AUTOGESTION COMING AND GOING: THE STRANGE SAGA OF WORKERS’ CONTROL MOVEMENTS IN MODERN FRANCE
George Ross
France has been an exception to the trend toward statist definitions of working-class liberation in capitalist democracies. Anarcho-syndicalism was a lively current in early French labor politics, as in many other places. The fact that similar themes persisted well into the twentieth century made France unusual, however. Autogestion, a modern reformulation of anarcho-syndicalism, has been central in the most recent French discussions. Yet despite the unusual openness of French leftist political debate on nonstatist definitions of workers’ control, concrete results in policies and programs have been meager. On the rare occasions when reform from the left has been possible in France, statist definitions have predominated. An explanation of the liveliness of nonstatist leftist ideas in recent French life and the paucity of their concrete political outcomes is the goal of this essay.
Themes in History
As French labor moved toward the twentieth century, the precise meaning to be attached to general themes of workers’ control was still in dispute. Anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism provided one pole of this dispute—Proudhon, after all, was a French thinker.1 To revolutionary syndicalists, capitalists and capitalism disempowered workers in the workplace in the first instance, distorting workplace-community ties in the process. The most pertinent and radical forms of anticapitalist struggle, therefore, were those in which workers took back power at such levels, removing capitalists and establishing democratic and cooperative local control. Explicit in this was not only a rejection of capitalist exploitation in an economic sense but, perhaps more important, the coordinating and organizing role of capitalists in production (i.e., as managers in a modern division of labor). French anarcho-syndicalism therefore refused to accept the inevitability of what many others regarded as the defining aspect of modernity—an elaborate division of labor based on rationality and involving delegation of power to experts and complex organizations.2
In France, as elsewhere, more statist definitions of workers’ control developed as well. In these visions liberation from capitalism would come only after labor amassed political strength, which ultimately would be deployed through the state to work change. For those who held this general position, accumulating political power was the essential prerequisite for serious movement toward workers’ control. There was considerable disagreement within this statist camp about how to proceed, however. Reformists were willing to use political power to strike deals with capital for piecemeal limitations of capital’s freedom to maneuver. Revolutionaries wanted to amass political power in order to destroy capital in one fell swoop. The statist tradition was more modern than anarcho-syndicalism in its acceptance of social evolution and of the inevitability of the division of labor. Here Marx himself was most eloquent. Capitalism was not simply to be abolished but transcended, once it had performed its historically liberating mission—from localism, ignorance, and scarcity—and had become a fetter on the emergence of the true modernity of socialism and communism.
Statism and Leftist Pluralism
France did not escape the overwhelming drift of labor in capitalism toward statist definitions of workers’ control and management in the twentieth century. In 1920–21 two major ideological and political actors, sworn enemies of one another but both statist, occupied most of the available space on the left. French social democracy became ever more reformist over time, focusing on the need for nationalization, economic planning, increasing working-class power over economic decisions, and stimulating economic activity through state macroeconomic policies and social programs. French Communists were revolutionaries, closely tied to the Soviet experiment, who sought to “seize state power” and abolish private property and “bourgeois democracy” in the interests of “proletarian dictatorship.” Following the Soviet model, the Communists foresaw access to workers’ control through the substitution of centralized political levers and public enterprise for the market and private capital. Although the differences between these two political families on issues of political process and liberties were huge, from a sufficient distance it was clear that both were branches of the same general nineteenth-century tree.
The fact of labor movement division meant, however, that France resisted powerful trends elsewhere toward the unification and reformist homogenization of working-class politics. Disunity and conflict between Socialists and Communists created space for the expression, if often only weakly, of other and different definitions of the meaning of working-class liberation. Thus anarcho-syndicalism and other minority visions of social change survived ideologically throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Anti-statist attitudes associated with working-class Catholicism also survived.
During those rare moments when the left had sufficient social and political power to change France, the statism of the “big two” was what counted. In the Popular Front of the 1930s and the resistance-liberation period, the left in power produced classically statist reforms, initiating a package of nationalizations and welfare state programs (health care, pensions, schooling, family allocations).3 The French left was unusual in its willingness to establish a system of national economic planning, even if this was a joint product of the right and left and was pointed toward economic modernization more than workers’ control.4 True, after liberation in 1944 steps were taken to achieve a degree of workers’ control over the health insurance system (whose administration was elected by the insured from lists presented by the unions until 1967, when this system was abolished). There were also trade union administrators on the boards of nationalized industries, but they had little access to key information and decisions. Both departures from strict statism were efforts to plug token workers (more often, union officials) into the top of organizational hierarchies alongside controlling elites, more than anything else. The one measure aimed more directly at a more decentralized type of workers’ control was the creation after liberation of works committees (comités d’entreprise), which owed much to Vichy corporatism and Communist desires to create new levels of enterprise power.5 These committees were granted access to a limited amount of economic information about the firm, but they were generally shunted off with small budgetary allocations to animate social activities—sports, culture, and tourism. They became important financial and agitational levers for trade unionism but only the thinnest of perches for workers’ control.6
Left statism fell on harder times during the Cold War in ways that eventually fertilized the soil for the renaissance of anarcho-syndicalist views—autogestion. Left reformist optimism ended in May 1947 with the eviction of Communists from the French government by a Socialist prime minister. Subsequently both major families of the French left found themselves in difficult situations. The Socialists, who were on the American side of the Cold War internationally and were consequently unable to ally with the pro-Soviet Communists, were obliged to ally to their right to have any influence in the multiparty Fourth Republic. The political consequences of this were that Socialist reformism virtually disappeared as Socialist ministers accepted increasingly more conservative economic and social policies at home and involvement in colonial warfare abroad. The credibility of French social democracy as an agent for progressive change of any kind was thereby severely tarnished, while Socialist electoral support began to decline (from a postwar high of nearly 25 percent to the mid-to-lower teens).7
The trajectory of the Communists was very different. Aligned on the Soviet side of the Cold War, the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) retreated from the adaptative subtlety of its earlier alliance politics into a reaffirmed neo-Bolshevik identity. During its worst Cold War moments (1947–53) the PCF adopted an absurd personality cult of Stalin, and its own leadership carried out campaigns in favor of socialist realism and “proletarian science,” got deeply implicated in eastern European purges, and enthusiastically bought the worst Stalinist hallucinations.8 Perhaps the most caricatural and damaging event of all occurred in 1956 when the party refused to acknowledge the existence of Kruschev’s report on the crimes of Stalin (calling it a concoction of the bourgeois press, the “report attributed to Kruschev”) and then wholeheartedly supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Openings to Change
In the context of the Cold War the particular situation of a pluralistic left thus worked to discredit both forms of French statist leftism. Social democracy still talked Marxism and radical utopias, yet it practiced coalition-mongering centrism. The Communists, isolated in a purist, Marxist-Leninist, pro-Soviet ghetto through the 1950s, acentuated their commitment to the illiberal, undemocratic, and repressive “existing” utopia of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR. If statism dominated the field of French leftist discourse, then its specific forms presented by the two major leftist families left a great deal to be desired.
