WINTER 2025
ISSUE 1

₁ On Mediterranea, see Sandro Mezzadra and Beppe Caccia, “What Can a Ship Do?,” Viewpoint Magazine, January 2017, available at https://viewpointmag.com/2019/01/07/what-can-a-ship-do. For the general point about the mobility of labor, see Ferruccio Gambino and Dylan Davis, “The Revolt of Living Labor: An Interview with Ferruccio Gambino,” Viewpoint Magazine, November 2019, available at https://viewpointmag.com/2019/11/05/the-revolt-of-living-labor-an-interview-with-ferruccio-gambino.

₂ Walter Rodney, “Labour As Conceptual Framework for Pan-African Studies,” in Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution, ed. Asha Rodney, Patricia Rodney, Ben Mabie, and Jesse Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2022).

₃ Laure Pitti, “‘Travailleurs de France, voilà notre nom,’” in Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales, 1920-2008, ed. Ahmed Boubeker and Abdellali Hajjat (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008), 95–111.

₄ See Yvan Najiels, “The Demise of the International Proletariat of France: Talbot as Political Turning Point,” Salvage Magazine 6 (2019), available at: https://salvage.zone/the-demise-of-the-international-proletariat-of-france-talbot-as-political-turning-point. See also Groupe pour la Fondation de l’Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste, “Nos Concepts Politiques au Sujet de la Composition du Peuple,” La Cause Marxiste 3 (1983): 15–18, and Joël Fallet, Les Maos de L’UCF: Une Histoire Politique, 1970-1984 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2021), 73-75, 84–85.

₅ Olivia Harrison, Nativism Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (Minnneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 25.

₆ Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 92. Ludivine Bantigny, “Hors frontières: Quelques expériences d’internationalisme en France, 1966-1968,” Monde(s) 11, no. 1 (2017): 139-160.

₇ MTA, “Textes de réflexion et textes politiques” 1969–1977, Collection Géneriques, available at https://www.lesamisdegeneriques.org/ark:/naan/a0114845785048abaTR/ecea3cef8d.

₈ Natacha Michel, Roman de la politique, 109.

₉ Xavier Vigna, L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: Essai d’histoire politique des usines (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).

₁₀ See Marc Jarrel, Éléments pour une histoire de l’ex-gauche prolétarienne: cinq ans d’intervention en milieu ouvrier (Paris: NBE, 1974). The Gauche Proletariénne (which had close ties to the Palestine Committees and the MTA), despite its ideological excesses and ultimate disintegration, published several interventions on these forms of factory-based organization that are still worth examining: see the two 1972 pieces, “Renault Billancourt, quatre actes du contrôle ouvrier” and “Syndicats, comités de chaîne, comités de lutte,” available at https://materialisme-dialectique.com/la-gauche-proletarienne/. See too Nicolas Dubost’s reflections in Flins sans fin (Paris: Maspero, 1979). Robert Linhart’s The Assembly Line has a chapter devoted to the formation of a “shop floor committee” [comité de base] and the determination and perseverance required by core activists to bring various sections of a large plant together: Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line, trans. Margaret Crosland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 59–84.

₁₁ See Laure Pitti, “De la différenciation coloniale à la discrimination systémique ? La condition d’OS algérien à Renault, de la grille Parodi à la méthode Renault de qualification du travail (1945–1973),” La Revue de l’IRES 46, no. 3 (2004): 69–107.

₁₂ See Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, “La question immigrée après 68,” Plein droit 53–54, no. 2 (2002): 3–7.

₁₃ For an informed discussion of how autonomy spread as a concept and practice among radical groups in the period and the difficulties that ensued, with a focus on the Sojourner Truth Organization, see Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).

₁₄  Abdellali Hajjat, “L’expérience politique du Mouvement des travailleurs arabes,” Contretemps, February 2017, available at https://www.contretemps.eu/hajjat-mta-autonomie-travailleurs-arabes.

^₁₅ Abdellali Hajjat, “Comités Palestine (1970–72): On the Origins of Solidarity with the Palestinian Cause in France,” trans. Rayya Badran, in Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties, ed. Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin, and Francesca Burke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 55–77.

