Representation and Displacement: Labor Disembedding and Contested Neoliberalism in France

Abstract

This article analyzes changing patterns of worker protest and mobilization in France, with particular emphasis on the post-1970s era of neoliberalism. It argues that processes of state-led disembedding of labor have underpinned major changes in the leadership, content, and class bases of worker contestation. Drawing on more than forty original interviews as well as extensive secondary sources, it highlights a long-term shift in the dynamics of labor’s political engagement, in which unions’ role has been increasingly displaced by broad-based, anti-systemic social movements. Protests have called into question the legitimacy of French capitalism and the state, revealing the dysfunctions of political representation with troubling implications for the stability of French democracy and the governability of advanced capitalist economies.