ical emotions alsoasaesthetic phenomena and, for instance,seeing resentment
andrage as apublic performance of antagonisms and as part ofahighlymedi-
ated cultureofgrievances and complaints.Herethe proletarian dream emerging
out of late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century German culture, includingits
debts to bourgeois traditions, offers an important historical perspective on the
powerful but little understoodrole of emotions in social movements and attests
to the formative role of culture, defined here broadlyassymbolic communica-
tion, as an integralpart of political mobilizations.
To introduce the largerproject through the metaphor of the book’stitle, what
is the proletarian dream or,touse an alternative term, the dream of the proletar-
iat?Adaydream oranightmare? An extension of communist ideologyoranal-
ternative to working-classreality?Atonce elusive and ubiquitous, the dream of
the proletariat refers to the social imaginary thathas survivedinthe countless
texts produced in the name of therevolutionary workingclass.With other mod-
ern social imaginaries, the proletarian imaginaries share an unwavering belief in
newspapers,books, and public debates as the building blocks ofafunctioning
public sphere and in civil society as the foundationofmoderndemocracy and
the nation-state.¹However,disagreements exist concerning the conditions of
power and domination under which imaginaries servelegitimating functions
and perform the purpose of what usedto be called ideologyasfalse conscious-
ness. In the proletarian imaginary,democracy usuallymeans the rejection of lib-
eralism and individualism as enablingconditions ofmodern capitalism and the
formulation ofradical alternatives in the context of the workers’movement.A
product of socialist and communist imaginaries, includingtheir differentgeneal-
ogies, the proletarian dream is at once grounded inaMarxist analysis of class
society and propelled forward by emotional energies that continuouslydestabi-
lize these theoretical frameworks. Always exceedingthe conditions of working-
class life, the culturaltextsand contexts created in the name of the proletariat
function both asalaboratory for new commitments and attachments and as a
repository for thoseneeds and desires that are excluded from, or find no place
in, official class-based narratives.
Drawing on the connection of dreams to the unconscious established in psy-
choanalytic thought,the book’stitle refers preciselytothis unique ability of sym-
bolic practicestomake meanings, form identifications, andguide the emotional
processes that,beyond political convictions, sustain the workers’belief in, and
The discussion of social imaginary is informed by twovery different conceptualizations, Cor-
nelius Castoriadis,The ImaginaryInstitution of Society,trans.Kathleen Blamey(Cambridge:Pol-
ity,1987) and CharlesTaylor,Modern Social Imaginaries(Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press,
2004).
2 Introduction