₁₆ “Plate-forme du Comité Palestine” (1969), available at https://materialisme-dialectique.com/plate-forme-du-comite-palestine-1969. 

₁₇ MTA, “Textes de réflexion et textes politiques” 1969–1977.

₁₈ “Dans chaque usine, chaque foyer, chaque café organisons-nous, unissons-nous aux masses françaises pour écraser le racisme et l’exploitation (Extrait de l’intervention des comités palestines à l’assemblée du 7 décembre 1971),” Fedaï: Journal de soutien à la révolution Palestinienne, no. 14 (January 1972): 2–3, available at https://www.lesamisdegeneriques.org/ark:/naan/a011378298959tv39hz/de0ab95fbc.

₁₉ Marie Poinsot, “‘Une idée revenait tout le temps parmi les ouvriers : pas de politique’: Entretien avec Driss El Yazami, militant des droits de l’Homme, ancien président du Conseil national des droits de l’Homme (CNDH) au Maroc et de l’association Générique,”Hommes & Migrations no. 1330 (2020): 25–29.

₂₀ Laure Pitti, “Les luttes centrales des O.S. immigrés,” Plein droit 63, no. 4 (2004): 43–47.

₂₁ “Dynamic: Pour l’autodéfense de nos grèves,” Assifa: La Voix des Travailleurs Arabes, new series, no. 1 (February 1974): 7.

₂₂ See “Pour un journal des travailleurs arabes,” Assifa: La Vois des Travailleurs Arabes, new series, no. 1 (February 1974): 8.

₂₃ See Danièle Lochak, “Les circulaires Marcellin-Fontanet,” Hommes et migrations 1330 (2020): 14–17. 

₂₄ Section Syndicale Penarroya-Lyon Gerland – CFDT, “Notre succès sera utile à tous,” Cahiers de Mai 36–37 (March-April 1972): 9–23.

₂₅ On Penarroya, see Laure Pitti, “Penarroya 1971–1979: ‘Notre santé n’est pas à vendre!,’” Plein droit 83, no. 4 (2009): 36-40; and Daniel Anselme, “La grève de Penarroya – Lyon, 9 février-13 mars 1972,” in Quatre grèves significatives, ed. Guy Lorant (Paris: EPI, 1972), 141–173. A recent discussion in English can be found in Burleigh Hendrickson, “Imperial Fragments and Transnational Fragments: 1968(s) in France, Tunisia, and Senegal,” doctoral thesis in History, Northeastern University, December 2013, 237–46. For primary texts from different acts of the struggle, see “Penarroya: Lettre des ouvriers de Saint-Denis aux travailleurs du trust,” Cahiers de mai 28 (March 1971): 4–7; “Penarroya (Lyon), Lettre collective des ouvriers: ‘Luttons la main dans la main aussi longtemps qu’il sera nécessaire,’” Cahiers de mai 35 (February 1972): 14–16; “Penarroya: Six mois après,” Cahiers de Mai 38 (November 1972): 23–26.

₂₆ See Matthieu Firmin, “Les Cahiers de mai 1968/1974. Entre journalisme et syndicalisme,” Master’s thesis, Université de Paris 1, 1998, 105–55; Nicolas Hatzfeld and Cédric Lomba, “Les Cahiers de Mai: partager l’enquête pour donner la parole,” in Les enquêtes ouvrières dans l’Europe contemporaine, eds. Éric Geerkens, Nicolas Hatzfeld, Isabelle Lespinet-Moret, and Xavier Vigna (Paris: La Découverte, 2019) ; Donald Reid, Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981 (New York: Verso, 2018); and Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives, 111–13.

₂₇ “Renault Le Mans: Le refus de la hiérarchie des salaires,” supplement to Cahiers de Mai no. 10 (April 1969): 6.

₂₈ “Le role poltique de l’enquête,” Cahiers de Mai no. 22 (July 1970): 13–16.

₂₉ Section Syndicale Penarroya-Lyon Gerland – CFDT, “Notre succès sera utile à tous.”

₃₀ Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 59. The phrase is Beth Henson’s.