First reactions to this, beyond the small world of anarcho-syndicalist sects with ties to nineteenth-century ideas, came from groups of intellectuals. In many other contexts such reactions would have been barely noticeable. With Parisian centralization, exaggerated reverence for words, and the consequent strategic importance of the intelligentsia, the clubs and bands of intellectuals striking out in new directions have often had considerable importance in France. Attempts prior to the mid-1950s to break away from the Socialist-Communist duopoly failed, as the existentialists’ history and Sartre’s ultimate grudging support for the PCF showed.9 After the events of 1956 much more was possible. Arguments, a review put together by dissident and ex-Communist writers who insisted upon the problem of bureaucracy and the centrality of democracy for the left, was one of the more important early breakthroughs.10 An even more mixed group composed of ex-Trotskyists, trade unionists, and former Communists joined to edit Socialisme ou Barbarie.11 Socialisme ou Barbarie, which may well have been the single most important source of the renewal of decentralized workers’ control notions in France, emphasized the importance of anti-Stalinist, antibureaucratic basiste shopfloor organizing and placed great stock in the creativity and energy of ordinary workers. Other contributors to the ground swell of reflection on face-to-face democracy at the base were left-wing Catholicism, which had begun to percolate through the JOC and JAC youth movements (Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne and Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne); scouting, which (incredible as it may seem to North Americans) became a hotbed of young radicalism in the later 1950s; and the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC), which was the Catholic trade union. Interest in workers’ control in Yugoslavia also spread at this point among intellectuals and trade unionists looking for a “third way” between communism and social democracy.
The Algerian War (1954–62), France’s last paroxysm of colonialism, provided added impetus to the development of an independent left with an anarcho-dencentralized tinge. For various reasons both major leftist parties restrained their opposition to this very nasty war. The Socialists had presided over the war’s beginning and were thereby deeply implicated in its pursuit. The Communists were more concerned in this period with getting out of their Cold War ghetto, which they thought involved wooing allies to their right, such as the Socialists. Given the positions of the Socialists, the PCF came to advocate a rather careful peace movement. Quite as important, the PCF’s own working-class base, whose sons were being drafted to fight in Algeria, was mildly infected by colonialist nationalism. With neither of the major forces on the left willing to promote strongly militant antiwar activities, there was thus room for a semiautonomous antiwar movement animated by students, intellectuals, and leftist Catholics. This movement, partly for its own reasons and partly because it spent much of its time responding to the chilling anathemas cast upon it by the PCF, developed its own strongly decentralizing antibureaucratic radicalism. The personnel and ideas of the student and intellectual antiwar movement were to be of great importance to the rise of autogestion in the 1960s.12
Thus by the early 1960s there were numerous movements in France pointing toward a renaissance of decentralized workers’ control, directed as much against the unsatisfactory alternatives presented by the left’s “big two” as toward anything concrete. Social change brought by France’s postwar economic boom intensified such trends. France was transformed practically overnight from an insular, protected, agrarian, and underindustrialized country to a modern, urbanized, consumerized, open society. Demography, urbanization, changes in the structure of industry, the rise of a modern service sector, the electronic media, the universalization of the automobile, and a host of other things began to decompose the working class, which had provided the underpinnings of traditional leftist politics and trade unionism. New middle strata expanded rapidly, as did higher education. Old-fashioned habits and attitudes of all kinds fell under siege.13
This social upheaval created new political space. New people with new outlooks and goals, working at new things in new ways, sought new eyes with which to view the social world. Changes in France’s constitutional organization in 1958, plus consequent changes in the structures of partisan politics also created incentives to open discussion on the left. The coming of the Fifth Republic in 1958 brought a new electoral system and presidentialism (with direct election to the presidency as amended in 1962), which both undercut the amorphous centrist coalition building of the Fourth Republic and favored renewed left-right political polarization. Great pressure ensued for the French left to unite its disparate and quarreling forces and for the new constituencies created by modernization to choose clearly between left and right. The character of the right-center majority that formed around General de Gaulle in the early 1960s (and that ruled France in various forms until 1981) biased this latter choice. Gaullism, being possessed of considerable dirigiste modernism, pushed hard to prepare the French economy for international competition, beginning with the European Common Market. Yet progrowth attitudes and intelligent economic strategies coexisted with markedly conservative approaches to the social consequences of growth. Some parts of the new majority were taken in by American rhetoric that growth, in itself, would provide the solvents needed to avoid social problems. Others had more old-fashioned ideas and believed that social problems were a form of malingering to be dealt with in mildly authoritarian ways. Since the huge social changes fostered by the postwar boom were often painful, dislocating, and disorienting, this mixture of benign neglect and mild repressiveness was bound to fuel discontent from which the left was likely to benefit.
The Ephemeral Triumph of Autogestion
Autogestion . . . is not only the product of uneven development between structures of economic and political power. It is equally a calling into question of bourgeois concepts of democracy, defined as a formal system of representation, . . . a refusal of popular democracy characterized by the refraction of society into the state.14
While statist definitions of workers’ control and liberation dominated large party politics on the French left into the 1960s, both major leftist families, the Socialists and the Communists, had tarnished ideological reputations and declining political stock. Social change was rapidly redrawing France’s class map in ways that would oblige both of these families to rethink traditional appeals and approaches. The “big two” also faced a new institutional setting that pushed them toward some form of unification and theoretical and strategic innovation. French leftist politics was thus more open and more promising in the 1960s than it had been for a considerable time. It was into this climate that autogestion burst in May–June 1968.
Autogestion Announced
The major labor movement bearer of autogestion was the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT). Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who was astonished to learn he had been speaking prose, the CFDT had begun to “speak” autogestion before it was aware of it. In 1968 the CFDT was a recent descendant of what had been France’s main Catholic union, the CFTC. The CFTC had persisted obstinately after 1945 with traditional Catholic labor doctrines about the essential harmony between classes, consequently behaving in very moderate ways. Opposition to such positions spread within the union in the 1950s, stemming in part from the leftward drift of parts of French Catholicism later abetted by Pope John XXIII. After extensive internal conflict the CFTC finally split in 1964. The great bulk of it, led by the progressive former minority, resolved to “deconfessionalize” and became the CFDT.15
The new CFDT wanted to abandon the class-collaborative meekness of its predecessor but beyond this was unsure of itself. CFDT leaders were aware of the effects of economic modernization on the French working class and perceived opportunities to tap new support from this group. In general, strategic movement was dictated by two factors. To begin with, the CFDT had to construct a new trade union identity different from that of its two major competitors, the Communist-controlled Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the much weaker “business unionist” CGT–Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO). The CFDT wanted to be both militant and radical, therefore by definition unlike the CGT-FO. Yet it had to find ways to be both in order to distinguish it from the CGT, which was by far the most powerful union force in France. The CGT, subordinate to the PCF’s politics, ordered its mobilizational goals around generating working-class support for the PCF and favored statist solutions to working-class problems. At least in the early 1960s it also believed in the liberating prospects of a French version of Eastern-style socialism.16 It made sense, then, to compete with the CGT by devising a militant, decentralized, and nonpolitical strategic perspective. Secondly, this rough-and-ready guide derived from the CFDT’s competitive position happened to fit rather well with the tone of the maturing leftist Catholicism shared by many CFDT leaders and organizers. Leftist Catholicism favored face-to-face mobilization of a decentralized and antibureaucratic kind that was solidly anticommunist.
