Class Consciousness in an Age of Hegemonic Despotism: What Political Imagination for the Future?

In this presentation, I will discuss the concept of hegemonic despotism as defined by Michael Burawoy (1985) and the question of the effects of this regime of production on workers' class consciousness. While this question has tended to be ignored in the research that have extended the concept, I propose to revisit it by integrating its implications for class consciousness and the trade union movement.

It will present results of my PhD research on the class consciousness of former steelworker. I conducted an ethnographic study (2014-2016), carried out outside the factory sites. It combines observation work at the reconversion unit, interviews with dismissed workers and union representatives, as well as an immersion in the Liege Basin.

The case study documents what the ordeal of corporate reorganizations does to workers, both through the analysis of social paths and aspirations and through the analysis of modes of collective action, contestations and interpretations "from below" of what capitalism is. The analysis of these aspects reveals the existence among workers of plural and contradictory fragments of class consciousness, mixing elements of a class cleavage and adherence to the societal project of welfare capitalism, which seems to be the most credible response to the processes of dispossession generated by globalized and financialized capitalism. In particular, I develop the ambivalence of the role of trade unions: their institutionalisation helps to maintain the politicisation of workers, but at the same time it restricts political imaginations to those forged in the post-Social Pact period (1945).