₃₁ Linhart, The Assembly Line, 59–60.  

₃₂ I take this point from Etienne Balibar, “Plus-value et classes sociales,” in Cinq études du matérialisme historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974), 103–92.  

₃₃ Linhart, The Assembly Line, 80. A compelling reading of Linhart’s text can be found in Michelle Zanncarini-Fournel, Le Moment 68: Une histoire contestée (Paris: Seuil, 2008), chapter 2.

Few phenomena have proved as vexing for the labor movement as constructing effective channels of internationalism in the face of repeated waves of nativist reaction. The barriers to achieving working-class unity have been much more durable and persistent than the short-lived episodes of solidarity that cross divisions of ethnicity, religion, and employment security. The continued political currency of immigrant fear mongering has boosted far-right forces’ bids for power in election after election, in multiple national contexts. But in the face of hardening border regimes across the globe, the appalling rates of migrant death in the Mediterranean and English Channel, and imperial destruction in the Middle East, recent political projects are rewriting what relationships of comradeship can look like. From the Mediterranea platform that runs rescue and aid missions for migrants and refugees coming by sea from North Africa to Italy, to powerful instances (from strikes to ceasefire resolutions) of Palestine solidarity in the workers’ movement, to the self-activity of immigrant workers in the imperialist core, the constant reshaping of class formations and the fundamental “mobility” of labor has been at once an arduous task and an opportunity to investigate the efficacy of different organizing approaches.¹  

Walter Rodney, the great Guyanese Marxist historian and activist, once suggested that we understand internationalism in terms of concrete resonances and connections – as “building up” the capacity for political action across borders or within territories marked by ethnic, racial, or social differences. If we take that orientation seriously, we have much to glean from past sequences of struggle.² The problems that militants are confronting today in organizing among a multinational working class – fragmentation of social groups, language justice, fear of reprisal, dips in momentum, the drawing of lines from imperialist policies to the precarious situations that immigrants, migrants, and asylum-seekers experience in the workplace or other social sites – are not new. In fact, some of the most compelling examples of organizing among immigrant populations developed amidst a heady climate of anti-war and anti-imperialist movements. What’s more, the internal dynamics of immigrant workers’ struggles, whether from informal resistance on the job or prolonged episodes of organized action, reflected these difficulties on a smaller scale. The circulation of information, tactics, and general camaraderie had to pass through different languages and workstations.

In France in the early 1970s, immigrant workers and radical activists collaborated in several localized fights that threaded a resolute internationalism with a keen sense of the basics of organizing for collective action. Patient conversations and serious discussions on breaks, in changing rooms, in bars or cafes, or in people’s living quarters became opportunities to reflect on the exploitation that immigrants were facing on the job or in the neighborhood. At the same time, the commitment to changing these conditions drew inspiration from and channeled the spirit of political examples abroad. North African and Arab workers in the postcolonial metropole framed their striving for dignity and equality on the social and political terrain through well-honed reference points of anti-imperialism (like the struggle for Palestinian liberation), but also sought to chart and break down the divisions that isolated sections and strata of the proletariat from each other.

This circuit between a political perspective attuned to the impacts of global events and an approach to organizing that closely tracked changes in the social composition and combativeness of a heterogeneous working class has much to offer today. Although organizations expressed their strategies in differing terms, the fusion between a recharged workers’ movement and a reframed politics of proletarian internationalism produced innovative lines of action that wove together the singularity of concrete struggles, the trajectories of their participants, and the scope of their demands.

Laure Pitti has emphasized that auto workers at Renault in the 1980s insisted that they were “workers of France”: members of the working class that traversed France, which could not be reduced to a single national identity.³ Militants in the Union of Communists of France (Marxist-Leninist) coined and elaborated the idea of the “international proletariat of France” through their political work during this period to cover the same ground.⁴ This concept is useful for thinking about the interplay of common ground and particularity that one finds in most workplace organizing situations. When people from wildly different backgrounds are thrown together in the same space, the effort to build unity has to begin from somewhere – through inquiry, discussions, and meetings. This is the starting point for most organizing handbooks and trainings. When confronted with a set of dispersed individuals and social cliques, the pathways to unity can take several directions. While the UCFml deployed the “international proletariat” concept as a critical weapon against other left groups, we can also use it as a rule of thumb for seeing how workers and their comrades analyzed the composition of the working class and the practices they developed for strengthening their capacity to organize in conditions marked by segregation, parcelization of labor, and speed-up.

