class youths. To understand the class formation process of the youngest working-class subjects in vocational training schools, we look at national discourses, schooling, internship practice, and work experience to capture the macro–micro interrelationships among state, education, and working-class formation. We conducted quantitative surveys and qualitative research in schools and workplaces to examine the macro structure of vocational training schooling and the social reproduction of class. From 2017 to 2018, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 10th to 12th grade students aged 16–19 years from eight vocational schools located in different regions of China. A total of 4178 respondents signed the informed consent and completed the survey on a voluntary basis (Pun and Koo, 2019). ²

In addition to the quantitative methods of investigation, from 2016–2018 we have conducted more than 100 semi-structured in-depth interviews in vocational schools in the four regions of China: Guangzhou and Zhuhai in Southern China, Xian and Lanzhou in Western China, Zhengzhou and Wuhan in Central China, and Hangzhou in Eastern China. While the schools are located in urban areas, the majority of the students come from rural areas. Their parents are either farmers or migrants working in the cities, with average monthly earnings of around RMB3000. ³ Most vocational school students are defined as working class due to their below average family incomes for the region in which they live (Lu et al., 2019). Originally, we were interested in understanding the ‘learning-to-labor’ experiences in vocational schools and at workplaces, but our in-depth interviews and field observations helped us to understand the dynamics of the lifeworld of these working-class youth by uncovering unexpected solidarity among the students, and this led us to formulate a macro–micro nexus of working-class solidarity.

Marx’s Concept of Combination

Taking a class-based worldview, Karl Marx emphasized historical materialism and the effects of economic crisis inherently embodied in the modern capitalist system and a mode of production that paradoxically created a unified basis for the agency of the working class to rebuild a new society (Callinicos, 2004). In this vein, we rediscover Marx’s (2009 [1847/1955]) concept of combination in The Poverty of Philosophy written to provide a multi-layer understanding of the meaning of class-based solidarity, and we employ a speech by Marx and Engels (2000 [1864/1993]) in the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association to help construct a theorization of solidarity focusing on structural and organizational factors.

Let us first turn to Karl Marx on class solidarity and its agency. In The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx, 2009 [1847/1955]), Marx (2009 [1847/1955]), in a debate with Proudhon, points out that

the more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements there are which call forth and strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to become a legal fact. (p. 78)

and hence ‘the first attempt of workers to associate among themselves always takes place in the form of combinations’ (Marx, 2009 [1847/1955]: 79). Instead of using a concept of solidarity, Marx uses the concept of combination, referring to a dynamic process of labor organizing, association, and solidarity since the goal of ‘association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (see also Lebowitz, 2003: 202). With the concept of combination, Marx develops an understanding of three interconnected layers of solidarity that are embedded in a historical transformation of capitalistic industrialization: concretized goal, mobilization strategy, and forms of organizing. In disputing wage rises through strikes would lead to rises in product prices, Marx (2009 [1847/1955]) argues,

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance—combination. (p. 79)

Contextualizing the concept of combination in the increasing competition of the market and the valorization of capital in which a mass of industrialized workers, no matter how divisive they are, shared the same wage-labor identity, Marx (2009 [1847/1955]) continues to provide an explanation of combination with a strategic goal:

Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages. In this struggle—a veritable civil war—all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character. (p. 79)

Combination, a political concept, serves not only to achieve concretized goals, but also as mobilization strategies and forms of organizing that move beyond purely economic interests. Marx (2009 [1847/1955]) said that combination would develop as modern industry evolved, and the hierarchy of the world market shaped the degree to which combination developed in any country: ‘England, whose industry has attained the highest degree of development, has the biggest and best organized combinations’ (p. 79). Marx explains that there would be a historical development from partial combination which facilitated the occurrence of strikes, but that the forms of association would disappear once strikes were passed, leading to a more complete and vigorous form of combination of class-based organizations such as trade unions. He said,

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. (Marx, 2009 [1847/1955]: 79)

Marx’s ideas of combination and working-class solidarity were soon crystallized in the formation of the First International Working Men’s Association in 1864. In its inaugural address (Marx and Engels, 2000 [1864/1993]), Marx and Engels wrote,

Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts. This thought prompted the workingmen of different countries assembled on September 28, 1864, in public meeting at St. Martin’s Hall, to found the International Association. (p. 30)

Class for itself hence becomes the highest level of combination and struggle, which is reflected in the formation of the First International and lays the foundation of Marxist tradition in discussing working-class solidarity and labor internationalism.

