Suchergebnisse

Many historians have examined the French labor movement, but few have gone beyond chronicling unions, strikes, and personalities to undertake a concrete analysis of workers' aims in their historical context. Searching for what Marx called the "real movement" of the working class, Bernard H. Moss presents a sophisticated revisionist interpretation that uncovers a core ideology of social vision underlying the many changes and variations in French socialism. To define this ideology and delineate its social base, Moss cuts through conventional distinctions between artisans and proletarians and between anarchism and socialism to derive an intermediate category, the federalist trade socialism of skilled workers. Originally manifested in the trade movement for producers' associations and cooperatives, this socialism eventually found revolutionary expression in Bakuninism, possibilism, Allemanism, and revolutionary syndicalism. The social base of this movement was the skilled craftsmen undergoing a process of proletarianization. In The Origins of the French Labor Movement, Moss rehabilitates ideology both as a vital force in history and as a serious subject for scientific history. He proposes important revisions in our understanding of French politics and society in the nineteenth century and suggests a new approach to socialist ideology, not as abstract theory, but as the result of historical experience and process. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976

Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities, Vivien A. Schmidt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 326.Vivien Schmidt is a specialist on the European Union (EU) who, like most, believes that it has taken over most of the functions of the member-states, that it is a pluralist democracy superior to theirs, that it is necessary and beneficial and the wave of the future. The only problem remaining to complete the subordination of the member-states posed in her book is that their politicians have not yet found the language or discourse to convince the public of these self-evident and unavoidable truths.

Monetary policy since the Second World War has always been a politically and socially sensitive issue in France. It reflected the peculiar strength of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the unions and working class. Postwar governments relied upon monetary inflation, devaluation and administered credit to sustain growth and guarantee social peace. With the exception of the period following General de Gaulle's seizure of power in 1958, there was little choice for governments faced with weak, divided and conflicting unions, a volatile work force, and a united left threatening radical change. Where German governments responded to union challenges and the oil shock of 1974 with deflation, the French expanded the money supply. The divergence of French policy from German after 1968 made European economic and monetary union impossible.

France is perhaps the only country in the Western world which because of the predominance of class-struggle unionism has not developed a system of mutually binding collective bargaining. The Auroux Laws enacted under the presidency of Francois Mitterrand were chiefly designed to encourage workplace participation and contractual partnership between unions and management. This article examines their origins, rationale and short-term results to illustrate the dependency of legally-induced collective bargaining on the broader economic and political environment. Under depressive labour market and political conditions the reforms barely altered existing relationships. Their potentially integrative effects were vitiated by union weakness, radical opposition and the absence of material incentives for cooperation. While the reforms helped shift the focus of labour relations from the industry to the firm, it was a process dominated by management that left little room for collective participation or free and consensual bargaining.