Events, plus these strategic concerns, led the CFDT to 1968. A limited treaty of unified action with its rival the CGT was signed in January 1966, leading the CFDT to refine its new approaches. The CGT was concerned with shaping local union struggles to contribute to broad national union concerns—big, general demands and campaigns—and against local struggles that followed their own parochial logic. In the face of this the CFDT developed a passion for encouraging local militancy to the fullest. Whereas the CGT sought to shape general labor mobilization in ways that might pay off politically, the CFDT was resolutely antipolitical. As a result the CFDT began to acquire a reputation for eager militancy and almost reckless desire to fight local struggles to their ends, a reputation garnered from its leadership of highly publicized, rather desperate local strikes, with the CGT usually looking on disapprovingly and apprenhensively.17
To return to M. Jourdain, such strikes and tactics had no label until May 1968 when the CFDT, in the heat of the moment, officially discovered that they were autogestionnaire. The huge strike of May–June 1968—which may conceivably have been the largest strike in the history of modern capitalism—added more to the content of the term, since there was a modest number of individual movements in which workers’ control over a plant or firm was posed as an issue.18 Autogestion, at that point, was defined in terms that looked very much like old-style anarcho-syndicalism—struggles for point-of-production workers’ control without much reflection on politics or general issues of economic coordination.
The other major autogestionnaire actor in May–June 1968 was the student movement. Here we need say much less, both because of the immensity of the literature on the 1968 student movement and because of the familiarity that most readers have with the general outlines of student movements.19 Demands for “participatory democracy” or “co-management,” particularly in universities and professional settings, were common to student-intelligentsia movements of this period almost everywhere. From such demands to their French translation of autogestion was not far. If the powerful antibureaucratic thrust of students was common everywhere, the response of the elite and the right-center majority in power gave the French case some of its particularity. Despite demographics and the expansion of universities, changes in policy, funding, facilities, and habits were slow. When the predictable student movement appeared, universities met the challenge with repressive ineptness. The result was a momentarily uncontrollable explosion of protest.
The specificity of the May–June 1968 student movement was the way in which it saw itself as revolutionary, in an anarcho-syndicalist way. One source of this was the sociology of the new middle strata (here the work of Alain Touraine is a useful guide). Equally important was the rebellion against the statist model of revolution proffered by the PCF. Because of its history of almost unbelievable ineptitude in dealing with intellectuals and students prior to May–June, the Communist party had managed to lose much of the great power and credibility that it had once exerted in French student politics. As a result many of the leaders and cadre of May–June 1968, if divided among themselves along the most esoteric of lines, were united in characterizing the PCF as a stolid, revisionist, Stalinized bureaucracy. The party’s predictably brutal and incomprehensive response to the May events themselves reinforced such feelings. Thus vague longings for nonstatist and decentralized radicalism natural to students were powerfully reinforced by antipathy to the postures of the PCF.
There were, of course, a number of writers to which the May movement could refer—Serge Mallet, the Socialisme ou Barbarie team (Castoriadis, Lefort, Mothé, Naville), André Gorz, Marcuse. The events themselves produced a tremendous explosion of new literature along autogestionnaire lines (often by the same authors). New vanguards of change were announced—new working classes, new middle strata, cultural revolutionaries—mobilizing around new anti-statist and antibureaucratic concerns in the interests of an autogestion whose positive content beyond such generalities remained elusive. Despite such vagueness, this new writing was of great importance. The radical intelligentsia was weighing in in an emerging political struggle against the statist leftism, particularly its PCF variety, which had dominated French leftist debate for so long.20
Welcoming Structures: The Changing Political Scene
What was the essence of this more general political struggle? Here we reach the heart of the hidden history of autogestion, to be found in the workings of leftist political pluralism in France. From early in the Fifth Republic, the Communists had begun to urge union de la gauche (leftist unity) around a “Common Program of Government.” After hovering for some time between leftist unity and a new centrist alliance strategy, the Socialists became more receptive to the Communist appeal, especially after the disastrous showing of a centrist Socialist candidate in the 1969 presidential election. With the coming of the 1970s a new episode of alliance between the two major leftist families was at hand.
Union de la gauche was designed to bring the left to power electorally. To do so, the left had to attract a substantial amount of new electoral support. Within the context of such general concerns, however, each major leftist party was betting on gaining the majority of this new support. The party winning this gamble would predominate in shaping the policies of the leftist government, which both parties were sure was in the offing. The PCF was much stronger at the outset of Union, yet it still operated in the shadow of its Stalinized, pro-Soviet past, demonstrating only the slimmest awareness of the need to change. The Socialists were substantially weaker than the PCF and burdened with an unattractive past. Since the general political situation after May–June 1968 favored the left, there was obviously a great deal of political hay to be made by the leftist force that would be best able to attract support from the newly radicalized intelligentsia and middle strata. The PCF’s strategic, organizational, and theoretical conservatism and its unfortunate record in dealing with these social groups in the past meant that the Socialists, despite their lackluster image and reputation, had a better chance of recruiting from the new forces.
The Socialists were the key to the new political situation. Beginning in 1969 and culminating at the Congress of Epinay (1971), the old Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) became a new Parti Socialiste (PS). The old party was effectively taken over by new forces, some from outside the SFIO and some from its own internal rebellious minorities. After much back-room wheeling and dealing, François Mitterrand, an ex-centrist, became the new PS leader, bringing with him commitment to a strategy of Left unity that led quickly to the signature of the Left Common Program with the Communists in 1972. The new party also structured itself internally in pluralist ways, such that the distribution of leadership posts and control over strategy were the final products of struggle between a multiplicity of internal currents, each seeking power and advancing different strategic concerns.21 The internal political system that emerged became byzantine in its complexity. More important, because of the existence of multiple currents whose relative strength varied over time, the balance of power, ideology, and program of the party were prone to change.
All of this meant that the new PS seemed open to influence by groups with determination and support, all the more so to the degree to which the complex balance of forces between internal currents was delicate. In fact, dissent existed from the outset to Mitterrand’s choice of a Left unity strategy. Beyond this, considerable discomfort existed about the specific content of the 1972 Left Common program, a classically statist documentreminiscent of the left’s resistance program that when not ambiguous, favored Communist priorities. On both issues an infusion of autogestionnaire forces might tip the internal party balance. For autogestionnaire forces outside the PS in the 1970s, the prospect of entering or working with this evolving party held an opportunity to de-statize the non communist side of the French left while endowing it with new strategic energy. At their most ambitious, these forces even dreamed of taking over the PS.
If the CFDT had found itself speaking autogestion almost by accident in May–June 1968, it quickly learned to speak it on purpose thereafter. Many of the labor market factors that had made the vocabulary pay off in 1968 continued into the early 1970s. Thus the CFDT intensified its decentralized, hypermilitant, anarcho-syndicalist union tactics, reasoning that there were large receptive constituencies of the French work forces, particularly in newly industrializing areas and among newly proletarianized groups. To the degree to which these tactics worked, the CFDT hoped to gain ground on the CGT, its ally-competitor. What was new after 1968 was the CFDT’s desire to formalize a body of autogestionnaire theory and practice, thereby making itself the principal carrier of autogestion.
