Holding the line in the working class. The establishment’s blissful conditions in France in the 2010s

While the “salting” of the Maoists of the ’68s has already been the subject of sociological studies in the past, this article aims to revisit this political practice by questioning the practice in progress, based on respondents who have migrated themselves in the working class after the 2000s. At a time when revolutionary belief, the socializing force of May 68 and working-class centrality are disappearing, the article aims to question the coherence of the self in a far-reaching social shift for these intellectuals who became “workers”. In this case, the social construction of self-coherence involves a significant hierarchization of spheres of life and the transfer of their dispositions to intellectuality in the displacement. In contrast to approaches that emphasize the social ordeal of crossing social boundaries, the dispositionalist approach emphasizes the self-coherence found in displacement. Indeed, these militants manage to live as intellectuals in the working-class world, even if this presupposes strong conditions of possibility for maintaining coherence over time. To answer this question, we’ll be basing our analysis on a certain fringe of contemporary “embedded militants” corresponding to the best-educated young militants who join the ranks of skilled workers. These are the people who most clearly demonstrate this search for coherence and cohesion.