Through brief accounts and translations, we can examine two paths that workers and militants cleared in early 1970s France in response to the problem of organizing the international proletariat of France. First is that of the Palestine Committees (CPs, the Comités Palestines) and how their transition to the Movement for Arab Workers (MTA, Mouvement des travailleurs arabes) shifted their focus on developments in Palestine and the combat against Zionism and Arab reaction to a “mass work” approach that prioritized organizing and interventions at specific sites across France where immigrants were engaged in struggle. Second, a quick glance at the 1972 Penarroya strike in Lyon shows how activists with Cahiers de mai worked out a “collective practice” with a largely immigrant workforce at a heavy metals processing plant that encouraged self-organization and direct connections with other worksites. While largely eschewing the exact language of anti-imperialism, their approach hit upon similar dilemmas, namely how to translate and transmit resources and lessons learned from one context to another. 

—

On March 4, 1972, over 200,000 people marched through the streets of Paris in a funeral procession for Pierre Overney, a Maoist militant and former factory worker slain by security guards at the Renault-Billancourt plant during a demonstration a week earlier. Images from the funeral have become iconic, particularly that of Michel Foucault passionately speaking into a megaphone, flanked by Jean-Paul Sartre. The sheer size and density of the crowd is an impressive display of the power that mass demonstrations can have. At the head of the procession, beside the hearse transporting Overney’s body, participants carry an array of objects and symbols that capture the spirit of the political movements he belonged to. There are plenty of red flags and banners (one reads: “Down with company goon squads!”), a cascading bed of roses, portraits of Overney, and, perhaps surprisingly, several Palestinian flags.

Yet the presence of these flags in a country whose armed forces had recently been routed in bitter anticolonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria was no accident. Strong currents of radical opposition to the legacy of French colonization and the ongoing, devastating consequences of imperial militarism and national oppression the world over had solidified through the 1960s. As the historian Olivia Harrison explains, Palestinian liberation would serve as a “rallying cry” for different layers of the anti-imperialist movement in France.⁵ Palestine in this moment held an emblematic status, which allowed different social groups, including workers who hailed from France’s former colonies, to imbue meaning into their respective causes. Through the Palestinian example, other fights could be waged.

Three key developments in French society during the early 1970s converged at the Overney funeral. First, the efforts by radical organizations to support and draw awareness to international struggles. Kristin Ross has shown how in the mid- to late-1960s, the Vietnam Base Committees (CVB) had previously pioneered a type of anti-imperialist “field-work” that prioritized sustained contact and implantation in working-class neighborhoods, as well as a political “style” that was founded in listening, investigation, dialogue, and deliberate organizing.⁶ Activists in the CPs would describe this kind of “mass work” as “building on the new,” enabling those recently politicized, those “ready to organize,” to “be able to take the initiative.”⁷ Mass work entailed a sustained proximity, a sense of trust and equality, and even comradely intimacy between those involved. For Natacha Michel of the UCFml, mass work meant,

being among the people in the banlieues, the poor neighborhoods, the foyers, listening to them, asking them questions, understanding what they aspire to, how to reach the objectives they give themselves, creating a form of organization that is their own and which they entirely control, without being bound to other people or those who support them, without reference to whatever party – such was our ambition. We thereby offered them a free form of organization, according to their extent and strength [force], even if we helped them discover the latter, their strength, and they were appreciative.⁸

Second, a pattern of “workers’ insubordination” gained momentum after the events of May 1968, which featured fierce battles over workplace conditions and labor discipline across several industries. While a good deal of this insubordination was informal, much of it was directed through organizational forms that allowed for flexibility and coordination. The main structure was the committee, like those seen in the anti-imperialist movement and the “action committees” of 1968. While those committees were usually based in neighborhoods, the committees that arose within workplaces had their own nomenclature: struggle committees, shop committees, assembly line committees, rank-and-file committees, and strike committees.⁹ They were usually comprised of committed activists (some of them établis, radicals who had entered large manufacturing sites to agitate and organize on the job), organic leaders, and a disparate mix of co-workers. These committees functioned at different scales, were assigned specific tasks, and existed for unpredictable lengths of time.¹⁰ But committees enable a stable core of militants to cohere, find a working rhythm, and establish outposts for collective discussion and planning in workplaces large and small.