Marx’s concept of combination was rarely mentioned in the literature on working-class solidarity as the working-class movement in Western Europe and its struggle for socialism was unpromising if not a complete failure in the 19th and 20th centuries. This lack of promise created a dilemma in Marxist theories on solidarity. In contemporary debates, Michael Burawoy (1979, 1985) contributed to influential studies and debates on working-class solidarity and its absence under the Marxist tradition by reapplying Gramsci’s (1971) concept of ‘hegemony’, which accounted for the complexity of the failure of the working-class movement in Italy. With different theoretical concerns from Gramsci (1971), Burawoy extends the concept of hegemony to the study of the manufacturing of consent in the post-war factory regime and analyzes social and political control over the labor process and how workers engage in a making-out labor process in capitalist society. As Burawoy (1979) puts it, Gramsci once stated that ‘hegemony here (in the United States) is born in the factory’ (p. xii), and he was obliged to further demonstrate the concept of consent ‘at the point of production’—independent of schooling, family life, mass media, the state and so forth’ (Burawoy, 1979: xii). Taking the workplace as a production regime—a micro-state regime—Burawoy highlights political and ideological mechanisms shaping labor control producing workers’ consent, hence affecting labor agency and solidarity.

In an attempt to address the biased understanding of economic determinism that he found in the Marxist tradition, Burawoy works to rescue labor subjectivity by presenting the ‘making-out’ game on the shop floor as the embodiment of the active agency of workers seeking to confront management’s control over the labor process, but which eventually resulted in co-producing consent to the production regime. By emphasizing a relatively autonomous labor process and the transformation of the organization of work in monopoly capitalism, Burawoy (1979) nevertheless turns the collective worker into ‘the growth of individualism, the dispersion of hierarchical conflict, and the concrete coordination of interests between capitalist and laborer, as well as between manager and worker’ (p. 193). Burawoy (1979) states,

What Marx missed was the possibility of tempering the worst effects of competition without undermining competition completely and the possibility that class struggle not only could be contained within the parameters of capitalism but could be harnessed to the reproduction of capitalism if works extracted concessions that would make it more tolerable. (p. 195)

Thus, to a certain extent, the working class actively creates its own submissiveness: ‘Class struggle was not the gravedigger of capitalism but its savior’ (Burawoy, 1979: 195). The self-proclaimed Marxist turns out to be somewhat anti-Marxist in his theoretical exegesis of contemporary labor regimes which empty out the potential of working-class solidarity.

In response to the general view that working-class solidarity is a mission impossible, either as a political project or for sociological study, a few scholars organized a special issue in Theory and Society in which they strived to re-articulate the logics of solidarity for working-class politics in America. Despite an overwhelmingly pessimistic atmosphere based on the decline of the contemporary American working class movement, the special issue called for a comparative perspective and historical studies to re-establish the importance of community dynamics, organizational capacity, specific firms and industry, the character of workers such as skilled or unskilled workers, the issue of ethnicity, and the relation of workers to the state and capital in shaping collective actions and class solidarity (Carsten, 1988; Conell, 1988; Hanagan, 1988; Tilly, 1988; Voss, 1988). As Kim Voss (1988) states, ‘students of class formation now point out that collective action is inherently difficult, that it requires resources and organizational capacity as well as shared grievances and generalized discontent’ (p. 330). Accordingly, working-class solidarity has been reconceptualized as ‘a mobilization process that entails building a set of organizations that represent the general interest of labor and are capable of class-based collective action’ (Voss, 1988: 330).

