ABSTRACT
The prime revolutionary class for Marxists, still the fixation of the PCF in the late Marchais era, has also been effectively abandoned. Party documents tend to prefer the term salariés (meaning wage-and salary-earners) to ‘workers’. And blue-collar workers now count for barely a quarter of those party members who are economically active. At the same time, the party has pitched for support among groups often left out by the old workerism, including second-generation immigrants, women, sexual minorities and (to judge from the enthusiasm of the PCF’s support for protests against high petrol taxes in September 2000) motorists.