Lastly came the rising visibility of recent immigrants to France, particularly from North Africa, who asserted their presence as workers and political protagonists. They were mainly employed as semi-skilled or unskilled workers and locked into the lowest job categories.¹¹ Some of the most significant post-May 1968 labor actions were sparked by the self-activity of immigrant workers of different nationalities, both inside and outside trade union channels. The strength of these struggles derived from how their participants connected these overlapping threads. But at the same time, immigration exploded as a live-wire political, social, and cultural issue. All sorts of actors and forces capitalized on it, adopting openly racist and nativist rhetoric. Fear of violent reprisals and police surveillance became a constant feature of daily life for the immigrant populations across France. 

Nineteen seventy-two, the year of Overney’s death, is a useful marker in this sequence. In early February, the French government, led by a conservative Gaullist coalition, announced the coming enforcement of the Marcellin-Fontanet circulars. These decrees would tighten undocumented migrants’ paths to regularization and render the issuance of residence permits contingent on verified employment contracts and housing.

Released in close succession in January 1972, the name of the circulars referred to their primary authors: Marcellin was the Interior Minister and Fontanet was the Minister of Labor. These decrees showed that a hardline border regime seeking to control all aspects of the immigration process and a labor policy protective of “French nationals” operated hand-in-hand. The already precarious employment agreements that migrants worked under, often without union protection, gained another layer of insecurity. Owners or managers could withhold employment documents, issue temporary papers that did not hold legal weight, or provide insalubrious, barrack-like housing to migrants, which could also prompt expulsion from the country. Several important labor actions took place throughout the next two years in response, and workers also engaged in hunger strikes.¹² The common demand was for an immediate granting of work, residence, and travel documents to all immigrants already in France. The Marcellin-Fontanet circulars set the backdrop and pace for organizing among international populations in the country until the closure of the border in 1974. They demonstrated how restrictive state immigration policies, employers, and a social atmosphere of racist violence against migrants could provide a risky, but generative context for political work.

A central trait of the political work conducted within and through these immigrant workers’ struggles was a redefinition of class autonomy. At one level, autonomy was defined in terms of the capacity that a specific group possessed to organize and carry out its own activities. At another level, it delimited a goal: resistance to the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, especially managerial strategies that aimed to incorporate workers’ consent and knowledge into the production process, as well as a relationship of independence vis-à-vis certain institutions, like trade unions or political parties.¹³ The Palestine Committees/MTA experience would deepen these organizational and political elements of the definition of autonomy. As Abdellali Hajjat notes, North African and Arab workers’s encounter with the realities of a French immigration system imbued with the structural remnants of colonialism, the societal and cultural demands of integration, exclusion from syndical or political life, and general isolation all led to a very specific meaning and expressions of autonomy among them.¹⁴

The platform of the Palestine Committees thus transposed the import of this revolutionary struggle against an occupying force to the situation in France, as an example and leading edge of the global revolution. Coordinating committees were established in neighborhoods with large Arab and North African populations throughout France, whose constituents had themselves experienced political repression or the power of movements for national self-determination in their own countries. The basic idea would be to set up a relay: by spreading information about the latest developments in the Middle East and holding assemblies about their consequences, an oppositional fuse could be lit in the postcolonial metropole. The argument was explicit: in an internal document from 1970, members of the CPs write that “all support given to a people in struggle against imperialism is an important contribution to the reversal of an unjust social order in our own country.” This orientation required that Palestine Committees had to be formed and strengthened “in living quarters and workplaces, in neighborhoods, factories, offices, colleges, schools.”¹⁷ CPs acted as springboards in specific areas of urban France.