Beyond Capital and Reflexive Solidarity

Along with these studies, instead of drawing away from Marxist tradition on historical materialism, Rick Fantasia (1988, 1995) develops a concept of ‘cultures of solidarity’ and re-confirms Marxist theories, showing that working-class solidarity could be formed in times of crisis; and when the working class is in struggle, it becomes united and constitutes itself as a class force (p. 273). In a dialogue with E.P. Thompson’s class concept as historical relationship and process in which culture, tradition, rituals and customs play a pivotal role in consolidating class solidarity, Fantasia (1995: 276) stresses that cultural practices, collective actions, and processes of organizational building are all central to the sustenance of class cohesion. Fantasia’s (1995) concept of cultures of solidarity ‘focused on the ways in which emergent cultural formations were constructed inter-subjectively and in relation to opposition, during acute industrial conflicts’ (p. 280). In contrast to Burawoy’s hegemonic consent, Fantasia (1995) argues that ‘cultures of solidarity’ indicate that collective consciousness can be built at the strategic encounter that has given rise to it, and thus such cultural processes can be seen as relatively independent of the previously existing ideas and beliefs of individual participants (p. 280).

A more theoretical and classical Marx’s approach is adopted by Michael Lebowitz (2003, 2006). In moving beyond the project of ‘Capital’ by Marx, Lebowitz (2003) puts forward a concept of ‘political economy of working class’ and keeps it distinct from ‘political economy of capital’ in order to refill the missing part of Marx’s ‘Capital’ project. Looking beyond strategic encounters that engage workers in struggles in times of conflict or crisis, and thus transform themselves into revolutionary subjects, Lebowitz (2003) re-examines and opens up the concept of ‘wage-laborers’ and extends it to the concept of the ‘collective worker’ who exists not for capital but for herself. ⁴ The life of collective worker is not to be reduced to moments of ‘wage-laborers’ in the production sphere, which is a theoretical malady, but praxis that open to a variety of subject positions such as student, family member, citizen, and the like, which nevertheless bears the imprint of class relations in global capitalistic society. Class struggle to Lebowitz (2006) is thus not only ‘the struggle of capital against workers (given the drive of capital for surplus-value) that Capital introduces but also the struggle of workers against capital because of ‘the worker’s own need for development’’ (p. 167). Self-development of the collective worker is more than economic struggles in the sphere of production, but political and social struggles in the sphere of social reproduction as a total social formation for the ultimate self-realization of human freedom and equality. The centrality of revolutionary practice, Lebowitz (2006) argues, is ‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change’ as the core of Marx’s understanding of how people develop (p. 170).

Silver’s study (2003), ‘Forces of Labor’, and the subsequent research by labor studies scholars (Agarwala, 2014; Chun and Agarwala, 2015; Evans, 2010) further assess the apparent new activism on the horizon at the twilight of the 20th century. Silver (2003) calls for recasting labor studies in a longer historical and wider geographical frame that will help us to explore variations of conflicts between labor and capital, and hence a growing number of protests arisen in new spaces and places.

In more current debates based on empirical studies, Ruth Milkman (2013) and Kim Voss (2015), among others (Bloemraad et al., 2016; Fantasia and Voss, 2004; Voss and Sherman, 2000), have made extraordinary efforts to study the struggles of collective worker in current labor movements. They persistently challenged the tide of pessimism by arguing that alternative forms of solidarity were possible, and the struggle of collective worker could be observed in attempts of social movement unionism in general and migrant labor organizing in the United States in particular. Extending from the struggles in the workplace, they highlight the formation of workers’ centers as a complementary form to trade unions, which are sites of organizing encompassing empowerment practices of the collective workers not only to achieve a wage increase, but also citizenship rights, education, health care, and other social welfare and benefits. Cultures of solidarity were re-activated by the trend of social movement unionism which is spearheaded by union activists, left-wing intellectuals, and students who work to rejuvenate strategic forms of organizing and mobilization that move beyond conventional business unionism (Fantasia and Voss, 2004; Featherstone, 2012).

