Etablissement : Working in the Factory to Make Revolution in France

When I think that the great Bolshevik leaders claimed to create a free working class and that none of them—certainly not Trotsky, nor Lenin, I think—had, you can be sure, ever entered a factory and, as a result, hadn't the faintest idea of the real conditions determining the servitude or the liberty of workers—politics appears to me like a dirty trick [sinistre rigolade].

—Simone Weil, La condition ouvrière

Like Marx, the youthful revolutionaries of the generation of May '68 have not committed themselves to the revolutionary movement and gone to work in factories because the proletariat acts, thinks and feels in a revolutionary way but because it is in itself revolutionary by destination, which is to say: it has to be revolutionary; it must "become what it is."

—André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class

Our action had only one logic: the factory. I wanted to put my head on the stock of the anvils [le billot des établis], to disappear to be reborn, in another manner, in worker brutality... . We venerated the people. We were intent on discovering on the lips of the voiceless the principles of reason. Their stammering protected us from ourselves... . We were strange shepherds who dreamed of being swallowed by our flock.

—Daniel Rondeau, L'enthousiasme

In the outside world the "establishment" appears spectacular, the papers make it into quite a legend. Seen from the works, it's not very important in the long run. Everyone who works here has a complex individual story, often more fascinating and more embroiled than that of the student who has temporarily turned worker. The middle classes always imagine they have a monopoly on personal histories. How ridiculous! They have a monopoly on speaking in public, that's all. They spread themselves. The others live their stories with intensity, but in silence. Nobody is born a semiskilled worker, you become one. And here, in the works, it's very rare to refer to someone as "the worker who... ." No. They say: "The person who works in the soldering shop." "The person who works on the fenders." The person. I'm neither the "worker" nor the man who's "established" himself. I'm "the person who works on the gantry crane." And my particular distinction of being "established" takes its place in a harmless way in the tangle of destinies and special cases.

—Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line

Robert Linhart entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), the summit of the French university system on the rue d'Ulm in Paris, in the fall of 1963. Linhart quickly became a favorite of his philosophy professor Louis Althusser. ¹ In preceding years, the Sino-Soviet split and the Algerian War of Independence had challenged the hegemony among French radicals of the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, PCF), known for its reluctant de-Stalinization and loyalty to the Soviet Union. Working with his students, Althusser was developing a reinterpretation of Marx's thought that could, he believed, provide the basis for a reorientation of the PCF. "My closest 'followers,' my students at the Ecole," Althusser wrote, "under the astonishing leadership of Robert Linhart," joined the Union d'Etudiants Communistes (UEC), the Communist student organization. ² The UEC was torn between, on the one hand, Trotskyists and the Sorbonne-based "Italians," who, inspired by Italian Communists' response to Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin, sought to democratize the PCF, and, on the other, orthodox Communists who remained loyal to the unreformed party leadership. The Ulmards held the balance at the national UEC congress in March 1965. Linhart told participants that the UEC needed to undertake a theoretical defense of Marxism, and the Ulmards took the shocking step of joining the orthodox party delegates to defeat the Trotskyists and "Italians." The Ulmards' goal was, first, to reveal that the "Italians'" eclecticism did not constitute a theory on which to base practice and then, having set forth...