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Automobile masculinities and neoliberal production regimes among Russian blue-collar men.
Working-class masculinity and the post-socialist neoliberal order
Working-class men have found themselves in an unparalleled position of subalterneity in
such societies (Kideckel 2002). They are faced with an ‘illusory corporatism’ (Ost 2000):
state, and employer relations are exclusory and seek to impose a strong form of neoliberal
labour disciplining and dispossession. Elites and the emergent middle classes alike see
workers as little more than politically quiescent, mechanical-turk operators of moribund
Soviet plant in dying factories of industrial hinterlands far from Moscow. …they should be
grateful to be given the privilege to unthinking remake the self into a pliant, self-sacrificing,
and interchangeable cog in the newly emergent transnational operations of manufacturers of
global capital.
Introduction
Car ownership and the DIY skills in repairing mechanically simple old Russian cars speak to
issues around the display of working-class masculinities In addition, the paper explores
automobility as emblematic of uneasy social mobility and fraught engagement with new
neoliberal regimes of work on the self and flexibility. Choices about what kind of car to own,
whether to use credit, to buy Russia-built or ‘foreign’, whether to learn from others how to
maintain it or pay a stranger – all these forks in the path of becoming automobile are
statements of what kind of man a person wants to be. They are similarly subject to
interpretation by others in a working-class setting. Conversations and conflicts about cars
come to dramatize aspects of literal and social class mobility, immobility. Cars as markers of
masculinity intersect with both aspirational fantasies (that largely remain inaccessible) and
stubborn retrenchments of more traditional identities. These ‘debates’ bespeak an uneasy
relationship with the ‘desired’ car as status symbol and object of labour in the ‘Western’
factories which employ the subjects of this research.
Glocalizing automobile working-class masculinities
Private car ownership and use as representing differentiated performances of masculinity has
long been a staple of youth studies. However, the majority of research has focussed on the
automotive articulations of gender in terms of subcultures; cars express a form of refracted
hegemonic masculinity – particularly among the dominated fraction of working-class male
youth in the West (e.g. Bengry-Howell and Griffin 2007; Lumsden 2010). Often examining
street racing, cruising, and car-modification – (e.g. lowering/low-riders), research on
automobility comes to be associated with delinquency and deviance, which is less
representative of a non-Western experience.
locally contrastive meanings – collective affordances extending to the realms of shared car
ownership and homosocial tinkering in garages (Kononenko 2011). Similarly, a classed
perspective finds car ownership less to do with conspicuous consumption, but as a store of
value (ibid), and, in the creation of ‘carholds’, automobility, and mobility itself, as a
household, rather than individual achievement (Broz and Habeck 2015).
Western-centric assumptions at the heart of Urry’s seminal scholarly treatment to show how
post-socialist automobility intersects with masculinity and neoliberalism in ways that contrast
with Sheller’s and Urry’s original definitions (Sheller and Urry 2000).
Automobility in Russia has, since the end of communism and the explosion in private
ownership, expanded in many ways as Urry predicted – as a ‘self-organizing autopoietic,
non-linear system’ which ‘generates the preconditions for its own self-expansion’ (Urry
2004: 27). In the recent post-socialist era Russians, as in the West, have come to experience
the automobile as the quintessentially manufactured object and status consumption object;
(Urry 2004: 25-26). However, Urry’s third, fourth and fifth systemic components are
arguably incomplete in much of the non-Global North. These comprise: a) automobility as
one of the most important examples of the technical-social nexus of modernity; b) the
predominant form of quasi-private mobility with other forms of movement subordinated; c)
dominant in symbolic articulations of the cultural meaning of the good life and well-being
(ibid). For the majority of post-socialist citizens, time-space has not yet been remade
according to the logic of automobility. Access to a car, use of urban space, the symbolic
meanings of mobility, remain inflected by socialist-era forms of modernity. Consequently,
while the – predominantly male – driver may well appear as a techno-social-cultural
assemblage (ibid; Thrift 1996), that assemblage is ‘put together’ out of the particular collision
of mobility, masculinity, and neoliberal categories pertaining to the post-socialist world.
Just three examples of post-socialist mobility will suffice to illustrate this: the either/or of
mass transit and walking remain dominant in many citizens’ everyday mobilities;
‘commuting’ by car is a minority sport. Many drivers (and particularly among working-class
men) interpret ownership as a practical as much as symbolic achievement and their
ownership as an economic hedge against the backdrop of a generation-long experience of
socio-economic dislocation – i.e. a literal store of value and as a practical resource for income
generation – as described below. The ‘good life’ and symbolic status, while important, are
secondary or encompass modalities of enjoyment and leisure that are in contrast to those in
the West (see, for example, Broz and Haback 2015, on the meaning of ‘day tripping’).
As the same time as the affordances of the automobile may differ outside the Global North,
the negative side of the car may not correspond. A sense of risk and uncertainty may increase
with ownership. Automobility in Russia is particularly associated with the risks of accident
and death, criminality, and corruption (respectively because of the infamously poor road
maintenance and climatic factors, and an abysmal culture of driving where one can still
illegally buy a licence without any training; the sense of the ‘wild’ open road populated by
bandits and thugs, corruption whereby the highway police are viewed as worse than thieves).
Few car journeys are seen as having the ‘seamless’ potential of point-to-point travel as in the
Global North (Urry 2004: 29). If just one category – mobility – is capable of such a
contrasting inflection, then what of its intersection with similarly different meanings of
masculinity and the (newly emerging) neoliberal subject? Automobility may represent a kind
of masculine ‘freedom’, as Urry argues (2004: 28), but it is one tempered by understandings
of risk, economic uncertainty, the valuing of practical skills, and as the main ethnographic
section that follows relates – a particular kind of homosociality.