In a nutshell, Marxist tradition of labor conflicts and working-class solidarity was deemed to be driven by embodied conflictual macro structures of economic transformation and capital–labor relations. Political ideology, symbolic and cultural practices, community networks. and social media all serve as components of resource mobilization and collective organizing capacity that affect the long-standing process of working-class solidarity formation. Current studies on working-class solidarity have contributed to a more detailed analysis of institutionalization process, community dynamics, and organizational capacity (Fantasia and Voss, 2004; Milkman, 2013). Despite these excellent studies on cultures of solidarity and alternative forms of organizing for the working-class migrants, the decades-long puzzle remains: how could we further conceptualize human agency and subjectivity of the working class at the everyday level, in addition to the strategic encounter in times of economic crisis or capital–labor conflicts?

Exploring Macro Structure of Working-Class Youth’s Solidarity

Our study of working-class youth solidarity inherits the Marxist tradition in understanding that deepening capital–labor relations, especially in times of crisis, would provide the macro structure and political economy for the formation of a working-class solidarity whose basis would be affected by cultural practices, mobilization resources, and organizational capacity at moments of critical encounter. We further contribute to enriching the understanding of the collective worker and the demand of self-development in the sphere of social reproduction generally, and of the process of ‘learning to labor’ in vocational education specifically. Vocational training schools are the cradle of the youngest working class for practicing combination and solidarity. The vocational training students are the natural reserve army for capital valorization and the ideal subjects for capital expropriation in general, and for state-building in China in particular. Extending the praxis of combination of the collective worker from workplace to community we further locate it in schools, the site of class reproduction as an embodiment of conflictual relations among capital, state, and family. This is an important dimension that is rarely the subject of serious study in the field of working-class solidarity. Our study focuses on vocational training schools in China that have prepared a large number of working-class laborers, especially in a time of scarcity of skilled labor and China’s shift from ‘Made in China’, a brand represented cheap products made by cheap labor, to ‘Innovation in China’ symbolizing a drive to upgrade its labor-intensive manufacturing toward high-tech industry and the new economy.

Students in China’s vocational training schools come mainly from working-class or rural families (Hansen and Woronov, 2013; Ling, 2015; Woronov, 2015). They attended vocational training schools with the hope of securing better occupations and higher incomes in growing high-tech industries after graduation. For working-class youths who have fewer chances and resources to enter colleges and universities, vocational training schools become their most available and affordable option for self-development beyond the compulsory level of schooling. In 2018, over 12 million students enrolled in vocational high school; more than 30% of the school graduates had taken up jobs in manufacturing sectors and 60% worked in service sectors (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2019). In the standardized 3-year vocational education program, students spend 2 years on career-oriented learning and training followed by 1 year in practice during a period of compulsory internship. During these years, school classrooms, student dormitories, and internships form a unique space of shared learning for their working-class students, a space which also serves as an effective mediation of conflictual class experience and solidarity. Although these vocational training school students could hardly escape their subject positions in a structured culture of dominance, we explore agency of these students who help challenge the claim that working-class solidarity is an illusion, and that the youth can only be dupes of the dominant system. Based on our long-standing studies and in-depth interviews with vocational training school students, we examine students’ experience both in schools and in their workplace training and internship, as significant alternative sites for studying the formation of working-class solidarity.

Our empirical findings show that vocational education in China embodies contradictory educational practices for the working-class youth (Pun and Qiu, 2020). For most of the schools we visited, we observed conflictual messages such as ‘the spirit of the craftsman’ advocated by the state, ‘entrepreneurial subject’ by the market, and ‘self-reliant and responsible self’ by the community and family are all intertwined and transmitted to the students at school. These messages, as macro structural factors, create contradictory learning experiences for the vocational training students regarding their active forming of working-class solidarity. In China, the dream of an individual student is often said to be largely intertwined with the nation’s dream, despite variation by region and locality. Unlike Silva’s (2013) study of American schooling or Reay’s (2017) research of the British education system which disclosed the failure of national dream in their education experiences, in China educational aspirations for upward social mobility is deemed possible, and the school contributes to the process of producing labor subjectivities by upholding China’s dream. Yet when the labor market is increasingly incorporated into the fluctuating global economy, the real world of work—internship—shatters their educational dream. Student interns at the Foxconn workplace were systematically sent by the schools to work on the production line as cheap labor. From time to time, students found that the ‘training’ in the school or at the workplace did not add any value to their skills, and that they are often treated unfairly as unskilled and flexible cheap labor in the market.

