Class Politics and Unit Politics - 中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

Class Politics and Unit Politics

Organization of benefit structure and participation in urban society

Published by Open Times

With regards to the issue concerned, the organizational system of society initially emphasized is “China’s working organization”. There are some documents that are concerned with the position or hierarchy of a unit, whose main point base on the economic understanding or the phenomenon of controlling resources and social stratification which have a guidable significance to the position. However, these documents do not reply to the relationship between the stratification and the cohesion of the public interests. We need to get a further to set a hypothesis: by what means the public interests of society which come from different classes can be integrateorganized? In western society, conflicts of interest occur among the people whose status, class, and the ideology of value have split up, and these people shape the cohesion of interests with spontaneous alliance of community. Besides the trade associations, individual enterprise organizations, which are often called “work unit” by Chinese, do not have the organizational feature of public interests, because the organizational function of public interests have been split into that of professional social community, while the role of “work unit” has been included in the category of pursuing private benefit which cannot be shared by the public. The aim of benefit with a feature of exclusion cannot give a public identity to enterprise organizations or make them become a unit of organizing public interests. On the contrary, in china’s society, a number of considerable evidence shows that the process of organizational interests is accomplished by such kind of work institutions or units. Since a long time ago people have been divided into different groups by different units, and shaped into “unit hierarchy”. Although it is not the only organizational mechanism of interests, the work unit is more dominant to the group with individual identities in the aspect of getting their interests and reaching them to higher authorities.

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