ABSTRACT
Union militants explain their own difficulties and contradictions in a number of ways: conjunctural, structural, and ideological. Militants have apparently been spending too much of their time acting as mediators and negotiators and been too caught up in internal union activities to effectively express the will of the rank-and-file groups they represent. To begin with, the French Marxist tradition generally accords a secondary (not to say marginal) place to the labor process, primary attention being focused instead on organization of production. By neglecting the crucial role of the workplace in the labor process and by hesitating to recognize any "class dimension" in what goes on there, organized labor is preventing itself from challenging the organization of production from within, at the shopfloor or production-line level. It is necessary to reconsider the foregoing ideas in the light of the changes initiated in France since 10 May 1981.