When students find that their internship and work experiences stand mostly in contrast to their goals and aspirations, these contradictory experiences open the space for negotiating a somewhat different working-class solidarity than that proposed by Paul Willis and others (Reay, 2017; Silva, 2013; Willis, 1977). For student interns, combination and resistance is found not only in the school, but also in the workplace. For example, when managers did not agree to pay workers the over-time rate, they slowed down their work pace, applied for sick leave together or simply did not show up on the busiest days of production and services. When the company required them to work nightshift, or delayed their payment, the interns who bound together as working-class subjects, figured out a way of uniting and demand improvement in their work conditions. We find that upon their return to their school, with broken promises of a ‘craftsman’ future after on-the-job training, students were not only able to cultivate shared interests and views, but they also actively generated and articulated a nuanced sense of working-class agency among themselves. By disclosing the richness of working-class youth’s aspirations at school, their various forms of misrecognition of middle-class life and finally their different reactions and resistances to the broken promises, we reveal a real detour in which these school-aged youth navigate their class reproduction at the intersection of production, social reproduction, and cultural production (Pun and Koo, 2019). We thus formulate a Marxist interpretation of working-class solidarity on the macro structural conditioning rooted at the contradictions between the school’s hegemonic project and the workplace reality, as well as between student aspirations for upward mobility and the limited chances of job advancement.

Toward a Micro-Foundation of Working-Class Solidarity

At the macro level, we understand that working-class solidarity is constituted and constitutive of socio-economic transformation embodied with crises, conflicts, and grievances that may lead to shared interests, common values, and joint actions as discussed above. On the top of the Marxist tradition of crisis or conflictual moments which serve as the macro structural layer of working-class solidarity, our study further contributes to the exploration of active agency and solidarity in everyday practices in term of cooperation and mutual support (Hui et al., 2020; Sennett, 2012; Simpson and Willer, 2015).

At the micro level, solidarity is now defined as a set of behaviors and sentiments that unite a group or class of working youths who may demonstrate cooperation and mutual support in formulating collective-emotional structures in everyday practices. Our study of the working-class youths in vocational schools, in which the education mission is to provide detailed training based on occupation and skill, confines us to a class-based understanding of solidarity. Highlighting moments of solidarity as potentially creative and dynamic processes at the vocational school, individuals seek out one another and come together to support each other, sowing potential combination preparing for future revolutionary or insurgent epochs.

Mutual Support/Reciprocity at School

Collective moments of solidarity are best demonstrated by the acts of generosity and mutual support that we find in the everyday practices of working-class youth at school. A more sociological concept that has a long tradition of debate on these human behaviors is reciprocity. In existing sociological literature, debates on reciprocity in general, and generalized reciprocity or serial reciprocity, in particular, have attempted to provide grounding for theorizing social norms, forms, and rituals of human societies which would otherwise be ‘broken apart’. The current studies of serial reciprocity further call for theorizing situated actions in various cultural contexts highlighting the significance of cultural meaning and affective structure in understanding reciprocal human behaviors, moving beyond the conventional analysis of a structure of exchanges dominating the field (Baldassarri, 2015; Komter, 2005; Moody, 2008).