Between 1969 and 1974 the CFDT made itself the champion of a large number of militant and often spectacular local strike movements, usually carried on under the banner of autogestion.22 More often than not, these strikes occurred in less industrialized areas of the country where dynamic and exploitative small- and medium-sized capital had moved to tap cheaper sources of labor (often female). Sometimes they occurred among unskilled workers in mass production industry (in the work category the French call ouvriers spécialisés). Such strikes often spilled over into surrounding communities, giving them a workplace-town character that accentuated their uniqueness. In such struggles, which usually had a strong egalitarian antihierarchical tone, the CFDT, at local levels at least, was willing to contemplate illegal militant tactics, such as “sequestering” (locking in) employers and occupying plants.23 The Lip strike of 1973 was archetypal. Here the CFDT led a movement in a dying Besançon watch factory in which the workers (mainly women) took over and “self-managed” the plant until it could be saved by refinancing.24
The CFDT’s efforts to formalize its commitment to autogestion paralleled these labor market events. The central moment was the union’s thirty-fifth congress in 1970 where it was announced for the first time that the CFDT believed in the class struggle and desired to help create a “socialist society,” both conclusions implying that the union recognized the need for a political side to its autogestionnaire vision.25 The model of socialism advanced by the CFDT was predictably a mirror image of statist and, more specifically PCF-CGT, positions, “founded on three indispensable and complementary pillars: autogestion, the socialization of the means of production and democratic planning.” If the CFDT recognized the need for political action, however, it was adamant in asserting that movement toward socialism would follow neither from electoralism nor from the maneuvers of parties and leaders, but through autogestionnaire local struggles, primarily in the workplace but also in the community.
What autogestion would look like more concretely was left vague, however. As various leaders announced at the congress, autogestion “was not a security blanket, but imaginative and open toward change.” Autogestionnaire struggle, rather than being aimed primarily toward the satisfaction of material demands of wages and hours and leaving the hard work of basic social change to political parties, ought “to begin to call into question the capitalist organization of the labor process directly.”26 Many speaking for the CFDT seemed to believe that the delegation of power and responsibility inherent in modern organizational life could be transcended. In the words of a young CFDT theoretician, “autogestion is a social dynamic before becoming a system, thus only the basic axes of reflection can be set out now.”
The CFDT also engaged in public debate about its new strategy with the CGT in the early 1970s, in ways that both publicized and sharpened its positions. The CGT’s postures at the time, more or less translated from the PCF program, were dismissive of autogestion as “vague formulae,” reformist by definition because they neglected politics. The CGT itself persisted in advocating a statist definition of workers’ control, which it called gestion démocratique, involving such elements as nationalizations with worker representation on boards of directors, planning, and strengthened union positions, but with the essential work of social change to come from party politics and national-level political reforms.27 In response the CFDT asserted that a triptych of autogestion, democratic planning, and decentralization were the only ways to begin overcoming what it saw as the three evils of capitalism—economic exploitation, authoritarian domination, and alienation. Any schemes for change and workers’ management that did not address all three of these issues simultaneously had a high risk of being exploitative, authoritarian, and alienating, as existing Socialism was and as France after implementation of the PCF-CGT program was likely to be. Autogestionnaire struggle, in contrast, would undermine workplace authoritarianism, generate new democracy, and create a “union of popular forces” pointing the way to a “new model of development.”28
The other major organizational bearer of autogestion from 1968 into the 1970s was the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), a small leftist party that had emerged from the amalgamation of split-off factions from both Communists and Socialists.29 By the early 1960s it had become a railroad station for the “new” left, bustling with the most vibrant—but also diverse and contentious—currents of leftist thought. Because of its pluralism and openness to virtually any strain of leftist ideology, the PSU found itself drawn to May-June 1968 like a fish to water, playing an important role in the events themselves and becoming at least partially converted to autogestionnaire politics in the process. The May–June period also coincided with the assumption of PSU leadership by Michel Rocard. At this point Rocard, one of the more important leftist politicians of his time, was a young technocratic modernist looking for a vehicle to pilot on his way to the highest pinnacles of French public life. Autogestionnaire politics fit his needs of the moment.30
At its sixth congress in 1969, the PSU, despite congenital internal disagreement, officially became autogestionnaire. The mirror-image process of defining autogestion against the Communists tended also to prevail in the PSU. “The essential thing,” stated thesis 6 of the 1969 Congress Declaration, “remains to organize effectively the power of workers collectively, and not that of state bureaucracy. Collective appropriation will progressively destroy the power of the existing possessing classes.” The answer to the conundrum of bureaucratization lay in radical decentralization of power, particularly in the firms (which workers’ councils would eventually run), with greater access to knowledge and “the socialist university” helping to achieve the general level of competence needed to make such things work. As Michel Rocard himself announced, existing capitalist society destroyed “social man” by dividing and isolating him into specific producer, consumer, and citizen roles. “It is these divisions between civil society and political society, between concrete man and abstract citizen, that we must end . . . autogestion is the means.”31 The major difference between the CFDT and PSU was the added emphasis the PSU gave to political autogestion (usually translated as “radical decentralization”).
After 1968 the significance of the PSU was much greater than either its actual size or internal disunity indicated. Rocard ran for president in 1969, for example, and won nearly as many votes (3.6 percent) as an admittedly weak Socialist candidate (together they won only about 10 percent). PSU activists were prominent in highly publicized strikes (Charles Piaget, the leader at Lip in 1973, was active in PSU, for example), in the renewal of grassroots politics through France’s new social movements and associations (e.g., ecology, urban activism, regionalism, consumerism), in the CFDT itself, and in the influential press including the important Le Nouvel Observateur.
All of this pointed the PSU toward deals with the PS. The PS needed a new self-presentation that would allow it to appear different not only from its statist rival-ally, the PCF, but also from its pallid social democratic ancestor, the SFIO. Moreover, it was particularly important for the PS to tap the modernist fervor and electoral support of the new middle strata that flowed from 1968. Thus there was an obvious place within the new PS for autogestion, for the militant activism of the PSU, the prestige of Rocard, and important trade union links with the CFDT.
The moment in 1974 the PS chose to address such matters was carefully selected by its very clever first secretary, François Mitterrand. Union de la gauche had done reasonably well in the 1973 legislative elections, with the PS starting an electoral comeback. Then in the presidential election in springtime 1974 occasioned by Georges Pompidou’s death, François Mitterrand, candidate of the United Left, missed winning by less than 1 percent. The stage was set for the autumn 1974 Assises du Socialisme call to integrate all, or as many as possible, of the autogestionnaire forces into the PS.
The Ironic Fate of Autogestion
The pieces of the puzzle are easy to put together. The word autogestion was on everyone’s lips . . . in the 1970s. Today it is absent from political vocabulary. Its disappearance has been as brutal as its rise was rapid.32
At the moment of the Assises, François Mitterrand was at the peak of his 1970s political strength. Mitterrand being Mitterrand, the Assises were designed as much to advance his personal goals as to do any favors for the advocates of autogestion. This was important, because the bulk of the PSU and CFDT autogestionnaires were hostile to both union de la gauche (Mitterrand’s preferred strategy) and the statist Common Program of 1972 (the agreement with the Communists that cemented this strategy). How much autogestion could be gotten from a party leader who held fast to such basic options?
