The low status of domestic service in the Soviet hierarchy of labor undermined efforts to politicize domestic workers through union mobilization. The appeal of “productive” work inspired domestics to use their activism as springboard for careers outside of domestic service rather than for organizing their peers. Domestics’ reluctance to engage with the union only confirmed the long-standing suspicion that domestic service fostered “lackey’s souls” rather than conscious proletarian selves. This chapter provides insight into the problem of marginalized workers that have largely been excluded from organized labor. While the difficulty in organizing domestic workers is often negatively affected by their vulnerability and dependency on employers, the low status of housework in the gendered hierarchy of labor poses a different challenge as it conditions household workers to invest in changing careers rather than strengthening their labor organization.

Labour movements deployed well-known strategies for collective action, but how did the professional class collectivise their interests? The mechanisms by which the professionals achieved and maintained their status in the mid-twentieth century are laid bare by records of an institution unique to Australasia: formal conciliation and arbitration courts. This chapter focuses on a particular event, the Professional Engineers Case, which was brought before the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission between 1957 and 1961. This case shows professionals articulating their class status to argue, in arbitration, for the value of their work to the nation’s collective economic and moral good. This good was linked, for the judges who elevated their salaries, to the individual professional’s investment in education but also to the prospective worth of their virtuous work to the nation. The risk to the nation if unvirtuous people performed professional work was too high to let them fall behind in material terms. To belong to the professional class, it was not enough to be qualified – they also had to perform class in their standard of living. Assuring consumption standards, then, was also a way to assure quality work – and the rationale that enabled the professional class to monetize their virtue.

Chapter 10 is dedicated to Friedrich Engels, who studied in Berlin at the beginning of the 1840s. The chapter explores Engels’ short monograph entitled Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. In this work he gives a critical evaluation of German philosophy and speaks with nostalgia of the important role of Hegel and Feuerbach for the development of his thought and that of his collaborator Karl Marx. Engels claims that the radical nature of Hegel’s philosophy lies in its dialectical methodology. While it might at first glance look like Hegel is attempting to glorify the actual, in fact his theory shows that everything that arises in history appears at a specific place and under specific circumstances, and in time everything grows old and decays, at which point it is replaced by something new that is better suited to the new situation. This is a recipe for criticism and revolution. It is argued that Marx and Engels also further develop Hegel’s idea of self-conscious and alienation into a theory of class consciousness.