All vocational school students we visited were busy preparing their CVs for internships/job interviews in the ‘job fairs’ that were organized by vocational schools with local enterprises in May and June every year. We found students practicing interview skills with one another inside classrooms or in their dormitory during those 2 months. During our visit at a vocational school in Shanxi, we met, Xiao-Yu, a working-class youth from a rural family in his last year of an engineering degree. Xiao-Yu and his roommates were preparing for interviews together for an internship in a factory before we chatted with him in the student dormitory. When we asked Xiao-Yu about the kinds of companies he wished to go to, he told us that his main concern was whether the factory or the company would recruit him with his dorm mates, so that they could help and take care of each other at work. Far from taking themselves as individualistic or isolated subjects, these young people seek support from each other in the exploitative working conditions under the dominance of neoliberal market values in China.

Empirical research in social psychology informs us of a culture of prosocial or helping behaviors and cooperation among working-class individuals, as they always score higher on measures of prosocial behaviors and are more likely to help others in distress. In a series of four studies, Piff et al. (2010) found a consistent tendency for working-class individuals to be more generous, support charity, be more trusting toward a stranger, and be more likely to help a person in need than their upper-class counterparts. It has been argued that as working-class people are disposed to have reduced social and economic resources, they are relatively dependent on the social relationships and on others to resolve problems. Having less, but giving more, working-class individuals are more empathic than their higher class counterparts, are therefore better at recognizing the distress or needs of others, and are more likely to provide support for others.

Our quantitative study surveyed a large group of working-class youth (N = 4178) from eight Chinese vocational schools. ⁵ Using structural equation modeling, we confirm that the pattern of ‘having less, giving more’ could be found in our sample. Our cross-sectional survey design and structural equation modeling examines the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and work experiences of vocational students on their labor rights knowledge and prosocial behavior (Hui et al., 2020). In this quantitative study, we understand youth’s active learning process as acquiring labor rights knowledge through part-time work, subsequently achieving the common good of prosocial behavior. In this study, prosocial behavior in everyday life, conceptualized as acts of informal and formal helping, is demonstrated through spontaneous activities and daily support among vocational school students, and formal participation in volunteering activities organized by their schools.

Our pioneering study correlates these work experience and their relationship to prosocial behavior by providing two dimensions of analysis. First, we study whether the socio-economic conditions (one’s SES) predict prosocial behavior. Second, in order to understand the social mechanisms behind the association, we look into the work experience of these students and their labor rights knowledge. Specifically, we study whether SES (in what conditions) and work experience (what kind of social context and when) contribute to prosocial behavior among vocational students. ⁶

Our findings reveal that work experience of vocational school students could significantly facilitate prosocial behavior via the increase of knowledge of both contract-based rights and labor action (Hui et al., 2020). Contrary to widely held views against work solidarity, we show that work experience could generate positive outcomes of prosocial behavior in working-class youth’s everyday practices. Studying vocational students in China—most of whom coming from rural areas, sharing working-class backgrounds, having part-time work experiences as well as considerable in-group variation in SES—we find evidence of the prosocial behavior of these working-class students found in school and daily life (Hui et al., 2020).

Our in-depth interviews and field observation further confirm that for students at vocational schools, mutual support is a common practice in daily life, particularly in the ‘compulsory boarding’ schools that require all students live in the dormitory, and do not allow them to leave the campus except for on weekends (Lu et al., 2019). The school serves as a small community which provides boarding for students. The dormitory is a transient space providing temporarily ‘homing’ for students, learning to socialize with and are dependent on one another. They share hopes and frustrations, exchange information for part-time job and internship opportunities, and learn from and support for each other. To learn together, to play together, and more importantly, to help each other when needed, became a daily life practice for the students.

During our fieldwork, we came across a few charity campaigns at school designed to raise funds in support of students when they or their parents have suffered from a traffic accident or a serious illness. Without proper medical care for migrant students or workers in the cities, the rural or migrant families would easily accrue debts impacting the schooling of these students. To support each other, students would run donation campaigns to raise funds to cover the cost of medical and other expenses. Students at vocational schools sacrificed their breakfast to save money which they donated to their schoolmate (Lu et al., 2019). The logic behind this prosocial behavior is obviously not because the working-class students have higher morality than others, but because suffering and difficulties in life that could easily happen in a poor family. This ‘having less’ material context drives them to have more empathy and to create a willingness to take care of others by offering support in their daily life despite frequent arguments and even fighting among students in the school’s dormitory due to over-crowdedness and other reasons.