Autogestion in the Lion’s Den
To begin with, the autogestionnaires who participated in the Assises (PSU members and other Rocard supporters, CFDT leaders and activists) were weakened by mixed goals and confused mandates. The PSU split about the Assises, for example, leaving Rocard, its leader, in a minority position where he could not officially speak for his own party. Moreover, some, if not the bulk, of new middle-strata agitation for autogestion had been dispersed into specific new social movements (e.g., feminism, antinuclear power, regionalism). The Assises therefore came to look more like a way of allowing Rocard and followers to join the PS than of integrating the PSU and autogestion. This, in turn, fueled well-founded suspicions in the PS that Rocard’s purposes were more personal than doctrinal. His stewardship over the PSU, it was suggested, had much less to do with the promotion of autogestion (in fact, Rocard was politically a centrist) than with establishing himself as a national political leader. The situation of CFDT leaders was more complex. They wanted to influence the PS programmatically, both in a general autogestionnaire sense and in more specific pro-CFDT ways (such that the PS would take CFDT policy proposals more seriously as it approached power). Yet the leaders knew that they could not carry the bulk of CFDT troops toward any explicit ties with the PS, since such ties would contradict the union’s commitment to trade union independence from politics. Thus they were not quite sure what they wanted from the Assises and, moreover, were unfamiliar with the shark-infested political waters they were entering. It rapidly became clear, for example, that Edmond Maire, the idealistic and rhetorical CFDT leader, and François Mitterrand, the florentine back-room log-roller extraordinaire, could make very little sense of one another, to the CFDT’s detriment.
In contrast Mitterrand and his colleagues knew precisely what they wanted from the Assises. Mitterrand was determined to maintain the union de la gauche strategy, because as of 1974 it had begun to allow the PS to outdistance its Communist ally-rival in important ways. Embracing autogestion, at least rhetorically, would help the party bring in needed new middle-strata electoral support, which the PCF had itself begun to woo through its own timid Eurocommunism. However, as both the PSU and the CFDT defined it, autogestion clearly had an anti-statist, decentralizing, antibureaucratic (and anticommunist) core. The juggling trick for Mitterrand would be to both maintain Union around the Common Program and embrace autogestion, since they were largely contradictory. For Mitterrand the path was clear. The PS would speak autogestion without taking it very seriously.
Mitterrand also had internal PS goals for the Assises that also had little to do with embracing autogestion. Introducing the Rocardians into the complex internal life of the PS might give Mitterrand a new coalitional pawn for his internal tactics. Beginning at the Epinay Congress in 1971, the leftmost fraction of the PS, the CERES (Centres d’Études et de Recherches Socialistes) group, had been an essential component in the coalition that had allowed Mitterrand to run the PS. CERES (which also talked about autogestion, by which it mainly meant local activism) was persistently the strongest PS advocate of close-to-PCF programs. Mitterrand understood, however, that as the PS gained strength vis-à-vis the PCF within Left Union, it would gain greater freedom to cut loose from the PCF’s programmatic desires. The first secretary also knew that such a cutting-loose process might well be the penultimate move needed to promote a Left victory led by a dominant PS. To take such external steps toward redefining union de la gauche, the internal coalition of the PS had to change. As long as CERES played a pivotal internal role, pro-PCF program positions would be well defended. The Rocardians, whose autogestionnaire politics barely masked anticommunism and anti-union centrism, would be useful new allies.
The Assises were a grande messe in true French leftist style, leading to a PS “project for society” embracing autogestion in vague and general terms.33 Michel Rocard and his followers were duly admitted as a new current into the PS, even if not warmly welcomed by everyone in the party. The CFDT leadership felt misunderstood and left with bitter feelings about politics and politicians. The following June (1975) the PS itself held a special conference to adopt its “15 Theses for Autogestion,” which were also vague and general, if nonetheless clear endorsements of autogestion.34 What would this mean in the greater scheme of socialist things? In the words of an astute former collaborator of Michel Rocard, “What is at issue is to know whether or not the PS actually accepts an autogestionnaire strategy as the foundation stone of an autonomous political logic.”35 Or, as the same author speculated, was all this just a way of taking tactical distance from the PCF as the PS got stronger?
Neostatism or Neoliberalism?
The answers were not long in coming. As the PS grew stronger electorally and as the left moved toward a majority, the PS began to claim predominance in union de la gauche over the Communists, with Mitterrand and others using autogestionnaire rhetoric liberally. The party began to succeed at winning new support from the uncommitted center and new middle strata, while also cutting into the PCF’s traditional working-class base. To accomplish all this, Mitterrand manipulated a recast internal PS majority, with the Rocardians replacing the CERES group. When the Communists finally concluded that union de la gauche had turned against them, they promoted a showdown over program in the summer of 1977, which led quickly to the end of Left unity.36
The split cost the left electoral victory in 1978. In the process the PCF (followed by the CGT) itself officially adopted autogestion, which it combined with a new workerist sectarianism for attacking the Socialists for their “right turn.” What the PCF meant by this was only marginally clearer than what the CFDT, PSU, and the PS had meant earlier. Communist autogestion would be a step-by-step movement to socialism via an accretion of local struggles. In an important sense, this also symbolized the PCF’s belated abandonment of its generations-honored “united front from above” political strategy that had been theoretically informed by a Marxist-Leninist vision of the state.37 With almost everyone on the left using the vocabulary of autogestion but with different meanings attached to it in each case, coherence had clearly been lost by 1978.
The left’s failure in 1978 and the breakdown of union de la gauche reopened strategic debate in the PS as well. It was inevitable that minority factions in the PS would press to drop Mitterrand’s strategy of leftist unity, along with Mitterrand himself. In contrast, Mitterrand insisted that the PS continue along much the same lines as before, being, as he said “unitary for two.” By 1979 with a presidential election in the offing, Mitterrand’s majority in the PS was weakening and he was increasingly portrayed as “archaic.” A hard-nosed internal struggle over PS strategy and party leadership between Mitterrand and Michel Rocard followed. The basic question was whether to persist in a union de la gauche posture or to turn toward a new left-center alliance constructed ideologically around economic modernism and autogestion. Underneath this lay issues about the advisability of statist solutions—those set out in the 1972 Common Program—to France’s problems, now greatly intensified by economic crisis, or the more localized initiatives urged by Rocard and his coterie. Something interesting had happened since the Assises to the Rocard position, however. Autogestion had lost its radical cutting edge and begun to move toward a de-statizing, decentralizing, deregulating perspective with clear ties to centrist American neoliberalism. The Rocardians were, in fact, labeled “the American left” by their CERES enemies. What was essential, however, was that the major spokesmen for the autogestionnaire current in the PS had redefined and deradicalized the meaning of autogestion. Henceforth, it was to mean little more than taking measures to allow French civil society to breath more freely against the state.
