The politics of protest

he aim of the government and its technocrats is to curtail and destroy those movements. Ministers and advisers use their prestige and experience from 1968 against the movements. When students occupied the ole Normale Supieur, the government figure arguing to send the police in firmly and swiftly had himself taken part in the occupations of 1968. People in Germany and in Britain often tell me that it must be wonderful to live in France with the 35 hour week and other reforms. But those gains are a result of the pressure of the movements. They are not freely given by the government. The left government believes it can be more successful than the right in controlling those movements. How do your sociological ideas influence your political stance? You developed your ideas when structuralism was the main influence on French intellectuals. I was not a structuralist. That approach saw the world as composed of structures which strictly determine the way people act. There was no scope for human agency. As the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser said in the 1960s, human beings were merely the 'unconscious bearers of objective structures'. The results of my anthropological work in Algeria in the 1950s did not fit into this structuralist framework. Of course people are structured by society. They are not, as free market theory holds, isolated individuals each deciding a course of action by making individual economic calculations. I developed the concept of 'habitus' to incorporate the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it. The habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of behaviour people acquire through acting in society. It reflects the different positions people have in society, for example, whether they are brought up in a middle class environment or in a working class suburb. It is part of how society reproduces itself. But there is also change. Conflict is built into society. People can find that their expectations and ways of living are suddenly out of step with the new social position they find themselves in. This is happening in France today. Then the question of social agency and political intervention becomes very important. The heart of Marxism is the struggle by the working class for its own emancipation. Where do you place the struggles of the working class within the spectrum of the social movements you are involved in? Seattle brought together organised labour and various single-issue campaigns. They were often mobilised on different political bases, but they influenced one another. That is new. For the first time we have the possibility of aggregating these kinds of people who were very suspicious of one another. In France we have this tradition of workerism which is anti-intellectual. The unions are very hostile to intellectuals and the intellectuals are very distant from workers. In 1968 it was very visible. Now for the first time because of the failure of Soviet Marxism we are free from that. So I can speak with a CGT official as I am speaking to you. They are very open. In a sense intellectuals like me did not exist 20 years ago. People like Sartre and Foucault were sympathetic to the movement, but they did not have much empirical knowledge of workers. Seattle is very important in showing how new forces are developing. The small farmers' leader Jos?Bov?is well informed. He expresses himself clearly without the oversimplification which you hear from politicians. He is an intellectual. But at the same time he works on his farm. I recently organised a meeting of all the leaders of the social movements in France--the unemployed, the sans papiers immigrants, some trade unionists. You had anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxists--all types. The discussion was at a level you could not imagine. You can see the revival of a left political culture in the huge sales of Le Monde Diplomatique. Some suspicion still remains among those who are working together, of course. Bu