At the community level, we also found enthusiastic students who formed organizations, such as Civic Virtue or Loving Heart Society, for organizing volunteer workers to serve the community. The major goal of these organizations is to promote a spirit of mutual support and social solidarity. While some of these student societies are formed under the dictate of their instructors at school, others are more autonomous and independently run. Some societies provided visits to elderly home nearby their school, others launched volunteering project collecting secondhand clothes in the city to donate to poor families living in the mountain villages. Obviously not looking for any rewards or reciprocity, they also run environmental campaigns to raise consciousness about pollution and collect garbage in the rivers of the city where they live. More importantly, we observed that the students of Civic Virtue in Xian tried to connect with all the volunteering groups from their community to nearby cities in order to expand the coverage of their service, thereby building a larger social network of support. Students coming from a lower class background studying in a vocational school felt proud when they could offer support to people in need. A student leader from Loving Heart Society also stated that it might be her low-income family background that nurtures her to be more sensitive and empathetic to the poor (Lu et al., 2019).

Our study of the vocational school students revealed that students’ generosity and mutual support derive from their empathy of suffering that they shared with those in the same working-class background, a boundary much larger than simply an in-group network formed by peer, family, neighborhood, or ethnic enclave. The drive and desire to support people in need is not only determined by the attachment or position of their own small social networks, but also by shared feeling and sympathy toward others of the same class who are strangers and usually lack resources and adequate support. All in all, the reciprocal behaviors of students’ solidarity indicate that reciprocity or cooperation may not be limited to the individual level constrained by a small in-group boundary. They can be a grounded social practice for self-development and self-actualization, gradually developed from one’s inner circle of solidarity to a shared class unity with affective structure of commitment—a phenomenon that deserve more systematic and detailed empirical study.

Cooperation: From the Community to the Workplace

Coming from a Marxist tradition, Richard Sennett’s (2012) Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation concerns the weakening of cooperation in a contemporary society that is driven by social inequality and a new division of labor. Sennett argues that a new and ‘higher’ division of labor in the new economy does not provide an organic form of solidarity, instead, modern society is ‘de-skilling’ people in practicing cooperation (Sennett, 2012: 8), which means that modern people are being deprived of the necessary skills for working together with others as cooperative subjects. With a vision to reclaiming the craftsmanship of cooperation, Sennett criticizes the neoliberal market ethos that perverts the value of togetherness, and he views contemporary capitalism as having made cooperation a shallow, money-driven, and often temporarily unstable performance. Given this broken face of human togetherness, Sennett proposes that the skill of working together to ‘repair’ something has become particularly valuable because ‘the processes of making and repairing inside a workshop connect to social life outside it’ (Sennett, 2012: 219).

Hence, requiring a technique of cooperation to repair broken social relationships is to re-establish solidarity, and the technique required is a kind of social praxis of education and internship at work, step by step, to repair the structure of society. This relates to our research in that students’ practices of cooperation can also be viewed as a ‘repairing process’ to confront the broken social bonds of today’s China (Lu et al., 2019). Certainly, it was common in our interviews to learn that students are working together—both within and outside the school. Because of their lower class background, the majority of vocational students actively engage in internships or do a part-time job on weekends to help their family or earn some extra money, on either a short-term or long-term basis. For example, most of them will distribute flyers on the street or work as waiters/waitresses in restaurants and hotels. During interviews, students emphasized that when going to internships or part-time jobs, togetherness is not only necessary, but imperative, because they can help and take care of each other in a dire market situation.

