Trotskyists at the factory: the LCR’s “turn to industry” by those who experienced it

In the early 1980s, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, convinced of the imminence of a major social crisis, decided to undertake a proactive policy in the hope of significantly improving its implantation in the industrial labor class, implantation that was deemed insufficient for such an organization striving to defend the immediate and historical interests of what it considered the “emancipation subject within the capitalist society”. In order to be present in the main companies of “key industry sectors”, it suggested to its non-worker activists to consider a professional reconversion, on a voluntary basis, Although having failed in its initial objectives, this attempt of “proletarization”, forgotten and ignored by historiography and collective memory, which took place ten years after the same implantation policy of the Maoist organizations in the years around 1968, was implemented at a time when we witnessed the questioning of “workers’ centrality” in France. Thus, it seemed interesting to report on some of these extraordinary militant trajectories, on those who “changed their lives” to help “change everyday life” in companies, and who among other things illustrate the biographical effects over the long term of partisan commitments embedded in the radical political field.