Jamila Mascat is an assistant professor of gender and postcolonial studies at Utrecht University.
Italian workerism had a big influence on the 1960s left, highlighting the role of workers’ struggles in the evolution of capitalism. As one of its key thinkers, Mario Tronti had to make sense of a world where those struggles went into sharp decline.
For decades, establishment French politicians have painted youths from Paris’s majority-minority suburbs as antisocial “scum.” But the generation of the banlieue revolts are now of working age — and they’ve been at the forefront of the strike to defend France’s pension system.