We met a group of students in Guangdong who majored in modern technology and had casual jobs in an advertisement company during the weekends. They complained about this company withholding their wages for more than 3 months. The company was supposed to pay them daily upon their completion of work. For the first few weeks this company paid them on time but started to delay payment after they worked there for months. Angrily, these students discussed the situation among themselves, knowing that nobody could really offer help so that they had to rely on their collective power to fight for their labor rights. Tian said, ‘We have no choice, if we don’t go together to argue with the boss and get the salary back. An individual’s power is not enough!’ For students who suffer from limited resources, cooperation in school and the workplace is vital if they are to survive in an exploitative situation.

We also encountered a group of four female students in Lanzhou who majored in e-commerce. Previously engaged in fighting in the secondary schools, these four students were very close friends, and they were determined to reform themselves and became ‘normal female students’ when they moved to the vocational high school. Closely organizing their daily lives together, they went to class as a group, eating, shopping, working, and even participating in a competition together. In a provincial-level competition which encouraged students to set up an e-commerce shop on digital platform, they excitedly told us how they worked together, designing their store, promoting it to consumers in a strangers’ world, and finally winning the competition. On winning, they were very happy and repeatedly said cooperation and detailed division of labor among them were the basic element for winning. Honghong said, ‘We are very close friends, and we know each other so well, so that we can easily coordinate when the competition starts. We have unspoken understanding of each other. The other group doesn’t have that’.

In theory, competition is leading to individualization, social distance, and less trust, and yet, in the social context of the young working-class, competition goes hand in hand with cooperation, and more severe competition requires harder work to achieve success resulting in more cooperation. Many student interns reported that they had to be very supportive of each other as they were inexperienced working at the workshop. Most of them were working for a company for the first time, and they had to travel for more than 30 hours to get to a factory in the coastal area of China. Once entering their internship program the students had to work 6 months or even longer; cooperation is the basis for their survival in an adult’s world which looks harsh to them. These Chinese working-class youth have repeatedly exhibited the value of cooperation and solidarity at the everyday level.

Conclusion

This article attempts to address the classic sociological problem of whether working-class solidarity was possible. It makes three contributions. First, it explores the sociological literature on solidarity, revisits Marx’s theories in tackling the concept of combination, and discusses its relevance to the study of working-class youth. Second, while relating to a Marxist tradition by embodying class solidarity with the politics of combination, we note that the working class was endowed with a revolutionary mission in challenging the existing system. We build a sensitivity toward the micro process of working class solidarity and explore the possibility of how everyday practices could contribute to the articulation of solidarity. In doing so, the concept of working-class solidarity interlocks in two layers of analysis: the first layer is a more macro structural approach, driven by class conflicts and socio-economic crisis directly connected to the current transformation of the global and national economy; the second layer contains the micro process of a collective-emotional environment, in which through mutual support and cooperation working-class youth create a soft solidarity base. These two layers are interconnected and interdependent; at times of economic crisis or social conflict, the soft solidarity base could, in theory, turn to collective-emotional bonding supporting collective actions.

Third, this article discloses the necessity of discovering a ‘micro-foundation of solidarity’ formulated by working-class youth. These working-class young people, while having few resources, can give more to others, contributing to the daily reproduction of cooperation and mutual support at the level of everyday life. This creates the possibility of questioning the hegemony of market competition by fostering cooperation to ‘repair’ the injustice caused by the capitalistic logic and safeguard the social justice and equality from which we argue that we might redevelop working-class solidarity in the future.

This research is a pilot project attempting to bridge everyday practices with Marxist studies of solidarity in times of crisis concerning the human agency of the working class. With millions of working-class youth in China ending up in vocational education schools, the time and space provided by vocational schooling enables working-class students to form networks across boundaries and maintain combination and solidarity. Vocational schools provide fertile soil for the nurturing of the future working class in China whose young members learn, live, and work together. For scholars working in the Marxist tradition, solidarity is a central practice of the political left and is indispensable to the activity of social and political movements. It has, however, rarely been the subject of sustained theorization (Featherstone, 2012). In response to the critique of the binary approach of macro structure and micro agency, this paper concretizes the debate by developing a macro–micro nexus of working-class solidarity explicitly or implicitly demonstrated by students at vocational schools in China.