Well-Behaved Workers Seldom Make History: Re-viewing Insubordination in French Factories during the Long 1968

Xavier Vigna has argued that from the late 1960s until the early 1980s female, immigrant and unskilled workers in France practiced a variety of forms of insubordination in confronting rationalization of labor and increased insecurity in employment. Though this insubordination of workers was of central importance to leftist intellectuals after 1968, it has gotten little attention in recent accounts of the intelligentsia. However, these acts of insubordination were chronicled in a number of films made of workers then and later and has an important place in a novel commissioned by workers of one factory to tell their story. If the bourgeois bohemians today need reminding of workers' insubordination then it is in part because, as Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello have shown, in the 1970s capitalism learned from critiques of capitalism which shared a great deal with the culture of workers' insubordination to craft a new capitalist ideology that managers embraced in revitalizing capitalism.