Manufacturing Proletarian Memory in the City of Har’kov from 1905 to 1917, 1918 and 1927

Abstract
Manufacturing memory is not in all cases a process of manipulating for the sake of continuing class hegemony. In the case of Har´kov factory workers, 1905-1927, manufacturing jointly to make a living curiously coincided with them assembling a highly combative set of active memory in class conflict within and around their factories. Instead of following the successive attempts by different parties to high-jack this militant legacy, the essay rather aims at retracing the development of material conditions allowing for the autonomous reproduction of proletarian memory in the townscape of Har´kov throughout an all-encompassing series of dramatic defeats and unexpected victories during the 22 years under scrutiny.
In the course of inquiry, collective memory reveals to be redetectable only on a higher and thus much more risky level of generic abstraction compared to more materialist analytic categories, such as
- class-specific conditioning for communication
and discontinuity in communication,
- materially industrial production in social relations of unequal dependence
- and subsequent class-segregated urban reproduction. The specific arrangements culminating in the agency of working-class street corner society prove thus vital for the formation and reproduction of active social memory. They were taken up by various institutional experiments created either by or for working class communication, such as
- factory and workers´ club canteens, in some cases constituting a veritable greenhouse of mutiny,
- workers´ self-governing assemblies and committees exerting a higher degree of control on parliamentarist oblivion than simple recalling of their delegates foresaw,
- and finally the dramatic oral testimonies of an oppositional steel worker and a Jewish working class writer in the moment of a first and decisive defeat of Soviet Har´kov on 25th of March 1918.
“The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. “The truth will not run away from us:” in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”
5th thesis “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin, written down just before fleeing from besieged Paris 1940.