The “bloquons tout” (“block everything”) movement has called for a nationwide shutdown on September 10 to protest the French government’s policies, and Jean-Luc Mélénchon, the leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party, is calling for a “general strike”. This concept played a major role in the revolutionary rhetoric of the early 20th century before falling into oblivion. What role have strikes played in French trade union and political history? What meaning do they have today?

While strikes do not occur more often in France than elsewhere in Western Europe, their place in the history of the French labor movement is nonetheless unique. For trade unions, strikes were once a preferred means of improving everyday life, and also at the heart of their revolutionary utopia. In other words, they were aimed at the overcoming of capitalism.

Over time, strikes have become firmly established as a central feature of social relations in France, but their utopian function has faltered. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, like other expressions of class struggle, it has even been significantly devalued.

The disruption of the prevailing order by the workers

In addition to its role as a tool for defending living conditions and fighting for new rights, strikes are a primitive form of agglomeration of the working class, whose rise in power precedes and then accompanies the development of trade unionism.

When the right to form unions was granted in 1884, labor disputes, which had been decriminalized in 1864, were already well on their way to becoming a central feature of industrial relations. In other words, action preceded organization. Often, throughout the 19th century, action even laid the foundation for organization: unions were formed in the wake of social unrest, with some disappearing quickly once a strike was over, and others continuing to exist.

When la Confédération Générale du Travail (General Trade Confederation), known as the CGT, was founded in central France in 1895, it quickly adopted a set of values based on “worker autonomy” and “direct action”. Through its own struggles, independent of partisan structures and institutions, the working class was supposed to prepare for the “dual task”, defined by the trade union movement, of the prosaic struggle for immediate demands and the utopian prospect of overthrowing capitalism. This approach gives strikes a central role and tends to endow them with all kinds of virtues.

Strikes are seen as an education in solidarity, through the material mutual aid they often generate or through their interprofessional reach. They are also an education in class struggle, an “episode of social warfare”, as one of the pre-1914 leaders of the CGT wrote. This is why, whatever happens, “its results can only be favorable to the working class from a moral point of view, [because] there is an increase in proletarian militancy”. And if a strike is victorious, it is a form of collective recovery from capitalism, because it produces “a reduction in the privileges of the exploiting class”.

Finally, revolutionary trade unionists believe that a general strike provides workers with the weapon that will enable them to achieve the Holy Grail: the definitive demise of capitalism. This is the argument put forward in Comment nous ferons la Révolution (How We Will Bring About the Revolution) the only work in the activist field that describes in detail the process of appropriation of the means of production by the workers themselves, under the aegis of their unions, which then set about organizing a bright future.

A politically charged general strike in France never occurred and, thus, never led to radical social change. But such a utopia was not necessarily intended to be prophetic. Its function was also, and perhaps above all, to protect the labor movement from the siren calls of co-management of and support for the existing system, a project conceived in the last decades of the 19th century by the republican elites. In addition, maintaining a revolutionary course seems conducive to fuelling a “great fear” in the dominant order, which, to reassure itself, feels compelled to make concessions.

From the paradise of class struggle to the purgatory of ‘social dialogue’

While the first world war dealt the final blow to revolutionary trade unionism, two main approaches to strikes prevailed during the years of a split in the CGT (1922-1935). For the confederation of Léon Jouhaux, a socialist who was awarded a Nobel peace prize in 1951, the suspension of production was essentially a last resort to be used only if negotiations failed. For the CGTU, which was close to the French Communist Party (PCF), it could be a weapon that went beyond the mere satisfaction of economic demands. According to communist trade unionists, “as it develops, the strike inevitably becomes a political struggle pitting workers against the trinity of employers, government and reformists, demonstrating the need for a ruthless struggle that goes beyond the corporate framework”.

However, in trade union discourse and imagination, striking is no longer seen as a practice capable of promoting the principle of “worker autonomy” or bringing about the birth of a new society. It has lost its utopian dimension.

Nevertheless, a strike remains a major weapon. Until the second world war, trade unionism and the working class were not yet fully integrated into Western societies; the process was certainly under way, but not yet complete. Although gradually becoming more commonplace, collective bargaining struggled to find its place. Workers’ organizations therefore had to rely on a culture of struggle, which was almost the only means of improving daily life and temporarily disrupting the capitalist system of exploitation.

Subsequently, and until the 1960s and 1970s, strikes remained a very common feature of union practices, albeit for reasons that differed significantly from those of previous periods. Within the framework of the “Fordist compromise” (the exchange of productivity gains for purchasing power) and the institutionalization of trade unionism, strikes became primarily a means of managing systemic disruptions and promoting a slightly less inequitable distribution of wealth, in a logic of conflictual regulation of social relations. The act of stopping work became ritualized, as illustrated by the exponential increase in the number of days of action.

Furthermore, within the framework of the welfare states built up during the post-war economic boom, France and the Western world undergo a phase of progressive reforms which, on the surface, do not appear to be the result of a systematic and constant power struggle. It is reasonable to assume that, in the long term, this situation is partly responsible for the decline in the legitimacy of strike action. As soon as an improvement in living conditions appears possible through political action or through compromises agreed with the unions in the context of a “social dialogue” that is set to prosper, a shift is likely to occur that will relegate strikes to the status of a nuisance or an accident to be avoided.

It was then that employee organizations and their practices were confronted with, among other things, the effects of the economic climate (slowing growth, deindustrialization, job insecurity, individualization of wages, counterreforms dismantling the welfare state, etc.), the rise of liberalism – one of whose aims is to paralyze union action – and post-1968 changes in society (rise of individualism, decline of grand political utopias, etc.).

To this list of endogenous causes, it must be added those created by trade unionism itself. These include its distancing from the political arena and its role in this area; its inability to generate hope; and the contradictions raised by its nature as an institutional counterweight, torn between an obligation to oppose and a deep-rooted inclusion in society.

Delegitimization of strike action

In this context, the trade union movement at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries seems to have significantly retreated to a strategy of survival. This appears to consist of saving its legitimacy, if necessary by distancing itself from the mobilization of workers and, ultimately, by abandoning the idea of breaking with the capitalist order.

For the past 30 or 40 years, one after another and to varying degrees, the major labor confederations have also embarked on a path that has fuelled doubt. There has even been rhetorical delegitimization of strike action. In 1985, Edmond Maire, then leader of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (la Confédération française démocratique du travail or CFDT), said: “[…] the old myth that says union action is only about strikes is a thing of the past. Trade unions must abandon it.”

However, trade unionism based on “social dialogue” without leverage has never been as successful as that based on confrontation. In France, the major historical phases of significant social gains have resulted from trade union and popular mobilization. The Popular Front in the 1930s, liberation (la Libération) from German occupation in the 1940s, and May-June 1968 are striking examples.

Conversely, since the 1980s, characterized by the development of decentralized collective bargaining processes, the restriction of social rights has been steadily progressing. Except in November-December 1995, when a determined social movement, in this case a bloquant (blocking) and renewable one, managed to spread while sparking debates that were able to establish a link between professional demands and the societal choices they brought to light.

Throughout its history, trade unionism has rallied support and established itself as a social force feared by the ruling order, which, today as in the past, rarely concedes anything without feeling threatened. This has been achieved both through the utopian political project that it promoted, and through strike action, which it made a major paradigm.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Stéphane Sirot, CY Cergy Paris Université

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Stéphane Sirot ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.