What was really at stake in this internal PS battle was the name of the Socialist candidate for the 1981 presidential elections. Here François Mitterrand ultimately outmaneuvered the Rocardians. But he did so only by renewed coalition manipulating inside the PS that resulted in a return to prominence and influence of CERES, the left-most current in the PS. The consequences of this involved reaffirming programmatic continuity with the 1972 Common Program—nationalizations, planning, and centralized economic voluntarism. Both the radical Projet Socialiste of 1980 and the list of promises in Mitterrand’s 1981 election manifesto were strong assertions of traditional statist leftism.38 Along with this came a renewal of “unitary for two” posturing toward the PCF (which, during the same period, was accusing Mitterrand and the Socialists of being agents of international capital). There were ritual mentions of autogestion in all this, but the bulk of pre-1981 Socialist politics was pre-autogestionnaire.
By 1981 the situation on the French left was full of irony. As a result of complex maneuverings, both major parties on the left had converted to autogestion, at least in language, by the later 1970s. Yet neither really took autogestion seriously on the eve of the left’s great 1981 electoral victories (though the PCF did begin to do so later on). The PSU as the major vehicle for autogestionnaire politics in the earlier 1970s had split, with its “locomotives” moving into the PS as Rocardians (though the PSU did persist thereafter as something of a rump). Once inside the PS, however, the Rocardians lost their taste for autogestion, gradually adopting a technocratic, anti-statist neoliberalism. Thus autogestion was like a bee that had flown noisily about the French political left after May-June 1968 until, after stinging everyone in sight, it died.
The evolution of the major trade union carrier of autogestion, the CFDT, was analogous. In and around the Assises the CFDT had assumed a posture of grudging support for the left. After 1974 the CFDT was strongly buffeted by political and economic forces. With the left contemplating its first political success in over two decades, the political atmosphere in France was unusually frenetic between 1974 and 1977-78. The CFDT, despite itself, was propelled into substituting quasi-political activity for real trade unionism in these years. At the very same moment the end of the postwar boom undermined the hypermilitant local struggles that had been the CFDT’s tactical launching pad. Thus there were fewer and fewer movements the CFDT could guide toward autogestionnaire protest. Swamped by politicization and coincidentally outmaneuvered by its rival, the CGT (which recaptured its title as the most militant French union in this period), the CFDT lost bearings and momentum.39
This, plus the collapse of leftist political unity, pushed the CFDT toward strategic reconsideration.40 Beginning in 1978 with what its leadership labeled recentrage (recentering), the CFDT called for total depoliticization and a return to rigorous trade union autonomy. In a logical (but erroneous, as it turned out) calculation that the left’s 1978 defeat would be long term, the union also began deradicalizing its identity away from the autogestion euphoria of earlier years and moving toward “pure and simple” unionism with much stronger stress on collective bargaining. Here the CFDT leadership was also responding to changes in the structures of trade union pluralistic competition. The CGT had itself begun to move toward pro-PCF sectarian isolation after the split of the political left. Because of this, might there not be new space for new “pure and simple” unionism? Finally, leftist Catholicism, which had pushed the CFDT forward for so long, was losing its creativity and energy.
The CFDT’s internal recentering coincided with the return of hard times for French unionism more generally. The memberships and mobilizing power of the CGT and CFDT both declined. Under growing pressure, the CFDT leadership changed the name of recentering to resyndicalisation and began to place more and more weight on a largely unsuccessful search for new collective bargaining. Autogestion increasingly became a ritual incantation. For the CFDT, as for other unions, macroeconomic and industrial policy questions of a more immediate kind came to the fore, as the very existence of work for trade unionists was called into question by geographical and technological changes in French capitalism. The analogy with the processes undergone by the Rocardians was close. For the CFDT, as for the Rocardians in the PS, autogestion lost its corrosive edge and came to mean a desire to revitalize French civil society at the expense of the state—in the CFDT’s case, through bargaining.
Conclusions
Autogestion had lived its time by 1981 when the French left finally did come to power. Derived from rejection of existing statist parameters in leftist strategy and tapping into familiar French working-class roots, autogestion had represented the radical dreams of significant forces in French society. Ironically, however, its adoption by first one and then the other major political force coincided with the beginning of its decline. Moreover, the social base for autogestion was moving on to other concerns. French new middle strata began to exchange collective political endeavors for individualistic cultural liberation. Where political urges persisted, single-issue focuses were the rule. The later 1970s, even as the left was about to come to power, were a time when powerful antileftist intellectual currents spread rapidly in the French intelligentsia. Leftist Catholicism also ran its course, with the CFDT, in particular, exhausting itself and changing its perspective.
In all this a strong new refrain arose from those who had once been the strongest believers in autogestion. Perhaps the problem in France was less capitalism than the fact that the state over generations had taken up so much space that French civil society had less and less room to breathe. If this was the problem, the solution was not autogestion but opening up breathing space. By the early 1980s Proudhon and Rosa Luxemburg had given way to Tocqueville! Autogestion, as a result, became a dead letter except in one rather unexpected place—the Communist party.41
The story of the French left in power after 1981 dramatically underscored this evolution.42 The first period (eighteen months or so) of the Mitterrand presidency was a time of concentrated and radical change. In particular, during this period three different sets of substantial reforms—nationalizations, government decentralization, and the industrial relations system—were enacted. The precise definitions of these reforms provided the ultimate litmus test of the fate of autogestion in France.
There were, here and there, pieces of evidence that indicated to careful observers that the French left had very recently spent much of its time debating autogestion. The nationalization laws included provisions for worker “administrators” (in fact, union delegates) on public-sector firm boards of directors, who received limited access to important confidential information about basic company decisions.43 Strictly speaking, however, this particular innovation and the structures of nationalization more generally owed much more to the left’s traditional practices than to autogestion. Moreover, given the difficult economic circumstances of the 1980s, the left in power quickly abandoned even the reduced aspirations toward broader industrial democracy in public firms that it may have had and turned toward using public ownership as a tool for restructuring and rationalizing large French industry sector-by-sector to make it more internationally competitive.44
Union administrators on boards of nationalized firms did play more active roles in discussions of company strategy, particularly since the economic crisis has drawn unions more and more into detailed issues of investment choice, industrial location, and employment policy. However, management still managed on the basis of criteria that would not have been be out of place at General Motors or IBM. Indeed, after much early leftist rhetoric concerning the place of newly nationalized industry in an industrial policy that would ensure employment and “reconquer the domestic market,” French public-sector firms were subsequently given strict orders to make profits and to behave like their private-sector multinationalized competitors. The right-center, which returned to power in 1986, began to denationalize and remove what little industrial democracy actually had come to exist under the left, rendering moot the issues of public-sector worker participation and autogestion.
