The French Workers' Movement by Mark Kesselman

Author:Mark Kesselman [Kesselman, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138325388
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter has traced the effects of the new conditions of the 1970s on the two French labor confederations, which forced them to rethink their understanding of women’s situation in capitalism, in socialism, and in the unions. One of these new conditions was very obviously the appearance of more than 1 million additional working women in the salaried laborforce in the decade. These women made demands on the unions to meet new needs. And women workers were very militant in their actions against capital, so that it was difficult to ignore their demands. A second new condition of the 1970s was the influence exerted by the women’s movement which challenged the unions to incorporate an understanding of women’s subordination to men into the existing analysis of the superexploitation of women by capital. The story of the unions in these years is one of reaction and adjustment to these new pressures at the levels of theory and practice.

However, what this chapter has shown also is that the notions each confederation developed about la condition féminine, as well as the mobilization practices vis-à-vis women, were drawn from its general strategy and changed as that strategy changed. Moreover, given the well-known weight of political factors on the French union movement, much of the strategic change was a response to changes in the partisan arena. That is, the unions’ positions followed not only from secular changes in laborforce participation and from the militancy of female workers but also, and much more directly, from the overall strategic situation which the unions faced. More specifically, the extent to which the CGT and CFDT were able to enunciate an analysis of women’s situations which incorporated the themes of oppression as well as exploitation depended on the extent to which, in the case of the CGT, it was able to move beyond narrow economism in all strategic realms, and in the case of the CFDT, the extent to which it placed at the forefront a developed commitment to a concretized program for socialisme autogestionnaire.

For the CGT, new emphases on changing families and social relations were intimately connected—in theory, in strategy, in personnel—to the Eurocommunist proposition force current. Therefore, once the post-1978 political situation resulted in the CGT being drawn into ever more defensiveness and proximity to the isolationist and workerist strategy of the PCF, and that current of strategic thinking was eliminated from the CGT, new understandings of women were altered too. They were caught up in the internal battle and disappeared, to be replaced by more traditional approaches. For the CFDT, the impossibility of unity in action for the post-1977 years and the disenchantment with “political” solutions, opened up the possibility of two readings of the recentrage strategy. To the extent that a leftward-looking reading was credible, the logic of women’s liberation in the context of the construction of socialisme démocratique et autogestionnaire maintained some promise that union would indeed promote real change in French working women’s situation. To the extent that recentrage really meant a move

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