In 1971-1972, with the official implementation of the Marcellin-Fontanet circulars and involvement in anti-racist movements like the justice campaign for Djellali Ben Ali, an Algerian teenager killed by the caretaker of the apartment complex he lived in, the Palestine Committees underwent a shift. The heavy emphasis on principled commitments and displays of global solidarity with events elsewhere, from Palestine to Egypt to Algeria, became more interwoven with concrete situations of organizing. Political bodies built up for anti-imperialist support morphed into bases for other kinds of outreach. Militants in the Paris and Marseille CPs called for these bodies to be transformed from “agitational groups” into an “organization of the broad Arab masses” whose cellular components would be “groups of political life” [groupes de vie politique] located around dwellings, cafes, outside of workplaces, anywhere people could gather, converse, and listen. A network of contacts in plants, construction yards, and other worksites also emerged. The MTA was created out of these meeting points, in response to the turbulence of social struggles where comrades were located.

One can see this shift in the articles covered in the CP publication, Fedaï. Fedaï often ran reports, profiles, and interviews from the frontlines of the Middle East or the PLO’s activities in France. Over time, however, Fedaï articles would increasingly focus on the organizing that the committees were doing on the ground. A feature in January 1972 covered a mass assembly that the group held during a day of protest in the Goutte d’Or neighborhood over Djellali’s murder (the article’s title: “Organize ourselves in every factory, every hostel, every cafe”). In a sidebar, a delegate from the assembly describes the benefits of patience in organizing:

It is crucial to trust the workers of the neighborhood. This must be instilled in everyone. Every worker awaits the sign that lets them see whether you trust them. For example: you schedule a meeting. The worker doesn’t come right away. If necessary, you have to wait for them several times; and if it comes down to it, go look for them where you know you can usually find them; this is how they will come.¹⁸

Driss El Yazami, an MTA member in the Marseille region, has recounted the organization’s approach to engaging and organizing in the community:

The militant culture of the time required “linking up with the popular masses.” Practically, in the Midi anyway, this meant going every evening to see the workers in their living quarters, their hostels, for around two hours, to conduct what we called in our jargon an “intervention”: sell the paper, discuss current events, let them know about a film screening or demonstration. Each militant had their area, their neighborhood that they had to regularly cover, then start again. Weekends, on the other hand, were devoted to marches: we would go as a group to participate in actions together but also, often, to give speeches, usually broken up by a police patrol or hostile interruption by members of the Amicale des Algériens, the official organization. We also had to go to the factory gates very early in the morning, at the hiring hall or during a strike. But that was more complicated. The CGT dockworkers’ union would not allow you to hand out leaflets at the port of Marseille.¹⁹

When the MTA launched their new publication, Al-Assifa (named after Fatah’s military wing) a few months later in 1972, the subtitle read “support for the struggles of the Arab masses,” and carried a front-page analysis of a strike by hotel workers in Aix-en-Provence. Al-Assifa, released in both Arabic and French editions, provided snapshots of shop floor actions taking place in France across several manufacturing industries in which migrant workers from North Africa – Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya – took the lead. These sectors included auto, rubber, construction, electrical assembly, and paper, to name a few. Walkouts, extended strikes, slowdowns, and sickouts were all deployed to fight harsh working conditions, health and safety hazards, discriminatory pay and job structures, and outright hostility toward migrant workers from bosses and managers. Laure Pitti summarizes the “tryptic” characteristic of these conflicts: they were often waged at the level of the “atelier,” the specific department or workshop; they were often hard-fought battles against obstinate opponents; and they were often organized “at a distance” from the trade unions.²⁰

Al-Assifa also released supplements to help workers navigate the legal challenges they faced and publicized how workers in other locations had undertaken struggles for labor and residence papers. Interviews and testimonials with worker militants give a sense of the social fabric and emotional substrate they had to construct for themselves in order to keep their strikes going. The opening lines of an account of an intense strike at the Dynamic rubber manufacturing plant in Ormoy-Corbeil, southeast of Paris, which featured a cafeteria occupation, sabotage, and “boss-napping,” shows the depth at which MTA militants analyzed their struggles:

It all started in “Mixing and Cylinders.” “Mixing”: this is the department where you come out completely blackened, covered in rubber particles, your lungs bursting. Dynamic is a plant where “you lose your health: we cannot keep working in such a dirty plant. The ventilation spews debris from the machines used in rubber preparation onto the floor. There is no ventilation for sucking out the powders that fall back into the room,” so the workers breathe in the poison. This is the reason why workers don’t stay long at Dynamic. These remarks are typical for workers in the plant. 

