On Fri, 7 May 1999, rayrena wrote:
> I guess maybe the bigger question is: Why does a country with a population
> as activist and take-it-to-the-streets as France's have such high poverty?
Besides the waves of changes that Barkely describes -- as well as the recent Americanization of French working standards (esp. the huge growth of temp work without benefits) under the lash of the EMU preparations that Doug laid out a couple of years ago in LBO -- one thing that has always made France very peculiar is that its tradition of radical street protest has always existed side by side with a very low level of unionization -- lower than the US's. But because that unionization is largely in the public sector (which includes student unions), and because it has a party expression, it is as ideologically charged as American unionism is not. In addition, French culture (like Italian culture) has developed in such a way that people can put up with enormous hardships and still support strikers in a way that is inconceivable here. During that huge wave of strikes a few years ago that almost looked for a moment like it would topple Chirac (and seemed in the end to accomplish nothing, although it might have paved the way to Jospin), people were spending up to 6 hours commuting every day for over a month -- and a majority of them still regarded the strikers in a generally favorable light, either because they regarded them as speaking for them, or on the general principle that they were at airing just grievances, and maybe you'd like to do that someday yourself: the golden rule of j'm'enfoutisme. In New York, it's hard to keep public support up after a week of a transport strike. And most other public sector strikes are regarded as little short of treason.
Anthony Giddens, back in in his pre-third-wave days, when he was intelligently explicating other people's ideas rather than puffily trying to convince us he had ideas of own, explained this (in his book on Marx, Durkheim and Weber) as a function of the timing of industrialization: that for various reasons the contrast between village life and the organization of factories stood out particularly starkly in the Italy and France, and the result was a transparent legitimacy for community action that became an enduring part of their national political cultures. Similar explanations are made by Michael Mann, in his book on European working class consciousness, and in the collection edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg called _Working Class Formation_. (The latter has a great concluding essay by Katznelson called "How Many Exceptionalisms?" where he points out that as late as 1900, two-thirds of the world's working class was located in just four countries, England, Germany, France and America, each of which was quite distinct.)
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com