ABSTRACT
The typical French scholarly approach to trade union issues in terms of congresses and official strategies obscures what is really occurring at the grassroots. The dominant pattern of practices itself is not shaped in any fundamental way by ideology, nor even by any clear view of the purposes of collective action. The basis of all collective action is the consciousness that individuals have of being actors involved in social relations. The labor movement in fact had to cope with a certain crisis, but a crisis limited, in the author view, to one aspect of the broader question, namely, the problem of forging new communities as a basis for new practices. Broadly speaking, there has been no sweeping change in the logic of collective action. One characteristic of the dominant class-based action is an assumption that the working class is necessarily opposed to the government.