… 220 immigrant workers – Portuguese, Yugoslavian, and above all Arab workers, as well as French workers, men and women, toil in the Dynamic hellhole.²¹

Workers’ own commentaries are interspersed with depictions of the ins and outs of strike organizing. In these report-backs we can detect an important rule for MTA militants that overlapped with other political tendencies: to always be à l’écoute, to always be listening to what other workers are saying to pick up signals of their frustrations and desires for change. MTA would continue to amplify the resonances between these signals and the struggles of Arab peoples elsewhere. The international proletariat had advanced fronts, historical knots, and political ties that needed to be reinforced.²²

The Cahiers de Mai is a group that deserves greater attention.²⁶ Their general approach to labor organizing, knowledge production, writing, and the distribution of texts, pamphlets, videos, and tape recordings was one of the most innovative to emerge from the May 1968 events. With a firm emphasis on workers’ autonomy, the group looked to assist struggles at the plant or factory level. For them, “political work was not just a matter of dispensing broad political explanations in a leaflet, or denouncing the maneuvers by union leadership”; rather, it required “being attentive to what is happening in the enterprise, providing a wider dimension to the struggles developing there.”²⁷ Inquiry or investigation was viewed as a collective act that could allow workers to “define the subterranean truths” and “new ideas” expressed in their struggles, broadcast them to a wider audience, and forge connections with other worksites in the same industry, or beyond. Workers’ inquiry, understood as an ongoing process, could open onto a “dynamic process of comprehension and organization.”²⁸

The Penarroya struggle began when the workers at the Saint-Denis Penarroya plant, located in a Paris banlieue, waged a 17-day strike (including a steady schedule of mass assemblies, occupations, solidarity actions by miners in the south of France, and direct challenges to racist regulations regarding who could serve as union delegates) for a raise and health premium. They sent a letter to other Penarroya plants in Lyon and Escaudœuvres informing them of their fight and calling for company-wide coordination. The Lyon workers responded with their own letter, which they also recorded on a cassette tape in Arabic so that their Penarroya colleagues could hold listening sessions.

The Lyon plant would take the lead in the next phase. They took up the call from Saint-Denis and drew up their own list of demands. Primary among them was the issue of health and safety: occupational lead poisoning was a constant threat, and the firm did not provide adequate medical care. A worker had also recently died on the job after being crushed by a furnace lid, held up by a faulty chain. Management tried to cover up the cause. The workers’ response was to craft a set of principles and basic tasks that would underlie their experience during the strike action. This “collective practice” ensured that they maintained direction over all aspects of their campaign. The activists from the Cahiers de Mai provided technical support by solidifying contacts, publicizing the struggle in its pages, setting up a support committee that launched inquiries, shooting film, and tracking down technical reports. The organizational processes and militant initiative for the eventual 35-day strike lay squarely with the workers’ analysis and decision making.

The strategic takeaways from the Penarroya struggle, drafted by Lyon workers and released in an issue of Cahiers de Mai, are worth quoting at length.

Of course, everything was far from perfect in the preparation and execution of the strike, and it would be dangerous to present it as an “example” or “model” able to be translated here and there. The existence of “models” of this type, which make it possible to “multiply” struggles the same way Jesus “multiplied” bread and fish, is currently a widespread illusion among far-left groups.

It is above all a matter of determining, in the most precise way possible, what has been produced by the specific conditions of a struggle, which can only very rarely be reproduced. In this strike the part played by specific conditions is doubtless significant. 

