emotion.Atthe same time, noterm captures betterthe profound differencebe-
tween current concerns about the rise in inequality and the future of democracy,
on the one hand,and the Marxist belief in history’sinevitable progression to-
ward communism, on the other,thanthatofthe proletariat–that strangelyob-
solete andradicallyother wordthat,from its first appearance in key Marxist
texts,includingTheCommunist Manifesto,toits obligatory mention in Social
Democratic and Communist Party programs, came to embodythe social,cultur-
al, and political habitus of the revolutionary workingclass. As the particular and
the universal class, the workingclassasdefined byKarl Marx andFriedrich En-
gels united the critiqueofcapitalism withatheory of revolutionary praxis. Enter-
ing the stageofhistory as the mostradicalizedpartofthe industrial working
class, the proletariat promisedto overcome the divisions in class society and re-
alize the utopian promise ofaclassless society.Atthe sametime, itwasthrough
this non-identity of proletariat and workingclass thatthe proletarian dream
proved so important to the parties, groups,associations, and initiativesstarted
to at once unleash and control the emotional regimes established in its name.
Todaythe proletarian dream isavailable onlyinthe form oftexts: poems,
novels, songs, plays,paintings, photographs,films, and the countless essays,
treatises,and polemics written in the name of the revolutionary workingclass.
Inseparable from the parallel histories of massmedia, literarygenres,public rit-
uals, and folk customs,the proletarian imaginary came to function asasiteof
class formation, an agent of revolutionary change, andatool of party discipline,
but,with special relevance to the studyofpolitical emotions, it also established
working-class cultureasasemiautonomous public sphere with its own forms,
traditions, and conventions. The productive tension between politics, culture,
and emotion–that is, between social and symbolic practices–offers ample evi-
dence for what Critical Theory calls the utopian quality of the work of art and its
anticipatory power of illumination. Retrieving these qualities from the social
imaginaries of the past,however,requires an acknowledgement of the double
historicity of culture and emotion andareturnto actual archivesand libraries;
aboveall, it meanstoresist the kind of presentistreadingsthat can easilyreduce
working-class culturetoanobject of sentimental longingoruttercontempt.
In summarize the study’smain conceptual difficulty and main critical inter-
vention once more in the interest of clarity:The proletariat as conjured in count-
less images and stories from the past never existed, but its collective imaginaries
hadaprofound influenceonpolitical ideologies,socialist parties, and workers’
associations.Itsconstitutive elements wereestablished in Marxist theory but in-
variablyexceeded its conceptual frameworks–which also means that new ap-
proaches will have to movebeyond economic determinist and social reflectionist
readings but nonetheless accept the primacy of classtoconceptions of culture.
14 Introduction