Car ownership, use and care as the nexus of the neoliberal hailing of Russian subaltern
masculinity
The freedom, not of the road, but of the garage: spaces of masculine working-class sociality
most blue-collar workers can realistically aim for ownership of a basic Soviet-era AvtoVAZ
Lada model (a low-tech vehicle based on the 1960s Fiat 124 and produced in large numbers
until the early 2010s), or buy a ‘western-style’ car on rather crippling credit terms. Technical
skills in DIY maintenance have long been desiderata for long-term ownership for three
reasons: a) very poor road maintenance and severe climatic conditions; b) poor automobile
network infrastructure generally – a preponderance of low grade roads and poor distribution
of vehicle maintenance businesses; c) the simple construction of most Russian cars.
‘Tinkering’ in garage blocks with acquaintances also has a long history and is a significant
part of working-class homosociality – among young and old alike (Morris 2016).
Like the use of ‘sheds’ in Anglophone culture – the garage is a masculine reserve devoted to
practical activity, often for its own sake; the car may never get completely ‘fixed’, but a lot of
talk and drinking ensure that homosocial ties are cemented and broadened. Recently there has
been a movement to give shed culture more of a communitarian ethic which is somewhat in
contrast to its culturally-specific association with Anglophone individualistic masculinity
(Cavanagh et al. 2014). In contrast, Russian garage use is predicated not on the lone tinkerer,
but only men coming together to reinforce bonds of competent masculinity – the garage can
be cosy space of consociality, whether used as a bar or mechanic’s shop.
Discussion
Two visions of vehicular performative masculinity emerge within the social group, the first of
which, represented by Petr is broadly understood as accepting of the neoliberal challenge of
working on themselves to become flexible subjects of Russia’s harsh neocapitalist order (cf.
Kideckel 2008; Morris 2012). His story represents the transition from work in a Soviet-type
labour habitus to ‘making the grade’ in TNC production regimes. Petr’s ‘new’ working-class
masculinity is entrepreneurial, striving, and progressive. Aspiring to ownership of a Western
car goes hand in hand (and is the reward for) becoming a flexible neoliberal subject, taking
on consumer credit, yet also delaying gratification. These dispositions are symbolised by the
purchase of a ‘new’ or, more likely ‘nearly new’ foreign car, often on credit. Yet such cars
are associated too with risk, fear and uncertainty; less used for leisure they are objects of
reverence and nurture in a guarded garage block, where men pay ritual homage in cleaning
and maintaining them. As Nikita notes: the car drives the man, and it should be the other way
around.
The second group examined here are those who choose to remain in lower-paid traditional
industrial employment or even semi-legal informal work, represented by ‘Nikita’. They are
wary of the new neoliberal order, seeing it as restrictive of autonomy and an unequal
compact. To them the ‘contract’ offered by new work and new cars is ‘unmasculine’ –
automobility is about the use of cars in the ‘now’ for pleasure regardless of the ‘risk’ of
damage. The ‘risk’ to them is ownership on credit of a ‘delicate’ foreign car. Thus they
interpret the care for cars by the first group as unbecoming. They compare this kind of car
ownership to new production regimes: involving loss of autonomy and control over life (the
car controls the owner). They emphasise a more traditional performative masculinity linked
to ‘banger’ car culture that revolves around self-reliance, DIY skills and the car as source of
eternally tinkering homosociality. For those that ‘give in’ to calculated self-moulding
according to neocapital’s requirements, the social affordances: the garage, the key spaces and
making of automobile masculinity, are lost.
Thus each group’s competing versions of masculinity are linked with either adapting
masculine personhood to neoliberalism or not. A particularly classed performance of gender
comes to dramatize the response of persons to changes in production regimes and the advent
of the neoliberal order more generally. The significance of this case study lies in the need to
acknowledge localized yet globally-inflected subaltern masculinities and how they intersect
with similarly non-Global North working-class responses to both neoliberalism and
automobile versions of global modernity.
Conclusion
The social self-organisation of working-class men through the shared experience of
automobility and the continuing class salience of the compressed social space of the small
industrial town sees subaltern masculinity reconstituted as a meta-occupational community of
confrères. Just as they are hailed by the neoliberal reconception of the labouring subject, the
spaces of masculine automobility also produce alternative responses. The Russian case
shows the need to acknowledge both the constrictions of working-class masculinity after the
socialist project – it’s doubly subaltern positioning, but also the anchoring and solidaristic
communities of the former second world that remain; automobile working-class masculinity
is a site for the production of ‘small agency’ in the face of the onslaught of the neoliberal
processes of self-making. Here, retreating into garage spaces, men articulate and perform
practices of homosociality and car-dom that articulate, if not enact alternative forms of
personhood to those offered by the TNC.
Russian men’s automobility – and ‘garage culture’ is an ideal site to witness how hegemonic
masculinity is renegotiated, refracted in a particular way both in relation to and in contrast to
the West. Many Russian men are subject to symbolic violence and unable to ‘propertize’
working-class masculine identity (cf. Griffin 2011: 255, and Skeggs 2004). But this study
would also suggest that Skegg’s search for autonomist working-class values is not in vain
(2011); automobile worker-masculinity is a project of personhood inexorably bound to, yet
revealing the limits of projects of neoliberal globalization (Connell and Wood 2005).
