Denys Gorbach holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po (2022). He received his Master's degree in June 2017 from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
at Central European University, Budapest. His research interests include political economy, social movements, labor, populism, moral economy, nationalism, and class. In his thesis, "The (Un)making
of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Socialist City he analyzes how the Ukrainian working class relates to the world of politics. His ethnographic
exploration focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the class and structures its relations with other social groups. He argues that the debilitating effect the postsocialist socioeconomic crisis
had on the workers’ political agency was exacerbated by the paternalist mechanisms that emerged to attenuate the crisis. At the same time, the “oligarchic democracy” of the 2000s brought with
it the moralization of politics and polarized it along the identitarian axes. These processes shaped the options for political participation available to workers: exploiting moralized ethnolinguistic
hierarchies in individual distinction strategies or withdrawing altogether from the public into the private domain.
The (Un)making of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Socialist City
The puzzle that motivates this thesis is a particular kind of populist politicization of industrial
workers in Ukraine: while the imperative of engagement in political action aimed at bringing
radical social change is widely shared among them on the discursive level, it coexists with a
demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory
attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in
2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019. In order to explain it, the dissertation
asks how the Ukrainian working class relates to the world of politics – both in the sense of
objective relations mediated by social structures and mechanisms acting at the workplace and
at the urban level, and in the sense of subjective attitude to the political domain. This ethnographic
exploration of the everyday politics of the workers focuses on the moral economy that
constitutes the class and structures its relations with other social groups.
The research is based on fieldwork conducted in the city of Kryvyi Rih between 2018 and
2021. It consisted of ethnographic interviews, participant observation at a factory, analysis
of local press archives, and digital ethnography continued after departure from the site. The
analysis proceeds on multiple scales: from the political dynamics on the city level, it descends
to the level of workplace politics, and finally to individual strategies of economic survival and
symbolic distinction.
The dissertation argues that the debilitating effect the postsocialist socioeconomic crisis had
on the workers’ political agency was exacerbated by the paternalist mechanisms that emerged
to attenuate the crisis. At the same time, the “oligarchic democracy” of the 2000s brought
with it the moralization of politics and polarized it along the identitarian axes. These processes
shaped the options for political participation available to workers: exploiting moralized
ethnolinguistic hierarchies in individual distinction strategies or withdrawing altogether from
the public into the private domain. In both cases, programmatic agonistic politics is discarded
in favor of antagonistic vision that closes off the political space and spawns lay technocratic
authoritarian anti-corruption projects.
Selected publications
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