The left’s governmental decentralization would have been considered a modest measure altogether had it occurred anywhere else but in a country like France that was plagued by hypertrophied overcentralization. Still, decentralization was an important change. By 1986 it had already begun to regenerate local political life on the new regional levels, with new party activity, new interest groups, and new local associations emerging. More of this will undoubtedly follow. Thus far, the effects of decentralization have almost all favored the political right, but in time this may change as well. Nonetheless, when the left decentralized after 1982, it retreated from any radical and autogestionnaire approaches. Instead, it implemented what had become consensual about decentralization across the entire French political spectrum prior to 1981, which was essentially a significant degree of administrative deconcentration plus increased policy freedom for local and regional governments. Thus, however felicitous such movement may turn out to be for France, its relative meekness will bring no new autogestionnaire Jerusalems.45
The workplace had been the privileged locus for autogestionnaire visions. Given the nature of social relationships at firm level in France that prevailed into the 1980s, this ought not to have been surprising. French employers, more often than not imbued with authoritarian or paternalistic values, had traditionally regarded workers as second-class citizens and objects to be manipulated. Unions, in turn, regarded employers as exploiters to be resisted at all times and to be dispensed with at the earliest possible opportunity. Partly for these reasons, France, unlike most other advanced capitalist societies, had never really built the kind of institutionalized, collectively bargained system that had established new rights and duties in industrial relations elsewhere. As a result, conflicts between capital and labor were ill-regulated. Contracts, when they were signed, were understood on all sides as momentary truces to be dispensed with when the balance of power changed. Moreover, such regulation of industrial conflicts as existed in France tended to come from the state and politics, a situation that overpoliticized the workplace.
Changing all this was one of the left’s main purposes after 1981. The left’s 1982 industrial relations reforms—the four Auroux Laws, so called after the minister of labor—were heavily influenced in their conception by the CFDT (if by a weakened CFDT more concerned with resyndicalisation than autogestion).46 Law I gave increased power and resources to firm-level union sections and personnel delegates while also reinforcing the position of works committees (comités d’entreprise). Law II contained provisions for obligatory annual firm-level wage bargaining and a clause that allowed majority unions to veto the implementation of minority union-signed contracts.47 Law III amalgamated formerly separate works’ committees on health, safety, and working conditions and endowed this new combined committee with greater powers. Law IV discussed workers’ rights in the firm, defined the legal scope of internal work rules established by employers, and established new shop-level “rights of expression” (implemented as periodic open meetings between workers and management to discuss the process and progress of the firm). The public sector, in general, benefited from even stronger versions of the same changes, plus new provisions for the election of workers’ representatives to boards of directors.
Four years is much too short a time to judge the effects of this kind of large change, of course. Industrial relations systems, and changes in them, are rarely a simple function of legislation, depending more profoundly on the attitudes of capital and labor and the balance of power between them over long years. Therefore, the various qualitative and quantitative indicators thus far gathered about the effects of the French reforms only reviewed the establishment of new procedures and habits rather than the workings of finished institutions.48
Some things were initially clear about the new worker “rights of expression,” perhaps the most autogestionnaire provisions of the reforms. Workers themselves, perhaps because of the economic crisis and shifts of leftist government policy toward austerity, were timid and skeptical about their rights. Significant problems arose quickly because of the lack of information available to workers, uncertainty about the role of middle management in the process, excessive formality in the “expression” proceedings themselves, and worker disbelief that “expression” would have any serious consequences for the running of the firm. There was some enthusiasm, in contrast, about the positive effects of new “expression” on intra-firm communications and the general atmosphere. The other important indicator of the workings of the reform, the firm-level “obligation to negotiate,” brought equally mixed results. Of the firms legally mandated to negotiate that had actually begun to do so in the first year of operation, only a minority had actually concluded a contract (since there was nothing like the Wagner Act’s injunction to “bargain in good faith” included in the law). Beyond this, works’ committees were getting more economic information about their firms and using such resources to accumulate more knowledge about firm decision making and strategies.
The ironies that accumulated in the first years of the Auroux Law indicated developments at a deeper level, however. Employers and their professional associations had initially regarded the reforms as a declaration of war. It rapidly turned out that an obligation to bargain with labor when it was weak, at a moment of economic crisis when little existed in company coffers to concede, and when no obligation to conclude such bargaining successfully had been enjoined posed few problems to capital. Perhaps more important, obligations to consult with workers meshed well with new firm-based neo-Japanese managerial strategies of the “quality circle” type. The Auroux Laws thus encouraged management to deal more directly with workers at that very moment in French managerial history when, in many sectors, French capital had decided that such direct dealing might be more rewarding than older authoritarian approaches. In many cases employers quickly turned new “rights of expression” sessions into tools to cut out unions on the shop floor and gain rank-and-file support for increasing productivity. In all, the Auroux Laws “were upsetting.”49 They most clearly did not introduce autogestion. They did, however, begin to move French capital-labor relationships away from high-level politicized conflict and toward a decentralized focus on firm-level issues. But rather than giving workers and unions a new foothold at firm level, the new laws seemed to have been quickly assimilated into a new management armamentarium of deregulation, pressuring unions and workers to assume greater responsibility for firm success. Few would maintain that the reforms have made no difference, of course. What is clear, however, is that the differences that the reforms have made and will make have little in common with the grandiose expectations for radical change held out in the autogestion debate but a decade earlier.
The meager autogestionnaire results of leftist reformism after 1981 were clear. Indeed, what was most obvious about the left’s reformism was that it was rarely even presented in autogestionnaire terms, a sign of the degree to which the autogestion debate had disappeared by 1981. Only the PCF and CGT even used the term with any regularity. The CFDT had developed new concerns with macroeconomic policy and the promotion of “new solidarities” in crisis, by which it meant work and income sharing of one kind or another, both of which fell flat as policies very early on. The first wave of leftist reforms were in fact strongly weighted toward traditional statist approaches. Where this was not the case, one found relatively timid (if usually needed) measures to redress the balance between state and civil society. Statist reforms fell on publicly deaf ears and seemed able to resolve few of the problems to which they were purportedly directed—i.e., nationalizations to economic growth. The left’s later and more modest moves, however tangible they might prove in the longer run, had long start-up periods and, in any case, could only have been labeled autogestionnaire by someone who had missed all of the radical debate of the 1960s and 1970s. By 1983 even this reformism had run out of gas. The leftist government leaned more and more toward the types of policies in vogue in other capitalist societies—industrial restructuring, higher unemployment, deregulation, allowing the market to decide, encouraging profitability—a major shift to neoliberal centrism, in other words. In this new posture autogestion was eclipsed, not by statism but by faith in the effectiveness of the market. What was most surprising in all this was how many people who had earlier sought profound change in autogestion had come to believe firmly in an anti-statist regeneration of liberalism.
Notes
1. Annie Kriegel, “Le pain et les roses,” in Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire et Proudhon (Paris: PUF, 1968).
2. An excellent general review is provided in Bernard Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). See also Peter Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971).
3. On leftist alliances, see André Donneur, L’Alliance fragile (Montreal: Nouvelle Optique, 1985).
4. Stephen S. Cohen, Modern Capitalist Planning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). Cohen does a particularly good job at showing how labor was effectively cut out of the planning process.
5. There is no really good study, but the closest is Maurice Monluclard, La dynamique des comités d’entreprise (Paris: CNRS, 1963). General information on resistance-liberation reformism is found in Jean-Pierre Rioux, La IVe République, vol. 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1984).
6. There are some fantastic hidden stories to be told about this. For example, the Central Works’ Committee of Electricité de France (EdF), through hard-nosed dealings in the post-liberation period by Communist Minister Marcel Paul, found itself endowed with a budget of 1% of EdF’s gross take each year. The result, given the geometric expansion of energy use in postwar France, was a staff of 1,000 with huge resources largely put to the use of the Communists and the Confederation Générale du Travail (CGT).