But the present fragmentation of struggles stems from the lack of an overall political solution adhering to the aspirations of wage workers and adapted to our time and national context. Workers’ desire in this situation to retain the maximum degree of control over their struggles by keeping them within a local, even categorical framework [cadre], has often led us to overestimate the significance of specific conditions, to develop a “parochialism” [esprit de clocher] that prevents us from absorbing the experience of others. 

For example, the workers of the Lyon Penarroya plant are immigrant workers, they are relatively few in number … Does this mean that their collective practice of information and liaisons, of organization and execution of their strike, and the way in which they prepared, directed, and controlled the support effort for this strike, does not offer useful indications for the workers of the Creusot factory in Loire des Dunes, the railway workers and conductors of the Paris metro, and still many others? It’s obviously up to the workers to decide. In this arena, assertions have little effect on the present situation.²⁹

The Penarroya example offers another vantage point for how the heterogeneous sections of the international proletariat can converge or fuse, if only fleetingly. Through the constant exchange of information and experiences of struggle, the dispersed elements of the new working-class combativity could increase their capacity to think and act collectively. The working groups of the Cahiers de Mai would only provide the “frame and occasion” for this protagonism to develop and find footholds.³⁰

In his 1978 memoir, Robert Linhart, a trained sociologist who worked at a Citroën plant outside Paris in the wake of the 1968 events, depicts the deep-seated atomization that can overpower any preconceived notions of working-class unity:

But [at Citroën] this entry “into the working class” disintegrates into a vast number of small individual situations among which I can’t find a solid footing. These very words, “the working class,” don’t have the same immediate meaning to me as they had in the past. Not that I’ve come to doubt that they embrace a profound reality, but the variety and mobility of this semiskilled population into which I’ve been thrown have upset me, submerged me. Everyone here is a case. Everyone has their own story. Everyone chews over their tactics and in his own way tries to find an exit. How can I find a direction in this semi-penitentiary, indefinitely provisional universe[?]³¹

Linhart discerns a feeling in this passage that is probably familiar to anyone who has attempted to organize their workplace. The common ground that is the selling of one’s labor-power for a wage quickly becomes clouded by an infinite number of differences, at the level of language, dispositions, social ties, and life stations. It can be difficult to know where to begin. What Linhart outlines, and what the concept of the international proletariat tries to grasp, is that the reality of class and class struggle is best pictured not in terms of shared features but as a moving system of differences and divisions.³² Linhart breaks through these differences, or at least traverses them, through inquiry and struggle. The first sections of the book are devoted to the observation of the division of labor in the shops along the assembly line: the segmentations, the methods of control, but also the cracks in the edifice where work groups can communicate and scheme. In the next movement Linhart discovers an issue to agitate around, namely the company’s attempt to recuperate the wages lost during the May–June 1968 general strike. After some list work and an initial organizing meeting at nearby bar, Linhart realizes that if they want to actually cause a stir and rally their coworkers, his small organizing committee would have to “build up” the strike, “patiently. Job by job. Person by person. Shop by shop. It’s the first time I see the question from this angle. The class war at trench level. Lampman’s level.”³³

The first task that this nascent shop floor committee sets for itself? Composing and translating, “into all the languages on the line,” a leaflet about wage theft, its words drawn from an impassioned speech about dignity by a coworker who happened to be linked up with the radical movements in Italy. There were six-plus nationalities present in one shop alone. A certain internationalist practice had to be inscribed in their strike preparations from the first.

The Palestine Committees/MTA and the Penarroya strike present two ways that militants attempted to navigate a complex sociopolitical landscape in the early 1970s by foregrounding the multinational composition of the working class in France. One path integrated the anti-imperialist impulses of the historical moment into a political orientation of “mass work” inside and outside the factory gates, cafes, and hostels where Arab and North African immigrants worked, socialized, and lived. The particulars of this political orientation would have to be reworked as the material conditions of struggle and mood of the masses they hoped to aid in organizing changed dramatically. The other path involved the circulation of information, tactics, and inspiration among workers from diverse industries, and with the workers’ direct participation in the production, distribution, and discussion of these hard-won insights. Both recognized the significance of the international proletariat of France, but explored different entry points for disassembling its borders.