JM

For one thing, the “party of the working class” has changed its discourse. It undertook a process of de-workerization, notably with the emergence of a “miserabilist” discourse in the late 1970s during the “notebooks of misery and hope” campaign.

After references to the heroic struggles of the laboring class during the Popular Front and Liberation, the PCF began to present itself as the mouthpiece of “the poor.” While we might understand this as the party’s desire to provide an account of the initial effects of the social state’s withdrawal from working-class neighborhoods, the focus on misery and want was out of step with worker-activists. They could not identify with what they understood as a belittling image. The PCF replaced the figure of the worker with that of the “excluded,” and the denunciation of exploitation gave way to the denunciation of misery.

This orientation neglected the aspirations — especially the cultural aspirations — of the most powerfully positioned segment of the laboring world, the backbone of the PCF.

It also represented a significant break in how Communist leaders achieve social legitimacy. Under this new orientation, they speak for the poor, without giving them power in the party and the state apparatus. They shifted from class struggle to poverty reduction.

A second development emerged in the mid-nineties: the PCF set out to address everyone represent French society in all its “diversity,” rather than targeting the working classes specifically. A class-based vision of society faded in favor of consensual themes like “citizenship” or “social networks.” They turned a plan for workers’ self-emancipation into humanist rhetoric, a rhetoric widely shared elsewhere in the non-profit and political spheres.

The problem was not so much that the PCF abandoned references to the “working class,” since that formulation is not as relevant now as it was thirty or forty years ago. What is crucial, I think, is the fact that its representatives ceased to reflect on class relations and to encourage the people who experience domination to lead the struggle. As a consequence, they have had difficulty addressing the concerns of today’s working classes.

In fact, the presence of working-class activists has becomes less and less important to the PCF leadership. Conventions rarely call for worker activists to have more power in the organization or municipal governments. There is less focus on developing spokespeople from the working class.

Instead, they approach the working classes from the perspective of electoral issues: winning back their members is now about winning back an electorate. The party solicits the working class, alongside other social categories, as voters, not as fellow class-members.

Motivated by their rejection of past workerism (often associated with Stalinism) contemporary Communist leaders tend to deny labor a specific political role as a class.