7. See Hugues Portelli, Le Socialisme français tel qu’il est (Paris: PUF, 1980).
8. Jeanine Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti (Paris: Minuit, 1983), on the PCF culture and science policies; Irwin Wall, French Communism in the Era of Stalin (Boulder: Westview, 1983); and Philippe Robrieux, Histoire Intérieure du PCF, vol. 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Communistes et la paix,” in Situations VI (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) and more generally Frédéric Bon and Michel Antoine Burnier, Les Existentialistes et la politique (Paris: Gallimard-Idées, 1971).
10. For samples, see Jacky Beilleret, L’Idéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
11. Socialisme ou Barbarie was a nursery for the intellectual mentors of later autogestion, such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Daniel Mothé, Pierre Naville, and others.
12. The most accessible source is Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les porteurs de valise (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979).
13. See Jean Fourastié, Les trentes glorieuses (Paris: Pluriel, 1984), for a quick review of the extent of such change.
14. Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Age de l’autogestion (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
15. See Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, La deuxième gauche (Paris: Ramsay, 1982), esp. chs. 1–5, for much of this history.
16. See George Ross, Workers and Communists in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), for details on the CGT.
17. Ibid., chs. 6–7.
18. For a thorough survey of the 1968 strikes, including those where autogestion was raised, see Pierre Dubois et al., Grèves revendicatives ou grèves politiques? (Paris: Anthropos, 1971).
19. The best reviews of the May events are to be found in Lucien Rioux and René Backmann, L’explosion de mai 1968 (Paris: Laffont, 1968); Alain Schnapp and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, eds., The French Student Uprising (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); Charles Posner, ed., Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1969); and Alain Touraine, The May Movement (New York: Random House, 1971).
20. Pierre Grémion, Paris-Prague (Paris: Julliard, 1985), provides a perceptive overview of such movements among the intelligentsia.
21. See Portelli, Le Socialisme français tel qu’il est. A. Duroy and R. Schneider, Le roman de la rose (Paris: Seuil, 1982) provides a spicy, journalistic approach to PS internal life. In English see R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).
22. For a review of these years in organized labor, see Peter Lange et al., Unions, Change and Crisis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), ch. 1, parts 3 and 4.
23. For a glimpse at such strikes, see Claude Durand et al., La grève (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975); Jacques Capdevielle et al., La grève au joint français (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975); and Danielle Kergoat, Bulledor (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
24. See Charles Piaget, Lip (Paris: Stock, 1973), and CFDT-Syndicalisme in the summer of 1973, especially June 14, June 28, and July 5.
25. The all-important report to this Congress by André Jeanson, then president of the CFDT, is reprinted in La CFDT (Paris: Seuil, 1971).
26. CFDT-Syndicalisme, Dec. 3, 1970.
27. Henri Krasucki, Syndicats et socialisme (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1972), summarizes the CGT’s positions. The CGT-CFDT debate is well-reviewed in Keitha S. Fine and Stephen Bornstein, “Workers’ Participation and Self-Management in France: Recent Political Developments,” in G. David Garson, Workers’ Self Management in Industry: The West European Experience (New York: Praeger, 1977).
28. Edmond Maire, Demain l’autogestion (Paris: Seghers, 1976), is the best review of CFDT doctrine. See also Rosanvallon, L’Age de l’autogestion, for a more intellectualized version.
29. Guy Nania, Le PSU avant Rocard (Paris: Roblot, 1973).
30. See Charles Hauss, Radical Politics in France: The Unified Socialist Party (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978).
31. Michel Rocard, “Le PSU et l’autogestion,” in Revue Politique et Parlementaire, Dec. 1972.
32. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Ou est passée l’autogestion?” in Passé-Présent 4 (1984): 186.
33. Assises du Socialisme, Pour le socialisme (Paris: Stock, 1974), esp. 29–32.
34. “Quinze thèses sur l’autogestion.” Le poing et la rose, no. 45 supplement (Nov. 15, 1975).
35. Roland Cayrol, “Le PS et l’autogestion, un beau texte ou un choix politique.” Projet 98, Sept.–Oct. 1975.
36. Interestingly enough, it was the issue of nationalizations that was central in the split, with the PCF asking for more and the PS moving away from those it had already agreed to promote.
37. We have tried to capture the turbulence and confusion of the PCF in this period in Jane Jenson and George Ross, The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
38. For a more detailed review, see George Ross and Jane Jenson, “Strategy and Contradiction in the Victory of French Socialism,” in The Socialist Register 1981, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London: Merlin Press, 1981).
39. See Ross, Workers and Communists in France, ch. 9.
40. Ch. 10 in Hamon and Rotman, La Deuxième gauche, contains the best review of this process at the elite level. See also the “Moreau report” introducing recentering in CFDT Syndicalisme, Jan. 12, 1978, and the CFDT Congress documents from later in 1978 published in CFDT Syndicalisme, Dec. 1978.
41. For a most interesting theoretical illustration of this, see Philippe Herzog, L’Economie nouvelle à bras le corps (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1984).
42. For interesting beginnings see John Ambler, ed., The French Socialist Experiment (Philadelphia: ISHI Press, 1984); Philip Cerny and Martin Schain, eds., French Socialism and Public Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); and George Ross, Stanley Hoffmann, and Sylvia Malzacher, The Mitterrand Experiment: Continuity and Change in Socialist France (London: Polity Press, 1986).
43. See A. G. Delion and M. Durupty, Les nationalisations 1982 (Paris: Economica, 1982), for an exhaustive description of the legislation.
44. David Cameron has done a good general review of this in French Politics and Society, no. 14 (Spring 1986). See also Jean-Louis Moynot’s “The Left, Industrial Policy and the Filière Electronique,” in Ross, Hoffmann, and Malzacher, The Mitterrand Experiment, ch. 12.
45. There are few sources where one can find out much about the effects of decentralization to this point. For one, see Jacques Rondin, Le sacre des notables (Paris: Fayard, 1985). See also Mark Kesselman’s “The Quiet Revolution at Clochemerle,” in Cerny and Schain, French Socialism and Public Policy; and Catherine Gremion’s “Decentralization in France: An Historical Perspective,” and Yves Meny’s “The Socialist Decentralization,” in Ross, Hoffmann, and Malzacher, The Mitterrand Experiment, chs. 8 and 9, respectively.
46. See Jean Auroux, Les droits des travailleurs (Paris: Documentation Française, 1981) and “Les nouveaux droits des travailleurs,” Le Monde, dossiers et documents, June 1983, for the original report and a review of the final texts.
47. France has had a pluralistic union movement, which has usually meant more than one union competing for precedence in a specific sector. This situation, in turn, has allowed employers to divide and rule by, among other things, signing contracts with the most pliable union it can find, hence this provision of Law II.
48. See the “Rapport d’information” submitted to the French National Assembly in early 1985 by the Commission des Affaires Culturelles, Familiales et Sociales (document 2681) for an early overview. See also Anni Borzeix, Danièle Linhart, and Denis Segrestin, Sur les traces du droit d’expression (Paris: CNAM, 1985), for a series of case studies.
49. The expression is from Michele Millot and Jean-Pol Roulleau, “Les relations sociales depuis les loix Auroux,” Projet, Nov.-Dec. 1985.